In conclusion, Guillemin wrote: “(1) Vacher suffers from mental alienation characterized by a persecution complex, and (2) He is not responsible for his actions.”
The local court issued a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity, transforming Vacher’s legal status from that of an accused criminal to that of a mentally damaged ward of the state—more specifically, a ward of his home district, or département, Isère, in the east of France. He would be taken to the state-run asylum there, outside of Grenoble, and stay until his doctors decided he was cured.
They put him on a train for Saint-Robert, the new asylum, along with two guards. In a note to accompany the transfer, Guillemin described Vacher as “currently really quiet.17 He only wishes to return to his region [and to] be back with his family soon.” Guillemin expressed confidence that Vacher would behave during the transfer. “However, because of a history of suicide attempts and escapes, I recommend serious supervision. Two reliable guards should suffice.” Inexplicably, he made no mention of the attempted homicide, the voices, or Vacher’s murderous impulses and dangerous paranoia. As far as the people at Saint-Robert were concerned, they were preparing to receive a depressed and suicidal man, but not one who was dangerous to others. Vacher later recalled that as the train pulled away from the station at Dole, all he wanted was “to see blood running everywhere.”18
Vacher had promised to behave during the transfer. In an effort to appeal to his reason and dignity, the doctors allowed him to wear his regimental uniform instead of the asylum grays. But the uniform only awakened his sense of outrage, and he resolved to escape and tell the world about Dole. On the platform, he tried his “urination” escape; the guards quickly grabbed him and shackled his hands and feet.19 Once on the train, he tried to create the maximum amount of disturbance. Seated between the guards in a third-class carriage, he lurched his body this way and that, trying to break free. When that failed, he shrieked anarchist slogans and screamed about his treatment at Dole—especially at stations, when lines of people were shuffling through the car. His ravings made women on the train cower and weep.
Vacher’s destination, the Saint-Robert asylum, was “one of the best institutions in France,” according to a British survey of hospitals and asylums at the time.20 Constructed on the grounds of an ancient priory, it commanded a majestic view of the surrounding Alps, where its inmates could savor the brisk mountain air. The facility had been designed according to the latest psychological theories, which emphasized bringing normalcy to patients’ lives, rather than simply confining them. The institution was built as a campus, with separate men’s and women’s residences and a common building in the center, all in a neoclassical style. Beyond the main edifices stood buildings and streets reminiscent of those in a quaint rural village, along with acres of trees and cultivated fields. The totality of the setting, from the scenery to the architecture to the attitude of the staff, was intended to lighten the spirits of the inmates who lived there.
The staff’s attitude reflected gentleness, as well. Unlike their colleagues at other asylums, doctors at Saint-Robert used straitjackets only two or three times a year, and only “in temporary and exceptional cases, when it is clear that a patient will injure himself,” as the asylum’s director, Dr. Edmond Dufour, explained to a group of visiting alienists. Saint-Robert’s employees never resorted to the common practice of using freezing showers to discipline their patients, or the “Scottish showers” of alternating hot and cold water. They never shackled the patients, even the violent ones.21 They busied their inmates with esteem-building employment such as cobbling and sewing, and with theatrical and musical productions. They always spoke respectfully and with kindness. It was all part of an effort to restore dignity to patients, and to appeal to the better part of their intelligence.
So it was with tenderness and humanity that the orderlies greeted the man who arrived late on the night of December 21, 1893, whose face portrayed a history of violence. Knowing that he posed a suicide risk, they assigned Vacher to the high-security section, placing him in a room with a calming view of the mountains. He had been there barely twenty-four hours when he began to show improvement. Apparently responding to the benevolent atmosphere, he stood up and offered a communal grace before dinner: “Dear Friends, let us praise God to have been born in a region where our caretakers are so loyal and humane.22 Thank God we were born under such a benign and benevolent sun.”
The words seemed to arise from an inner gentleness, and augured well for the patient’s recovery. No one who heard those words of benediction could ever imagine how misleading they would be.
