I might well have agreed even before enquiring whether the door had been locked from the inside and checking the possibility of an alternative convenient exit. I did not have to go that far. The first thing that struck my attention was that the bed linen was neat and almost covering the man’s arms. Also his eyes were closed. His skin lacked the usual gun-powder burns of a close-range shot.
I made some enquiries with colleagues and nurses who had experience of dealing with the after-effects of violent deaths. The consensus was that the eyes would remain open in a fixed stare which matched my own observations in such events. I turned my attention to the gun in the man’s hand. Such a tight grip would be hard to achieve by placing the weapon after death. I asked medical colleagues to inform me immediately of a death.
When one arose I placed a pistol in the hand of a man. It could be manipulated to grip, but not tightly. However when rigor mortis set in, the gun placed in a loose grip now tightened. This eliminated the possible earlier contradiction. The police questioned the victim’s son who confessed to the crime when confronted with evidence that contradicted the finding of the physicians. He had closed his father’s eyes and rearranged the bed linen after the murder out of ‘respect’ – which was his undoing.”
To the delight of the rapt audience he then brought the case of Joseph Vacher to attention as a classical example of the persistence of a magistrate that paid off and the crime-scene investigation that linked the perpetrator to the savage murders of one adult woman, seven teenage girls and seven boys in different parts of the country.
“A serial killer of cunning savagery and deliberate sexual depravity, a bloodthirsty psychopath,” the professor said.
He pointed out behaviour in Vacher’s childhood that gave clues to his nature such as the mutilation of animals. The fourteenth of fifteen children, he once shot dead his dog because he would not eat the food Vacher had laid out. Later when a soldier he fell in love with a pretty maidservant Lousie Barrant who laughed when he suggested marriage. This rejection drove him into an uncontrollable rage. As a result he shot her four times and tried to kill himself. They both survived, he with a partially paralysed face. It was clear that Vacher had as little respect for his own life as that of others.
After a year in an asylum he was released by the doctors, according to them “cured”. He took to the roads as a vagrant, one of 400,000 roaming the countryside in search of food and work. This vast army of tramps provided the man with a killing instinct with unintended cover.
His first victim was a 21-year-old female mill worker who he strangled and stabbed and then mutilated after death.
Over the next three years he murdered at will, moving on rapidly from location to location. Many of his victims were young shepherds working in isolated places which facilitated the perverted killer.
Émile Fourquet, a magistrate in the town of Beley, was the first to identify and link the murders and he gathered witness statements from all over the country. When the killer was caught assaulting a woman by her husband and son and jailed, he confessed to the murders in the hope that by pleading insanity he would escape the guillotine.
Lacassagne visited and assessed each crime scene and established a modus operandi that implicated a single perpetrator.
“At each of the murder scenes it appeared that a predatory animal had gone on a rampage. But there was an unmistakeable pattern to each one. The killer always stalked the victims, approached them from behind, slit their throats with the professionalism of a hunter, sodomised and then disembowelled them. The killer had left his signature on the bodies of the victims. One man responsible for all.”
While incarcerated he claimed in a letter to the judge that while young he had been bitten by a rabid dog which poisoned his blood and drove him to lifelong insanity and murder. This also, he said, explained why he drank blood from the neck wounds of some of his victims. His defence was going to plead that he was insane, which if successful would mean he would avoid execution.
Certainly, the professor admitted, it could be perceived that the sheer depravity and horror of his impulsive slaughter could not be other than the acts of a madman. But then where does one draw the line between insanity and evil? Or the Shakespearean dilemma at the heart of Hamlet: was the Prince mad or simply feigning madness to justify his brand of bloodletting?
What occurred to him was that the killer was self-obsessed and showed not an ounce of remorse for his victims or the terrible effects that he wreaked on the families of the young people he had despatched. He was devoid of feeling, compassion and conscience. The insane by contrast were capable of human emotion.
He therefore examined and closely studied the background of Vacher over a five-month period before his trial in the town of Bourg-en-Bresse, a time during which he put together a psychological profile of the serial killer and established that he was not insane but was responsible for all his depraved and evil actions.
During his evidence the professor held the packed courtroom in thrall and made a significant contribution to the prosecution case. Even the prisoner was prompted to complement his expertise by remarking that he was good.
Vacher was executed on December 31st 1898, and even nine years later the horror of the killings still haunted the public imagination. The professor had become a legend who introduced a national system of post-mortem procedure and helped devise techniques in crime-scene analysis proposed by Bertillon and later improved upon by Locard.
To say he fired up his audience with enthusiasm is in the realm of understatement. More importantly, he heartily approved of the uptake of his techniques and their implementation under Dupin in the Marseilles force.
While Dupin took his coffee break, there was a body of a young woman in the morgue awaiting the pathologist Dr Dufour’s cutting attention. Dupin and the pathologist were two sides of the forensic coin and both shared the same philosophy regarding their task. On his office wall the pathologist had a large poster with the Latin quotation:
MORTUIS PRAESIDIUM ET VOCEM DARE NECESSE EST. “The deceased must be protected and given a voice.”
