The Killer of Little Shepherds

by Douglas Starr

  After weeks of futile inquiries by police, an informant named the bomber as Ravachol, a shadowy character who presented himself as the avenger of the working class but whose true identity was unknown. Told where the suspect habitually ate lunch, police stormed the café and captured him. At the prefecture, Bertillon carefully measured the suspect, went to his files, and a few minutes later revealed that Ravachol was actually a common criminal named François-Claudius Koenigstein, a violent offender who had been arrested near Lyon three years earlier. He had been charged with several crimes, including digging up and robbing a corpse and murdering an old man and his servant with a hatchet, but released for lack of evidence.

  On the eve of his bombing trial, anarchists exploded the restaurant where Ravachol was captured, in an effort to intimidate the prosecutor. It worked: The prosecutor treated Ravachol with deference and settled for life imprisonment rather than the mandated death penalty. But two months later, Ravachol was transferred to a provincial courthouse near Lyon, where he was tried for the crimes he had committed as Koenigstein. Unimpressed by the goings-on in Paris, the judge sent the defendant to the guillotine.

  Bertillon was, along with Lacassagne, one of the founding editors of the Archives of Criminal Anthropology. Their one serious disagreement occurred during the notorious Dreyfus affair of the mid-1890s, when Bertillon offered his services as a handwriting expert and testified that Dreyfus had written a document giving state secrets to Germany.10 Lacassagne, who became a committed Dreyfusard, urged Bertillon not to get involved in graphology, an area outside his main expertise, but Bertillon blundered ahead.11 The resulting scandal damaged his reputation and, according to Lacassagne, destroyed his chances of winning the Nobel Prize.

  While Bertillon worked to deconstruct a living person’s identity by breaking it down into small measurable parts, Lacassagne worked in the opposite direction, reconstructing a corpse’s identity by compiling small parts to create a whole. The most obvious way to identify a body was by appearance, which is why morgues were so important to police work. Yet relatives often found it impossible to recognize a loved one’s remains. Once putrefaction took hold (which happened rather quickly in the absence of refrigeration), it was difficult even to look at the body, much less swear to an identity. Furthermore, in the cat-and-mouse game between criminals and police, dismemberment had become “à la mode,” wrote Lacassagne.12 By the late 1800s, police had learned to trace missing persons by using photography and the telegraph system. Criminals responded by decapitating or dismembering their victims, making them more difficult to identify. Oftentimes, investigators had only pieces of the body with which to reconstruct an identity.

  Lacassagne and his counterparts counseled investigators to look for small, indelible clues, such as scars. The character of scars changed over time—tender, soft, and pink when fresh; harder and brownish white after a month or two; and tough, thick, white, and shiny when mature. Scars formed in childhood could disappear by adulthood. There were particular scarrings that medical examiners should know about. Flogging, common among seamen at the time, left “faint white lines extending between little circular pits made by knots,” according to a forensic textbook of the period.13 Bloodletting, a common medical treatment, left slender white linear scars that ran along the path of a vein. Scars left by the application of leeches would shrink and become difficult to see. It would take a keen eye to spot the characteristic three-point bite marks.

  Tattoos had the added advantage of revealing something about the victim’s character—occupation, politics, sexual proclivities. Lacassagne referred to them as “speaking scars.”14 (In an effort to stay ahead of the police, criminals frequently altered their own tattoos, adding to the patterns or trying to erase them.) Other skin marks gave hints as to the victim’s occupation: laundrywomen and dressmakers exhibited fingertip needle punctures; violinists and other string musicians showed fingertip calluses; men who had worked in cobalt mines in the colonies had a bluish tint to their hair; copper miners would have a green tint, and aniline dye-makers’ skin would bear deep brown chemical stains.15

  Such details offered useful clues to identity, but they lasted only as long as the skin. Thus, the durability of clues became important. As Lacassagne had showed in the Gouffé case and elsewhere, individual bones could reveal a victim’s height and, to some extent, medical history. He and his colleagues also found ways to use bone fragments to estimate age.

  Skeletons had long fascinated anatomists, but more for their mechanical than biological properties. Even Leonardo da Vinci, a master anatomist and anatomical illustrator, saw bones mainly as a series of levers. It was not until the nineteenth century that scientists took enough interest in bones to study their biological complexity and distinctive growth phases. They learned that certain bones solidified in the early months of life; others, which seemed to be one solid piece, such as the skull and the pelvis, actually were a combination of bones that had fused during youth. Some bones that might seem fully formed in a young adult, such as the long bones of the arms and legs, actually revealed areas of ongoing growth, called “epiphyseal plates,” characterized by a groove near the ends of the bone shaft.

  Lacassagne brought that knowledge to crime analysis. In his Handbook for the Medical Expert, he created eleven pages of charts listing the ossification rates of thirty-seven different bones of the body.16 He cross-referenced them with the ages when ossification typically took place—from the early years, when the main bones of the skull stitched together, to the mid-twenties, when the five vertebrae comprising the sacrum at the base of the spine fused as one. Using this information, the investigator who had collected only a fragment of a skeleton could make an educated guess about the victim’s age and begin to narrow down his or her identity.

  Sometimes the investigator did not even have a bone to work with. In such cases, the medical examiner would find a head, or a piece of a head, burned, thrown in a river, or (with alarming frequency) dropped into a latrine. The investigator would have to collect clues from the smallest, most durable parts of the human body. Tooth enamel, its hardest substance, consists of a mineral form of calcium that literally can last millennia. The hardness of teeth surpasses that of copper, equals that of steel, and rises almost to the level of gem-quality minerals. That durability, plus the fact that dentists kept detailed records of their patients’ teeth and dental work, made them a natural tool for identification. One of the early cases of forensic dentistry occurred when Paul Revere, who worked as a dentist and as a silversmith, identified his friend Dr. John Warren, killed and buried during the Revolution, by an artificial tooth Revere had implanted.

  Such primitive uses had limited applicability, since they depended on knowing the victim’s identity and confirming it with his or her dentist. Many murder victims were anonymous, so, just as with bones, dental forensics would require a sophisticated understanding of teeth and how they grew.17 That knowledge developed in the middle of the nineteenth century when several scientists, notably Dr. Émile Magitot of Paris, studied the natural history of teeth—not as simple chewing devices, but as living human tissue with stages of growth and vulnerability to disease.18 Magitot was among the first to incorporate Pasteur’s germ theory to explain tooth decay, explaining that cavities were not formed by a “tooth worm” or acidic foods, but by the bacterial fermentation of food bits caught between the teeth. More important, for the purposes of forensics, he traced tooth development, from the saclike dental follicles in the embryo to the “milk teeth” of childhood to the molars of youth to the wisdom teeth of adulthood and their ultimate breakdown and decay in old age.

  Magitot’s studies made dentistry an indispensable part of forensic analysis, and they became standard in medical texts at the time. Lacassagne directed his students to write theses on how to apply Magitot’s work broadly to criminal science. He printed them as reference tables in his Handbook, correlating tooth development and age. Teeth gave other clues to identity, such as whether the vict
im smoked (tobacco stains or wear marks of a pipe stem) and the nature of his or her diet and health. Stunted teeth with thinned or pitted enamel revealed that the victim had suffered from rickets, linked to calcium deficiency. Teeth with a peglike or notched appearance indicated congenital syphilis, acquired from an infected mother while in the womb.

  Magitot wrote a report in Lacassagne’s journal that would become one of his most celebrated cases of odontic deduction. It involved the case of Louis XVII, son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, both of whom were executed during the French Revolution.19 Fearing a possible resurgence of the monarchy, the revolutionaries put the eight-year-old heir in prison, where he died two months after his tenth birthday. In 1795, he was buried in an unmarked grave near the church wall in the Sainte-Marguerite cemetery in Paris. Ever since, there had been a cultish curiosity about the location of the grave and the circumstances of the child’s demise. The boy became known as the “Lost Dauphin.”

  In 1894, a prominent Parisian attorney got permission to excavate near the church wall, where he found a coffin marked “L … XVII.” Could these be the remains of the child king? He assembled a forensic team, including Léonce Manouvrier, who had constructed bone-length charts similar to Rollet’s, and Émile Magitot, who would evaluate the dentition.

  Magitot’s study was a masterpiece. He began by noting that most of the cadaver’s teeth must have been present at the time of death. A few had fallen out, but because the gaps where they had been showed no sign of healing, Magitot knew they had dislodged after death. There had been twenty-seven teeth in all. Magitot then used his knowledge of the natural history of dentition to bracket the victim’s age systematically. For example, the front teeth, the canine teeth, and the bicuspids all would have come into place in early childhood, which set a minimum age of five or six. There were no baby teeth—milk teeth—left in the mouth, which meant the boy must have been at least twelve years old.

  Then Magitot turned his attention to the missing first molar of the lower right jaw, which left a gap between the second molar and the bicuspid. Unlike the other empty tooth sockets in the jaw, this one had healed over, indicating that the tooth had been pulled during the victim’s lifetime. That set a minimum age at twelve or thirteen. After the extraction, the second molar had grown at an angle toward the gap—so much so that it completely crossed over the gap and leaned up against the bicuspid. All that would have taken several years, said Magitot, which now set the minimum age at sixteen.

  Finally, he looked for the wisdom teeth, which typically would emerge in the early twenties. They hadn’t appeared yet, but he did find their crowns just below what would have been the gum line. Based on those factors, he estimated the corpse’s age at eighteen to twenty years old. The remains found in the coffin were certainly not those of Louis XVII.

  * This charge, known as the “blood libel,” had been levied against Jews in Europe since the Middle Ages.

  * The movement made its mark in the United States when an anarchist bomb killed seven policemen in Chicago in 1886 and when the anarchist Leon F. Czolgosz assassinated President McKinley in 1901.

  Seven

  The Oak Woods

  Augustine Mortureux was the youngest of seven siblings who grew up on a farm in the village of Étaules, about six miles north of Dijon.1 The daughter of a woodcutter, she had inherited none of her father’s or sisters’ native hardiness. Even at seventeen, she was frail and often fearful. Perhaps because of that vulnerability, she was the light of her mother’s eye.

  Augustine woke up on Sunday, May 12, 1895, in a state of terrible anxiety. One of her sisters, who lived in a neighboring town, was ill and had asked if a family member could come visit. Neither parent could get away, so they had asked Augustine to make the trip. Even though the route followed a busy national carriageway, she had never made the walk by herself. She trembled at the thought of hiking through the Bois du Chêne, the gloomy oak woods along the way. She took her little dog, Quiqui, for protection.

  She left at 9:00 a.m. The sky threatened rain, so she carried an umbrella. On the road, she passed a lumberjack named Chaignay, who promised to keep an eye on her until she was out of sight. It had been a holiday in a neighboring village and the presence of other walkers undoubtedly reassured Augustine. She passed bicyclists coming from the opposite direction, one of whom was a man named Messner, a municipal counselor from Dijon. Moments before, Messner had overtaken a vagabond, whose menacing appearance gave him a chill. Augustine kept walking. Chaignay watched her shrink into the distance. She came to a bend in the road, then disappeared from view behind a clump of trees. Chaignay turned back to his work.

  A few hours later, a woman named Gaumard was walking up the carriageway with her two young daughters and her cousin, on leave from his regiment. One of the girls noticed someone lying down in the distance and mostly shielded from view by an open umbrella. “Look, Mama,” she said, “it’s a bicyclist taking a nap.”2 An hour later, when they made the return trip, the children mischievously threw some pebbles to awaken the sleeper. When there was no reaction, Gaumard’s cousin approached the body; then they all fled to alert the neighbors about his shocking discovery.