———
Joseph Vacher walked into history at a time of expectation and dread. The period at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, known as the Belle Époque, was an era of peace and prosperity, of advances in science and the arts. It was a time when Sarah Bernhardt lit up the stage and Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas illuminated the art world; when Gustave Eiffel was building his tower and Louis Pasteur was developing his germ theory of infection.
Everything seemed bigger, faster, newer, more efficient. The new train networks sped passengers across continents, and steamships bore them rapidly across the seas. Telegraph wires carried messages at the speed of light across the countryside and under the Atlantic. The Olympics were revived. The cinema was born. Modern burlesque halls opened in Paris, where they featured a lively new dance called the cancan.
People could truly aspire to enjoy life, not just endure it. They shopped in the new department stores, bought the new ready-to-wear clothing, and pedaled their new bicycles, which had taken the middle class by storm. Women especially flocked to the bicycle as an independent means of transportation. Posters and full-color newspaper ads—themselves innovations of the era—portrayed new customers as liberated goddesses, flying naked across the heavens on their bikes.
Yet amid all the optimism ran an undercurrent of anxiety. For every happy, well-off family, many more lived in poverty and destitution. Everyone could sense the instability, the rumblings from below. Anarchism, an international terrorist movement, was growing: Bombs were exploding at markets, government offices, and train stations. The authorities responded with brutal repression, and the cycle of reprisals continued. By the end of the century, anarchists would bomb targets throughout Europe and assassinate the presidents of France and the United States. Some intellectuals saw modern society, with its vulgar amusements and avant-garde lifestyles, as evidence of a species gone soft, of a reverse evolution, of a social degeneracy.
Crime rates were rising, and fear among the populace was inflamed by the new tabloid press. It was not simply crime that alarmed people but also the emergence of a criminal class. Londoners learned to fear the “residuum,” New Yorkers saw the rise of ethnic street gangs, and Parisians knew to avoid the “apaches”—roaming bands of youths who swarmed over the gentry who might wander from the beaten path. Legions of the dispossessed—vagabonds from the countryside, street gangs from towns, the criminally insane who escaped from the asylums—all seemed bent on victimizing good citizens.
In this climate of hope and anxiety, an international group of experts emerged that took a scientific approach to crime. Like the other great logicians of the era, they viewed the problem not as sin or the workings of the devil, but as a scientific challenge. (This, after all, was a scientific age.) Trained in medicine, law, psychology, and anthropology, they established new institutes for criminal research, published their work in scholarly journals, and debated their theories at international conferences.
Theirs was the first generation of modern criminologists, and they developed the techniques that characterize forensic science to this day. They learned to read meaning into the chaos of a crime scene by measuring and mapping; by recording scuff marks, prints, and fibers; and by performing methodical autopsies and collecting biological samples. They employed the new science of psychology to create profiles of suspects and to interview th
em calmly and effectively upon capture (in contrast to the brutal techniques of their predecessors). To understand larger patterns of crime, they created databases of maps and statistics. To explore the roots of deviant behavior, they dissected the brains of executed criminals. Their studies opened realms of discussion formerly reserved for priests and philosophers: What impulses for good and evil naturally existed within human beings? What modified those impulses along the way? What were the limits of free will and sanity? Could the impulse to do evil be understood, predicted, redirected, or cured?
If the doctors at Saint-Robert looked kindly on their new patient, he seemed to feel the same about them. “When I arrived here I thought I had entered Paradise,” he wrote in a letter to the director, Dr. Dufour. Later, in a long letter to Louise (to the end of his days, he never stopped writing her), he wrote of his delight at arriving at the new asylum:23
Imagine my surprise.…24 I arrived by train through a little valley surrounded by snow-crowned mountains, and there it was, glowing by the light of the moon … this clean and rich establishment lit by electricity (for I arrived at night). The main door opened and there in front of me were two friends who I had thought would be executioners. We crossed gardens as beautiful as any in Grenoble.
