The highlight of the students’ training involved assisting in the eighty or more criminal autopsies Lacassagne and his staff conducted every year.8 Each session followed a rigid protocol. Lacassagne or his lab chief would start by describing the known facts of the case—where and when the body had been found, whether authorities suspected foul play, and what they assumed to be the cause of death. Then he would distribute “observation pages” (feuilles d’observation)—charts that laid out the procedures they planned to employ. Designed as a kind of flowchart, these pages would prescribe the steps that Lacassagne, his lab chief, and students would follow in investigating each possible cause of death, with a series of observations to check off along the way. Each series of observations would lead them to the next logical series, and so on, until they arrived at a conclusion. “There is nothing more indispensable, more useful to the students, than getting habituated to medical-legal protocols,” Lacassagne would say.9
To do such exacting work required a well-equipped facility, and Lacassagne created one of the world’s most advanced criminal laboratories at his Institute of Legal Medicine. The ground floor housed a modern amphitheater for dissections, with a rotating table in the center and semicircular galleries that could hold up to one hundred observers. An elevator brought corpses up from the basement and lowered the remains after the dissections. Adjacent to the operating theater was a laboratory containing microscopes and spectroscopic equipment.
Upstairs from the laboratory was a large criminal museum that served as a reference base. There, students, colleagues, and magistrates could wander among the exhibit cases and study the variety of natural, accidental, and purposeful deaths in order to inform their own investigations. One display case, for example, held everything related to fetuses and newborns—embryonic skeletons, bones with fractures typical of infanticide, instruments used for illegal abortions, and the heads of infants at several stages of development. Enormous glass cylinders held the bodies of stillborn infants, suspended in clear liquid as though in an eternal womb. Two glass cases were devoted to skulls and their fractures—broken from accidental deaths, suicides, and crimes, including falls from high places, hammer blows, and bullets. One cabinet contained projectiles and cartridges of every known firearm. One cabinet was stocked with vials of poisons, drawers filled with microscopic preparations of human and animal hair, and fabrics stained with blood, sperm, and pus. There was a collection of various ropes and chords used in hangings, as well as Lacassagne’s collection of thousands of tattoos.
Several tall cases made of wood and glass displayed skeletons of criminals who had been guillotined, the bones wired together in a standing position. Another case contained twenty-four plaster casts of the criminals’ brains and reconstructed models of their heads. There were hundreds of photographs of criminals’ faces, grouped according to the crimes they had committed.
The largest and most important collection exhibited body parts collected from crime scenes—some conserved in alcohol or dried, others rendered in plaster reproductions, photographs, or anatomical sketches. “One finds there wounds created by instruments sharp and blunt, wounds of all sorts: of the skin, heart, lungs, head, liver, kidneys,” according to an article in the Archives of Criminal Anthropology.10 The most useful part of this exhibit was one in which various weapons were placed alongside organs with the wounds they had created. “Weapons” was quite a broad category, including revolvers, pistols, pocketknives, swords, hammers, shovels, hatchets, and other improvised implements of destruction. With cause and effect visually reunited, medical examiners could work backward from a cadaver to the weapon that might have caused the damage.*
Adjoining the museum was a library full of books, journals, and the hundreds of theses Lacassagne’s students had written. The halls were festooned with more than three hundred maps representing a criminal geography of France, and charts showing trends in crime dating back to the 1820s. Those charts highlighted another of Lacassagne’s life missions—not only to develop methods to solve crimes but to uncover the patterns and causes of the phenomenon. He became famous for his opposition to Cesare Lombroso, the great Italian criminologist, who held that some people were biologically “born criminals.” As Lacassagne’s charts and other studies showed, he sensed larger forces at work behind criminality, such as poverty, family life, times of the year, and economic cycles. The debate between Lacassagne’s “Lyon School” of criminology and Lombroso’s “Italian School” would become an ongoing theme in their lives and their field.
