The “interrogation” of evidence would prove challenging in finding the killer of Madame Foucherand, who had lain dead on the ground, a wine bottle next to her.31 Lacassagne had noted bloodstains at a height of more than five feet on the door frame and on a newspaper on top of the bar. The shape and location of the splashes told Lacassagne that the body had not been killed elsewhere and dragged, but struck by a blunt instrument with such violence that the blood droplets had been splashed to their current locations.
The examination of the body in his lab told him that at least two people had taken part in the murder. Lividity stains showed she had been killed and left on her back on the ground. He found extensive bruising on her wrists, stomach, and rib cage. Internal examinations showed that the wounds penetrated deeply, with bleeding into the muscles and organs and breaks in several ribs. All these signs indicated that an assailant had violently held the victim to the floor while kneeling on her rib cage. At one point, he must have strangled her: The hyoid bone above the larynx had been broken, the thyroid cartilage had been torn at its base and midsection, and the ringlike cricoid cartilage had been torn, as well. To Lacassagne, this indicated the presence of two killers—there were too many breaks to be accomplished by the same pair of hands that had held her down. He found no evidence of a sex crime. The right side of the head was one enormous concavity, which Lacassagne attributed to strikes from the bottle. The left side of the head showed reciprocal fractures, indicating that the left side of her face had been against the ground when she was struck. The bottle, more bloody on one side than the other, probably was the murder weapon, but it bore no handprints or finger marks.
Lacassagne still had no evidence to tie any specific person to the crime. When he examined the fecal matter, however, he saw something threadlike, white and about half an inch long. He dissolved the fecal mass, and a dozen more appeared. Professor Lortet, an expert in parasitology, identified them as pinworms, a fairly common intestinal parasite.
The authorities, meanwhile, had detained six suspects, members of an “apache” gang who operated in Madame Foucherand’s neighborhood. Lacassagne gained permission to examine their waste buckets. “These observations gave no results,” he reported, because the suspects had contaminated the contents by throwing in bread and other bits of food.32 He went back to the prison. Using long swabs, he took samples directly from the suspects, which he mounted on slides and examined microscopically. Studying the swab from one suspect, Annet Gaumet, Lacassagne noticed microscopic translucent disks, which Lortet identified as pinworm eggs.
All six prisoners admitted to breaking into the apartment with the intention of robbing Madame Foucherand. Things got out of hand when she resisted, and they started to beat her. Gaumet and the gang’s leader, Émile Nouguier, were particularly out of control: Gaumet threw her down and started strangling her, while Nouguier grabbed another part of her throat. Finally, he finished the job by clubbing her with a bottle. Nouguier and Gaumet were sent to the guillotine. The other four received life sentences.
On the morning of his execution, Gaumet conveyed a message to Lacassagne. He was so impressed with the power of science, he said, that he wished to donate his skeleton to the professor’s laboratory. It has been hanging in the display case ever since.33
Eleven
In Plain Sight
The village of Truinas sits in the semiarid hills east of the Rhône River, about halfway as the crow flies between Lyon and Marseille. On September 23, 1895, a merchant farmer named Théodor Vache was driving his carriage up a dirt road approaching the village when he saw a strange-looking man creep from behind an acacia tree, his face and hands covered with blood. He watched as the man scraped at the dirt to cover up patches of blood on the ground. He greeted the stranger and asked if he was sick. “He told me that he’d had an accident and that he was always getting a bloody nose,” the man recalled.1 “All the while he kept scratching at the ground with one hand while he held his head with the other.” Vache also noticed a big hobo’s sack and a club sticking out of it. He watched for a minute, shrugged, and kept going.
If Vache had looked a few yards beyond the side of the road, he would have seen the still-warm body of Aline Alaise, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a local landowner.2 Moments before, Vacher had killed her.
Earlier that day, Aline had walked with her father to a neighboring village to sell eggs and cheese, then had started home alone to finish some chores. When Aline did not arrive by dinnertime, her parents went out to search for her. They did not find her body until the next morning. Authorities found a page torn from a schoolbook nearby, on which they could make out the letters “M-A-R-C.” They then seized an itinerant carnival fighter named Auguste Marseille. Apparently, the letters in his last name were close enough to those on the notebook page to qualify as a clue. Eventually, he was released for lack of evidence.