Once when Dupin had the temerity to sympathise with Dufour on the gruesome nature of his work, he pointed out that while the Inspector had his hero Bertillon and now Lacassagne and Locard – he also had his.
“My dear Dupin, mine is the great Carl Von Rokitansky, the founder of modern post-mortem technique. In his career he supervised 70,000 post mortems and personally performed 30,000, which averaged two a day, seven days a week for 45 years. And I should complain?”
Touché.
A straightforward suicide by drowning, the result of love’s rejection it seemed, but Dupin had been around long enough to know nothing might turn out to be as it seemed. Like the fact that the victim’s scarf was found tied around her neck. With a knot at the back that no woman would have made. There was a lot tides could do, the Inspector thought, but tie a scarf?
While the scarf had no role to play in the death, it was a message. An insult, not only to the victim. It made the Inspector feel that someone had just spat in his eye. But without the force to blind him, not for an instant.
This was the third in three weeks. Suicides, Dupin knew, often occurred in spates, as if the knowledge of one made it easier for others on the edge to take the plunge. The other young women had died, one by hanging and the other by poisoning. All three were prostitutes, open to all sorts of characters and dangers. It was a hugely profitable trade in the port and the Inspector was aware that there was a territorial war bubbling between controllers of the two main red-light districts. These glorified pimps would stop at nothing to maintain their profits, including murder.
There were terse notes. But a strange echo:
“I can’t go on anymore.”
“I can’t live anymore.”
“He doesn’t love me anymore.”
The tenor of those notes, it struck Dupin, was too singular. There was one persistent note in all three. And of course one word: an
ymore. The same author, he began to be convinced. The notes, he suspected, were dictated. But he needed more physical evidence to back up his suspicion.
It was just a suspicion but there was another aspect of singularity which he noted. If the images of the victims’ features were placed in a line they bore a remarkable similarity. Coincidence, perhaps, but even if so he felt it invited explanation, the purpose of which at this point in time he simply did not know.
He had Lazare’s photographs at the scenes of discovery and prior to, during and after post mortem. In looking at them, whatever their evidential value, he found he was viewing them as if at one remove, as if they were mannequins. In pictorial repose, they lost the real sense of the human quality of the victims. By the same token, they were more disturbing. A representation as opposed to the bare fact. This experience sickened him in a way that the real body did not. He could identify better with what was flesh, however brutalised.
There were occasions when he had to draw breath, as any human would, faced with man’s inhumanity. To place himself exclusively in the temple of raisonnement was not possible. It was excusable on the odd occasion to sigh when poring over the photograph of a dead young woman, whose last minutes and seconds on this earth he could only imagine.
Time is of its very nature relative and not always measurable. One second of terror could be equal to a lifetime, before the veil of darkness was drawn over for eternity. It was that second that he often contemplated. For it was that short space of time that drove him in the most measured fashion to get justice for the departed and incarcerate the perpetrator who then must wait out his moment before the guillotine deposited the head in the basket and hurtled the killer to the afterlife.
He had asked Dufour to re-examine the body of Marie-Anne who had apparently hanged herself.
Dufour consulted with Locard. It was his opinion that it is very difficult to stage a hanging and well nigh impossible to persuade a victim to hang themselves under threat. Most would opt for death by the manner threatened. Locard said that hanging always produces an almost identical mark pattern on the neck and slight rope burn. He provided sketches of the four most common knot positions found in hanging suicide. One was a knot at the back of the head, two a knot on the right side of the head, three on the left side behind the ear and four on the left side in front of the ear. In further illustrations he sketched the pattern of ligature impressions that should be found on the neck of the victim. Any difference in the patterns which he had illustrated could indicate staging. Locard also recommended that the pathologist look for any other signs of prior strangulation – a mark or impression that was not consistent with the impact of the rope. He also recommended checking for recent sexual activity.
Dufour followed his instructions and found no ligature mark that conformed to the sketches in any of the positions indicated and on the front part of the hanging victim’s neck an impression that could have been a thumb indentation. And by careful measurement found that the pattern of compression on the neck did not conform to the pattern illustration provided by Locard. In the first two victims there were signs of sexual activity before death and he took swabs for analysis.
Dupin’s team had also collected fibres from the living quarters of the victims and from their clothes which he had sent to Locard for analysis and comparison. He awaited those results.
It was beginning to be obvious to Dupin that he had three murder victims, young women from the provinces working on the night streets of Marseilles, away from their families and living solitary existences outside their workplaces. He would await Dufour’s post-mortem report to formulate his investigation now that the scientific signs had altered his view.
Thanks to Locard’s advice he had not released the first two bodies for burial and postponed the inquests. This gave him pause for thought as did the fact that some months ago the first crematorium opened in the city, only the third in France. The opposition of the Church had hindered the progress of the use of crematoria. Dupin had no truck with the clergy but on this occasion he agreed wholeheartedly with Bishop Freppel of Angers whose opposition some years ago on a number of issues to the introduction of a cremation bill included the potential to allow murderers escape undetected.
