Whilst researching something in the Staffordshire Sentinel, another story caught my attention and it’s so strange that I just had to share it, despite it having no links to Lichfield or the local area. In fact, the tale takes us away from England altogether and to France where a series of true yet unbelievable events took place in the early twentieth century.
It was September 1929 when the first of what would be a series of peculiar letters was posted to the offices of ‘Le Matin’ newspaper in Paris. It said, ‘We have the honour of informing you that we are a powerful secret society composed of persons of the highest authority. Our purpose is to rid France of the unscrupulous crooks and swindlers who prey on their fellow men”. Well, it said that but in French obviously.
The note also stated that the notorious Marquis de Champaubert was to be the society’s first victim. Now, this is where we need a bit of backstory because the Marquis was no nobleman but a master criminal whose real name was Clément Passal. His crooked career included a fraudulent motor-car company in Nantes and a bogus perfume factory, but he was eventually caught out by a jeweller who smelled a rat when he received an invitation to meet de Champaubert at the Chateau du Prieure. In a sparkling bit of detective work, the diamond dealer noticed the Marquis had signed his name De Champaubert and deduced that someone from the upper class would never use an uppercase D to spell that part of their name. Further investigations revealed no-one had ever heard of the Marquis de Champaubert and so the jeweller gave the police a ring.
When they found out that four other jewellers had received the same invitation to take a selection of valuables to the Chateau du Prieure, they knew some sort of game was afoot. On raiding the castle, they found a crime scene in the making that would be too loopy even for an Arsène Lupin story. Five rooms had been set aside for each of the jewellers and each one had been made airtight. In the billiard room was a tank of choloroform with pipes leading from there to each of the five rooms. The plan was that the fumes would overcome the jewellers and as they lay in a state of stupor, Passal would pocket their precious stones and disappear. Thanks to the efforts of the police, Passal did not get to do it in the billiard room with the lead pipe but instead spent two years in irons at Loos Gaol.
It seemed that the secret society calling themselves the Knights of Themis did not feel that justice had been done. The next letter to be received at Le Matin revealed that following his release from prison, the ‘Marquis’ had been lured to their headquarters by Madame D’Orgeval, the only lady member of the Knights. She’d entrapped him by claiming she wanted to publish his autobiography but what awaited him was a series of twisted tortures, each one more terrifying than the last. The first horror he had faced was to be tied to a cot in his cell with an iron funnel placed in his mouth and one and a half gallons of water poured into it but the letter reported that, ‘He has the vitality of twenty men; he did not even complain. Tomorrow he has an appointment with Sam our giant orangutan. He cannot survive’.
Turns out that he could. In the next letter to arrive at the newspaper office it reported that, ‘Today, the Marquis met Sam, our orangutan. We keep this gigantic beast in a pit 14 feet deep, its sides so slippery that neither he, nor anyone else, can climb out. Sam had been starved for twenty-four hours and given a heavy club which he knew from experience how to use. The Marquis was lowered into the pit by a rope. Another man would have grovelled in fear. But not the Marquis. He bent over so that his hands touched the bottom of the pit. Then he managed to scoop up some of the dirt, stand up and hurl it into Sam’s bulging eyes’.
This apparently made the animal hysterical with agony and it dropped the club. The Marquis seized it and smashed it on the orangutan’s head, knocking it unconscious (possibly a more successful strategy than piping chloroform into a room). His next trial was to be bound into a parachute that would only open 200ft above ground and pushed out of a plane. However, he survived this deadly descent and so his captors decided to bury him 6ft underground. The letter ended with ‘Tell the whole world of our plans. Let all scoundrels know of Champaubert’s fate’.
On 2nd October a note arrived at Le Matin to inform them that it would be their last communication regarding the Marquis de Champaubert as their mission had been accomplished. Inspector Adam of the Sureté was informed and went to visit Passal’s mother. He found her in bed crying, and she passed him a letter from beneath her pillow in which he told his mother of the tortures he had endured, informed her that he had asked his captors to bury him with a photograph of her over his heart. That same morning George Durot, a friend of Passal’s, received another letter, signed by the mysterious Madame D’Orgeval who seemed to be having some misgivings about her role in the murder. ‘You can save him’, she wrote, ‘There is still time. The ventilating pipe will have brought him sufficient air. But hurry’. The letter contained details of the ditch in Verneuil Wood where Passal had been buried. Durot and another friend sped to the woods on a motorcycle to find the soon to be a murder site. They found the pipe protruding three inches from the ground and began to dig. Using pocket knives they tried to force open the lid of the coffin but without success and so headed to the nearest village. They returned to the coffin accompanied by two local gendarmes armed with axes and eventually prised open the premature tomb. It was too late though. Clement Passal had already passed away.
However, the story still doesn’t end even here! Georges Durot remembered that Passal and a man named Henri Boulogne, who had been imprisoned at Loos with him, had rented a nearby cottage. When the police searched the premises, they found Henri hiding. On a rubbish heap outside the cottage they also found a scrap of paper and a piece of wood.The wood was the same as that used to create the crude coffin and the paper matched the letters sent to Le Matin. As Boulogne confessed to the police, the whole thing had been a hoax gone horribly wrong.
The Knights of Themis were fictional and the letters had been penned by Passal. At the cottage, he’d built himself a coffin which Boulogne had then buried him in at Verneuil Wood. The pipe projecting out of the earth was intended to keep Clement alive but their not so cunning plan was flawed and Passal slowly suffocated.
Why did Passal partake in such a complex and dangerous ruse though? The answer may lie in a manuscript of memoirs found near where he was buried. There was also a packet of press articles, copies of letters sent by the non-existent Knights of Themis and a diary containing details of the crimes Passal had committed, others which he took credit for including the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 and some which I strongly suspect exist only in his imagination e.g. plans to fell the Eiffel Tower, a duel with American police and the discovery of invisible death rays. The theory is that the stunt had been contrived by the now penniless Passal to promote the memoirs of his alter ego the Marquis de Champaubert.
It seems that sometimes there is such a thing as bad publicity.
Sources
Sunday Mirror 13th November 1938
Liverpool Echo 9th October 1929
Lichfield Lore 