Vacher, as usual, had quickly left the scene. He walked down to the Rhône Valley, across the river, and then westward up into the hills of the Ardèche. It is a place of harsh beauty, with bold granite outcroppings and cliffs, stunted high-altitude forests, and high, angled meadows with vertiginous views. A day’s outing in this countryside would involve scrambling as much as walking. The diminutive pastures were barely large enough to sustain the sinewy local goats and sheep. It was in such a meadow, six days after the Alaise murder and forty miles away, that a fourteen-year-old shepherd named Pierre Massot-Pellet was pasturing his flock, along with his sheepdog.3 Pierre watched the sheep on Thursdays and Sundays; the other days of the week, he attended school.4
Sometimes in mountains, when the weather is just right and the morning is quiet, the rocky surfaces act as an echo chamber, propelling noises great distances. Far down the mountainside, out of sight but not out of earshot, several other shepherds heard Pierre singing his usual lighthearted songs. Then they heard two horrifying screams echo across the valleys. Then they heard barking, and then a deep, unnerving silence. Some time later, a few of his sheep came wandering down.
When Pierre failed to return for the midday meal, his employer sent another boy out to find him. The boy found Pierre’s mangled remains behind a boulder.
The local investigating magistrate, Morellet, believed the killing resembled those of Victor Portalier and Aline Alaise. But just as with the murder of Augustine Mortureux and the wrongful persecution of Eugène Grenier, public opinion alighted on a suspect who had nothing to do with the crime—Bernardin Bannier, a stolid, gruff fifty-four-year-old farmer and father of four who had been politically active in town.5
Politics made enemies in those isolated little villages, and anonymous denunciations came flooding in. Bannier’s chief tormentor was a man named Chevalier, a political enemy, who said that because Bannier’s grazing lands abutted the crime scene, Bannier was worthy of suspicion. The accusations grew to such an extent that authorities felt obligated to detain Bannier for a few weeks. Absent any valid evidence, he was released.
That was when Bannier’s troubles really began. Outraged that a “guilty” man had been allowed to go free, townspeople pursued justice the traditional way—by making the culprit’s life so miserable as to drive him away. Neighbors shouted epithets whenever they saw him. People threw stones at him and his family. At the silk factory where his wife and one of his daughters worked, the other employees refused to stand next to them. Later, the workers all banded together and told the factory owner that if he did not fire the Banniers, they would all quit. (The wife and daughter found other employment.)
Most nights, a nasty crowd would assemble outside Bannier’s door. One night, a drunken mob broke into his kitchen, gobbled everything in the cupboard, and started a fire on his floor. One Sunday, a group of his neighbors planted a tree outside his front door and festooned its branches with the intestines of a goat kid. They hung up a blood-soaked sheet, a knife, and a placard reading DEATH TO THE KILLER!
All this took place despite the fact that the mayor and prosecutors repeated
ly exhorted the town folk that Bannier could not be the killer. They fined Chevalier for spreading false accusations, but he continued. At one point, Morellet asked Bannier if it wouldn’t be easier just to move. “But, Judge,” he replied, “where would you like me to go?6 I’m not rich: I have only two little plots of land and my flock. It would be impossible at my age to begin again.”
“You could imagine such savage and barbaric demonstrations worthy of an earlier era,” wrote a contemporary journalist named Laurent-Martin, “but it’s incredible to see it in the middle of France in the nineteenth century!”7
Yet turn-of-the-century France, or Europe, or, for that matter, the United States, was not at all uniform in its modernity. Rural life, as we have seen, seemed centuries behind life in the big cities, and the searing inequalities of the time must have made the condition of those in rural areas seem worse. In a period that became famous for science and progress, rural folk (and the urban poor, as well) faced a daily struggle to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves—a struggle made worse, ironically, by the “modernizing” forces of global trade and the industrial economy, which made certain labor and trades obsolete. They did not enjoy the fruits of the era, but faced unemployment and poverty, and the increasingly bold and numerous vagabonds who would drift into their towns. Morellet complained that a “cloud of vagabonds” invaded every autumn, causing a seasonal increase in crime.8 “The gendarmes are up to their teeth; they do what they can, but it isn’t enough.” At one point, Morellet was so helpless against the vagabonds that he sent word to Marie-François Goron, who at the time was still chief of the Paris Sûreté, requesting some agents to help with the crime wave.
