A PATHETIC TRIO

Two Women And a Babe in the Parish Jail

Crowley Signal abt 1902

People whose business compels them to visit jails and court houses are not infrequently called upon to witness sights so pathetic that they linger unpleasantly in the memory, no matter how hardened or calloused the beholders may have become through their experience. This was illustrated in the Parish jail Saturday. Two white women, a mother and daughter, were yesterday arrested on a charge of having stolen a quantity of dry goods and china ware from the home of L.W. Richart, a well-to-do farmer living fourteen miles south of town, near Bayou Queue de Tortue. The elder woman’s name is Corneile Touchet and her daughter is called Eva Roy. The younger woman is about 20 years old and rather pretty. She is the mother of a tiny baby girl whose escutcheon will be clouded by the bar sinister, for the mother has never been legally wedded.

The women are ignorant, but not so much so they do not realize the gravity of their situation. Saturday when a Signal reporter called to see them at the jail they were seated on the side of the bed rocking back and forth, moaning and weeping and apparently in the throes of the direst distress. The younger woman hid her face in a handkerchief when the jailer and the reporter entered the room and did not once look up. The elder woman held the child, which seemed strangely out of place in its grim surroundings.

Mrs. Touchet made one or two vain endeavors to explain their presence in the jail, but her sobs choked back the protests which it was easy to see her lips were trying to form. When the iron door clanked on the unfortunate trio the moans of the women could still be heard.

Deputy LeBlanc, who made the arrest, says there is no doubt of the elder woman’s guilt, but the daughter’s connection with the crime is yet to be determined.

It seems that Mrs. Touchet, who with her daughter and Gil LeBlanc, live near Mr. Richart, had been employed in the house from which the goods were stolen. When they were missed she denied having seen them at all. A search of her rooms, however divulged the fact that most of the missing articles were concealed there. Then she admitted taking them.

Gil LeBlanc was not at home Friday, but the deputy found him near Abbeville Friday night and arrested him, thing that the stolen goods could not have been concealed in the house without his knowledge.

Both he and the girl claim they knew nothing at all of the theft.

Deputy LeBlanc regretted the necessity for arresting the younger woman, but the facts pointed so strongly to her complicity in the crime that his sworn duty made the act imperative. And the woman could not be taken without the infant, so there was nothing to be done but place the three of them in jail.

The stolen articles are valued at $50.