The Treacherous Tennis Player

4/27/2025

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Vere St. Leger Goold was born October 2, 1853 into a wealthy, Irish family. When he was 26 years old he became the first Irish tennis champion. His early success in sports faded, and by 1883 he turned to alcohol and opium. However it took a turn for the worse when he met Marie Giraudin, a French, twice-widowed dressmaker.

Marie and Vere Goold while being held in the prison at Monaco c.1907

Marie and Vere married in 1891, and riddled with debt they moved to Canada in 1897. She opened a dressmaker shop, but by 1903 they were managing a laundry business in Seacombe-on-Mersey, Liverpool. Despite their common occupation, they adopted the title of Sir Vere and Lady Goold.

Deeper in debt than usual, in 1907 Marie Goold persuaded her husband she had figured out a system to win at the gaming tables in the Monte Carlo Casino. Marie took her niece Isabelle along with them. They lived on the first floor of the Villa Menesini in the Boulevard des Moulin for three years, before all their money finally petered out. It didn't help that Marie Goold had expensive tastes.

Later on it was inferred that the couple brought Isabelle along in order to prostitute her from their room. Vere Goold would meet men in the casino while playing cards, then invite them to their apartment to continue the game. Once there, they would be introduced to the young and pretty niece.

In 1907, in answer to their desperate prayers they met a wealthy Swedish widow named Emma Levin, who was staying at the casino accompanied by her friend Madame Castellazi, also a widow.

Then one day Marie Goold and Madame Castellazi had a public dispute in the casino, which made the social columns and drove Mrs. Levin out of the city in order to escape the publicity.

Vere St. Leger Goold in his youth when he was a tennis champion

Unexpectedly an unsigned letter was slipped under the door of Levin’s hotel room, informing her that Vere and Marie were fraudsters and he had no legal right to a title.

The Goolds had borrowed 40£ pounds from Madame Levin, and she asked for repayment of the money before she left Monte Carlo. On August 4, 1907 she went to collect the money. By midnight she had not returned to her room, and Madame Castellazi went to the police. They responded to the hotel where the Goolds were staying, only to find they had left Isabelle behind, and had gone off to Marseilles claiming they had to meet a doctor in the city.

The police found bloodstains on the dining room walls, two saws, a chopper knife, a dagger and a hammer with blood on them. Madame Castellazi who accompanied the police, recognized Madame Levin's parasol. It was determined the couple had used a pestle, an Indian dagger and a butcher’s knife to accomplish the deed of what later turned out to be a horrific murder.

Emma Levin with an unidentified child

The Goolds' real intention in heading for Marseilles was to escape to England. They left a trunk at the Marseillaise Railway station. One of the clerks named Louis Pons noticed a foul smell and blood leaking from the bottom.

The police were notified, and the couple stated the trunk was full of slaughtered poultry. The farfetched story did not dissuade police, and once opened they found the chopped up body of Madame Levin. The head and parts of the legs were missing. They were found in a small portmanteau which Goold was holding. The woman had several wounds on the head, and she had been stabbed several times in the chest. The intestines had been removed — it would later be speculated this had been done to delay putrefaction of the torso.

Vere Goold, 54, at the time took all the blame, and confessed to the murder, but pleaded insanity. During the trial many thought the mastermind of the deed was Marie Goold, and she received a death sentence by guillotine. After she requested to be executed in front of the Monte Carlo Casino it was commuted to life imprisonment. She died of typhoid fever in a Montepellier jail in 1914.

Vere received a life sentence on Devil's Island. He survived a trip on a convict ship to French Guiana, but deprived of alcohol and opium he descended into madness and committed suicide on September 8, 1909.

Due to the notoriety of the crime, and Goold's aristocratic lineage, during the trial attempts were made to verify what was true or a lie.

According to the Burke's Peerage, Vere Thomas St. Leger Goold was born October, 1853 and belonged to an old Irish family. He was the fifth son of George Ignatius Goold. His grandmother was a daughter of an Earl of Kenmare. He had studied at Trinity College in Dublin. Of his siblings only his older brother James was still alive.

Vere Goold married Violet (Violette), daughter of Hippolyte Giroudin on August 2, 1891. Her family of origin lived in Chateau La Sou, France.

Trunk and portmanteau where Emma Levin's body was stored

The present head of the family was Sir James Stephen Goold, who succeeded to the title in 1893, after his uncle's death.

Vere's brother had left to South Australia since 1863, and concealed his identity since he could not keep up the title. He was employed at Gladstone, as a railway ganger. All other family members had died, and the only other person left was an elderly aunt.

