Crimescribe

A long, long way as it turned out.

When Vere Goold took his own life on this day in 1909 he was far from Tipperary (his ancestral home) and everything else he’d ever known. Once the son of a prominent Irish family, a talented boxer and Wimbledon tennis star, he died a convict, murderer and the property of the Penal Administration, French Guiana.

So, how exactly did this gentleman fall so far from grace? What left a potentially great tennis player and socialite to be rubbing shoulders with France’s lowest-ranking people in history’s worst convict prison? How on earth could a man of noble birth die so ignoble a death?

The answer, as is so often the case, was a woman. Two women, to be exact.

Goold had won the Irish tennis championship in 1879, also making the final at Wimbledon that year. A few months later he tried his hand the first open championship at Cheltenham. Again, he reached the final and, again, he tasted defeat. After that his form declined and he gave up tennis completely.

After that his life dissolved into drinking, drugs and general debauchery. A man of vanity and personal weakness, he was easy game for women of predatory natures. When he met Marie Giraudin in London, he was exactly what she was looking for. Twice married already, with expensive tastes, minimal funds and increasing debts, she saw him as a ripe pigeon to be plucked. In 1891 they were married. In 1907, having figured out what they thought was the perfect system for gambling and, posing ‘Lord and Lady Goold,’ there was only one place to go to make their fortunes, Monte Carlo.

Every year many casino towns greet many gamblers who bring many infallible systems. These infallible systems usually fail, the casinos  usually profit and the gamblers usually go home broke or seriously in debt. The Goolds were no exception apart from one thing:

They didn’t go home. Murder, prison and suicide were the results.

Having gone broke within a matter of weeks they borrowed money to try and recoup their losses. Among their creditors, to whom they owed the then-princely sum of £40, was a Swedish socialite Emma Levin. A wealthy widow, Ms  Levin was accompanied by a friend, Madame Castellazi. Soon Ms Levin had Marie Goold for company as well. Castellazi and Goold almost immediately hated each other.

A very public contretemps between them saw Levin, horribly embarrassed, decide to leave Monte Carlo. Before she left, however,  she made it clear she wanted back the £40 she’d lent the Goolds. The Goolds, however, seeing her obvious displays of wealth while in Monte Carlo, wanted rather more than a mere £40 loan from Ms Levin. They were prepared to kill to get it.

On the night of August 4, 1907 Ms Levin promptly vanished and so did ‘Lord and Lady Goold.’ They had, however, reckoned without Madame Castellazi who was waiting at Levin’s hotel to leave town with her. Knowing that Ms Levin had gone to collect the debt from Marie Goold (of whom Castellazi was by now deeply afraid) and Ms Levin not having returned despite it being after midnight, Castellazi informed the police. The police and Madame Castellazi immediately visited the Goolds.

The Goolds had already left for Marseilles, leaving behind Marie Goold’s young daughter Isabelle. They’d also left behind a bloodstained saw and axe and Ms Levin’s parasol, although they’d remembered to take a large steamer trunk. A large steamer trunk, by a macabre coincidence, that was big enough to hold a human being. Both Madame Castellazi and les gendarmes were by now deeply concerned.

They had every right to be. And so, as it happened, did ‘Lord and Lady Goold.’

Courtesy of a railway clerk named Pons local police had visited the luggage office at Marseilles railway station. At the luggage office they found a trunk belonging to the Goolds and dripping blood. Inside the trunk they found what was left of Ms Levin. She’d been murdered, dismembered and packed away like a box of unwanted baggage which, in a macabre sense, she was. The Goolds were immediately arrested.

It didn’t take long for Vere Thomas Goold, erstwhile socialite and sportsman, to confess to murder. Whether it was he or Marie Goold who planned the murder and struck the fatal blows will never be known for sure. Goold, clinging to whatever remained of his gentleman status, was prepared to take the fall. In France, of course, that fall could have been a guillotine’s blade, had the judge not seen it differently.

Seen as the prime mover in the murder Marie Goold was condemned to death. Her sentence was commuted despite this and she went to Montpelier Prison for life. She died there of typhoid in 1914. By then, of course, her husband was already dead.

Goold was shown mercy, in a sense. Instead of an appointment with the guillotine and its operator, known throughout France by his sinister nickname ‘Monsieur de Paris’ (‘the man from Paris’) he received a life sentence. Unfortunately for Goold life meant spending the rest of his in the infamous penal colony in French Guiana, the worst collection of hellholes any convict could hope to avoid. Goold couldn’t avoid Devil’s Island and on September 8, 1909, less than a year after arriving, he decided life there was more than he could bear. He was 55 years old.