Tender Murderers Read online

  The Hindu Goddess Durga. Many people believed that Phoolan was a reincarnation of Durga

  Late one August night in 1980, Phoolan and Vikram were camped in the jungle when a shot rang out. Vikram had been shot; he died with his head in his lover's lap. His killers were Sri Ram and Lala Ram, upper-caste dacoit brothers who had just been released from prison, and who were avenging the death of Babu Gujar. Phoolan was overpowered and bound, tossed like a sack of flour into the bottom of a boat, which sailed down the Yamuna River to the village of Behmai, home to about fifty families of Thakurs, one of India's highest castes. As much as the lower castes idolized her, Phoolan was hated and feared by the upper castes, especially the men.

  In Behmai, Phoolan was held captive in a dark, filthy hut for three weeks. Every night, turbaned upper-caste men whose faces she could not see took turns raping her until she fainted. Finally, she was dragged outside by the dacoit brothers, who forced her to parade nude in front of the laughing, jeering Thakur men of Behmai.

  Rescued by a priest from a nearby village, Phoolan recovered and formed her own gang. This young woman, not even five feet tall, became the Avenging Angel of the Ravines, leading her gang of upper-caste dacoits. Most untraditionally, she cropped her hair, wore lipstick and nail polish, and dressed in jeans and boots. She earned the reputation of a female Robin Hood who looted the rich to help the poor. You could even buy a Phoolan Devi doll.

  And of course the upper-caste men continued to hate her, and as before, they attacked her sexuality, accusing her of being a nymphomaniac. One police inspector said, “For every man this girl has killed, she has slept with two. Sometimes she sleeps with them first, before she bumps them off.” A rival upper-caste dacoit called her a woman of loose character. Naturally, none of these men made mention of how many women they had slept with–or raped–or how many more women they would sleep with if given half the chance.

  A deputy police commandant explained to journalist Mary Ann Weaver why people become dacoits: “Some join for reasons of revenge: if the system gives you no justice, then you take justice into your own hands.” Phoolan definitely took justice into her own hands, and she had her revenge.

  On Saint Valentine's Day 1981, Phoolan and her gang invaded Behmai, dragging about thirty Thakur men from their homes, lining them up and demanding that they r eveal Sri Ram's and Lala Ram's hideout. When they denied all knowledge of the dacoit brothers, Phoolan strode up and down the line, ripping off their turbans in a fury, beating them with the butt of her rifle while they begged for mercy. Finally, the men were marched down to the river where they were forced to kneel. Shots rang out and twenty-two of the men fell dead. This largest massacre in modern India, led by a lower-caste woman, was dubbed “The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre.” Phoolan wasn't yet twenty-six years old.

  She had avenged her rape by the men of Behmai, but there was one small problem: Phoolan had no way of knowing if these really had been the men who r aped her, or merely those who jeered and spat as she was paraded naked in front of them. It didn't matter to her; she felt vindicated. But now things got hot for her. She had gone too far, and important upper-caste men insisted on her capture. There was a price of $10,400 on her head.

  Phoolan managed to elude the law for two more years before surrendering in February 1983. With a red scarf tied around her flowing dark hair and a small silver figurine of the goddess Durga tucked into her breast pocket, she mounted the wooden steps of a twenty-three-foot-high dais and knelt before the portraits of Gandhi and Durga that she had insisted on as a condition of her surrender. A watching crowd of 8,000 people cheered her. Even in surrender, she was a legend.

  Eleven years later, after having been held in prison without benefit of a trial, Phoolan was finally pardoned by Uttar Pradesh's new chief minister, himself a member of the lower castes. That same year, a film about Phoolan, The Bandit Queen, was released to excellent reviews, and was quickly banned in India, where censors objected to the movie's gr aphic sex and its depiction of India's caste system.