James Goold told the press that despite not having seen his brother for 40 years, he found it difficult to believe he could commit the crime. He said his younger brother had always been a kind person, who would not even harm animals.

The Boulevard des Moulins where Emma Levin was murdered c.1907

Marie Giroudin had married a young man contrary to her parents' wishes. She left her husband after one week, and moved to Geneva where she worked as a dressmaker. In 1870, she went to London, and became a companion to an English lady. She accompanied the lady to India where she met and married Captain Wilkinson. By then she had become a widow since her first husband had died.

Captain Wilkinson died 3 years later, and she sold her jewelry, and opened a dressmaking shop in London. It was during this time she met Vere Goold through a matrimonial agency.

Through testimony presented during the trial, it came to light that Marie Goold's first two husbands had died mysteriously, creating a suspicion that she had murdered them as well.

For European and American commentators, this crime demonstrated the dangers of cities like Monte Carlo, and how its influence corrupted society at large.

Newspapers of the day described Monte Carlo as a ‘Devil’s Paradise’, a ‘Glittering Hell’, or ‘House of Perdition’, and a letter published in The Times asked: 'How long are the nations of Europe going to tolerate the continuance of this plague-spot in their midst?'

‘The Rooms’ at the Casino were never more influential than during the early years of the twentieth century, attracting royalty, industrialists, singers, showgirls, prostitutes and the courtesans known as the ‘Grandes Horizontales’ of ‘La Belle Epoque’.

As a contemporary travel report in the influential British publication, Pearson’s Magazine, observed of the scene inside the white-stone building: 'A strange congregation of people promenade between the pillars, or rest in the lounges. The smart, the dowdy, the eminently respectable, the bizarre, all are there.'

Smart European society lived vicariously through the tales of misbehavior on the rock. Visiting the casino for the first time could still be shocking, and the young, newly-wed Duchess of Marlborough was astonished to see so many 'ladies of easy virtue.'

The story of ‘La Malle Sanglante’, (The Bloody Trunk) made the headlines of all the newspapers in France c.1907

The Victim

Emma Enrik Levin née Alhquist was a middle-aged widow. She married Leopold Levin, a Jewish stockbroker who was about 20 years older then her. They met when she worked in his rag factory, Messrs Levin and Sons located in Copenhagen. They were married 18 years, and he died in 1906. They had no children, and he left her a small fortune, and with a pension from his company she was comfortably off.

She spent part of the year in Denmark, Sweden and Monte Carlo, where she could be found at the roulette tables until midnight. Afterward she went off to the cafes to show off her diamonds.

A weird coincidence was that within days of the murder one of the principal witnesses, a porter named Berard was shot in the back and wounded by an unknown person while walking down a Marseilles Street.

A depiction of the Monte Carlo suicide cemetery c.1896

By the time of Emma Levin's murder, Monaco was considered a playground for the wealthy, but no doubt there was a dark underbelly.

The birth of the Monte Carlo Casino came about in 1866 when Princess Caroline of Monaco built the resort, which allowed gambling, something that was outlawed in most of Europe. Aristocratic luxuries were part of the stay while gamblers attempted to make Lady Luck smile on them.

In 1883, a Parisian woman lost her all her money. The management refused her an advance of 2,000 francs. She was told to leave the property, then she pulled a "six shooter revolver loaded with one bullet" and placed the barrel to her temple. Guards pulled the firearm from her, and she was taken to the director's office. They agreed to front her the 2,000 francs she asked for. It seemed she had no intention of killing herself, but knew this was the only way to get what she wanted. This unidentified woman understood the casino feared any hint of murder or suicide attached to their establishment, thereby forcing their hand to give her the funds. She had been coming to the casino since 1881, and lost almost 100,000 francs during these years.

Monte Carlo Casino c.1896

Monte Carlo Casino gained a reputation for being the catalyst for innumerable suicides, however there were two sides to this story.

These were the years when Victorian morals saw gambling as a vice that opened the doors to many other depravities.

The casino claimed the tales of suicides from those who had lost their fortunes, were made up to give the resort a bad name. The motive being there were plenty of other locations along the Riviera who would immediately open their own gaming rooms, if the Monte Carlo closed its doors.

The reports appearing in the newspapers, never specified the names of those who had done away with themselves in despair, only generalities about the sums they lost and what station they held in life.

No doubt the Monte Carlo Casino was motivated to keep the scandal of suicide away from its doors, but it was said they would change the cause of death to an illness or disease — anything but suicide or murder. This was in complicity with the coroner and the police department. Many times the family were more than cooperative, since suicide carried a stigma they wanted to avoid. If the murderer was a spouse or family member, they would also stay quiet when a shot through the head was listed as pneumonia.