A PATHETIC TRIO
Two Women And a Babe in the Parish Jail
Crowley Signal abt 1902
News Article from Adadia Parish
Submitted by Winston Boudreaux, 2006

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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.