Now that forensics, he suspected, had frustrated the perpetrator’s effort at covering up one of the crimes, he would turn his thoughts to the mind that would plan and carry out such dastardly acts. An investigative tool that he favoured was trying to look at the world from the killer’s point of view.
Understand the mind of the killer, to better understand his crime. It had the effect of being better able to reconstruct the crime and of particular benefit during interrogation. Such use of psychology was another tool of his trade that the Inspector was beginning to value more.
Of course Dupin’s qualification in psychology was limited to his life and professional experience so when the occasion demanded he consulted Professor Lacassagne. The professor had given expert evidence at a number of trials on the mental state of perpetrators and had more than a passing interest in the criminal mind.
Of late, pleas of insanity were becoming increasingly common, the awful prospect of incarceration in a lunatic asylum being deemed preferable by killers to the prospect of the hell that might await them after the guillotine.
He planned to contact the professor after he had received and read the post-mortem report. While he was musing during the silent moments of his break he was as usual doodling on a page of the large notebook on his desk – a word that had entered his mind with no prompt: narcissist.
He knew the myth of Narcissus, the beautiful young man who falls in love with his own image in a pond, having treated admirers with cruel disdain and in the end perishes as a result of this obsessive self-love and attachment to the beauty of his reflection. He remembered the narcissistic Mathilde in one of his favourite books, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir, who looks at herself rather than the protagonist Julian Sorel and creates a fantasy of him as a hero of her dreams and not as he really is.
But without knowing what, he felt there was more to the condition than being in love with a reflection and made a note at the end of an arrow: Ask Lacassagne about this.
Then, as he finished the dregs of his coffee, a phone call.
“Ah, my good friend Pons!”
He listened, his handsome creased face lighting up as the news from his friend sank in.
“Hmm. Wait there – we will be there shortly.”
Pons led Dupin with his assistant Froissart and photographer Lazare to the wooden rack and pointed towards the trunk. The Inspector noted the coagulated blood on the floor. Pons looked at him nervously and handed him the note he had made about the tag.
“Excellent, Pons, very good, you have touched nothing – very important when it comes to evidence. Aha, British aristocracy no less. Odd but people, given the circumstances, can be very odd.”
Pons had become anxious all of a sudden as if reality had just come home to roost.
“What do you think, Charles?”
“Not a lot, Pons, until we see what is in the trunk.”
“You mean break it open?”
“Not for the moment, of course, my dear fellow.”
The Inspector noted a twitch appear in his assistant Froissart’s eye and watched Pons’ face blanch. All no longer in doubt and cognisant of what the outcome might be.
Dupin, as always, when faced with the inevitable, relaxed. He asked Pons to close and lock the door to the area. He told him that he was unconcerned about the chaos that would ensue in luggage handling and placement. They were faced with a far more serious situation.
“My dear Pons, this is now a crime scene. We must all do our duty.”
He told Pons to advise his team of porters of a problem but under no circumstances to reveal its nature. In time they could resume their duties after he had finished his business.
He took Pons, now pale-faced and agitated, aside.
“My friend
, I know how you must feel. Don’t worry, when we have finished, you can resume your work. If you are bothered later with enquiries, particularly from the wolves of the press, refer them to me under instruction. There is no need for you to be an accidental victim of someone else’s dastardly act. I will ensure that you are not affected and that your employers are aware of your total co-operation in our enquiries and your professionalism in all aspects of this unfortunate situation.”
Pons seemed comforted by his words.
“Now what I suggest is this,” said Dupin, “but you do not have to do it. Go to the owners’ hotel – Hôtel du Louvre. Tell this couple that you have to enquire into the details of their luggage and say that they must come here to assist you. We will then confront them with whatever we find.”
Pons then left to go to the hotel.
Dupin directed Lazare to begin photographing the trunk from a variety of angles and acquire images of the blood that had pooled beneath the rack.
The Inspector then asked one of his team to force open the trunk to establish what was inside. When the top was pushed back the young man’s face drained of colour and he fell backwards into the arms of one of his companions.
The Inspector moved forward and was confronted with an unspeakable sight. Inside the trunk there was a bloodstained torso, partially covered by blood-soaked material. The legs had been hacked off. The neck was severed. There was no head. The female genitalia indicated that it was the body of a woman.
Lazare, without prompting, moved forward and took more shots of the dismembered corpse.
Dupin took a deep breath. “Nothing is to be touched or handled.”
Pons would be back shortly with the owners of the trunk and then, Dupin surmised, the investigation would begin in earnest. His mind instantly jumped to the Gouffé case. Another trunk but an entirely different scenario and with no less a sensation as far as the press were concerned. Nothing, he determined, in this case could be left to chance. When news of this broke, he knew with certainty that Célestin Hennion would be on the phone.
Murder in Monte Carlo Page 13
