Room Service in Lausanne

The plot might have been created by Henry James in collaboration with Tennessee Williams. The place: Lausanne.

The victim was Marjorie Winifred Bird, a rich, neurotic American widow who hoped that the U.S. would one day be come a monarchy so that she could be its queen. The accused were Nicolas Sturdza, a penniless Rumanian homo sexual who styled himself prince and claimed that he was descended from the Moldavian kings, and Dr. Gerard Sa voy, a shady Lausanne psychiatrist who specialized in wealthy female patients and who, over the course of 18 months, prescribed for Mrs. Bird 18,970 barbiturate pills. Last week, in a Lausanne courtroom, the doctor was found guilty of murdering the American widow and the prince of stealing over $200,000 worth of her jewels.

Spaghetti & Prunes. Winnie Bird came a long way from Missouri, where she was born in 1897. Daughter of a poor railroad employee, the tall, blonde young beauty came East, married Wallis C. Bird, a Standard Oil heir. In 1941 Bird was killed in a plane crash, leaving Winnie with an income of $300,000 a year and a desire to crash European society. But World War II intervened, and it was not until 1948 that Winnie left the U.S. to live in Europe, where she divided her time between a five-room suite at the Crillon in Paris and smaller digs at Lausanne's Hotel Beau Rivage.

Winnie was a joke on the society scene. At 51, her beauty faded, she was a hopeless hypochondriac who existed on spaghetti and prunes, found it difficult to get up in the morning and impossible to get to sleep at night. She complained that she was too weak to wash or comb her hair or care for her pets--two pedigreed dogs, a huge cage of exotic birds, and a vast aquarium of equally exotic fish. So the dogs dirtied her room, the birds died, and the aquarium was carpeted with dead fish.

But Winnie had the money to attract --and buy--an entourage. Her consort was the bogus prince, "Nicky" Sturdza, who was flat broke when he met Winnie at a Paris cocktail party in 1950. She hired him as her escort at $1,000 a month, had his crown and her initials engraved on her handbags, and since he had a flair for designing clothes, Winnie set him up in the Boutique Nicky on Paris' fashionable Faubourg St.-Honore.

Then there was Dr. Gerard Savoy, who was called in to treat Winnie in Lausanne in 1958, when she had a nervous breakdown. Though Dr. Savoy conveniently forgot to mention that his license had just been suspended for taking kickbacks from a nurse, he went on Winnie's payroll at $1,500 a month.

For three years, the ill-mated trio followed the sun around Europe. But as the money went out and the pills came in in ever-increasing doses, Mrs. Bird slowly began to disintegrate. Beaten, bullied and publicly ridiculed by her courtiers, she began to fear for her life. In July 1961, she begged her Swiss banker for armed guards to protect her from Nicky and the doctor; the banker relayed the information to the U.S. consulate in Geneva, which took no action. Ten days later, Winnie was dead. The cause of death certified Dr. Savoy was a cerebral hemorrhage. When Mrs. Bird's lawyers could find neither the original copy of her will nor about $400,000 worth of jewelry, they hired a Swiss lawyer to investigate. He discovered that Nicky had pawned much of the jewelry, dug up so much evidence of Dr. Savoy's strange treatment of the widow that the authorities arrested both Savoy and the prince.

Autopsy Report. At the trial, the prosecution produced an autopsy report that revealed that Mrs. Bird died not of cerebral hemorrhage but of a massive overdose of drugs administered by Savoy, which caused the failure of her respiratory system. A Lausanne doctor testified that two days before Winnie died, he had advised Savoy that she needed a blood transfusion. Dr. Savoy said he had ordered the blood through room service. "That is incredible," exploded Judge Bertrand de Haller. "You don't order blood as if it were champagne."

The sentence was unusually light, even for Switzerland, where the maximum penalty for premeditated murder is 20 years. Dr. Savoy was sentenced to seven years in prison for killing Mrs. Bird. Nicky was given four years for robbery, less the 622 days he spent in prison waiting for the trial. With time off for good behavior, he could be out of prison in less than two years.

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