  In I996, Phoolan authored an autobiography and was elected to Parliament in India by a landslide. Campaigning against the caste system and promising to work for the “upliftment of women, the downtrodden, and the poor,” she earned yet another name: The Gandhi of Mirzapur. Now a respected member of Parliament, Phoolan settled down in a modest three-story house in New Delhi, with a husband, Umed Singh, a high-caste r ealtor whom it was rumored she called “my wife.” New York performance artist Penny Arcade interviewed Phoolan, asking why she had married. She answered that she was worried about what people would think of her, and that she needed protection. Penny couldn't believe what she heard. She exploded, “Phoolan, you killed twenty-two men, and you're worried about what people will think of you?”

  But Phoolan did need protection. After she was elected to Parliament, the government reduced her bodyguards from ten policemen to only one, even though she constantly received death threats. On July 25, 200I, she was ambushed by three masked gunmen as she returned home from a morning session of Parliament. They wounded her sole bodyguard and pumped five bullets into her. She was rushed to a hospital and pronounced dead.

  Phoolan's assassins were Thakurs, bent on revenge for the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre. But Phoolan lives on in songs and stories among exploited Indian women. Illiterate, raped, and abused, she avenged herself and rose from legal slavery at the age of eleven to a place in India's Parliament. Yet at the time of her surrender, Phoolan had told reporters, “What do I know about, except using a rifle and cutting grass?”

  The Movie

  Phoolan's life story, The Bandit Queen, was released to rave reviews in 1994 and immediately ran into trouble. The Indian government banned it, and Phoolan didn't like it much, either. Although the film is excellently acted, beautifully photographed, and packs a wallop, Phoolan objected to the unsettling rape scenes and the shots of actress Seema Biswas, as Phoolan, being paraded nude in front of the villagers. When the board of censors rescinded their ban, Phoolan sued and threatened to set herself on fire in front of the theater if the film was shown. Eventually she was mollified by the offer of an out-of-court settlement of £40,000.

  In an online chat at indya.com, the Bandit Queen explained her feelings: “I did not want the naked scenes to be depicted on screen. A lot of women from impoverished backgrounds undergo this humiliation. Several such women even commit suicide. Only some of us have the strength to fight back.”

  Phoolan Devi and New York performance artist Penny Arcade in 1995

  Four

  Fabled Femmes Fatales

  Charlotte Corday

  The Woman Who Isn't in the Painting

  The original painting by Jacques-Louis David hangs in the Royal Museum in Brussels, but you've probably seen it in an art book. A turban wound around his head, the man in the painting slumps life-lessly in his cloth-draped bathtub. His right arm, hanging outside the tub, still holds a quill pen; a list r ests in his left hand. The painting is called The Death of Marat, but the most important person in the story it tells is not in the picture. A portrait of that person, done while she awaited execution in prison, shows a pretty girl with typically French heavy eyelids and long, straight nose. A fashionable mob cap perches on her long dark curls. Her name was Charlotte Corday. She was Marat's assassin, and she was twenty-four years old.

  Marie Anne Charlotte Corday D'Armont was born in 1768. Her family were aristocrats, but not the kind who had bankrupted France, starved her citizens, and who, after the revolution, were losing their heads to La Guillotine while the mob cheered. In fact, they were poor, though in decent enough financial condition to have their daughter brought up properly in a convent in Caen, Normandy.

  She was well read, well bred, and romantic. Among her ancestors was the famous dramatist Pierre Corneille, who is considered the father of French tragedy. The lessons in his plays were basically that, no matter what the personal cost, a man's gotta do what a man's (or woman's) gotta do. Charlotte devoure
d the works of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a major influence on both the French Revolution and the then-current romantic movement. His recurring theme was that politics and mor ality must never be separated. All in all, Charlotte was an enlightened woman by the standards of her day. Aristocrat or not, she approved of the revolution and supported the Girondists, political moderates who could be compared to the American Democratic Party.

  On the other hand, Marat's political affiliation, the Jacobin Party, can be compared to the most hard-core Maoists during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The Jacobins, the original terrorists, were responsible for the mass atrocities and beheadings that we now call the Reign of Terror, which followed the French Revolution. Ironically, the Jacobins, too, invoked the name of Rousseau to justify their Stalinist-type purges. Marat was a journalist who wielded such power through his newspaper, The Friend of the People, that even revolutionary leaders like Danton and Robespierre feared him. Among the many victims of his denunciations were King Louis XVI and the entire Girondist Party.