Lacassagne and his students did not confine themselves to the workrooms of the institute, but drew on the vast intellectual and material resources offered by the medical faculty and the Hôtel Dieu Hospital. As seen in the Gouffé case, Lacassagne believed strongly in collaboration, and he readily called in experts from the faculties of surgery, anatomy, toxicology, entomology, and other disciplines. The hospital often contributed bodies. Limited data were available on the etiology of wounds, especially those caused by modern revolvers, rifles, bombs, and bayonets. Sometimes, when a mysterious wound was presented, Lacassagne and his colleagues would try to reproduce it on fresh cadavers from the hospital and work backward to the weapon and circumstance that had caused it.
All these resources gave Lacassagne the opportunity to expand the study of forensic medicine beyond the realm of ordinary investigations. He helped create a field known as “medical archaeology,” in which he used the tools of modern forensics to explore the lives and deaths of historic characters. In one study, he and a colleague re-created the 1793 assassination of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, who was stabbed by Charlotte Corday as he soaked in his bathtub.11 There had always been questions about the nature of the fatal wound. In order to reconstruct those final moments, Lacassagne and a colleague obtained a cadaver of the same size and build as Marat, positioned it as Marat had been in his tub, and stabbed it several times with a table knife at the same angle as recorded by the original physician. When they autopsied the cadaver, they found that Corday, who had been educated in a convent and had no history of violence, had struck an exceedingly precise and lucky blow. (Indeed, it took Lacassagne and his colleagues several strikes to duplicate it.) The blade of her knife had slipped between Marat’s first and second ribs, a space no wider than a twentieth of an inch, clipped the aorta, passed under the pulmonary artery, and entered the left atrium of the heart. If she had held the knife at any other angle or rotation, the ribs or the sternum would have deflected it.
A sense of excitement pervaded the institute—not the ghoulish frisson of working with body parts, but a feeling of doing creative and important research. “The medico-legal school of Lyon is indeed an active, hardworking group, full of confidence and order,” infused with “the will and spirit of the master,” wrote a visiting scientist from Brussels.12 That spirit of inquiry extended to matters beyond crime and death. One day in 1892, when Lacassagne heard that the celebrated math genius Jacques Inaudi was coming to town, he invited him to the institute, where the prodigy submitted “with much good grace” to several hours of cognitive testing.13 Much to their surprise, Lacassagne and his students found that Inaudi did not process equations visually, as they had expected, but by repeating the problems over and over in an “internal dialogue.” Another time, the bishop of the Basilica of Saint-Denis asked Lacassagne to investigate a shroud given to his church by Charlemagne and believed to have been worn by Jesus on the cross.14 Lacassagne and a colleague confirmed the age of the garment and a dye that might have come from the Sea of Galilee, but they could not be more specific about its provenance. While not ruling out the chance of authenticity, Lacassagne reminded the bishop that many such shrouds were in circulation and that from time immemorial Middle Eastern merchants had profited and taken delight from duping foreign adventurers.
The third part of Lacassagne’s mission, after teaching and research, involved developing reliable and standard methodologies that ordinary doctors could use. Whenever possi
ble, he would take evidence from a crime scene back to the lab, engage his students in investigating the larger issue that the case represented, and tabulate the results in a way that would add to the arsenal of medical expertise. Any issue that needed exploring—chemical changes in the liver at the time of death or physical signs of child molestation, for instance—could become the subject of a research thesis. (He directed 225 student theses in all.) It was for that reason that he assigned Étienne Rollet to research the relationship of long bones to body height, for although the idea had previously been written about, it had never been examined rigorously enough to use as a reliable forensic tool.
Lacassagne published his students’ research in a collection called Works of the Laboratory of Legal Medicine, Lyon. If a thesis held promise as an investigative tool, he and his colleagues would reconfigure it as a flowchart, or “observation table,” similar to those used in class, and publish it in the Archives of Criminal Anthropology. In 1892, he assembled those charts and observations in his book Vade-mecum du médecin-expert (Handbook for the Medical Expert). Small enough to fit in a back pocket (the Latin Vade mecum means “Go with me”), it contained more than 250 pages of flowcharts, procedures, and background of almost every crime that a medical examiner might come across. It became a best seller in the forensic world, praised for being both comprehensive and easy to follow. More important, it contributed to the standardization of practice. By carefully following the steps in the handbook, even a harried doctor in a remote hamlet could conduct an autopsy that would lead to a righteous conviction. Given the professional nature of his exam, it is likely that Dr. Brottet used Lacassagne’s feuilles d’observation when conducting the autopsy of Eugénie Delhomme.
