Lacassagne worked his way up the right lower leg. The fibula, the narrow bone running alongside the calf bone, appeared slimmer than that of the left leg. This meant that the muscle must have been weakened, for without the pull and pressure exerted by muscles, the bones beneath would lose mass. The right kneecap was smaller than the left and more rounded. The interior surface of the kneecap showed several small bony protuberances. None of these features previously had been noticed because the first examination took place three weeks after death. At that stage, both legs could have been bloated with gas. It was only now, with the skin and muscles removed, that this aspect of the victim’s medical history was revealed.
To confirm his observations, Lacassagne called Dr. Gabriel Mondan, chief of surgery at the world-famous Ollier clinic in Lyon. Mondan carefully studied the leg and foot bones, sketching their irregularities, treating them with chemicals to remove the bits of flesh, and drying and weighing them. He found that the bones of the right foot and leg weighed slightly less than those of the left, individually and collectively. He confirmed Lacassagne’s observation of the kneecap, and of the subtle withering of the lower part of the right leg. He noted that the right heel and anklebones were “slightly stunted.”16 He placed both sets of bones on a table. The bones of the left foot sat normally, with the anklebone, or talus, balanced on the heel. The anklebone of the right foot kept falling off.
Meanwhile, in Paris, Goron’s men had been gathering information about Gouffé. They interviewed Gouffé’s father, who recalled that when his son was a toddler he fell off a pile of rocks and fractured his ankle. It never healed correctly. Ever since then he’d dragged his right leg a bit when he walked, although many people did not notice. Gouffé’s cobbler testified that whenever he made shoes for him, he made the right shoe with an extra-wide heel and used extremely soft leather to accommodate his tender ankle and gouty toes. “His big toe stuck up when he walked,” the cobbler said.17
Gouffé’s physician, a Dr. Hervieux of Paris, attested to a variety of leg problems that had plagued his patient for years. In 1885, Hervieux treated him for a swelling of the right knee. The condition had been chronic, Hervieux reported: Another doctor had considered amputating the leg. Hervieux instead prescribed two months of bed rest, after which Gouffé returned to work. In 1887, Hervieux saw his patient for a severe case of gout in the big toe of his right foot. This, too, was a chronic condition, he said, and caused so much painful swelling that Gouffé could not bend the toe joint. Hervieux sent his patient to a spa at Aix-les-Bains for six weeks. A document from the spa stated that Gouffé had suffered a relapse in 1888.
By now, enough evidence had accumulated for Lacassagne to satisfy even his doubts. The victim had been five feet, eight inches tall, weighed 176 pounds, and was about fifty years old. He had chestnut-colored hair and a complete set of teeth, except for the first upper molar on the right. The man had been a smoker—Lacassagne surmised that from the blackened front surfaces of the incisors and canine teeth. Sometime in childhood, the victim had broken his right ankle, an injury that had never properly healed. Later in life, he had suffered several attacks of gout. He had also had a history of arthritic inflammations of the right knee. All these injuries had contributed to a general weakening of the victim’s lower right leg, reflected in the reduction of bone mass. He must have frequently suffered pain in that leg and perhaps walked with a slight limp. “Now we can conclude a positive identity,” Lacassagne reported.18 “The body found in Millery indeed is the corpse of Monsieur Gouffé.”
Once the body had been identified, the pieces of the case quickly fell together. Goron had a replica of the trunk made and displayed it in the Paris morgue. It caused a sensation: Within three days, 25,000 people had filed past it, one of whom identified it as having come from a particular trunk maker on Euston Road in London.19 Goron traveled to London and obtained the receipt, which showed that the trunk had been purchased a few weeks before the crime by a man named Michel Eyraud. Goron quickly sent bulletins with descriptions of both Eyraud and Bompard to French government offices on both sides of the Atlantic. He dispatched agents to North America, who followed the couple to New York, Quebec, Vancouver, and San Francisco—always just a few days behind them. Finally, in May 1890, a Frenchman living in Havana recognized Eyraud and alerted Cuban police. His girlfriend, meanwhile, had stayed in Vancouver, where she met and fell in love with an American adventurer. Eventually, he persuaded her to turn herself in.
