One woman took pity. “I’m not very rich,” she said apologetically as she ladled a little soup for him.8
“It’s not the rich people who give the most,” he replied.
He walked up a dirt path another mile or so and arrived at an even smaller hamlet, Onglas. He stopped at the farm of Pierre Guiffray and offered to pay a couple of pennies for some milk. Guiffray invited him in and then eyed him suspiciously as he dunked his bread in the milk and devoured it.
“Why aren’t you working?” Guiffray asked.9 “You certainly seem strong enough.”
Vacher told him that a malady prevented him from doing hard work, and he showed Guiffray his wrist, as though that would explain things.
“Where are you from?”
Vacher thought for a moment. “Seillons,” he said, referring to another village in the area. Guiffray watched in silence.
The next day, Guiffray saw Vacher sitting against a chestnut tree along the path between Bénonces and Onglas. “You seem to be fine there resting in the shade.”
“Not for long,” Vacher said.
The farmers of Ain, the region that includes Bénonces and Onglas, have long raised an ancient breed of cow known as the Charolais. Off-white in color, the animal is heavily muscled, long-bodied, rugged, and fast-growing, and provides large quantities of milk. They are coarse-looking creatures, with rough fur that helps them endure the harsh climate.
The rhythms of the cows governed farm life.10 Each day at dawn, farm girls would milk the animals. At about 7:00 a.m., the shepherd boys would walk their little herds to the hillside pastures about a mile away, watch over them for several hours, and then guide them back to the stables at around 10:30. They would pasture the herd again for another three or four hours in the late afternoon and into the evening.
Despite this pacific tableau, a shepherd’s life was not at all an easy one, nor was rural life a picturesque idyll. Most rural folk lived in near poverty, only a dry season away from indigence. Meat was a luxury, something to be eaten only a few times a year; a prosperous farmer ate it once a week. (The average Parisian ate nearly four times as much meat as the average rural dweller.11) Their main foods were coarse bread or pancakes and soup—a broth or a stew into which they threw anything they had. Soups, which comprised the main meal of the day, were usually vegetarian. Corn, buckwheat, chestnuts, cabbage, turnips, or potatoes were cooked in salted water or with a little bit of lard. The locals drank milk or water; they could not afford wine.
Almost no one in the countryside had running water. Tuberculosis, typhoid, and cholera were common, and medical care in the provinces was poor. To live was to work, almost as a farm animal.
Many shepherds lived with their flocks for months at a time, isolated from other people.12 An observer in the Pyrenees in 1888 described a shepherd’s dwelling as a stone hut one meter high. Inside were all the young man’s worldly possessions: a pile of straw to sleep on, a small heap of potatoes, and a sack containing half a loaf of bread, some fat, and some salt. Those who lived with farm families had marginally better lives. They could bed down in the barn, in the kitchen, or in front of the hearth. Like their nomadic counterparts, they spent their days alone with their animals, exposed to the dangers of brigands, wolves, and rabid dogs.
“Such a sad existence is that of the shepherd!”13 wrote a columnist for Le Petit Parisien. “We may poeticize it but in reality it is one of the most punishing and least rewarding professions.… The shepherd … has to have varied knowledge, a gentle character, and a highly developed sense of duty.”
Despite the hardships of a shepherd’s existence, it was an improvement over the life Victor Portalier might have led.14 He was born in Trévoux, a riverside town just north of Lyon, to a woman who had married a much older man. Victor lost his father at the age of twelve and started drifting toward petty crime. His mother, reputedly a woman of low moral character, did not properly guide the boy, so the local priest took him to the Society for the Protection of Children in Lyon. He was assigned to the foster care of Jacques Berger, a farmer in Onglas, about forty miles away. The placement was successful. Now, at the age of fifteen, Victor had friends among the other shepherds and a reputation as an agreeable boy with a solid work ethic.