A typical and notable example of that process was Lacassagne’s discovery that bullets were marked by grooves, known as “rifling marks,” which could link a crime to a particular gun.15 He had been called to a crime scene in 1888 where a seventy-eight-year-old man named Claude Moiroud had been shot dead. Lacassagne conducted the autopsy on-site and found three bullets lodged in the body: One had stopped in the soft tissue of the larynx, one had lodged up against the shoulder bone, and one had passed through the abdominal cavity, drilled through a kidney, and lodged near the spine. Examining the bullets, he found something that surprised him: Even though each bullet had passed through a different part of the body, and only one had hit solid bone, all had identical markings. “It was extraordinary,” he wrote. “The bullet found in the larynx, which had not collided with anything hard, was creased along its axis with the same kind of furrow as the bullet that was lodged in the shoulder.… It seemed to be a kind of marking or sign of identity of the revolver.”
A witness had said that the girlfriend of a young man named Echallier was hiding his gun at her home. Police seized the weapon and gave it to Lacassagne. He contacted the venerable arms manufacturer Maison Verney-Carron, which sent an expert, Charles Jeandet, to the crime scene. He explained to Lacassagne that gunmakers cut helical grooves in the barrels to cause bullets to spin, increasing their accuracy. Those grooves left characteristic markings on the projectiles—something that was common knowledge in the arms industry but not among medical professionals.
Lacassagne returned to Lyon with Jeandet, the gun, and several more bullets. In his lab, he obtained the cadaver of an eighty-year-old man from the hospital, dressed it in the same kind of clothing as the victim had been wearing, and fired two shots—one into the shoulder bone and the other into the soft tissue of the abdomen. When he retrieved the bullets, he noted that each showed identical markings and that they matched the markings on the bullets he had recovered from the victim. When he examined the bullets through a magnifying glass, he saw even smaller matching grooves within grooves. “The formations are so identical that they must have come out of the same revolver,” he concluded.
Echallier was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Meanwhile, Lacassagne, knowing he had stumbled upon a new vein of inquiry, assigned one of his students to research the phenomenon. After months of research and testing, his student and he published an article in the Archives of Criminal Anthropology, along with a chart listing twenty-six common bullets from French, American, and British pistols, as well as their weight, shape, and predominant groove patterns. More comprehensive charts would follow, until identifying the markings on a bullet became standard practice in criminal science.
Amid all his successful research and institution building, Lacassagne faced one goal that eluded him—replacing the city’s notorious morgue. Morgues served a critical function, not only for public hygiene but as a place where unknown bodies could be displayed for possible identification. In Lyon, the “floating morgue,” as it was called, sat on a barge in the Rhône River, chained to a pier in front of the Hôtel Dieu Hospital.16 The facility consisted of a wooden building twenty meters square, with a large “exhibition room” where next of kin could view the cadavers, a small autopsy room, and a bedroom for the guard. Every year, scores of bodies of the anonymous and indigent would arrive for identification and autopsy.
In 1853, when the city fathers placed the morgue in the river, it had seemed a good idea. The location was close to the two biggest sources of bodies in Lyon—the main hospital and the Rhône River itself. (Nearly thirty people drowned every year in the Rhône and the Saône, the two rivers running through Lyon.) Real estate on the river cost nothing, and the breezes drifting down the Rhône would surely carry the odors away from the city. But reality proved otherwise. The facility was a damp, stinking place, breathless during the summer and so cold in winter that surgeons had trouble holding scalpels between their fingertips. The smell of the corpses permeated the woodwork. Bilge pumps fought a constant battle against flooding. Storms on the river caused the morgue to break free, smashing against the bridgeworks and spilling its cargo. Even normal turbulence caused disarray. The Rhône was one of the most heavily freighted rivers in France. When steamships churned by, their wakes would cause the barge to heave; sometimes the chains would snap and it would drift away.
