Claville-Motteville

An autumn morning can turn the quietest parish on its head. On the 29th of November 1828, alongside the road running from Cailly to Clères, local residents walked into a horrific scene inside a modest cottage set between the château gates and the lane to the stables. Jean Guillaume de Hurpy, aged fifty-two, lay dead and gruesome-looking beside his knitting frame, his body terribly mutilated.

The shock ran deep throughout the community. The bachelor was a familiar face: parish church sacristan by calling and stocking knitter by trade, with official records also listing him as a boundary warden. Two neighbours—farm servant Jacques Philippe and blacksmith Jean-Baptiste Dumesnil the younger—rushed to alert the mayor. Inquiries revealed the murder took place the previous evening, on the 28th of November, between nine and ten o'clock.

On Monday the 30th of November, Father Bertin conducted the burial. Claville's two schoolmasters, Jacques Nicolas and Louis Lemaistre, walked behind the coffin to the churchyard. Hurpy was laid to rest beside the vicarage garden and the neighbouring farmyard. Yet one unsettling question lingered: who could have murdered the parish sacristan?

For a long stretch, local constabulary had nothing to go on. Suspicion gradually settled upon a sinister figure: Joseph Pascal Malet. Born in Goderville in 1798, the journeyman carpenter had married into a reputable village family in 1821 when he took Marie Charlotte Clotilde Dumesnil as his wife. This respectable match masked the grim trajectory of an inveterate felon.

Malet was a hardened ex-convict. Decades after the Claville murder, he struck again: on the 27th of December 1849, he brutally slaughtered Marie Thérèse Angammare, a sixty-year-old costermonger, in her cottage in Harfleur. Pinned down by eyewitnesses, he was sentenced to death.

The guillotine brought his violent career to an end. While historical accounts place his execution in Rouen either in February or June 1851, a chilling rumour followed him to the grave: though many in Claville had long held him responsible for Hurpy's demise, others claimed he finally made a clean breast of the sacristan's murder whilst standing on the scaffold.