L'Affaire Poupette

Time.com

Monday, Feb. 01, 1960

In a suburb of the placid city of Geneva, Mme. Marie Zumbach returned home one spring evening in 1958 from a weekly parish meeting. As she entered the back door, she heard her husband Charles scream for help. Four shots rang out, and a man came running toward her, chased her out into the garden and shot her down. The attacker returned to the house, savagely and repeatedly stabbed the dying Charles Zumbach, then mounted his bicycle and pedaled away into the night.

Mme. Zumbach survived her wounds but could not tell police who might have wanted to kill her husband. Then police talked with the Zumbachs' handsome son, André, 28, a producer at Radio Geneva, who remembered that on the night of the murder he had twice been called to the phone at the radio station, but that each time the caller hung up when André answered. Clearly, someone wanted to be sure he was there. Had André any idea who the caller might be? Of course, he replied: Pierre Jaccoud.

The police blinked. Jaccoud, 54, had a topflight reputation. A brilliant lawyer and politician, cantonal boss of the powerful Radical Party, he had been Aly Khan's attorney during his divorce from Rita Hayworth, and he represented innumerable Swiss and foreign companies in Geneva's tightly controlled banking community. Distinguished-looking and wealthy, Pierre Jaccoud lived on the patrician Rue de Monnetier, had a loving wife and three children. He was so much a part of Geneva's upper crust that it was unlikely he would even be acquainted with a family as humble as the Zumbachs.

Moroccan Dagger. Young André explained: Lawyer Jaccoud's mistress for the past eight years was a fellow worker at Radio Geneva, slim Linda Baud, 38. André had wooed and won the susceptible Linda, and Jaccoud's reaction had been one of hysterical jealousy. He sent neurotic, anonymous letters to André, including photographs of Linda in the nude.

Linda Baud supplied the police with more details. Pierre Jaccoud, she said, obtained the nude photos by forcing her to undress at gun point. Another time he had driven her to the country and then threatened her with his revolver; Linda managed to get the gun away from him and throw it into a stream. To win her back from André, the desperate Jaccoud kept writing tear-stained letters and finally offered to divorce his wife and marry his "Poupette" (little doll).

In Jaccoud's absence on a business trip to Sweden, police searched his house and office, impounded two pistols, an exotic Moroccan dagger, Jaccoud's bicycle and clothing. The police laboratory reported that there were traces of blood and human liver on the dagger, and tiny bloodstains on Jaccoud's raincoat and on his bicycle. Furthermore, a button was missing from his raincoat, and a similar button was found just outside the house.

On his return to Geneva in June 1958, Jaccoud was arrested. He spent the next 19 months in the prison hospital, for the shock of incarceration turned him into a quivering wreck of a man, given to fainting spells." Last week Jaccoud was taken into court in a hospital chair to stand trial for the murder of Charles Zumbach.

Tranquil Nude. The first witness was Mme. Zumbach, who admitted that when she was confronted by a line-up of five men in the police station, one of whom was Jaccoud, she had promptly picked a burly policeman as the likely culprit. Her son André followed her to the stand, described his affair with Poupette as "an adventure neither of us took seriously." He conceded that he had already given her up in October 1957 — months before his father's murder — and had become engaged to an other girl, to whom he is now married. Jaccoud's attorney, flamboyant René Floriot, star criminal lawyer of the Paris bar, got André's agreement that he had had no dealings with Linda since his engagement.

Linda Baud avoided looking at Jaccoud during her four hours of purple testimony. The judge, studying the nude photos that Linda said had been taken at gun point, remarked that she seemed "perfectly tranquil and at ease." Conceded Linda: "Well, I didn't react." Did she consider the defendant capable of killing a human being? After some hesitation, Linda said, "I don't think so." Lawyer Floriot wrung from Linda the admission that she had taken a new lover since André, a young Belgian who worked for the Palais des Nations, and he left implicit the suggestion that if the jealous Jaccoud had been planning to kill anyone, it would have been the new lover, not the father of the old one.

Family Man. Last week's emotional high point came when Jaccoud's wife Erna took the stand to insist that her unfaithful husband was a "devoted, exemplary family man, who saw to it that our children and I lacked nothing." His only flaw: "He did not spend his leisure time with his family." He was far too shy to be a killer, insisted Erna Jaccoud. Under the stress of her testimony, Defendant Jaccoud fainted dead away. After a 15-minute adjournment, the judge asked everyone to do his utmost to "get this painful part of the proceedings over with." Gasped Jaccoud: "I am doing my best."

At week's end the newsmen and photographers from all over Europe who filled the court were uncertain what impression was being gained by the twelve apple-cheeked Swiss jurors who will decide whether lovelorn Pierre Jaccoud goes free or goes to jail for life for "murder with singular perversity." But already the testimony had been such that staid, strait-laced Geneva—the society that ignores tourists and scorns international conclaves —is not likely to be the same for a long time to come. Said a Swiss-German lawyer of the Swiss-French city: "This is the undoing of the smug Genevois society, the curse of immobile prosperity in this self-centered community which likes to call itself Calvinist."