They put me in a building that was frequented by rabble, but they were nothing like the walking dead [at Dole]. Whereas in Dole we were surrounded by guards who might as well have been executioners, here there are guards who embody Vigilance and Humanity.
That is not to say that Saint-Robert was a summer camp. Like their colleagues elsewhere, the alienists had a fear of free time that bordered on paranoia and left not a moment for idle hands or deviant thoughts. Wake-up call came at 5:00 a.m. (6:00 a.m. in the winter), followed by a half hour of room cleaning and then breakfast.25 Patients spent the morning cultivating the fields or laboring in one of the asylum’s workshops. Lunch was served exactly at noon, followed by a half hour of recreation and then the afternoon work shift. Dinner was at 6:00 p.m. (5:00 p.m. in the winter), followed by quiet activity, such as dominoes or cards, reading or strolling the grounds, and then bedtime at 8:00 p.m.
Days moved forward in lockstep progression: Friday was for haircuts, beard trimmings, and hair washing; on Saturday, new sheets were given out; and on Sunday, patients received clean clothes before mass. Sunday was also concert day, and the patients would stage a variety of shows, plays, and musical performances for the other residents and people from the community. Patients could write one letter every two weeks to someone in the outside world, and censors would review it. The concept was simple: The order and discipline of a daily routine would help alleviate the disorder and chaos of the patients’ minds.
Amid all this “normalizing” activity, doctors administered physical and psychological therapies. In part, they relied on the era’s pharmacopeia: leeches to calm excitability; purgatives to cleanse the system by provoking vomiting and diarrhea; and light doses of opium, belladonna, or chloroform, depending on the symptoms they were trying to relieve. They often used hydrotherapy—long, hot baths to calm patients with mania and cold baths for depressed patients who needed stimulation. Sometimes they applied mild electrical shocks to calm a manic or hallucinating patient—a procedure known as “the touch of a brass paintbrush.”26 Doctors would also engage the patients in talking about their problems and their hopes for a better life.
Vacher spent three months in Saint-Robert. The alienists who treated him knew he was manic and sometimes suicidal, so they likely administered calming hydrotherapy. They may have given him electroshock treatments—in a letter to the asylum director in January 1894, Vacher asked him not to “electrify part of my head.”27 Certainly they employed talk therapy; the doctors recorded in their notes that they listened to and accepted his version of the incident with Louise. He spent most of his time alone, reading.
Saint-Robert’s status reports portray a very different man from the one who behaved so wildly at Dole. He responded to treatment, or at least appeared to. Within two weeks of his arrival at Saint-Robert, doctors could report that he no longer heard voices, that he was becoming “docile and polite.”28 He wrote fawning letters to and about Dr. Dufour. (“He should be governing all of France rather than administering this establishment full of rabble.”29) On January 29, 1894, Vacher wrote that he understood the crime he had committed, deserved the punishment he had received, and felt that he had been able to cure himself despite the previous six months in Dole. Soon he described a plan to put his life back in order after his release.
The letters, together with his “inoffensive” behavior, persuaded Dufour that his patient was recovering. As he explained, they demonstrated two critical elements: that Vacher accepted responsibility for his crime and that he showed an ability to plan for the future. “He also made it clear to me and insisted on this point that we don’t have the right to hold those insane people who are completely cured,” Dufour later told a newspaper reporter.30 “And it is my obligation to set them free.” Meanwhile, the local government of Isère, chafing at the expense of running a world-class asylum, had been pressuring Dufour to release patients as soon as their symptoms abated.31
In early March of 1894, Dufour wrote to the prefect of Isère that Vacher, having suffered a fairly ordinary nervous breakdown triggered by his broken engagement, was now cured. The prefect issued a release order. On April 1, 1894, less than ten months after Vacher tried to murder Louise, guards opened the wrought-iron gate. Vacher hugged his doctors and fellow inmates. Then he walked free.
