The Killer of Little Shepherds

by Douglas Starr

  Five

  The Vagabond

  Hours after the Eugénie Delhomme killing, Joseph Vacher washed his blood-spattered clothes in a stream, formed a haystack into a shelter on a hill overlooking the crime scene, and bedded down.1 The next morning, the property owner noticed the construction and figured that a hobo must have spent the night there.

  Vacher walked east, a little over forty miles, to Grenoble. After a few days of fruitlessly looking for employment, he headed back into the countryside, wandering from farm to farm, asking for charity, a place to sleep, or a job. His was not a reassuring presence, since he grimaced hideously whenever he talked, and the discharge from his ear gave off a nauseating smell. If people seemed suspicious or frightened, he would show them his regimental papers, which sometimes reassured them.

  Vacher had acquired the accoutrements for life on the road.2 He wore maroon velour pants, a black felt hat, and sturdy shoes. He carried a voluminous hobo’s sack, filled with cooking utensils, bits of food and clothing, a wallet with some change, a file, a pistol, and, at various times, a razor or a knife. Somewhere along the way, he acquired an accordion, which he sometimes played—badly—while seeking alms. At some point in his journeys, he started carrying two large and deadly wooden clubs.

  In May or June of 1894, a landowner near Geneva, Jules Cartier, hired Vacher as part of a hay-scything crew.3 The new man was not at all friendly or chatty like the other migrant laborers; he kept his head down and maintained a gloomy silence as he thrashed away. One day, he lost track of what he was doing and kept slicing right into the asparagus field. He did not take well to being corrected. “Where did you get this rhinoceros?” one of the workers asked the foreman.4 “I’m afraid of him.”

  Once, Vacher took the sheets off his bed, hid them in his suitcase, and accused a coworker of stealing them. The police discovered the truth and ordered him to leave the area immediately. He set out for France.

  In doing so, he joined a flood of wretched humanity that was inundating the French countryside in the century’s final decades. These were the “vagabonds”—an estimated 400,000 hard-core unemployed who were looking for housing, seeking employment, begging, and committing crimes. These drifters, part of an international phenomenon, obsessively worried Europeans, who linked them to every social evil.

  Beggars had always been a fixture throughout Europe, but rapid modernization had caused huge economic dislocations, making the problem immeasurably worse.5 The mechanization of agriculture led to worldwide price declines, which by the 1890s had accelerated into a collapse. France was hit particularly hard: In addition to the overall drop in farm prices, the vineyards had become infested with phylloxera—a sap-sucking insect related to the aphid—which provoked a “bubonic plague” in the wine industry. Whole villages emptied. Thousands of families lost their livelihoods and land, flooding Paris, Lyon, Grenoble, and other cities in search of a new beginning. Many fell back on public assistance. Rather than increase charity to meet the need, many city fathers tightened the residency requirements so as not to attract more indigents to their towns. Many argued to eliminate aid altogether, because, they said, it only encouraged laziness.

  By the mid-1890s, 1 percent of the French population was wandering the countryside, rootless and penniless. Their numbers included the mentally ill overflowing from asylums, the abandoned elderly, and anyone else who was uncared for.

  In 1899, investigating magistrate Émile Fourquet (Foorkay) published a monograph about vagabonds, based on interviews with dozens who had been in his custody. More humanistic than some of his colleagues, he compared them not to a contagion but to migratory birds that followed the weather and the crop cycles for shelter and food. Fourquet was able to discern at least two major migratory groups, whose ragged routes intersected and overlapped. One group would spend the winter in the south of France and migrate up the Rhône Valley as various fruits and vegetables ripened for harvest. The other group would spend winters in Brittany, where the coastal winter was made mild by the Gulf Stream, and then walk to the area north of Lyon to harvest cereals, vegetables, and wheat. Later in the summer, that group would head north into Normandy and Belgium, taking jobs in small factories and harvesting sugar beets.