With both suspects in custody, the bizarre story of the crime emerged. Bompard and Eyraud had known of Gouffé’s wealth and reputation for sexual adventure, and they’d heard that he spent most Friday nights at the Brasserie Gutenberg after emptying his office safe. So they had set a trap. Eyraud went to Bompard’s apartment, where he attached an iron ring to the ceiling in an alcove behind her divan. He passed a sturdy rope through the ring, then hid the apparatus and himself behind a curtain. Bompard, meanwhile, went to the café, found Gouffé, and started flirting with him. She persuaded him to go back to her apartment, where she took off her clothes and slipped into a robe. Seductively drawing Gouffé close to her, she playfully slipped the sash around his throat. She passed the ends to Eyraud, who affixed them to the rope and, pulling with all his might, hanged Gouffé before he could react. To their horror, however, when they rifled his pockets, they found that he had left all his money behind somewhere.
They needed to get rid of the body, and fast. They trussed it up in a canvas sack, packed it in a trunk, and bought tickets on the next morning’s train to Lyon. Once in Lyon, they spent a night in a rooming house with the body, then rented a horse-drawn carriage to travel into the countryside. They rode about a dozen miles south of the city, then dumped the body on a steep hill leading down to the Rhône River. On the return trip, Eyraud purchased a hammer, smashed up the trunk, and threw the pieces in the woods.
They had expected the body to roll into the river and float downstream, never to be seen again. Unfortunately for them, it got hung up in a bush and became the key piece of evidence that led to their convictions. The world saw it as a miraculous turn of events, and Lacassagne as the wizard who had made it happen. The feat was unprecedented. To think that the corpse had been autopsied and buried for months! Not even Gouffé’s relatives could identify it. But Lacassagne, using the tools of a new science, enabled the victim to exact justice from beyond the grave. “It was no miracle,” his former student Locard protested, “because modern science is contrary to miracles.”20 Yet as a work of deduction, it was truly “a masterpiece—the most astonishing, I think, that ever had been made in criminology.”
After a massively attended and publicized trial, Eyraud received the death penalty and Bompard was sentenced to twenty years in prison. On Feburary 4, 1891, Eyraud went to the guillotine. Thousands of people mobbed the event, straining to glimpse the notorious killer. Street vendors circulated among them, selling miniature replicas of the infamous trunk. Inside each was a toy metal corpse bearing the inscription “the Gouffé Affair.”21
Three
First Kill
Standing outside the Saint-Robert asylum, Joseph Vacher felt certain that God loved him. How else could he explain the fact that both he and Louise had survived the shooting, that he had lived through the horrors at Dole, and that he had survived his jump from a speeding train? As he later recalled in his testimony and letters, who but God would have placed him in Saint-Robert, where kindly alienists truly understood him? Who but God would have guided their decision to set Joseph free after only three months in confinement? And now that he was released from the asylum, Vacher felt certain that God would tell him what to do.
Meanwhile, he needed to find lodging and work. He had 170 francs in his pocket from the paid field work he had done in the asylum, as well as a certificate of honorable discharge from the army, his knife, and a pistol. He started wandering. He found odd jobs and slept in haylofts along the way. After a couple of weeks, he grew tired of this existence
and bought a train ticket to Menton, a Mediterranean resort town, where his sister Olympe worked in the Monte Carlo Café. Olympe had always been leery of her youngest brother. She remembered how he would run wild in the fields, brandishing a club.
Nonetheless, she agreed to take him in.1 For the next several days, he stayed in his room for the most part, writing, sometimes emerging to regale her with unsettling stories about the asylums. After a week, she gently suggested he go elsewhere—perhaps he could stay with the monks again. She took him to the train station and bought him a ticket to Saint-Genis-Laval, the site of the monastery that once housed him. She promised to send money whenever he needed it.
After he left, she noticed a pile of crumpled-up letters in the fireplace. She flattened them out and found page after page of passionate scribblings to Louise Barant, the woman he had shot. He really is completely crazy, she thought.2 She set fire to the letters and hoped she would never see him again.