On the afternoon of August 31, 1895, he set out with his cows at 1:30 p.m., a half hour before the other boys. He liked to get an early start. He would lead his flock to the “big meadow,” as they called it, on a hillside just over a mile from the farmhouse. There he would settle his cows and then sit under the big walnut tree at the meadow’s edge. From this vantage point, he could gaze across the panorama of the forests and cliffs of the Luizet Valley. At the far end was a precipice and the Cascade of Luizet, a cataract more than three hundred feet high. In the summer, the boys liked to play under the waterfall, frolicking in the limpid pool below. It was an unusually hot day, and nothing stirred.
He heard a noise …
The other boys were coming up from the valley when one of Victor’s cows began wandering back. Jean-Marie Robin, a friend, started coaxing the cow back up the hill, up to the big meadow. How unlike Victor to lose track of one of his cows. About seventy yards from the tree where Jean-Marie knew Victor would be waiting, he saw a puddle of blood. He followed that puddle to another … and came upon a blood-soaked shirt. He could not bear to see what his next steps would reveal to him, and he ran away, screaming. Several people came in response, including the garde-champêtre, who saw Victor’s remains and then sought out the nearest authorities.15 The next morning, the police arrived from the town of Villebois, about five miles away, along with two doctors they had pressed into service as medical examiners. The body was too mangled to transport, so they conducted the autopsy right there in the meadow, in front of horrified villagers.
The depravity of this crime was truly unprecedented. No one in the region had seen anything like it before. By following the trail of forensic evidence across the meadow, medical examiners were able to re-create the sequence of events, deriving facts about the killer and his method of attack.
“We arrived at a huge walnut tree situated in a clearing near a meadow of clover,” wrote the doctors.16 “Two meters from this walnut we observed a large puddle of blood.” Ten meters from the tree, they found a second pool of blood. Sixty meters from the tree, against some juniper bushes, rested the body of Victor Portalier. He lay on his back, with his pants pulled down to his shins.
The killer had sliced open the victim from sternum to pubis, like a hunter gutting an animal. “It is a complete evisceration,” the doctors reported. They noted several other nonfatal stab wounds. The boy’s sexual organs had been removed with a sharp instrument. The edges of the wound were neat and not hacked—a detail that would later become important in the course of evaluating the criminal.
Vacher would later say that of all his victims, Victor Portalier had suffered the most. Fittingly, this was the crime that would prove Vacher’s undoing.
The community reacted in terror. These were villages without a police force, where the only security measures were dogs and flimsy locks. Formerly hospitable villagers now closed their doors to strangers and thought they saw assassins everywhere. The citizens of Onglas, unlike those in the larger towns where Vacher had struck, could not comfort themselves by arresting the usual suspects, for there weren’t any.
“What demon pushed this monstrous murderer to tear his victims to shreds?”17 a Lyon newspaper reporter later asked when the extent of Vacher’s crime spree was revealed. “The cadaver was mutilated so appallingly that it is impossible to believe in a single murderer: One would think the little one was killed by a bull who then turned its horns on him.”
Within hours, more than 150 armed people from the surrounding towns organized themselves into a posse, scouring the forests, hills, and crevasses.18 They had a good sense of what the killer looked like. It had to be the vagabond who was begging for milk. Very few strangers came to Onglas, and this was one everyone remembered. Yet
Vacher eluded them. Immediately after the killing, he fled down a gully and abandoned the high ground. Within a couple of days, he was seen crossing one of the railroad bridges over the Rhône.
In the wake of so ghastly a crime, the police promised immediate action. The procurer general of Lyon took a personal interest in the case, as he was an active member of the Society for the Protection of Children. He sent word to his subordinates to use every means at their disposal to solve the crime. The regional official who got the case, a substitute judge in one of the local towns, returned to the area several times over the next few days and interviewed local people about strangers they had seen. He sent out a strikingly accurate description to all19 the neighboring districts, towns, and hospitals:
Age: 30 to 35 years
Height: 1 meter 56 [about 5 feet, 2 inches]
Thick black eyebrows
Coloring: pale and sickly
White hands, indicating that he does not indulge in any hard work
Head covering: straw hat, said to be a panama, with the front pulled down over his eyes. Sometimes he wears a beret.