  In August, both groups tended to converge south of Paris for the cereal harvest, then wander down to the vineyards of the Rhône Valley and the south. In October, they would drift farther south to Provence to pick chestnuts and then olives. As the fall progressed, many would traverse the country, walking back up to Brittany, while others would trudge farther south to Lourdes, near the Spanish border. Those who were too weak to walk south for the winter would get themselves arrested so they could spend the mandatory three- to six-month sentence in one of the country’s special beggars’ prisons, where at least they would not starve or freeze to death.

  Fourquet’s description was not neat or comprehensive—after all, he was generalizing about hundreds of thousands of indigents, some with families, some elderly, some young, and many of whom were mentally ill. He also noted that drifters were drawn to certain areas not by the climate, but by the reputation of the inhabitants. The citizens of some areas, such as Dauphiné and Savoie, the mountainous regions near the Swiss border, were known for hospitality, while others, such as the residents of Touraine, which encompasses the city of Tours, were not.

  Vacher himself wrote about those differences in a letter to Louise:

  Two years ago, with a pair of boots I bought for 40 sous, I was in Brittany, where I saw everything … and in Normandy, big towns and rich prairies, and cider that was every bit as good as in Brittany.6 I was also in Marne [a region east of Paris] where the people really are religious and humane … and above all the Savoie, where the people are particularly humble and loyal. This year I also saw Touraine, which they call the garden of France, but not of humanity.… I am not the only traveler who makes that observation.

  In earlier days, villagers had welcomed vagabonds to their towns. Those who were craftsmen were needed for their skills while others were required for farm labor. But industrialization had reduced the need for their manual labor, and the economic depression hit farmers very hard. Those farmers who could afford to hire migrant laborers got rid of them the moment the harvest was done, lest they be saddled with beggars to care for.

  “People used to be nice to us and reassure us in the past, but now we receive a glacial welcome,” a man arrested for vagrancy told Fourquet.7

  But how much confidence can you have in someone who looks so poor and roughly traveled … covered by dirt and rain, who doesn’t eat a lot and is not so attractive or in a good mood? In the old days the farmers themselves had to work like this; they remembered that and welcomed us as one of them. Now the farmers who hire us themselves are unhappy. The convents used to comfort us, but not anymore. Everywhere there is suspicion and no more charity.

  The vagabonds could not even rely on one another for companionship. They knew how people reacted when a score of unemployed descended on a village: They’d more likely get a job if alone. They walked through life as solitary drifters—hungry, desperate, suspicious of one another, and a worry to the settled people they encountered.

  Vacher found work on a farm near Grenoble, then drifted toward the Rhône Valley for the grape harvest. For a while he identified himself as Carpentier, a vagabond whom he had befriended and whose papers he had stolen. (Investigators suspected that Vacher might have killed the man.) He made his way south along the Rhône River, where he briefly worked in a tile factory. He never stayed anywhere for long. A prodigious walker, he would cover more than twenty miles in a day, sleeping in fields or in the rustic stone shepherds’ huts.

  By the fall of 1894, he entered the district of Var, two days’ walk from what later would become known as the French Riviera. It was a mysterious country of dry, craggy peaks surrounded by dense pine forests and precipitous chasms. A man could disappear in those gloomy valleys. Sometimes he would emerge to stop at a rural chur
ch long enough to light candles, then disappear again.

  On November 20, 1894, Louise Marcel was returning from a neighboring village, where she had gone to ask if anyone had seen her lost puppy.8 Although only thirteen, she was known to be exceptionally lovely and physically mature beyond her years. When she did not return home by lunchtime, her parents went to look for her. When they could not find her, they organized a search party.

  Two days later, searchers found the girl’s body in an old sheep barn. An autopsy revealed the likelihood of postmortem anal rape. There were blood smears on a nearby outcropping of rock where the killer must have wiped his hands.

  Ever since he was a young man, Joseph Vacher had felt the pull of two warring tendencies: to lead a life of walking with God, and to satisfy a need for violent sexual gratification.9 The fifteenth of sixteen children (the father had married twice), he grew up in a single-room house with a red-tiled roof and massive stone walls. He seemed a bright enough child, and his parents made sure he attended school.

