Deception 5 steps
How Marie Disguised Curare Murders as a Plague Outbreak
Marie injected the victims with the arrow poison Curare and then drew black spots on their skin with charcoal to mimic plague lesions, while Clémentine's flea-infested envelopes and Damas's door markings built the surrounding epidemic atmosphere that made the deaths read as plague.
Read the 5 steps as text
- 1
Clémentine spreads plague fear with flea-infested envelopes
Clémentine · The six supposed murderers
What it looked like: The flea-infested envelopes made the threat look like a spreading plague contaminating the neighborhood.
Clémentine, fixated on the plague, bred rats in her basement and orchestrated the spread of rodent fleas through envelopes sent to the six supposed murderers of her son.
- 2
Damas marks doors with plague symbols
Damas
What it looked like: The door markings were read as plague warnings marking contaminated homes in an epidemic.
Damas marked doors to spare certain neighbors, taking a disturbing role in distributing the signs of danger around the neighborhood.
- 3
Marie kills the victims with Curare injections
Marie · The six supposed murderers
Marie injected the victims with Curare, a deadly arrow poison, killing them with a precise lethal intervention that left a puncture at the neck on all the corpses.
- 4
Marie draws fake plague lesions with charcoal
Marie · The six supposed murderers
What it looked like: The black spots presented the victims' bodies as bearing genuine plague lesions.
Marie used charcoal to draw black spots on the victims' skin, mimicking the lesions of plague as the apparent cause of death.
- 5
The deaths are mistaken for a plague outbreak
Marie · The six supposed murderers
What it looked like: The authorities believed the victims had died of plague infection rather than poison.
The manipulated symbols and coldly executed murders misled the authorities, who initially treated the deaths as plague before laboratory analyses and the discovery of Curare pushed back against a simple plague diagnosis.