There were deeper reasons for the kind of primitive thinking that Laurent-Martin decried. France at the time was still largely a nation of peasants, barely a generation away from medieval-era fears and superstition.9 People lived in a world populated by wraiths and spirits, in which real and imaginary fears played a role in daily life. It did not take much for a villager to believe that a spell had been cast on his cattle or field. Numerous studies at the time documented a shocking level of rural superstition. For example, in 1892 an agricultural commission noted with genuine surprise that farmers in southwestern France did not practice apiculture because they felt beehives attracted bad luck, and that they would hang fern leaves over their doors to ward off the evil eye. As part of an attempt to reduce the level of rural superstition, the government issued schoolbooks admonishing children not to adhere to all their folk beliefs: “Do not believe in witches.10 Do not believe in ghosts, in specters, in spirits, in phantoms.… Do not imagine one can avoid harm or accidents with … amulets, talismans, fetishes.”
In such an atmosphere of fear and superstition, it did not take much to persuade villagers that one of their own had become damned, or, in a sense, had decided to damn them. It was comforting to seize on a suspect, even the wrong one. Certainly it was preferable to wondering which of the malignant, invisible forces was waiting to victimize others, as well.
Years later, when the case of Massot-Pellet had been solved, a reporter for La Dépěche de Toulouse went to interview Bannier. The reporter, Albert Sarraut, who later entered politics and eventually became prime minister of France, was shocked to find the town folk still tormenting the man.
In the naïveté of his unjust martyrdom [Bannier] has been telling himself that when his innocence came to light, society would give him some kind of compensation, at least for the losses that he has sustained.11
Should I have told him to abandon this illusion; told him that there is a fatal law in every society of every age that the victims of error of the hatred of their fellow man … cannot count on society for reparations? Should I have told this man, whose heart was crushed by the most dreadful injustices, that society will content itself in saying that he should consider himself lucky to be publicly declared innocent, and that he has no right to expect anything more of us?
I dared not.
Vacher laid low after killing Pierre Massot-Pellet. As cold weather approached, he wandered to the vagabonds’ wintering grounds in Brittany. Along the way, he fashioned a hat of white rabbit fur, which became one of his trademarks. (The white fur, he said, symbolized purity.) He carried a club, on which he carved the initials M.J.L.B.G. (Investigators never figured out what all the letters stood for, but they assumed that L.B. stood for Louise Barant.) He reemerged in February 1896 at a farm near the city of Le Mans. Late one night, a woman heard a noise in her greenhouse. She went outside, spotted Vacher, and immediately fled back to her door. Before she could slam it, he shouldered his way in, grabbed her, and started dragging her to the woods, but her brother heard the screaming and drove him away.
A few days later, twelve-year-old Alphonsine Derouet was walking to church in a nearby village.12 She passed a man reading a newspaper, and he asked if it was a long way to the town center. No sooner did she begin to reply than he grabbed her by the throat and threw her to the ground. Her screams drew the attention of her employer’s security guard, who came running and found Alphonsine struggling underneath a stranger, her skirts bunched up around her waist. He pulled the maniac off the little girl but lost his grip when he was kicked in the face. The attacker escaped. The guard then alerted the police, who learned that a man matching the attacker’s description had spent the previous night at a farm, identifying himself as Joseph Vacher, a former novitiate and sergeant. They organized a manhunt and sent an arrest warrant with his name and description to neighboring towns.
