25. A Homicidal Sleepwalker Cop
Upon hearing Detective Robert Ledru’s bizarre confession to murder, the Le Havre police were skeptical at first. His bosses back in Paris thought that their star detective must have suffered a temporary crisis caused by overwork and stress, which made him imagine himself as a killer. However, ballistics testing proved that the bullet recovered at the crime scene had been fired from Ledru’s revolver. That solved the crime but did not explain why Ledru did it. He was jailed for his own good and kept under constant watch.
While in prison, the authorities, acted upon medical advice to test a theory that might explain how and why Ledru murdered the unfortunate Andre Monet. They gave the distraught detective a revolver loaded with blanks. One night, Ledru got up and fired it at a guard. That convinced the authorities that he was a homicidal sleepwalker. From that day until his death fifty years later in 1937, Ledru was kept in a secluded farm outside Paris, where he was watched over by doctors and armed personnel.