Early on the morning of August 5, 1907 the 5.38 train from Monte Carlo pulled into the Marseilles station of Gare De Saint Charles. From the Monte Carlo train and across the platform a trunk and valise with a forwarding address to London was brought by a porter to the baggage section and deposited the luggage on one of the racks. Sometime later in the morning another station porter, while on his rounds, was stopped in his tracks when he noticed drops of blood seeping from underneath the trunk. The Marseilles police were called and on opening the trunk, to their horror, discovered the dismembered body of a woman in it.
The post mortem revealed that the victim was subjected to a frenzied knife attack with ten major points of entry, one piercing the heart. The police team arrested a man and a woman in a nearby hotel for questioning. They were identified as Vere Thomas St Leger Goold, an Irishman, and his French wife Marie Violet Giroudain, most unlikely suspects for such a crude and brutal crime. A quite extraordinary tale unfolds as the police question the couple, the magistrate delves into their background and it emerges that Goold, an aristocrat from a baronetcy in Co. Cork, was once a Wimbledon finalist. Murder in Monte Carlo, a bloodcurdling recount, tells of the tragic and sad outcome to a life of a man, whose birthright and great sporting talent should have promised him the world. Instead he became the architect of his own destruction and met his end in one of the worst hell holes in prison history.