  He might have had a typical childhood for his time and place, except for certain strange formative experiences. As a baby, he had a twin sister, Eugénie. One day, before going outside to do chores, his mother put Joseph and Eugénie on a bed and covered them with a light fabric to keep the bugs off. She was baking bread in the family’s outdoor oven—enormous, heavy loaves that she sold to neighbors to supplement the family’s income. When the bread was cooked, she called one of the older children to put the loaf in the house, cautioning him not to put it on the floor. The child, seeing the expanse of fabric on the bed, put the bread down to cool without noticing the infants. When his mother came in, Eugénie was dead.

  Joseph would always see God’s hand in his deliverance, and from an early age, he showed priestly tendencies. When he was ten years old, his class went on an outing to a church in a neighboring village. The teacher left for a moment to say hello to some friends. When he returned, Joseph had taken the class into the church, had seated them in pews, and was delivering a sermon.

  The following year, Joseph was licked by what the family thought was a rabid dog. His mother panicked, sent for a folk remedy, and made the boy drink it. What was in the potion is unclear, and perhaps it did Joseph no harm, but in the months after the incident, he changed. Classmates recalled that he became sneaky and ill-tempered. Once, when he was fourteen, he was pulling a wheelbarrow with one of his brothers, who he felt was not working hard enough. Without warning, Joseph started choking him and probably would have killed him if a neighbor had not intervened. Another time, some classmates rigged up a trip wire and Joseph fell over it. Rather than laughing it off as a prank, he ran to get a gun and started shooting.

  At the age of fifteen, he left his village to join the Marist monks in Saint-Genis-Laval. He loved the austere monastery environment, reveling in how his spiritual brothers praised his beautiful handwriting. On a couple of occasions, they sent him to affiliated parishes to teach. Two years later, however, they asked him to leave. Much later, when a newspaper reporter asked why, they would refer only to his inability to “resist certain temptations of the flesh.”10 He had been caught masturbating his comrades.

  Vacher, now eighteen, returned to his native town of Beaufort and started taking farm jobs. In June 1888, he tried to rape a twelve-year-old boy, but a neighbor stopped him. He fled to Grenoble, where he stayed with a sister and worked in a restaurant. The job lasted only a month before he was hospitalized for venereal disease. “We called him the Jesuit,” a fellow patient later recalled, referring to Vacher’s clerical pretensions.11 “He was sneaky and kept trying to touch the nuns.” After his two months of treatment, he went to live with another sister in a village about thirty miles away, but her husband threw him out after six months.

  Joseph’s illness flared up again, and he checked himself in to Antiquaille Hospital in Lyon. As part of his therapy, which lasted for two months, doctors removed part of his left testicle. He then traveled to Geneva, where he stayed with another brother for several weeks, before he, too, asked him to leave. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Joseph told his brother.12 “I feel as though I am possessed by something evil. I’m afraid if I met someone I might do them harm.”

  For the next couple of years, he drifted from town to town, seeking agricultural jobs. In 1889, he visited the Universal Exposition in Paris, where, with tens of millions of people from all over the world, he must have marveled at the newly built Eiffel Tower, the world’s tallest structure, and the Gallery of Machines, the world’s largest enclosed space, whose steel and glass structure seemed to float over the massive steam engines and electrical dynamos. He may have walked through the popular Cairo exhibit—a reconstructed street from the Egyptian city—and the exhibits celebrating the new science of anthropology, where “primitive” people had been shipped in from the colonies to inhabit re-created villages. He may even have caught a glimpse of the criminal anthropology exhibit, where Alexandre Lacassagne, Cesare Lombroso, and others in the field displayed skulls, tattoos, and annotated maps, with which they tried to make sense of the rising crime rates.

  Such pleasures were short-lived. Generally he faced a hardscrabble existence—wandering to a farm, getting a job doing manual labor, and then doing something aggressive or crazy enough to be sent away. At one of his last full-time jobs, at a farm in the Rhône Valley, he started ranting at the dinner table about anarchism and the need to cut rich people’s throats. “One day my name will make history!”13 Joseph shouted as the farmer paid him and showed him the door.

