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Millery's bloody trunk, the Gouffé trunk, the Gouffé Case or the Eyraud-Bompard affair was an 1889 French murder case. On 26 July 1889, Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé, a Parisian civil servant at Montmartre, was reported missing. Two weeks later, Gouffé's corpse was found near Millery village, a suburb of Lyon. The inquiry captured the attention of the French press for much of the year, and the case's impact was felt through the rest of the 19th century.
Contents
The victim, Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé, a court bailiff, was murdered by a couple, Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard.
The new investigative techniques used in this case marked a milestone in forensic pathology and forensic science.
Case reveal
On the 13th of August, 1889, roadmender Denis Coffy received a complaint of a bad smell on the secondary road in Vernaison in Millery. According to «The Tower of Millery», a large oilskin cloth bag, emitting a foul smell, was found under a bush. Authorities were alerted. In the bag the investigating officers spotted a small clue.
A forensic surgeon, Paul Bernard, undertook an autopsy on August 14th. He noted in his autopsy report that the naked body was bound with seven meters of rope, the head was enveloped in a black oilskin cloth and that the victim had obviously died by strangulation three to five weeks before. Three months later the body was examined by doctor Alexandre Lacassagne. Lacassagne's autopsy started on November 13, 1889 and lasted a week. Based on a sample of hair taken from Gouffé's comb, and the description of an old back injury in his missing person's report, Dr Lacassagne identified the body from the trunk as Gouffé. Nowadays such a method is routine in a forensic examination. The victim, the 49-year-old Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé, had kept a study at 148 Montmartre in Paris. He was described as a respectable widower, properly raising his two daughters, but also said to be somewhat of a womaniser.
The discovery of an abandoned trunk, noticed by a trader of snails, two days after the sinister find of the roadmender, pushed the inquiry in Saint-Genis-Laval. The key fitted to the lock, a missing nail was similar with a nail found in Millery and the stench from the chest left no doubt about its objective usage. A tag glued to the one of the boards imparted that the trunk travelled from Paris to Lyon by rail, on July 27, 1888 or 1889, the last figure was unreadable. The registers of the company PLM insured that 1889 was the precise year, and this date corresponded just after disappearance of the bailiff. The prosecutor of Lyon decided to transmit elements in his possession to the Public Prosecutions of Paris which entrusted the inquiry to the commissioner Marie-François Goron, leader of Parisian Safety (La Surete) since 1887. The inspectors explored habits and relations of the bailiff, and realized that he saw frequently, just before his disappearance, a couple of swindlers: Michel Eyraud and his mistress Gabrielle Bompard. Coincidence more than disturbing: they left Paris hurriedly on July 27. On July 29, the brother-in-law of the missing, was anxious about his unexplained absence and alerted the police station of the district. On November 29, one of the first Interpol notice was broadcast against both swindlers. Later suspicion was confirmed when a carpenter in London identified the trunk, which he sold to Eyraud and Bompard.
Investigation
On July 26, in the daytime Gabrielle Bompard saw the bailiff. She pretended to meet accidentally in a cafe and encouraged him to come to visit her in the Parisian flat, which she and her accomplice rented in the 8th district, in the Tronson-du-Coudray street. Having invited him to sit down on a deckchair, while flirting, she wound round his neck the cord of a dressing gown. Eyraud, who hid behind a curtain, caught the cord and strangled Gouffe. Gouffé resisted. Eyraud, thrown into a panic, came out of the hiding-place, sprang up and choked him with his hands. During the interrogation Eyraud blamed Bompard and said that it was she who strangled Gouffé.
Without booty, the murderers tried then to get rid of the body. They put him in a trunk bought earlier in London and sent this one to Lyon, via the Paris–Marseilles railway. In Lyon at the railway station they recovered the bulky luggage and rented a convertible (truck?) to transport it. When the 105 kg trunk became too heavy for them and the smell of putrefaction began to be observable, they left it on the road of Millery. The couple then left for the United States.
Portraits of murderers
Michel Eyraud, born in Saint-Étienne, March 30, 1843, was the son of merchants. He married a 19-year-old girl on March 17, 1870. Being a violent and fickle husband, he left his wife, beaten and humiliated, to take up a career of "adventurer". In 1863 he gets involved once in the army and participates as corporal of Jägers in battles during the Maximilian Affair, before his walkout. Then he was in fraud and other wormy business.
Gabrielle Bompard, born in 1868, Eyraud's companion, was 21. Daughter of an easy metal trader of the North, small, rather nice, she had a confusing character, perhaps due to a youth spoilt by a selfish father. In spite of her youth, she dragged nevertheless behind her a solid reputation of debauched girl.
Arrest and process (trial)
While being in San Francisco, Gabrielle Bompard left Eyraud and came back to France, where she was imprisoned on January 22, 1890. First she disclaimed any participation in murder and set up her lover, but she ended up cracking and started to tell everything in detail. Eyraud, meanwhile, continued his living on stopgap measures sometimes on frauds between Canada, the United States and Mexico. In June, 1890, having avoided several times French policemen, he was finally arrested in Havana (Cuba) in his refuge.
Both criminals were judged in December, 1890. Although defended by the famous lawyer Félix Decori, Michel Eyraud was sentenced to death and guillotined, at the Rocket place, on February 3, 1891, by the executioner Louis Deibler.
Mister Henry-Robert, lawyer of Gabrielle Bompard, pleaded that his client was subjected by Eyraud by means of hypnosis, ( a very popular practice during that era ), had been his involuntary accomplice. It is what explains probably a more merciful verdict for the young woman. Because of extenuating circumstances her sentence was twenty years of hard labour, which she spent in the female prison of Nanterre then in Clermont dungeon (Oise). She was liberated in 1905, before the term of her penalty, having benefited from several reductions of penalty for good conduct. She continued her occupation of dance and her past inspired the public for the lament Gabrielle Bompard. She died in obscurity around the early 1920s.
Literature
The commissioner Marie-François Goron (1847-1933) retired in 48 years and wrote his memoirs. He became a precursor for a historian François Vidocq. During sixteen years, the public was roused with twenty-one books about braggart policeman. One of those books, appeared in 1890, narrated about «The Gouffé Case».