Vacher rode north in the direction of Lyon, through landscapes that changed from Mediterranean to temperate. Palm trees gave way to chestnuts and pines; dry, ragged countryside yielded to shadowy valleys and paths lined with impenetrable hedges. Six miles before reaching Lyon, he got off in Saint-Genis-Laval, an ancient walled village near the banks of the Rhône. He recalled with pleasure the years he’d spent wandering among the monastery’s arched passageways while contemplating the mysteries of the Trinity. Surely the monks would remember, too, and take him in.
The monks had very different memories of Vacher, and they turned him away.
He caught a train to Lyon, where he worked at a few odd jobs. Finding that urban life did not agree with him, he wrote to his sister for train fare out of town. She declined; so he left the city on foot, headed for his native town of Beaufort. He walked south along the Rhône, taking towpaths and carriage trails that wended their way between the riverbank and the vine-covered hillsides. May was a hopeful time along the banks of the Rhône: The apricot and peach buds held the promise of ripening fruit, the lavender and rosemary bushes released their perfume, and the squawk of the magpie punctuated the air. When he came to the small city of Vienne, he turned left and crossed the iron bridge across the river. His route would take him up into the hills, where, after a few days of begging and stealing, he would find himself in the town of Beaurepaire. With God looking over him, he felt that things were certain to work out his way.
Eugénie Delhomme was an attractive twenty-one-year-old woman who worked at the silk mill of Monsieur Perrier, on the outskirts of Beaurepaire.3 It was one of hundreds of such factories scattered throughout the villages that fed the burgeoning textile industry of Lyon. Inside the mill, hundreds of silk reels mechanically twitched as they wound the threads from skeins onto bobbins. Amid the staccato clatter, an army of women monitored the apparatus, deftly reaching in and straightening tangled fibers. It was a grueling day that began at 5:00 in the morning and lasted, with a lunch break, until 8:30 at night. Eugénie received twenty-four sous per day, barely enough to buy a pound and a half of bread. She sent part of her salary to her elderly father in another town.
It was a tough life, but a decent one for Eugénie and her companions. They lived in the factory dormitory together, ate in the factory dining hall, and spent evenings gossiping at the Café Dorier in town. Many of them had love affairs with the local men; Eugénie, in particular, was known to have had several. People remarked that if you walked along the lane that bordered the factory, you could often hear kissing on the other side of the hedge.
On Saturday evening, May 19, 1894, Eugénie got up from her workstation about an hour before quitting time and headed out the factory door. She had just eaten a dinner provided by the company. She wore a red-and-white-striped smock and Molière shoes—a popular style with open tops, stumpy heels, turned-up toes, and fancy laces.4 They were named for the playwright, whose foppish characters wore similar footwear. “Where are you going?” her supervisor asked.5 “It’s beginning to rain.”
“Oh, I’m just going to take a walk in the alley. I’ll be back right away.”
No one knew if Eugénie had planned a rendezvous with a lover or whether she just needed some air. In any event, she did not return to work for the rest of the shift, nor did her friends see her in the dormitory that night. The next morning, Monsieur Perrier did not see her, either, which surprised him, because she had always been reliable.
That afternoon, a local woman was grazing her sheep near the mill when she saw a pair of Molière shoes protruding from under a hedge. She knew this was a place where lovers would lie in each other’s embrace, but became curious when she noticed only one pair of feet. She wandered over to take a closer look.
Eugénie’s body, only two hundred yards from the factory door, looked like it had been attacked by a wild beast.6 On hearing the woman’s screams, the workers poured out, and they recognized the victim. Under the horrified eyes of the crowd, the police took notes on the crime scene; then they transported the body to the hospital in Beaurepaire, where a doctor named Claude Brottet conducted an autopsy.
Under French law, any local doctor could be required to perform an autopsy if called upon by the authorities to do so. There were only a few proper morgues in the country, and only a few modern anatomy labs. Conditions in the rural areas were especially primitive. Police would carry the body to the nearest farm or perhaps to a municipal building. There, working over a kitchen table or a functionary’s desk, breathing the stench of a putrefying body, and working without gloves, a doctor would attempt to do an autopsy skillful enough to be admitted as evidence in court.
