Mexican-born French criminal acquitted in a famous trial; the elder daughter of French writer Héra Mirtel, she was judged for complicity in her mother’s murder of her stepfather after she helped her mother dispose of his body and the murder weapon.
Paule was the older of the two daughters of Mirtel and her first husband Pierre Paul Antoine Jacques. He died in March 1914, and her mother married Ishmael Jacob Providence Weissmann, a commissioner born in Romania, who called himself Georges Bessarabo, in 1915.
Mirtel murdered Bessarabo in Square La Bruyère, Paris, on 31 July 1920. On 4 August 1920 his corpse, shot dead by a revolver, was discovered at the bottom of a trunk in the Nancy rail station, having been sent by train from the Gare de l’Est. On 21 June 1922 Mirtel, defended by Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, was sentenced to twenty years of forced labor. Paule Jacques, present at the scene of the crime and judged for complicity, was acquitted.
Many French dailies followed the trial, rich in theatrics: Le Petit Parisien (17 issues), Le Temps (12 January 1922), Le Matin (22 June 1922), Le Figaro (29 April 1921), Le petit journal illustré (18 June 1922), L’Ouest-Éclair (9 June 1922) and Le Gaulois (29 April 1921).
In 1929, after recognizing that Paule had lied, there was a request for the revision of the trial. Mirtel, incarcerated in Rennes and on the verge of obtaining a conditional release, died on 21 March 1931.
Paule Jacques died in 1954.
Link to Wikipedia biography