Democratic Enquirer

A Swiss Woman found Guilty of Nine Murders.

If De Quincey were now alive (says an English paper), he might write a companion essay to the one on murder as one of the Fine Arts—taking for his theme, Murder as a Pastime, and illustrating it by a case which has just happened at Geneva.

A woman named Jeaneret, thirty-two years of age, whose employment was that of nursing the sick, has just been found guilty of nine murders. She was a clever woman, with a highly nervous and excitable organization, and she seems to have had no other motive for her crimes than a morbid love of the excitement of murder and a grim delight in witnessing the sufferings of her victims.

The unusual fatality of patients nursed by her drew the doctor's attention, and it was found that she gave them atropine, the active principle of belladonna. She did not deny that she had given the narcotic, and of course pleaded that she had done so to produce sleep and lull restlessness.

But it was clear that she knew the sleep she produced to be that which knows no waking. Brought into the presence of the exhumed corpses of her victims she showed no signs of horror. and went through her trial with complete coolness and self-possession.

Yet the woman was no mere monomaniac. She had all her faculties about her: and the only rational theory of her crime was that she had taken to it for amusement. A kind of gambling passion had taken that direction, and had gained entire mastery of her. The case is a rare, but by no means unique example of the possibility that all feeling may be lost in one over-mastering passion. Fortunately, such passion is generally some form of self-indulgence, and it rarely happens that any human being is sufficiently callous to indulge a passion for murder.