Jeanne Webber liked to feel powerful. Decide on the life and death of others. She placed her delicate hands on the neck of her victims, small and defenseless creatures, and squeezed hard until she accomplished her goal. Suffocation is one of the forms of domination that most excite psychopaths. Experts estimate that a strangler takes only five minutes to complete drowning. Webber used this method to end the lives of at least 10 children, including her three children. All the little ones had suspicious red marks on their necks that went unnoticed. A series of fortuitous circumstances made it impossible to charge her with murder. To unmask her, she had to be caught red-handed.
The motives that led Webber to perpetrate these crimes were never clarified. Her environment considered her a beautiful and sweet woman who loved children, that is why many neighbors and relatives trusted her as a babysitter and continued to do so after the deaths, since she committed many crimes until she was discovered. The woman was born in 1874 in Keritry, a small coastal town in north-eastern France, at the tip of Penmarch. Her parents were humble fishermen, and since childhood she had to dedicate herself to the care of her six younger siblings. At the age of 14, she began working in the house of a wealthy family in the area and, when she turned 24, she decided to make her dream of moving to the capital come true. There she met Marcel Weber, whom she married and from whom she took the surname with which she has passed into criminal posterity.
The couple went to live in the Passage de la Goutte d'Or, currently one of the most iconic places in Paris for being in the heart of the Montmartre neighborhood. The place is also known as the painters' quarter, as it housed artists of the stature of Picasso and Van Gogh. In the area there are buildings as emblematic as the Moulin Rouge or the Sacré Coeur Basilica. Montmartre was an independent town until 1860, when it became a district of Paris. At the end of the 19th century, the neighborhood acquired a very bad reputation due to the emergence of cabarets and brothels, so the rents were very cheap. Just what the young couple needed, because, although Marcel was a transporter, he did not have a steady job and was addicted to drinking. Jeanne made some money babysitting.
Neck markings
Misfortune entered the humble home of the Webbers in 1905, when two of their three children apparently died from the bronchitis epidemic that was ravaging the country. The police did not intuit anything strange in their deaths, although the two little girls showed reddish marks on their necks. The doctors did not give it much importance either. The neighbors took pity on her for the misfortune she had suffered and entrusted her with custody of their children. A few weeks later, two other children were found dead, but the authorities blamed it for a lung infection, again ignoring the small red marks on their necks. The terrible epidemic helped the criminal to hide her murders.
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Webber requested that he be granted the opportunity to continue working. Since no one suspected her, her brother-in-law, Pierre Webber, entrusted her with the care of their daughters. When Pierre returned home one day, she found the youngest, Georgette, 18 months old, dead. The girl lay on her bed, her face bruised, while Jeanne cried inconsolably beside her. The doctor ruled that the cause of death was due to severe seizures caused by pneumonia. And again they missed the red marks on the neck. Despite everything, they did not suspect her and her brother-in-law entrusted her with the care of their other daughter, Suzanne, three years old, who also lost her life. Officially, natural death.
Neighbors in the neighborhood began to relate the cases to the nanny, but circumstances caused many people to continue to feel sorry for her. One of Jeanne's brothers asked her to take care of their seven-year-old daughter Germaine. The girl suffered two seizures, which she managed to survive, but did not exceed the third. The doctor attributed the death to diphtheria, an infection that causes fever and affects the respiratory tract. The episode ended up outraging the neighborhood, which was already blaming Webber openly. However, on the day Germaine was buried, it was learned that the nanny's only remaining child had died under similar circumstances. Juan Antonio Cebrián explains in Psicokillers: profiles of the most famous serial killers in history which was the woman's way of showing that what was happening in Montmartre was the result of a terrible epidemic; she would have sacrificed her own son to hide her crimes.
Transfer to Indre
A month later, her sister-in-law had to go shopping. She entrusted Jeanne with the care of her 10-month-old son Maurice. When she returned she discovered how it was trying to suffocate the little boy. Only the police intervention saved her from being lynched. Formally accused of murder, she waited months for the trial that was to lead to the guillotine. The hearing began on January 29, 1906, but the statement of the prestigious doctor Leon Thoinot changed the tide of events. The specialist vehemently assured that these deaths could not be attributed to Webber, as they had occurred due to natural causes. Her speech was so convincing that the nanny was acquitted and released. However, in Paris there was no longer a place for her.
Webber moved to the Indre region in central France to care for the Bavouzet family's children. Everything went normally during the first months, but on April 16, 1907, one of the children, Auguste, aged nine, was found dead with mysterious marks on his neck. The doctors thought of meningitis, but when the news reached Paris all the alarms went off. Thoinot himself investigated the case and concluded that the death was due to fevers that his colleagues from the provinces had failed to diagnose. The nanny was once again free of being convicted. Incomprehensibly, she received a new opportunity when she was hired by Dr. Georges Bonjeau, president of the Society for the Protection of Children, to take care of children in an orphanage in Orgeville, where she was discovered trying to strangle a six-year-old boy, a fact that was silenced by an embarrassed Bonjeau.
With no family and no friends, the woman returned to Paris to work as a prostitute. She stayed in a dingy and dirty pension where she was caught strangling the owner's son, Marcel Poirot, 12. The dress and her face were covered in blood, so Dr. Thoinot had to surrender to the evidence and claim that the death was the result of a strangulation. Even so, the woman did not enter prison. Thoinot produced a psychiatric report recommending her admission to a mental institution. Webber was committed to the Maréville Sanitarium in New Caledonia, where she was found dead on July 5, 1918. She had managed to commit suicide in the best way she knew how, by strangling herself.
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