Hours later and several miles away, a policeman on a bicycle pulled up to Vacher, who by then had recovered his composure. When the gendarme started questioning him, he handed over his military papers.13 The documents changed everything: Rather than seeing Vacher as a suspect, the gendarme, an ex-military man himself, saw Vacher as a comrade in arms. Vacher confided that he had seen a strange-looking vagabond earlier, and he gave directions that sent the gendarme far away.
A few days later, Vacher was begging at a farm when he got into a protracted fight with a watchman. He had a death grip on the man’s throat and was holding him in a water-filled ditch when several other servants arrived, overpowered Vacher, and took him to the police. Arrested for vagrancy and aggravated assault, he was sentenced to a month in jail. It was a lenient sentence, given the antivagabond hysteria and the aggravated nature of the assault. Surprisingly, the jailers never made the connection between the man they were holding and the one who was being hunted just a few towns away. They certainly must have received the arrest warrant. While police in the neighboring district pursued a vigorous manhunt, Vacher had found the perfect place to hide—in plain sight.
Of all the luck—but it was something other than luck. Outside of the big cities, the French police were barely competent.14 (The same was true for the rest of Europe and for the United States.) Big cities had municipal police departments, but the countryside was only loosely patrolled by a network of wardens and federal police. The wardens, or gardes-champêtres, were equal parts game wardens and policemen. Appointed by small-town mayors, these rural guards had been a feature of French country life for centuries and addressed the everyday problems of rural living such as vandalism, poaching, and bar fights. Many were old, poorly paid, and corrupt—useless in the face of serious crime. For major crimes, the local guard would find a gendarme, a local officer of the national police. (In Britain and the United States, the sheriff was the enforcer of higher authority.) Gendarmes were generally competent, but their barracks were thinly spread throughout the countryside, mostly along the main routes.
Generally, whenever a serious crime was committed, the chance of successful prosecution was small. Only the three biggest French cities, Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, had full-time detective bureaus, a relatively new institution at the time. The rest of the country depended on a complicated legal structure that pivoted around a national network of investigating magistrates. University-educated and generally ambitious, these magistrates
(juges d’instruction) served as both detective and grand jury. They could direct rural guards or gendarmes to bring in a suspect and to interview and detain him as long as necessary without charges. Usually, these suspects would be confined until they cracked or someone came forward with new evidence that either exculpated or condemned them. If the magistrate found enough evidence for a trial, he would write up a report, which he would then pass to the regional prosecutor, or procurer of the Republic (procureur de la République), who would take the case to court. An investigating magistrate could send out interrogatories to his colleagues in other districts, asking them to pick up a suspect and question the person on his behalf. Such investigators were generally supposed to keep in touch with other districts on criminal goings-on. But due to overwork or sometimes professional jealously, they often did not. All too often an investigator did not think beyond his particular jurisdiction.
Journalist Laurent-Martin, who eventually retraced Vacher’s footsteps, wrote that he was stupefied that someone “in our time, in the middle of France” could commit so many crimes “without ever being reported from one locality to another and without falling earlier into the hands of justice.”15 He blamed the magistrates:
Each is isolated. There is no correspondence between the authorities.… So if a crime is committed in a commune [a village or town], all the murderer has to do is pass into the neighboring territory for the wardens and gendarmes not to have the slightest recourse against him. By the time they can alert the authorities in the neighboring district, he’s long gone.
That certainly described Vacher’s method of killing in one district and fleeing to another. Yet there were other reasons why police overlooked him while repeatedly jailing the wrong people as suspects. In addition to understaffing and jurisdictional limitations, they were hampered by their own methods of investigation. Despite the modern emphasis that Lacassagne and others placed on evidence, many police departments remained wedded to their old ways. Ever since Eugène-François Vidocq established the Paris Sûreté, the world’s first detective bureau, in 1812, the French police had relied on coercive methods to solve cases: cultivating informers, pressuring suspects (including the use of thumb screws), placing stool pigeons in jail cells, and using undercover police as agents provocateurs.16 But those methods, questionable even on the mean streets of Paris, often proved useless among rural villagers.
The Killer of Little Shepherds Page 14
