Auguste Ambroise Tardeau: Investigator’s Methods Become the
Standard for Future Forensic Scientists
By Katherine Ramsland, PhD, CMI-V
In the early days, most forensic scientists were generalists who
developed methods for examining nearly every aspect of crime
investigation. The evidence they gathered with techniques they invented
or refined took many criminals by surprise. Their aim was to improve the
pursuit of justice, and some made a considerable contribution.
During the 1830s, the Duc de Choiseul-Praslin in France, Charles-Louis
Theobald, married Altarice Sebastiani, a daughter of one of Napoleon’s
generals. The dutiful wife bore nine children in 15 years, but Theobald
began an affair with one of the governesses. Although the duchess
discovered this and sent the girl packing to another part of Paris,
Theobald continued his blatant adultery. Humiliated, Altarice announced
her intention to seek a divorce, which would in turn ruin him, but she
never got the chance to go through with it.
In the middle of the night on August 17, 1847, the household servants
heard the bell-pull clanging in the duchess’s room, along with the noise
of crashing furniture, followed by a piercing scream. They rushed to
her aid but were stymied by her locked door, so they went out to the
garden under her window and looked up. To their surprise, they saw the
duke in the room, so they went back inside. Now the door was unlocked,
which allowed them to find the duchess on the floor amid a chaos of
upset furniture, her throat slashed and her head bruised and beaten.
They determined that she was dead. But Theobald was no longer there, and
they wondered where he’d gone. Just then he rushed in, acting as if he’d
only just awoken. He clearly did not realize the servants had seen him
in the room moments earlier, but they knew something was amiss with his
behavior. So did officials from the Sureté who questioned them
before interviewing Theobald.
He quickly suggested that his wife was killed during a burglary, but
her jewelry remained in clear sight, on display. This had been no
burglary. A search produced a blood-covered pistol from under the bed,
identified as the duke’s. However, Theobald had an explanation: He’d
heard his wife scream and had run into the room with the weapon, but
upon seeing her dead, he’d dropped it on the floor so he could hold her.
Realizing she was gone, he’d returned to his own room to wash off the
blood. While a blood trail in the hall to his room did confirm his
movements, it was unclear whether Theobald had shed it after killing his
wife or after holding her wounded body. Then a search of his room turned
up a blood-stained dagger and the severed blood-stained cord from his
wife’s bell-pull. He had more trouble explaining these items.
Theobald was placed under arrest, and the police turned to a young
pathologist from the University of Paris, Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, for
help. He had recently established himself as a clear-headed thinker with
a firm grasp of medicine in a legal context. Tardieu agreed to get
involved, and he was allowed to examine the crime scene, the
bloodstained weapon, and the body. He placed the pistol under a
microscope—a device about which few people were even aware—and on its
butt, he located a chestnut-colored hair similar to the victim’s. He
also discovered skin fragments near the trigger guard. In addition, when
he compared the butt of the weapon with wounds on the duchess’s head, he
discovered they perfectly matched. This evidence undermined the duke’s
story, as did a fresh bite mark on his leg that resembled that from a
human. It was the right size to have been sustained in a struggle with
his wife. (Dental comparisons were not yet a discipline.)
Tardieu went a step further to logically reconstruct what he believed
had occurred, including a motive, and he described how Theobald had
tried to stage the crime to appear to be a burglary. Failing this, he’d
repeatedly stabbed his wife and then bludgeoned her to death as she
screamed and fought with him. Before she died, she managed to bite him,
leaving her mark. The servants witnessed the last part of this fatal
altercation, but Theobald then left the room, leaving it unlocked, and
when he heard them enter, he arrived and acted as if he were discovering
the murder along with them.
Theobald apparently realized his story was lame, and he soon poisoned
himself with arsenic rather than face both public shame and the
guillotine. The case brought Tardieu even more renown throughout France,
and he became a regular participant in forensic cases of all kinds. Over
the course of his career, he would consult on more than 5,000 incidents,
including an attempt to assassinate Napoleon III in 1858.
The son of a mapmaker, Auguste Ambroise Tardieu practiced medicine in
Paris at a time when many learned men in France were making strides in
forensic science, making the city a center for progressive ideas. In
1843, Tardieu wrote a doctoral dissertation, which became a classic in
medicine and brought him international attention. His subsequent
participation in sensational cases, along with his painstaking scrutiny
and prolific writings, made him one of the foremost medico-legal experts
of the mid-nineteenth century. At the university he was both a professor
and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, and he later became President of
the French Academy of Medicine. Among his many publications was one of
the early texts on forensic toxicology, Étude médico-légale et
clinique sur l’empoisonnement. With his typical immersion, he also
studied abortion, criminal insanity, hanging, suffocation, and the
social conditions of child endangerment.
In fact, Tardieu wrote what may possibly be the first book about the
sexual abuse and battering of children. In one study, he analyzed more
than a thousand cases of abuse, both male and female, fully describing
the physical signals. But try as he might to generate interest among his
colleagues in the plight of maltreated children, his work went unnoticed
during his era.