  With no likely suspects in the Louise Marcel killing, the police arrested Charles Roux, a neighbor who had discovered the body.14 They reasoned that he must have known the corpse’s location in order to have found it in such a hidden place. The police found footprints nearby made by wooden-soled shoes—the same kind of shoes worn by Roux. They neglected to consider that probably half the townspeople wore wooden-soled shoes, the region’s traditional footwear. The police eventually released Roux, but the girl’s parents and neighbors never stopped blaming him.

  Two weeks later, an elderly couple was slaughtered in their home about half a dozen miles away.15 As police reconstructed the crime, the woman must have opened the door, where she was felled by no fewer than nine stab wounds. Her husband, who was just getting into bed, had one shoe untied when the attacker burst in. He tried to shelter himself between the bed and the wall and raised his right arm to protect himself, as revealed by defensive wounds. He was killed and mutilated with fifteen savage blows. The killer or killers stole six hundred francs and made off with a sack of wheat. Witnesses reported seeing a man who matched Vacher’s description in the area, along with a big blond accomplice. (At various times during the next couple of years, witnesses would report having seen the two men together, but the blond man was never implicated or arrested.)

  Having committed three murders in two weeks, Vacher knew he needed to leave the area. It was late December, and vagabonds were migrating south to avoid the cold and the snow. Vacher, however, more comfortable in his native lands of Isère and Savoie, hiked north. In late 1894, a farmer outside Grenoble hired him to watch over his cows. Halfway through the agreed-upon employment period, Vacher quit. When the farmer withheld his pay, Vacher threatened him. The farmer ran to get help. By the time he returned, the vagabond had left.

  ———

  When faced with the misfortune of large numbers of their citizens, societies can take one of two general approaches. They can extend a helping hand to the sufferers, or they can characterize these people as the “other,” somehow deserving of their affliction. Like other countries at the time, France decided that the vagabonds were the “other”—different from settled folk and a threat to orderly bourgeois society. (America’s “army of tramps” of the Gilded Age fared no better. A Chicago newspaper advocated poisoning some of them in order to discourage others; the dean of Yale Law School called them “incorrigible, cowardly, utterly depraved savage[s].�
��16) Throughout Europe, studying and analyzing the vagabonds became an obsession, as one would study an agricultural blight or a contagious disease. There were international conferences about the problem, and scholars wrote dozens of theses. In language that we now recognize as eugenic, studies referred to vagabonds not as unfortunate human beings, but as the “dangerous classes,” the “inferior classes,” and “social garbage.”17

  “Vagabondage is in the blood,” asserted a prominent social critic of the time, “and this axiom is no less true for children than it is for adults.”18 Most experts felt the same way. No one denied that the phenomenon had grown with worsening economic conditions, but in the prevailing view, the economic depression had not caused the phenomenon, but only aggravated an inborn tendency. Like the born criminal characterized by Lombroso, there existed born vagabonds, whose numbers swelled as the economy declined. Granted, there were small numbers of “accidental” vagabonds—families who lost their small farms to debt, perhaps—but the “real” vagabonds were born with a desire to ramble and a contempt for the values of settled society. Most had some form of mental disorder, according to Drs. Armand Marie and Raymond Meunier, the reigning experts on vagabondage during the 1880s and 1890s—hysteria, epilepsy, alcoholism, mysticism, dementia, or an ingrained wanderlust.

  In keeping with the “degeneracy” theory that was popular at the time, many saw vagabonds as an evolutionary accident, a throwback to a more primitive species or form of human development. Alexandre Bérard, an authority from Lyon on vagabonds, described them as “wild beasts misplaced in civilized society,” victims of an ancient wandering instinct.19 It had been a useful instinct in its time, he asserted, one that “led primitive people across the steppes, forests, and deserts to populate the earth, create nations, found empires.” But the time for that impulse had gone. With no use in a civilized and stable society, this instinct expressed itself in the rootless, maladjusted individuals who populated the byways and frightened the good folk.