  As early as 1789, when Marat had twenty-two Girondists arrested, Charlotte considered killing him. She wrote, over and over again, on little slips of paper, “Shall I or shall I not?” It took her a while to completely make up her mind. The king's execution in January I793 was the last straw for Charlotte, who wasn't so liberal that she didn't support the monarchy.

  By this time, the expelled Girondists had taken refuge in Caen, and Charlotte was hanging out with them. The horror stories they told about Marat, Paris, and the Terror must have helped her make her final decision. She packed up her dreams and went to Paris, leaving behind her Bible open to the story of Judith, the Jewish heroine who saved her people by beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes. No doubt she also thought about that other romantic young French girl, Joan of Arc. Like Joan, she too would become the savior of her country.

  Charlotte arrived in Paris and bought a kitchen knife. She had considered emulating the Roman hero Brutus and stabbing Marat through the heart on the floor of the French Senate, the way Brutus had dispatched Julius Caesar. However, Marat wasn't attending the Senate for the time being. He suffered from a nasty skin condition that forced him to spend most of his time in bathwater full of healing herbs. The tub, draped with a sheet for modesty's sake, was where he conducted most of his business.

  She sent him a note saying she had news of a planned Girondist uprising in Caen. Girondist uprisings were Marat's meat. He agreed to see her on July 13, I793. Seated in his bathtub, he copied down the names of the Girondists as she dictated them to him. Suddenly Charlotte pulled a kitchen knife from the fichu at her bosom and plunged it into his heart. It pierced his lung, his aorta, and the left ventricle. He called out to his wife, and died.

  Charlotte's escape was prevented by Marat's friends and family, who lived with him. She gave up without a struggle, resigned to sacrificing her life for her ideals, as her ancestor Corneille had preached. At her trial, she testified that she had planned and carried out the assassination alone, with no accomplices. This frustrated the Jacobins, who wanted a good excuse for a mass persecution of Girondists. They ordered her lawyer to plead insanity, which would at least humiliate and discredit her. He couldn't bear it. The best he could come up with were the words, “This incredible calm . . . this complete tranquillity and abnegation which in their way are sublime, are not natural.”

  At least, if we're to judge from the portrait done of her by a National Guard officer named Hauer, she doesn't seem to have been mistreated in prison. She looks at peace and is even wearing her fashionable mob cap. As payment for the portrait, Charlotte gave the young officer a lock of her hair. Hauer was not the only romantic young man to be moved by this calm, lovely woman. A witness to her execution, Pierre Notelet, wrote, “Her beautiful face was so calm, that one would have said she was a statue. . . . For eight days I was in love with Charlotte Corday.”

  There were no lengthy appeals, no years spent on Death Row. Four days after Marat's assassination, Charlotte climbed the steps to the guillotine in her dainty little slippers and was beheaded.

  Like all assassins, Charlotte naively believed that killing one person would make everything better. Of course, that never happens, and her plan backfired. Instead, Marat became a martyr. Along with David's famous painting, busts of Marat sprang up all over Paris, replacing the crucifixions and Madonnas that were icons non grata in the new regime. An obelisk was erected as a memorial to him a month after his death, and at least six plays about the assassination were written and performed. Parents named their children after him, and the names of streets, towns, and bridges were changed. Montmartre became Mont-Marat!

  This mania lasted two years. Then, thanks to the volatile political temperament of revolutionary France, Marat fell out of favor. Like statues of Lenin after the fall of Communism, his obelisk was overturned and smashed. Children burned their little Marat dolls, and pamphlets entitled “The Crimes of J.P. Marat” were sold in the marketplace. And finally, Charlotte became the heroine: a beautiful girl who gave her life to rid her country of a monster. Fat lot of good it did her—she was still dead.

