第7章 INTRODUCTORY:(6)

It occurs when the female killer happens to be dramatical-minded that she will use a pistol.Mme Weissmann-Bessarabo, who, with her daughter, shot her husband in Paris (August 1920), is of this kind.She and the daughter, Paule-Jacques, seem to have seen themselves as wild, wild women from the Mexico where they had sometime lived, and were always flourishing revolvers.

I would say that the use of poison so much by women murderers has reason, first, in the lack of physique for violent methods, but I would put alongside that reason this other, that women poisoners usually have had ahandy proximity to their victims.They have had contact with their victims in an attendant capacity.I have a suspicion, moreover, that a good number of women poisoners actually chose the medium as THE KINDEST WAY.Women, and I might add not a few men, who would be terribly shocked by sight or news of a quick but violent death, can contemplate with relative placidity a lingering and painful fatal illness.Propose to a woman the destruction of a mangy stray cat or of an incurably diseased dog by means of a clean, well-placed shot, and the chances are that she will shudder.But--no lethal chamber being available--suggest poison, albeit unspecified, and the method will more readily commend itself.This among women with no murderous instincts whatever.

I have a fancy also that in some cases of murder by poison, not only by women, the murderer has been able to dramatize herself or himself ahead as a tender, noble, and self-sacrificing attendant upon the victim.No need here, I think, to number the cases where the ministrations of murderers to their victims have aroused the almost tearful admiration of beholders.

I shall say nothing of the secrecy of the poison method, of the chance which still exists, in spite of modern diagnosis, that the illness induced by it will pass for one arising from natural causes.This is ground traversed so often that its features are as familiar as those of one's own house door.Nor shall I say anything of the ease with which, even in these days, the favourite poison of the woman murderer, arsenic, can be obtained in one form or another.