Prescription: Murder! Volume 1: Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd (11 page)

But the whole story, the whole series of suppositions, pushed credibility past reasonable limits. Robert just couldn’t fathom it.

In the days and nights that followed, however, Robert poked into the known past of the doctor. He thus put together the story of the defection of Bougrat’s patients. This buttressed the suspicion in Robert’s mind that Bougrat had suffered from a shortage of funds with which to finance the revels.

Now, suddenly, Robert began to think about two paperhangers he had seen in Bougrat’s kitchen on the Monday following the paymaster’s disappearance. Had Bougrat murdered Rumèbe and, not being able to dispose of the body elsewhere before the hue and cry went up, stuffed it in a kitchen closet? Then, to cover things up, had he had the kitchen papered and the closet sealed?

One night, some three weeks after Rumèbe had dropped from sight, Robert, nostrils flaring, hung around Bougrat’s house until the lights went out. Then he jimmied his way into the kitchen and played a flashlight on the walls, looking for a sign of unevenness to indicate a closet that had been papered over.

Robert found something even more interesting. In one area of the wall, his flashlight picked out several worms busily engaged in boring their way through the wall. Those worms told the detective that he had come to the end of the trail. Worms, he knew, were attracted to the decomposition of flesh and were able to figure out, even though a layer of wood, what human nostrils couldn’t detect.

When Robert tapped the wall and heard a hollow sound, he knew he was rapping on a closet door. Jimmying the door, the Sûreté man found the decomposing body of Jacques Rumèbe.

By then it was dawn and Robert was jolted by a banging on Dr. Bougrat’s front door. He concealed himself as he heard Bougrat crash down the steps to open the door. Thereupon several other law enforcement types confronted Bougrat over a series of bad checks that he had passed to cover some of his debts. Robert listened to this commotion for several minutes before stepping out of the kitchen and interrupting the financial haggling. He went then to arrest Doctor Bougrat for murder.

Bougrat admitted everything but the murder. But the detective had the vital organs of the corpse analyzed and found that death had been caused by an overdose of the drug arsenobenzol. The motive, insisted Robert: murder for profit.

At his trial, Bougrat admitted that he had administered the drug, secretly, so that he could keep Rumèbe on his feet and save the man’s job for him. But, since the administration of the drug was an inexact science, he had given the paymaster an overdose by mistake. Feeling the effects of the overdose, Rumèbe, had come staggering back to the doctor’s office that Saturday a few hours after having received his treatment from Bougrat. Not only was he sick, but he was in a panic, Bougrat said. He had paid a drunken visit to a brothel claiming and had lost his satchel, which was full of money. Feeling too sick to function on his own, he asked Bougrat to go back to where he had been and try to find the money. Bougrat did as asked but when he returned empty-handed he found his friend dead on the floor. He then panicked, he said, and, his better judgment suspended, he had sealed Rumèbe up in the closet.

And where did the money come from for Bougrat to purchase Andrea from Marius, the cops asked next. That was from all those bounced checks, Bougrat said: he was desperate to get the woman he loved away from the gangster, so he hung bad paper all over the south of France. What about those wealthy old folks who had disappeared, Robert also inquired. An unhappy coincidence, Bougrat said, and only two had been his patients.

On the surface, the doctor’s alibi held together. But the police and prosecutors, recalling that body stuffed into a closet, just weren’t buying it.

The trial, of course, was a regional sensation and even made international news, with most observers feeling that Bougrat just plain seemed like a guilty man, what with that ex-hooker for a playmate, the Apache clothing, the love of money and nightlife and the dead war buddy with syphilis.

So Bougrat was found guilty of the murder by a vote of six to five under the French jury system of the time. He faced the guillotine, and the majority of the jury, working up a real bourgeois dislike for the man recommended it.

But under French law, no man could be put to death who was in a certain category of war hero. Bougrat - remember those medals? - was so classified. So he was sentenced to twenty-five years on Devil’s Island with no possibility for parole. He was sent there immediately by boat, leaving a heartbroken Andrea behind, and still maintaining his innocence.

End of story? Far from it!

Devil’s Island is located approximately nine miles off the coast of French Guiana, near South America. The island was a part of the controversial French penal colony of French Guiana from 1852 to 1953. In its time, it was the most famous for its use for internal exile of political prisoners. The island, a tourist attraction today, albeit a bizarre one, is surrounded by rocky promontories and shoals, vicious ocean cross-currents and shark-infested waters. Landing on the island by boat in the day of Dr. Bougrat (mid-1927 when he arrived) remained so treacherous that prison officials had constructed a cable car system to connect the island to the nearby Île Royale, and used it for years to travel the two hundred yard wide channel between the two islands.

The most famous political prisoner on Devil’s Island, as is well known, was Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and while political prisoners were common in the penal colony, it was a destination mostly for the most hardened, violent and unsavory of the French criminal class. Conditions were brutal and prisoner-on-prisoner violence was common. Tropical diseases were rife and mosquitos - big blood-thirsty fat ones - were everywhere. To say the least, the place was appropriately named.

