Marie Dumolard

Murder Accomplice

(1816 - unknown)

Photograph courtesy Tussaud's

Quoted from Look for the Woman by Jay Robert Nash, 

M. Evans and Company, New York, 1981:

For more than a decade, Martin Dumolard, a farmer living outside the French village of Montluel, attacked nad murdered several young women, ravaging the bodies nad taking what belongings these poor peasant girls carried.  Madame Dumolard encouraged her husband's murderous perversions and was given some of the victims' clothes to wear as payment for her complicity.

In 1861 Dumolard attacked a young woman named Marie Pichon, after promising to gt her a job at a remote chateau where he said he worked.  Marie was too fast for the man and escapped the lasso he tried to toss over her head on a lonely road, outrunning the man down a dark lane and gaining the safety of a nearby village where she told her story.

Dumolard was apprehended but refused to admit any crime. His wife broke down under interrogation and told the gruesome tale of her husband's murders.  Both were placed on trial at Bourg in January 1862, howling mobs outside the courtroom demanding the Dumolards be killed at once.

The man was described as being "a strong and brutal peasant, with a large nose, thick lips, hollow eyes and bushy eyebrows.  A beard fringed his hard features.  His wife, th9in and slight, with shifty eyes and a cunning face, was placed at his side."

Clothes from at least ten victims were put on display in court -- their victims may have numbered as many as twenty-five.  Both were quickly convicted.  Dumolard was executed, beheaded on March 8, 1862.  The cold-hearted Marie Dumolard was sent to prison for twenty years.

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