“I can recall almost none of these operations without deep feelings of repugnance and discouragement,” wrote Dr. Henri Coutagne, a colleague and friend of Lacassagne who sometimes was called upon to do rural autopsies.7
If the temperature is not too cold, we would put the cadaver for better or worse in the open air in a courtyard or in a barn on some planks propped up on some barrels or casks. We would get water … linens … and operate slowly, completely exposed to all the changes in temperature, without help, and consider ourselves lucky if the policeman acts as a clerk. But if it is cold the question becomes more complicated; the body is transported for better or worse (for there are no stretchers available in the countryside) into a community building, such as City Hall, the police station, or school.… One time we were obligated to operate on the municipal council’s meeting table … the mayor afterwards faced a veritable revolt on the part of the administrators.
Sometimes he would have no choice but to operate in the victim’s house, often on the “victim’s own dinner table.”
For this miserable, dangerous work, doctors would receive twenty-five francs for an ordinary autopsy, thirty-five francs if the job required an exhumation, and from fifteen to twenty-five francs for a newborn, depending on whether it was fresh or had to be exhumed.8 (The new rates were instituted in 1893 after lobbying by Lacassagne and his colleagues. Previously, the payments had been about a tenth of that amount.) The procedure was designed to move forward in stages. On arriving at the scene, the doctor would fill out a form with his name, the names of other officials, and whatever background he could supply about the case. He would describe the immediate area: Were there traces of blood? Ripped clothing? Trampled bushes or other signs of struggle? Then he would describe the position and condition of the body and then—still without touching it—go over every inch of the cadaver, noting all identifying characteristics and describing and measuring every wound. Then he would turn the cadaver and continue to examine it minutely. He would be sure to note which insect larvae were colonizing the body and how far along they were in their development, a signal as to the date of the death. Only then would the team be ready to move the body to a protected place for the autopsy.
With the cadaver on a table or on a clear stretch of ground, the doctor would make sure to open and examine the head, neck, thorax, abdomen, and stomach. Given the uneven state of medical trai
ning, Lacassagne assumed nothing when he published instructions for medical examiners. Finally, the medical examiner was to register, in a written protocol, the facts and his conclusions.
Brottet generally followed the procedures.9 He duly noted the location of the body, and the evidence that it had been dragged from the crime scene, a short walk away, where he found trampled, bloody bushes and chewed-up ground. He carefully described the external wounds and abrasions; then, during the autopsies, he noted the corresponding damage to internal organs.
Based on his examination, Brottet concluded that Eugénie had been attacked in the alley about 7:00 or 8:00 p.m., about an hour after her last meal. (He had found partially digested bread, cheese, and alphabet pasta in her stomach.) The attacker had grabbed her throat, thrown her to the ground, and started strangling her with two hands, as evidenced by the finger marks on both sides of her throat. She must have resisted fiercely, judging from the trampled vegetation and the bruising of her palms. The assailant had tried to stifle her cries by forcing his hand over her mouth (evidenced by the inner surface of her lower lip, which has been torn by her front teeth) and pinned her with his hands and feet (evidenced by footmarks on her left knee). The suffocation must have been almost complete when, in order to hasten her death, he stabbed her several times. Wounds on the right side of the victim’s neck indicated that the killer had stabbed with his left hand as he continued to strangle her with his right. Eugénie must have been dead by that point, but the killer was frenzied. He repeatedly stomped her around the torso, chest, and pubis. He then used his knife to dig out the areola of her right breast and threw the bloody tissue away. There was no evidence of rape. In the end, the killer dragged his victim away from the crime scene and left her behind the hedge.
As complete as the autopsy was, Bottet missed some key observations. He departed from Lacassagne’s handbook by neglecting to note the condition of the rectum, which might have revealed signs of anal rape and told him more about the nature of the predator. Nor was he, nor the police, able to make plaster casts of footprints, because the rain had made the ground a muddy soup. The trail began and ended with the body.
The Killer of Little Shepherds Page 4
