Extraordinary Murderess

"I do not believe that judicial history contains the record of more than a dozen criminals of your type. You are possessed of all the vices. . . ."

With these words a judge at Nimes, France, last week sentenced to the guillotine* Mme. Antoinette Scierri, 35, after she had been convicted simultaneously of six extraordinary murders.

Her last crime was to poison an elderly couple with whom she had lived, after stealing their entire savings. On three occasions she volunteered to nurse sick women friends, whose deaths she caused by introducing poison into the drugs prescribed for them by their physicians. Her first and most revolting murder was accomplished when she poisoned her fiance, "for the pleasure of watching his death agony," and celebrated over his corpse the dread "Mass of Satan." It was the latter which made France shiver.

"The Black Mass," as this rite is often termed, is designed to attain utter blasphemy by burlesquing the Eucharist. The usual procedure is to steal a portion of the consecrated bread during a mass celebrated in the ordinary way. A mock priest, robed in black, holding the cross upside down in his left hand, then performs backward the usual ceremony. The chalice is first filled with wine and then with water. The mock priest, symbolizing Satan, then eats the bread and tramples on the cross. When several persons participate, a general orgy usually follows. Louis XIV, when he celebrated the Black Mass, is said to have committed the supreme blasphemy of resting the chalice on the body of a naked woman instead of upon the altar.

As everyone knows, the entire rite has now fallen into almost complete disuse. It is often represented in French revues, several of which have toured the U. S. without the least idea on the part of the local authorities or spectators as to the significance of what was being done before them.

First. If Mme. Scierri's sentence is not commuted by the President she will be the first woman guillotined in France since the War.

*Invented by a French doctor, Antoine Louis, and originally called the Louisette. Later it was named for another French physician, Dr. Guillotin, who proposed its use to the French Constituent Assembly of 1789.