Distinguishing characteristics: scar across his right eye. Carries a small work bag and a club.
No lead went unexplored. On September 5, a telegram arrived from the police in Trévoux, the town where Victor was born, where anonymous tongues had been wagging about a suspect the authorities had not considered: Victor’s mother, Marie Pinet.20
Most people did not like her. Nor did they like that she had married Lazare Portalier, a dwarfish old man, and that during the marriage she had dallied with other suitors. After her husband died, she immediately took up with a bricklayer with a rough reputation. Her enemies in Trévoux told the police that Portalier, who ran a tailor’s business, had left a small fortune of ten thousand francs to her son, which Marie never told the boy about. People asked darkly why she had given him so willingly to foster care and why she had never answered his letters. Now that the boy was approaching the age of majority, the theory went, Marie had had him killed by a vagabond so the money would be hers.
Police conducted interviews in Trévoux. Some of the rumors proved true: Marie was a loose woman. But the stories of the inheritance were greatly exaggerated. The father had left the family only a modest amount, and almost all had been consumed by an ongoing lawsuit against his brother. Marie scratched out a marginal existence washing linen for two francs a day. She never answered her son’s letters because she was illiterate, although she kept them as a personal treasure. When she gave the packet of letters to the police to examine, she said, “Please give them back to me, because they’re all I have left of him.”21
The most compelling piece of exonerating testimony came from witnesses who saw her reaction to Victor’s death. Even though Marie had heard rumors of a shepherd’s murder, she had no idea it might be her son. When Marie came by to ask Claudine Suchet, who sold newspapers, about finding someone to care for a sick relative, Claudine asked Marie to remind her of the name of the village where Victor was working and the name of his foster family. Suchet had read the news about the killing of a then-unidentified shepherd. “I must have subtly changed color,” recalled Suchet, “[because] the poor woman began trembling and broke into uncontrollable sobs.22 Her attitude seemed completely grief-stricken.” She still had not recovered by the time of the interrogation. Police eliminated Marie as a suspect.
Weeks passed. On September 30, the medical director of the Saint-Robert asylum wrote to the authorities that one of his inmates had escaped two days before the murder. The patient, named Jean-François Bravais, who had been treated for depression and a persecution complex, had much in common with the description in the bulletin, including a scar on his face from a self-inflicted gunshot. Police put out a dragnet, and five weeks later they apprehended Bravais as he got off a train about fifty miles south of Bénonces. Bravais denied everything, and he had a reliable eyewitness to back him up—a policeman.
On November 22, 1895, with no new evidence and no new leads to pursue, authorities officially closed the investigation. The citizens of Bénonces, Onglas, and the surrounding towns would continue to live in fear. Meanwhile, Vacher would continue to stalk the countryside, preying on the innocent, the weak, and the young.
Louis-Albert Fonfrède, who had tried but failed to solve the Augustine Mortureux case, read about the Portalier killing. He started compiling a dossier.
Ten
Never Without a Trace
One of Lacassagne’s treasured artifacts was the skeleton of a young man hanging in a display case, its head reattached after an encounter with the guillotine. On the inner surface of the right pelvis, the name Gaumet was inscribed in inch-high letters. It served as a reminder of a brutal crime and the power of science to use even the tiniest traces of evidence to solve it.
Annet Gaumet was a hardened criminal, with fourteen convictions by the age of twenty-four. On the night of December 21, 1898, he and several gang members broke into the apartment of the widow Foucherand above her bistro on rue de la Villette in Lyon.1 They strangled her, clubbed her to death, and stole her money. The police had been well versed in the management of crime scenes, so when Lacassagne arrived the next morning with the prosecuting attorney and the commissioner of police, he found the scene undisturbed. They found the woman on her back on the floor—legs splayed, skirts hiked, her right arm in a defensive position across her chest, her left extended outward, bruises on her throat, and a gaping wound on the right side of her head. Next to the body was a blood-covered wine bottle. Furniture had been turned over; drawers had been emptied.
