Héra Mirtel

Marie-Louise Victorine Bessarabo was a French writer, woman of letters, militant feminist, salonnier, lecturer, and ardent suffragist. She was also a spiritist and a "believer in the Black Mass," a stock exchange gambler, a plotter for the restoration of the royalist regime in France, as well as an advisor of other women in matrimony and affairs of the heart. Mirtel was famous for the murder of her second husband, Georges Bessarabo, whose body was sent in a "bloody trunk" "from Paris to Nancy, by rail. Defended by Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, she was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment. She was suspected of having murdered her first husband as well.