  The Movie

  1964 saw the debut of a hit Broadway play by Peter Wiess, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. To avoid verbal exhaustion, the title was abbreviated as Marat/Sade and made into a movie. It's a good movie if you like ambiguity and experimental theater, but don't take it as gospel. Neither Charlotte Corday nor Marat ever spent any time at Charenton, and they were both dead and decayed at the time of the supposed incident, 1808.

  Frankie Silver

  “Die with It in Ye, Frankie!”

  If you grew up in Appalachia, chances are you've heard the legend of Frankie Silver, the first woman to be hung in the state of North Carolina and the inspiration for the song, “Frankie and Johnny”—and everything you heard is wrong.

  Except for one thing: Frankie Silver did indeed kill her husband, Charlie Silver, on December 22, 1831.

  Frances Stewart was probably about seventeen years old when she married Charlie Silver, who may have been all of eighteen. They'd both been born in log cabins across the ridge from each other in the mountains of Buncombe County, North Carolina. The little cove where she grew up is still known as Stewart's Cove. Charlie built them a little one-room log cabin on some land his father gave him, cutting the trees and hewing the logs himself. For all the vast acreage they owned, the Stewarts and Silvers were poor. Their rocky land was a hard place to raise crops, and they depended for food on what the menfolk could shoot, and what berries and herbs the womenfolk could find in the woods. They had to make anything they needed, and their work was hard. Charlie's younger brother Alfred said about Frankie, “She could card and spin her three yards of cotton a day on a big wheel.”

  Within a year, Frankie had given birth to a baby girl. By then, her life was probably already miserable. They lived secluded lives, miles from the nearest town, and Charlie had already acquired the habit of leaving his young wife alone for days at a time, while he was off drinking and chasing women. Alone with her baby in a dark, tiny cabin in mid-winter, Frankie must have felt painfully isolated, but it was worse when Charlie came home, drunk and abusive.

  Everyone knew that Charlie beat Frankie, and they may not have approved, but wife beating was an accepted practice in those days, in those parts. It was only a question of how badly a man might beat his wife. There was an unwritten but accepted law called “the rule of thumb,” which said that a man shouldn't beat his wife with a stick that was wider than his thumb. Charlie, it was said, broke the rule of thumb.

  On December 23, 1831, Frankie trudged up over the ridge and through the snow to the house where Charlie's family lived. Charlie hadn't been home for days, she told them. Their cabin was cold, she'd burned up all the firewood, and she was taking the baby and going home to her folks. She didn't care if he ever came b
ack again. Charlie's family searched the woods and river for him; maybe he'd fallen through the ice, or been attacked by an animal. Finally, Charlie's father hiked forty miles across the mountains to Tennessee, where there lived a slave who, folks said, could “conjure.” The slave was gone, but his master used the conjure ball, a ball on a string that moved like a pendulum, over a map that Charlie's father had drawn. It stopped right over the crude sketch of Charlie's cabin. That's where to look for Charlie, said the man.

  Meanwhile, a neighbor, Jack Collis, explored the abandoned cabin. He noticed that there was an extraordinary amount of ash in the fireplace; Frankie's last fire had consumed a huge amount of wood, and had burned very hot and very long. The ashes were suspiciously greasy. Poking around in the fireplace, he discovered bits of human bone. Neighbors pried up the floorboards, and found a puddle of blood “large as a hog's liver.”

  Next the family and friends searched around outside the house, and found grisly parts of Charlie hidden all over, parts that would n't burn. In a recently dug hole filled with ashes was the iron heel off one of his hunting shoes. A hollow tree stump concealed his liver and heart. Meanwhile, Charlie's family was burying the body parts as quickly as they were found. When they found more parts, instead of opening the grave, they dug a new grave, with the result that Charlie Silver has three graves.

  On January IO, 1832, Burke County Sheriff W. C. Butler arrested Frankie Silver for the murder of her husband. But there was a problem: little Frankie stood four feet, ten inches high. Charlie was big, and weighed twice as much as she. Could she have dragged his body to the fireplace and chopped it up her self? She had to have had help. So along with Frankie, the sheriff arrested Frankie's mother and her brother Blackston. They were quickly let go for lack of evidence, but Frankie was brought to trial, and within two days she was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead.