Lacassagne saw purple splotches on the body’s back and immediately deduced that Piot was lying. When a person dies and circulation stops, gravity pulls the blood into those capillaries closest to the ground. This pooling creates purplish splotches, known as lividity, on the bottom of most skin surfaces. The stains can migrate if the body is shifted soon after death, while the blood remains liquid; but after several hours the patches become fixed, when the blood has seeped into the tissue. Badoil must have died on his back and remained in that position for eight to ten hours. After that, someone had shifted him, perhaps to fit his body more neatly into the trunk or to create a more convincing scenario.
By immediately looking for signs of lividity Lacassagne was making use of the emerging science of postmortem timing. Physicians understood that once death occurred, a biological clock began running that could be traced backward to estimate when the death had taken place. What Lacassagne and his contemporaries tried to develop was a way to narrow the postmortem time window to make it a useful crime-solving tool.
Lividity created a window of twenty-four to thirty-six hours—appearing within a half hour of death, reaching its maximum in six to twelve hours, and then gradually fading over the next day.7 Another window was provided by rigor mortis, the muscular stiffening that begins three to six hours after death and reaches a maximum about nine hours later.8 Thereafter, the muscles begin softening again, and by the second to third day, the body goes limp. Rigor mortis does not appear in all muscles at once, and scientists at the time carefully studied the phenomenon to see if they could produce a clear timetable of its progression. Many tried to develop precise timing charts based on the theory that rigor mortis began in the head and worked its way downward. Lacassagne argued that rigor mortis did not begin closest to the head, but in whichever part of the body was most elevated, and proceeded downward from there. (Both sides were wrong: The phenomenon begins at the same time in all muscles, but becomes obvious first in the small muscles, such as those of the face.)
Even within broad parameters, rigor mortis could not serve as an entirely dependable time clock. It could appear more quickly in hot weather than cold, and more rapidly in people suffering from exhaustion or disease. Nor were its characteristics completely understood.
Over the years, scientists came to see livor mortis (lividity), rigor mortis, and algor mortis (a dropping of body temperature) as the three main time indicators of the cessation of life. They all had limited usefulness for dating, though, because none extended beyond a couple of days. In order to date older bodies, they needed to look at other forms of life that colonized the body after death. Conceptually, this meant learning to see death not as an end, but as a pivot point when certain processes ended but others began.
The most obvious of these processes was putrefaction, the greenish color change and bloating of the body, a phenomenon that had always been surrounded by mysticism and dread.9 (Sir Francis Bacon described bloating as “unquiet spirits” trying to escape their worldly remains.10) In the middle of the nineteenth century, Pasteur explained away the superstition by describing the fermentation of microbes. He and his successors demonstrated that in a dead body, bacteria would escape from the digestive tract, and, along with other bacteria and fungi, colonize human tissue, turning it green. Enough gas would be released to swell the skin and push blood into peripheral veins. Sometimes the blood would escape from old wounds, giving rise to the myth that a corpse would “bleed afresh” in the presence of the murderer.11 Very few morgues had refrigeration at the time, and doctors dreaded that first scalpel cut, when a whoosh of repellent gases would almost overcome them. Before the Paris morgue installed its refrigerators, Brouardel would make pinpricks in the cadavers and light them, allowing the combustible gases to burn off. They might burn for three or four days, producing “long bluish flames.”12
Scientists tried to create timetables for putrefaction by identifying the succession of bacterial species or the order in which body parts became colonized. But so many species of bacteria were involved, and the onset of putrefaction was so affected by moisture and climatic conditions, they found the task impossible. All they could say was that putrefaction generally began after rigor mortis and continued for months.
It was not until 1894 that a long-term postmortem timetable was developed by a Parisian entomologist named Jean-Pierre Mégnin.13 In a masterwork entitled Fauna of the Tombs, he described the successive waves of arthropods—insects, beetles, mites, and other creatures—that colonized corpses in orderly and highly predictable progressions. Each wave, which he referred to as a “squad,” was a collection of species that thrived under certain conditions: They would eat what they could and then leave when their waste products accumulated and the body chemistry changed. That would make way for the next squad, which found the new conditions hospitable. “We have been struck by the fact that … the workers of death only arrive at their table successively, and always in the same order,” he wrote.14
Mégnin specified eight squads, or “laborers of death,” whose presence could date a body within discrete time windows from one day to three years. The first squad, for example, consisted of houseflies and blowflies, which deposited their eggs at or just before the moment of death and fed on the body for about a month. Next would come several generations of brilliant metallic green bottle flies (Lucilia), large gray flesh flies (Sarcophaga), and two other species, which would dominate the cadaver from one to three months. From the third month to the sixth, a third squad would take over, comprising the larvae and adults of flesh-eating beetles. The progression would continue, one collection of species after the next, until the body was little more than a fibrous husk still being gnawed on by certain beetles and moths.
———
To determine how Badoil died, Lacassagne drew upon the vast amount of emerging research. Scientists worldwide were dissecting murder victims, executed criminals, cadavers from hospitals, and laboratory animals to reproduce the conditions they saw at crime scenes and learn how to interpret the results.* They did research on whether death happened quickly or slowly, and on which markings on the body revealed murder or suicide. Lacassagne was in the forefront of the endeavor. In 1888, he wrote a paper describing how the angle of a stab wound to the heart could reveal the handedness of a murderer.15 He wrote another paper analyzing the wound shape and lethality produced by the army’s new bayonet, which was beginning to appear in civilian homicides.16 He wrote a series of monographs on whether chemical changes in the liver would indicate whether a victim died slowly, as in a natural death, or suddenly, as a result of murder, accident, or suicide. The liver converts glycogen, a starch, to glucose, a simple sugar, to supply the body with energy.17 His research showed that the absence of glycogen in the liver would indicate a slow death because the organ had continued to break it down as the body’s natural processes gradually wound down. The presence of residual glycogen would show that sudden death had brought conversion to a full stop.*
Some of the most frequent cause-of-death laboratory studies involved asphyxia—the lack of oxygen that would result from hanging, strangulation, suffocation, and drowning. The mechanisms of death by asphyxia were not simple. Through laboratory experiments, von Hofmann, in Vienna, showed that hanging and strangulation not only cut off the air supply, as was commonly known; they often produced a combination of injuries, such as a rupturing of the carotid artery, which would stop the flow of blood to the brain, and damage to the pneumogastric nerve (now called the vagus nerve), which runs down the neck and controls many of the body’s organs, including regulating the heart rate and keeping the trachea open. He and others revealed that the throat area was so important to vital functions that a sudden violent squeeze could cause a victim to drop almost immediately, which may explain why so few of Vacher’s victims cried out.
Because asphyxia was so common in cases of murder and suicide, medical experts tried to characterize the various postmortem signatures of death by asphyxiation.18 Drown
ing was revealed by a frothy foam that appeared in the windpipe and bronchial tubes—the result of violent, spasmodic efforts to breathe in the water. The lungs appeared “inflated … spongy … doughy.” Hanging was indicated by the oblique groove in the skin of the neck made by the rope above the thyroid cartilage and under the jawline, coupled with damage to the muscles underneath. (Von Hofmann and Parisian anatomist Auguste Tardieu did a joint study of 299 hanging victims and found that 244 exhibited this pattern.19) Hanging from a drop of several feet, such as in American executions, could result in broken vertebrae, as well. Strangling by ligature differed from hanging by the angle of the groove—perpendicular to the spinal cord, as opposed to at an angle. Manual strangulation was indicated by finger and fingernail marks on the sides of the neck, which also gave clues to the killer’s handedness by the orientation of his fingers and thumb. In most cases of hanging and strangulation, doctors would also find “emphysemas” in the lungs—thin, light patches caused by the rupture of air cells. Suffocation proved an especially subtle cause of asphyxia, since there usually were no external signs of damage. Auguste Tardieu found a certain pattern of bruising on the lungs that he felt could serve as a signature for suffocation. The bruises, which became known as “Tardieu spots,” ranged in size from that of a pinhead to that of a pea and could be so numerous that they gave the lungs a granitelike appearance.20 They resulted from the rupturing of capillaries.*
Carefully examining the surface of Badoil’s body, Lacassagne saw numerous hints of a rapid and violent death.21 The eyes were bloodshot and the inner surfaces of the lids were covered with tiny red dots, or petechial hemorrhages, which occur when pressure in the blood vessels causes small amounts of blood to leak from capillaries. Both forms of damage were known to result from death from a blocked airway, as in strangling or hanging—but not from gradual suffocation. He found extensive bruising around the neck and chest. He noticed a small rip in the skin of the neck, as though it had been snagged by a fingernail. He found symmetrical abrasions on the right and left shoulders, right and left hips, and right and left sides, as though the man had been forced into the trunk while still alive.
Lacassagne proceeded with the dissection. Opening the throat, he saw that the tissues and muscle were infiltrated with blood, and he found a tear in the lining of the left carotid artery. Both were signs of manual strangulation. The lungs showed no trace of Tardieu spots, which, to his way of thinking, would have signaled gradual suffocation if present. He noted little “emphysemas” caused by a violent struggle to breathe.
Next, he moved to the chemical analysis. Tests of the liver showed the presence of glycogen as well as glucose, meaning that Badoil had died suddenly and that the conversion of sugars had come to a quick halt. As a second test for sudden death, Lacassagne asked a colleague to run a spectrographic analysis of the blood to check for oxygen.22 The procedure—which involved diluting a small quantity of blood and then shining a bright light into the liquid and through a series of prisms and lenses mounted on a microscope—would create a colorful spectrum that varied according to the liquid’s oxygen content. In this case, the spectrum revealed two distinct black bands separated by a strip of greenish yellow light—a clear indication that the victim’s blood carried the normal complement of oxygen at the time of death. In other words, the victim died suddenly, for the blood would have lost much of its oxygen if he had gradually suffocated in an enclosed space.
Lacassagne confirmed his results by reproducing the crime-scene conditions on dogs, as often was the practice at well-equipped laboratories. Gruesomely, he had three dogs strangled and then placed in a trunk (their combined weight totaled Badoil’s) and had three other healthy dogs placed in a trunk, where they were allowed to suffocate over the course of several hours. One test after another confirmed his impression that Badoil had been strangled. The dogs that died from slow suffocation showed the presence of Tardieu spots in their lungs, the absence of glycogen in their liver, and low oxygen levels in their blood. In short, the suffocated dogs showed all the physiological signs that Badoil had not.
The body told all. Contrary to the witness’s version of events, Étienne Badoil had not climbed into the footlocker and accidentally suffocated; he had been forced into the trunk and, while in that confined space, battered and strangled. The case went to trial the following November. The members of the jury had no trouble concluding that Badoil had been murdered, but they did not find enough evidence to connect Piot and Matillon directly to the killing. (The only evidence that linked them to the crime was suspicious bruising on their arms.) Matillon was set free, and Piot was sentenced to one year in prison for negligent homicide. The result must have been disappointing for Lacassagne, although, characteristically, he did not include his reaction in the report. We can assume he derived a certain satisfaction from the fact that in the case of this murder, evidence trumped the witness’s lies.
* Sometimes the doctors would experiment on themselves. Dr. Graeme Hammond of New York, in order to understand a strangling victim’s final sensations, had a laboratory assistant twist a towel around his throat while another marked the time. “I first noticed a sensation of warmth and tingling … passing quickly over my entire body,” reported Hammond. “Vision partially disappeared but there was no manifestation of colored lights. My head felt as if about to burst, and there was a confused roaring in my ears.…” He rested a few minutes and had his assistants repeat the procedure. “Sensibility ceased in fifty-five seconds, and a stab with a knife [into my hand] sufficiently deep to draw blood caused no sensation whatever.” (Frank Winthrop Draper, A Text-Book of Legal Medicine [Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1905], p. 296.)
* Lacassagne’s conclusions about glycogen have since proven invalid. Modern forensic scientists find that almost all causes of death, fast or slow, may leave residual traces of glycogen in the liver.
* Tardieu spots were a source of controversy for years. Some experts claimed to see the spots not only in suffocation but in all forms of asphyxiation. It is now known that Tardieu spots occur in almost all cases of death and are not the result of suffocation, but of all internal forms of lividity.
Nine
The Crime in Bénonces
Vacher was a creature of the high country. Having been born in a small village in the highlands, he was drawn to the world of sleepy hillside villages and rushing mountain streams. Here he could prowl in the high meadows and forestland, shielded by the trees and interrupted sight lines. There were fewer victims here to satisfy his appetites, but fewer witnesses, as well. Here he could stalk the youngest and weakest, and pounce when he knew they were alone.
“Woe to those who crossed the path of this terrible vagabond,” Albert Sarraut, a reporter for La Dépěche de Toulouse, later wrote about Vacher.1 “Wherever he goes, a cry of agony breaks the silence of the countryside.”
In the months since the Mortureux murder, Vacher had not remained idle. From the Dijon area, he had set out toward Paris, then abruptly changed course and spent the next couple of weeks making his way south toward Lyon. He stayed well away from the highly trafficked Saône River, roaming instead through rural villages parallel to the river valley. Then he crossed the Rhône Valley and started meandering eastward into the foothills of the Alps.
An evil wind blew wherever he roamed.2 In late May, he attacked a domestic worker walking home after visiting her parents. She escaped by using her fingernails to bloody his eyes. A few weeks later, he grabbed another girl, who escaped. In late July, neighbors in the little mountain village of Chambuet found the body of a sixty-four-year-old woman, who had been stabbed repeatedly in the head and neck. In early August, he tried to lure two boys into the forest, but they fled when their older sister warned them away.
On the morning of Saturday, August 24, a young man in the village of Saint-Ours, just north of the spa town of Aix-les-Bains, came home from pasturing the family’s only cow, to find his elderly mother dead on the kitchen floor, her throat slashed. Her dr
ess had been pulled up to her chest.
“If there ever was a crime I regretted, it was that one,” Vacher would later say.3 “Because the people of that region have such a loyal and hospitable nature.”
The village of Bénonces sits on a tilted plateau in the foothills of the Alps, east of where the table-flat Rhône Valley collides with towering cliffs.4 Verticality rules here. Meadows that are broad and level in the valley become miniaturized and tipped at crazy angles, offering panoramic views of the farmland below. The stone houses are capped with steep red-tiled roofs.
Like many villagers of the high country, the 450 citizens of Bénonces lived in peaceful isolation. There was no telegraph, electricity, or newspaper in town, and the serpentine road leading to the hamlet made it a difficult destination. The residents were tough but hospitable people—although they were more inclined to bestow their hospitality on a stranger who showed a willingness to work. When Vacher drifted into the town during the last week of August 1895, the woman at the first house turned him away. “We give our stew to our workers, and there’s none left for you,” she told him.5 He came to another farm and asked a boy outside if they offered employment. “Certainly,” the boy said. “You just have to ask.” “But does one have to work?”6 Vacher asked him. “That’s for sure,” said the boy. “You don’t stay here without doing something.”
He came to the house of a family named Babola and asked a woman he met there for milk. She didn’t have any. He groaned, cursed her, and kept walking.
“The thing that impressed me most were his hands,” Madame Babola said later.7 “As soon as I saw them in front of me, I noticed that they were small compared with those of other peasants of his height. And his nails were so long … they reminded me of the claws of a bird of prey.”
The Killer of Little Shepherds Page 11
