October 7, 1874 - Jeanne Weber
What distinguished Weber's case was not only the number of victims but the repeated failure of medical and legal institutions to act on visible evidence — bruised throats dismissed as convulsions, acquittals secured despite consistent patterns, and a hospital position obtained precisely because authorities had twice cleared her name. She operated across nearly three years and multiple locations before being caught in the act, and even then the legal system defaulted to an insanity ruling rather than a criminal conviction. The case became a notable example of how assumptions about maternal innocence could override physical evidence in early twentieth-century French courts.
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