  That afternoon, a friar named François Brûlé was strolling along the carriageway when he came upon three lively young boys who were heading to the Bois du Chêne to collect mushrooms.3 They all fell in together, walking and chatting. They approached a dirt road with shoulders that fell away in steep, shady embankments. One of the boys ran ahead to where a cute little dog was barking. Then he cried out.

  The dog stood next to the body of a girl lying in a cavity where some boulders had been removed; she was partially hidden by an open umbrella. Her skirts had been pulled up and her blouse ripped open. Friar Brûlé straightened the clothing to restore the girl’s modesty and cover her ghastly wounds. Someone, apparently, had stolen her shoes.

  The friar ran to the nearest village and burst into a tavern, where Eugène Grenier, a wealthy landowner, was playing cards with some friends. On hearing the news, Grenier piled the friar and several other people into his carriage and ordered his coachman to speed them to the Bois du Chêne. As they approached the crime scene, Grenier cried out, “It’s there, I see it!”4

  By midafternoon, a crowd began to gather. Bicyclists sped off to alert the local authorities. Within a couple of hours, nearly three hundred people were jostling for a view, including the girl’s horrified parents. No one could understand how a murder could have been committed on such a busy road in the middle of the day. At one point, Madame Gaumard, who had joined the crowd, said, “We’ve known about this for a while,” referring to the fact that they also had spotted the body.5

  The authorities inspected the crime scene and took the body to the city hall in Étaules, where Dr. J. Quioc, from the school of medicine in Dijon, performed the autopsy.6 He found that death had come quickly from a massive stab wound to the neck, though there were several other wounds and contusions. One stab wound had penetrated a lung, but this was not what had caused Augustine’s death. Dr. Quioc noted that blood had pooled in the back of the lung, indicating that she had been stabbed after collapsing onto her back; blood collecting at the bottom of the lung would have indicated that the wound was incurred while she was standing. Quioc found no evidence of rape. There were pale bloody smears on her undergarments, which indicated that the killer had washed his hands and then wiped them on her clothing. The doctor finally noted that her earrings had been stolen, judging by the empty piercings in her earlobes, and removed with great dexterity, as evidenced by the absence of bruises.

  Two investigators were assigned to the case—Louis-Albert Fonfrède, the local investigating magistrate, and a Dijon-based prosecutor named Tondut. They suspected the unknown vagabond whom Messner and others had seen in the area and started gathering testimony. Several people along the road that day had seen a mean-looking vagabond wearing gray pants, a tattered blue shirt, and wooden-soled shoes. Fonfrède sent out a bul
letin to surrounding districts, advising people to be alert for a man who matched that description. It was carried by newspapers as far away as Paris and Lyon.

  The dragnet progressed normally for the next week and a half. Police in surrounding areas captured, interrogated, and released several suspects. But a rumor began to circulate regarding Eugène Grenier. Many people in town envied him for his wealth and property and resented his youthful reputation for laziness and dissolute ways (although he was now respectably married and had children). Some began to whisper that Grenier had spotted Augustine’s body so quickly because he knew precisely where to look. Gossips said Grenier must have tried to force himself on Augustine and then killed her when she refused. It did not matter that Grenier had never shown an impulse toward violence or aggression.

  Fonfrède and Tondut interrogated Grenier and his wife separately and also spoke with several of their employees. Their alibis checked out, and the two were set free. But their ordeal was just beginning.

  The late nineteenth century saw the sudden and wild proliferation of the penny press, the first incarnation of the modern mass media.7 So-called because a newspaper cost only a penny or two, this form of popular journalism was taking France by storm, just as in Britain and the United States. After decades of censorship, French journalism was invigorated by new laws prescribing broad areas of press freedom. New technologies, including the Linotype machine, which made typesetting almost as fast as typing, and the rotary printing press, made it possible to churn out huge volumes of newspapers quickly and cheaply. The telegraph enabled correspondents to wire in stories from far corners of the world and from the equally inaccessible corners of France. The skyrocketing literacy rates gave newspapers millions of new readers, and the newly developing advertising industry yielded revenue beyond what the cheap newsstand price could provide.