Lacassagne repeatedly wrote to city hall, urging that this unhealthy facility be replaced. He once complained that while he was giving a demonstration to several dozen students, the barge settled so deeply into the river that water began seeping up through the floorboards. The city officials ignored his requests.
It was an embarrassing contrast to the Paris morgue, which Lacassagne’s Paris-based colleague Brouardel liked to boast about.17 Constructed in front of the city’s main hospital, the capital’s morgue had a large exhibition space with a dozen marble tables tipped to display bodies at a convenient viewing angle. They were separated from the public by a glass wall, similar to the display windows of the new department stores. Cadavers were chilled by modern steam-powered refrigeration units. Refrigeration proved a boon to police work, as it delayed putrefaction and kept bodies recognizable for weeks. To increase the likelihood of identifying cadavers, authorities kept the morgue open to the public from dawn to dusk. People flocked in, whether or not they had missing relatives. Thousands strolled through every day to see the latest arrivals. Workmen came by on their lunch breaks, and retirees drifted in to occupy their time. The morgue became such a citywide attraction that the Thomas Cook tour company of London included it in its Paris itinerary.18
That was not at all the case in Lyon, where the dankness and stench repelled all but those who needed to be there. There was no refrigeration unit to suppress odors; only a primitive pumping system dribbled water from the river over the corpses. The only thing remotely positive about the morgue was the beloved old guardian, Delègue, who managed to live there despite the smell. He seemed to have wandered out of the Old Testament, with his white beard and hair hanging down to his chest, a pipe clamped between his teeth, and his faithful little dog. When asked about any of the bodies on board, he would respond with terse efficiency about how long it had been in the river and how long it had been putrefying—all after a quick glan
ce at the corpse. “In order to resolve those questions it was [normally] necessary to understand many variables,” recalled Edmond Locard, who trained at the morgue as a student of Lacassagne, “but this old patriarch never made a mistake.”19
In 1910, after nearly three decades of Lacassagne’s imprecations, the city finally broke ground for a new facility on dry land near the Faculty of Medicine. One January night during construction, a violent storm ripped the barge from its mooring. Caught in the grip of a furious current, the morgue smashed against the bridge supports, its pieces scattering downriver for miles. Delègue, his dog, and three corpses were thrown overboard. The next morning, Delègue was found safe on the riverbank, but his dog and the bodies had washed away. When told what had become of his dog, the crusty old patriarch wept like a child.20
* In 1840, Mathieu Orfila, dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, caused an international sensation when he employed laboratory tests to demonstrate that Madame Marie Lafarge used arsenic to poison her coarse and boorish husband.
* In New York, an idealistic corporate lawyer named Clark Bell tried to clean up the image and practice of American legal medicine by heading a professional group called the New York Medico-Legal Society He founded a scientific periodical, the Medico-Legal Journal, in which he published studies and wrote editorials urging the professionalization of the field. He urged Harvard, Yale, and a new university, Cornell, to offer degrees in forensic science, but none took up the challenge. (Clark Bell, “Forensic Medicine and Its Progress,” Medico-Legal Journal [1889]: 373–374.)
* Envied throughout Europe, the museum became a forerunner for others in the capitals of criminal science. At the University of Turin, in Italy, Cesare Lombroso created a museum devoted to “scientific policing.” Rivaling Lacassagne’s in size, it was less dedicated to practical forensics than to demonstrating Lombroso’s theories about the hereditary nature of crime, with numerous examples of the “criminal type.” At the University of Graz, in Austria, about one hundred miles south of Vienna, the jurist Hans Gross created the Kriminalmuseum as an instructional tool for his students and for magistrates; others were built in Berlin, Würzburg, and Prague. All presented vivid displays of the seemingly endless variety of crime and science’s determination to attack it.
The Killer of Little Shepherds Page 6
