Pons's first visit to the hotel had aroused doubts in Marie's mind, and she told her husband to get ready to steal out of Marseilles. He quickly obeyed, and they were actually emerging from the hotel when the goods clerk arrived for the second time. He conveyed to them the decision of the police, and Marie, conscious that they were in a tight corner, staked her life on bluff.
"Very well," she said haughtily, "we will take a cab and drive to the station, and when you have opened the trunk you can apologize for having been so impertinent as to doubt my word." The cab was called, and Marie and her husband with the large carpet-bag got in, but the woman's heart must have sunk when Pons entered after them, as though they were under arrest already.
The cab rattled along, and no one spoke until Mrs. Goold clutched the clerk's arm and whispered to him that she would be willing to pay ten thousand francs if he would let them go. Pons sat immovable. He was not to be bribed, and the attempt to do so proved that his suspicions were well-founded.
The examination of the contents of the trunk and carpet-bag indicated that a brutal murder had been committed, and before the two prisoners had time to confess the police identified the victim, and unravelled the whole story. Marie and her husband were accordingly sent back to Monte Carlo to stand their trial.
The woman was the chief figure in Court, her husband always presenting a shivering, weak-kneed appearance in the dock. Marie Goold was clearly the person who had murdered Madame Levin, and the sentence in her case was death. Her husband was consigned to penal servitude for life.
After a sensational trial they were removed to the French prison at Cayenne, and there in July, 1908, Marie Goold died of typhoid fever. Fourteen months later Vere Goold, driven insane by remorse and the deprivation of drink and drugs, committed suicide.
The fate of the niece was pathetic. She was so upset by her association with the murderers that despite every attention she faded away, dying before she attained her twenty-seventh birthday.
The European War produced many German criminals, but the most resourceful of them all was Martha Kupfer, a middle-aged widow with a plausible manner and a pretty daughter, whose only capital was a profound knowledge of the weaknesses of her compatriots, out of which she made over £200,000 before she was arrested. She obtained this fortune in less than a couple of years, and there is every reason to believe that had she not grown careless she would never have been detected.