The investigators proceeded carefully from room to room, carefully noting the position of the furniture, bloodstains, and artifacts. Yet this scene seemed abnormally free of telltale traces. The bloody bottle may have been used in the attack, but it turned out to be free of handprint and finger marks. No footprints marked the scene, despite the apparent chaos. There was no clothing that did not belong to the victim, and no bits of foreign hair were found. The one thing that struck Lacassagne as unusual was a lump of human fecal matter on the bed. He had no idea why it was there, or if it would prove useful in the investigation. He had it taken back to the institute, along with the body and the bottle.
By the mid-1890s, experts were becoming increasingly sophisticated about searching for hidden evidence at crime scenes and eager to bridge the gap between science and the law. In the introduction to the eighth volume of his journal, in 1893, Lacassagne urged greater collaboration “between men of law and men of science.”2 Representing the law-enforcement point of view, Hans Gross, the renowned Austrian jurist and law professor, felt the same. In his book, Criminal Investigation, he devoted eighty-one pages to the wisdom of using scientific experts, including “The Microscopist,” “The Chemical Analyst,” “The Experts in Physics,” and “Experts in Minerology, Zoology, and Botany.”3 “Experts are the most important auxiliaries of an Investigating Officer,” he wrote, “and in some way or other they nearly always are the main factor in deciding a case.” In 1895, the International Union of Criminal Law, meeting in Linz, Austria, passed a resolution calling for “specially designed” courses for young jurists to deepen their knowledge of scientific procedures.4
Part of what science can do best is show patterns where none seems to have existed and reveal what once had been impossible to see. The same held true for the growing science of forensics. Investigators were finding that no matter how careful the criminal, he or she inevitably left traces at the crime scene, or carried traces away. Years later, Lacassagne’s disciple Edmond Locard would codify that observation as the “Locard Exchange Principle.”5 Police and experts alike were fascinated by how small these bits of evidence could be. To track down a criminal through clues as tiny as a hair or some fibers approached wizardry (which is how such feats were often portrayed in the press). Knowing the importance of tiny clues, medical experts and investigators were learning to search nonobvious places, such as hat linings, cuff
s, or under the fingernails of the victim and suspects. No item was too trivial to escape their attention, whether an article of clothing, the chewed end of a pipe stem, or torn bits of paper. And they were using technologies that could detect traces so small as to be virtually invisible.
The most valuable tool for this task was the microscope. Although invented centuries before, microscope technology made a huge leap in the nineteenth century as lens crafters used the new mathematical understanding of optics to replace trial and error in designing new lenses and employed new formulations to produce purer glass.6 By late in the century, manufacturers such as Carl Zeiss in Germany were building microscopes whose power remained unsurpassed until the development of the electron microscope in the 1960s. Gross recounted numerous investigations in which the participation of a microscopist revealed clues that were invisible to detectives. He described several cases of cleaned-off murder weapons that revealed tiny traces of blood when a microscopist examined the rivets of the knife handle or the junction between the ax handle and blade.
Microscopes proved especially effective in examining hair, which was ubiquitous to crime scenes, if one searched carefully enough. It appeared on clothing, shoes, weapons, and bone fragments. It frequently became entangled in the fingers of the deceased, which often gave a clue to the identity of the assailant. “This happens more frequently than one would believe; indeed, if the hands of the victims were more carefully examined it would be found even more frequently,” wrote Gross.7 For that reason, he insisted that ordinary policemen stay away from victims’ hands until authorized medical examiners arrived. Those experts could microscopically distinguish the varieties of hair: human hair as opposed to animal fur or vegetable fibers such as flax, corn silk, and cotton. They could identify hair from various parts of the body, from children and adults, and from various races. By the late 1800s, sexual-assault cases were being decided based on the microscopic identification of intermingled pubic hair.
The Killer of Little Shepherds Page 12