A newspaper would later describe that moment as “opening the door to the cage of a wild beast.”32
* Both survived, because the dealer who had sold Vacher the revolver loaded the cartridges only with half charges—just enough powder to stop an aggressor but not necessarily to kill him.
Two
The Professor
In mid-November 1889, Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, head of the department of legal medicine at the University of Lyon, got a request from the city prosecutor to help with a particularly nasty case. Four months earlier, a body had been found in a sack by the Rhône River, about a dozen miles south of the city. The corpse had been autopsied by another doctor, who could not arrive at an identification. Now, because of new developments in the case, the body was being exhumed. Granted, there would not be much left of the cadaver, but could Dr. Lacassagne perform a new autopsy? Perhaps he could find something the previous doctor had missed.
It was not unusual for Lacassagne (Lackasanya) to be called in where others had stumbled, for he had established a reputation as a skilled criminologist. As the author of textbooks, the developer of many new forensic techniques, and the investigator of several celebrated cases, he was first among equals in an international cadre of experts in the new field of legal medicine.
The subject of this autopsy was presumed to be a missing Parisian named Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé.1 A bailiff by profession, and a widower with two daughters, Gouffé was a prosperous man and had a reputation for being a sexual adventurer. On July 27, Gouffé’s brother-in-law, whose name was Landry, reported to police that Gouffé had gone missing. Police paid little notice at first—this was, after all, the summer of the Paris World Exposition, with many unscheduled comings and goings. But when three days passed without Gouffé’s reappearance, they took the case seriously, and referred it to Marie-François Goron, renowned chief of the Paris Sûreté, the city’s investigative unit.
Three weeks later, a body turned up about three hundred miles southeast of Paris, near the village of Millery, south of Lyon. A few days after that, some snail gatherers in the woods found a broken wooden trunk, which reeked of death and bore a shipping label from Paris.
Could the body and the trunk be connected to the missing man? Goron telegraphed a description of Gouffé to the medical examiner’s office in Lyon. At the time of the discovery, Lacassagne was away, so a colleague and former student, Dr. Paul Bernard, conducted the autopsy. He found little
that matched the corpse to the missing person. True, the cadaver, like Gouffé, had large and strong teeth and was missing the first right upper molar, but that was about all. The corpse measured about five feet seven inches, while the missing man stood about five eight. The corpse had black hair; Gouffé’s hair was chestnut-colored. The cadaver was between thirty-five and forty-five years old, according to Bernard’s estimate; Gouffé had been forty-nine. Just to be sure, Goron sent Landry to Lyon, along with a deputy. Landry took a brief, gasping look at the bloated, greenish body and saw not the slightest trace of his relative. Case closed. The men returned to Paris and the body went into an anonymous pauper’s grave.
That might have been the end of the affair, but in the fall Goron received an anonymous tip. Just before Gouffé disappeared from Paris, he had been seen at the Brasserie Gutenberg in the company of a con man named Michel Eyraud and his consort, Gabrielle Bompard. The couple left Paris the day after Gouffé went missing. Meanwhile, Goron had taken the shipping label from the trunk and showed it to the clerk at the Gare de Lyon in Paris. Records showed that the trunk had been shipped to Lyon the day after Gouffé’s disappearance. Its weight was registered at 105 kilograms—just about the combined weight of a fully grown man and a stout wooden trunk.
Everything tied the victim to Gouffé—except for the autopsy. Goron felt there must have been a mistake. He contacted the authorities in Lyon and asked them to exhume the body and reexamine it. They resisted: By now the victim had been dead for four months; no one could possibly identify the remains. But Goron, legendary for his persistence, remained adamant. And so the hideous job of conducting an autopsy on a body that had previously been dissected and had lain rotting underground fell to the one man in Lyon—perhaps in all Europe—who stood the slightest chance of solving the mystery.
The Killer of Little Shepherds Page 2
