The Potteries Examiner : — 1872-05-11 (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England)

HORRIBLE MURDER IN GENEVA.  A correspondent writes, under date Geneva, May 3:—" I barbarous murder was committed here on Friday last, the 26th of April, and the measures taken by the murderer to conceal the deed surpass in horrible details any of the sensational and atrocious murders which have of late agitated the public of Europe. The victim is one Vioget, about 65 years of age, a money lender well known in Geneva. He had not been seen since last Friday at his place of abode in the quarter of the Madeleine, where he occupied three rooms filled with old furniture, old clothes, odds and ends on which he had lent money at usurious interest, or which he had purchased at low sales. He lived entirely alone in the midst of this accumulation of pledged property. His prolonged I absence rather surprisedhisneighbours, causing some suspicion of foul play. The police authorities, informed on Tuesday last of this circumstance, set watch near the premises, and about six o'clock in the evening a man was detected trying to open one of the doors of the apartments, which he at last succeeded in doing. Instantly arrested and interrogated, he eventually confessed the following facts, though the horrible confession he made did not seem to trouble his conscience. On Friday last, he said, he gave Vioget a rendezvous at his own apartments in a street of the Eaton Vives, on some business connected with a loan he had of Vicaret —quarrelling with him about the money. Vioget accused him of being a cheat and thief, and enraged at this accusation he knocked him down with a hatchet, and afterwards murdered him. The deed was no sooner accomplished than he felt horrified, not knowing what to do with the body, but at last decided to adopt the horrible process of cutting it up into small pieces with the intention of burning them in the furnace of the room he occupied. This confession was hardly believed by the Commissary of Police, to whom it had been made; but on Wednesday morning, when the Procureur•Generel, the Jugs d'lnstruction, a medical gentleman, and the Commissary of Police proceeded to the scene of the murder, they found the statement to be too true. They found the remains of the body cut up as the murderer had described. In one bucket were the entrails, in another a quantity of congealed blood; in a trunk and in a cupboard other parts of the body. Portions of the limbs and the greater part of the head, of which only the bones calcined remained, had been consumed in the furnace. Reports of another person being an accomplice in this horrible butchery were , current, and a butcher's boy was arrested; but on accounting for his occupation for the last few days he was soon after released, and it seems probable • the murderer alone and deliberately consummated ; this disgusting work. His name is Veuchet, and he ' is a native of a village in the Canton de Vaud. He is shut up closely watched in the town prison. Ibis ' a pity the punishment of death is abolished in the Canton of Geneva, for this murderer well merits the forfeiture of his head; but he will be oondemned to imprisonment for life, under the almost certain prospect of a commutation of punishment at the end of twenty years.