Tardieu did gain considerable eminence with his definitive study of
victims of asphyxiation, noting the pathological differences among those
who were hanged and among those who suffocated from strangulation, chest
pressure, or smothering. He discovered tiny blood spots that occur under
the pleura and heart with rapid strangulation, which he named Tardieu’s
ecchymoses, now commonly called Tardieu spots. Whatever he studied, he
also recorded and published, making the results of his wide range of
observations and experiments available to other professionals. In a
number of cases, such as the following one, he performed groundbreaking
work.
Another criminal incident in France that gained widespread attention
in 1863, when Tardieu was 45 years old, was that of Edmond Pommerais,
whose failure to make a fortune with homeopathy inspired him to take a
more sinister route to wealth. First, he presented himself as a count,
so as to be more enticing to the upper class. Apparently this worked,
because he soon married a woman from a family of means, Mademoiselle
Dubiczy. Yet he retained his mistress, a young woman named Séraphine de
Pauw, widowed after Pommerais treated her ill husband. (It is not known
whether anyone suspected foul play in this man’s death.)
Pommerais, a spendthrift and gambler, may have poisoned his wife’s
mother to get the inheritance, because she died hours after dining with
him and her daughter. He soon bankrupted his wife’s estate. To get more
money, Tardieu hit on a diabolical scheme: He persuaded Séraphine de
Pauw to get insured and make out her will to him. She did, and despite
her good health, she suddenly fell ill and died. But the deceased woman
had confided to her sister that her “illness” was supposed to have been
a pretense, part of an elaborate scheme to defraud the insurance company
and enrich both her and her lover. The sister believed the scheme had
been nothing more than a deception—a way for Pommerais to insert himself
into Séraphine’s will for his own purposes. When Séraphine died, the
sister was certain that she had been murdered, so she told everything
she knew to the chief of police, who in turn involved Tardieu.
On the suspicion of a poisoning, Tardieu requested that Séraphine’s
body be exhumed, but he found nothing from an autopsy to indicate a
fatal injury or disease. He also supervised testing for arsenic and
antimony, but these, too, were negative. Thus, he faced the possibility
that a poison had been used for which there was no test. Still certain
of his guiding hypothesis, Tardieu performed an experiment. He’d learned
that before Séraphine de Pauw had expired, she had suffered from a
racing heart, so he suspected her killer had use an alkaloid toxin that
would produce such symptoms. Taking an extract from the victim’s organs,
he injected this substance into a large dog. After a few hours, the
animal vomited, lay down, and for the next 12 hours showed symptoms of a
racing heart. Yet the animal survived.
At the same time, investigators found a number of poisons and drugs
among Pommerais’s remedies, including digitalin, used for regulating the
heart, which in high doses could be lethal. The “count” had purchased it
not long before the victim died, and from his depleted stock it was
clear he’d used up a considerable amount. In fact, in love letters that
Séraphine had written, she mentioned taking this “remedy” for “stimulation.”
Tardieu injected the dog with digitalin from Pommerais’s stock. This
time, the animal died, from heart paralysis. Tardieu had to admit it was
ingenious; Pommerais had known there was no scientific means as yet for
detecting digitalin in the human body. He might even have orchestrated a
way for his mistress to admit administering it to herself, in the event
some clever investigator managed to detect it. But compelling logic was
not the same as hard evidence. Tardieu knew he needed proof that the
woman’s death had been the result of murder.
From her room, the police had scraped up traces of vomit, so Tardieu
tested it, this time using three frogs. One was a control, one received
a pure extract of digitalin, and the other an extract made from the
vomit. These latter two test subjects both showed the same symptoms and
both died in half an hour, while the control showed no symptoms. Over
the course of 2 weeks, Tardieu repeated the experiment several times to
be certain of his findings. Finally, he took specimens from floorboards
from the victim’s room on which she had not vomited, so as to
deflect any suggestion that the floorboards themselves contained a toxic
substance. This extract had no effect on the frogs. Thus, Tardieu proved
his theory that Séraphine de Pauw had died of a toxic dose of digitalin,
and the most logical culprit for administering it was her physician —Pommerais.
Because the defendant had medical knowledge, Tardieu fully expected
Pommerais’s defense attorney to make a stiff challenge, and he did. The
celebrated trial began in the spring of 1864, and the attorney
questioned Tardieu’s methods from every angle, focusing specifically on
the lack of digitalin in Madame de Pauw’s body tissues. In addition, he
claimed it was ludicrous to compare the reactions of a frog with a human
being. Tardieu’s decision to extract the poison from the vomit won the
day, trumping all arguments about the lack of presence of digitalin in
the body. The evidence held up in court, given more weight from the
suspicious circumstances, and Pommerais was convicted of the murder of
his mistress. He was subsequently executed.
Tardieu went on to assist in many more cases. His logical, patient
approach and his determination to support his intuitions with firm and
repeatable methodology became the standard for future forensic
scientists.
Sources
Evans, C. (2004). The second casebook of forensic detection. Hoboken,
NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
Labbé, Jean. (2005). Ambroise Tardieu: The man and his work on child
maltreatment a century before Kempe. Child Abuse and Neglect, 29,
311–324.
Thorwald, J. (1964). The century of the detective. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World.
Wilson, C., and Wilson, D. (2003). Written in blood: A history of
forensic detection. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers.