The penal colony had been functioning with the flotsam of the French underworld for more than a century. Very few men who were sentenced there were ever seen again in Europe. But Dr. Bougrat, reluctantly pushing Andrea out of his mind now, had plans other than dying in one of the most miserable places on the planet.

On Devil’s Island, Doctor Bougrat quickly became a model prisoner. And almost as quickly, he became the prison doctor.

Bougrat studied his predicament and put on his thinking cap. Here he was surrounded by water on one side with squalor, disease and violence all around him on the other sides. His only real asset was his medical degree. He went to work on a plan to get out of there.

One day a few weeks after arrival Bougrat was in the prison hospital administering to a man who had been stabbed overnight in his cell.

“This man has outsmarted all of you,” Bougrat mused to the head of the guards.

“How’s that?”

“He’s going to die from loss of blood. So he’ll never have to serve his sentence here. In death, he escapes you.”

The guard shrugged.

“What else can we do?” he asked.

“If I could have treated him last night, I could have closed the wounds and saved him. Then he might have had to serve another twenty years.”

A few weeks later, Bougrat was moved out of his nighttime cell and into a small hut on the island so that he could be on duty round the clock. Since there was presumably no escaping, letting him have his liberty at night - and being on call as a doctor - would do no harm, the prison administration theorized. Bougrat had also already proven himself to be an engaging soul, so no one begrudged him his hut or an occasional evening stroll.

Almost immediately, Bougrat started putting his night time hours to good use: building a makeshift boat out of timber and various garbage he found in the prison. And at the same time he ingratiated himself with a small team of some the strongest men in the colony.

Then, nineteen months after he had begun his sentence, he was given the privilege sometimes awarded to trusted long-termers: a month’s freedom in the town of St. Laurent-du-Maroni on the French Guinea mainland. There he was kept under surveillance by the police, but not the kind of surveillance that couldn’t be outwitted.

One night, in a house of prostitution, history began to repeat itself. Bougrat met a prostitute named Annette duBois, the closest thing he had ever seen to Andrea Audibert. She was thirty and the doctor was forty-four and they were quickly in love with one another.

A few nights before he was to be returned to Devil’s Island, Bougrat decided not to go back. Annette put up some money and they quickly spread it around. Next thing anyone knew, Bougrat’s little raft, equipped with a sail, had arrived at the shore along with seven burley prisoners from the penal colony to act as a crew.

And then he took off on August 30, 1928.

They began a sea journey that has become part of French prison folklore, encountering high winds, currents, storms and a dozen days when they were marooned on a mud bank. But eventually the boat found its way northward along the coast and eventually up the Orinoco River and into Venezuela. He eventually landed at the little town of Iripa. As fate would have it, the town was in the middle of an epidemic of dengue fever a nasty mosquito-borne tropical disease caused by the dengue virus. There had already been fatalities.

Bougrat knew when he needed to go to work. He offered his expertise in medicine and treated patients with boundless dedication, although he was hit himself by the disease. He threw himself into his work for months, refusing to send for Annette until the epidemic had died down.

Meanwhile, French authorities had learned of his whereabouts and demanded his extradition, as well as those of his breakaway companions. But there was no extradition treaty between the two countries at the time. Pictures and stories began to appear in the French press about the dissolute doctor who had been condemned to Devil’s Island but was now living openly in South America.

Venezuela at the time was governed by an ornery strongman named Juan Vicente Gomez. His rule was absolute for decades and he was particularly cunning about juggling relations at home and abroad. But Gómez was also busy on other fronts. He never married but he had two beautiful mistresses by whom he had sixteen children. Gómez also fathered many other children in brief relationships, somewhere between sixty and ninety. So the strongman didn’t have a lot of time to ponder requests from distant foreign governments. Thus he decided that he would return the other escapees (some having had the stupidity to commit various new crimes) to French authorities. But Bougrat, the busy medical man, the emerging local hero, was useful. He could stay. Thereupon, Dr. Bougrat sent for Annette whom he eventually married.

Bougrat quickly learned that there was a shortage of physicians in Caracas. So he and Annette got married and set up a home, on her money, in the capital. Bougrat applied for a license to practice. The medical authorities in Venezuela declined to let him work in the capital but had no problem with him working out in the remote hinterlands. So Dr. Bougrat took a new look around for a soft landing.

He found one soon. Fully integrated in the country, now proficient in Spanish, married with two daughters, he settled in Margarita Island, a pleasant place off the mainland not too far from Caracas. He opened a small private hospital in the community of Juan Griego, never refusing to treat the needy for free. Comfortably, he sat out the Great Depression of the 1930’s as well as World War Two. Bougrat, with his sex problems solved right in his own home, didn’t do any chasing in Venezuela. His mind on his work, he soon gained the respect of his professional colleagues.

He also never stopped protesting his innocence of murder. He may have been guilty of many things back in France, he insisted, but killing his friend Rumèbe was not one of them.