Alphonse Benoist, the investigating magistrate of Lyon (who had jurisdiction over the Laurent case), thought he saw common elements, as well, and he discussed them with a reporter from Le Lyon Républicain. On June 25, the newspaper listed several crimes involving “young shepherds, who after their death were defiled and mutilated.”7 No one had actually witnessed the murders, but in many cases people had seen a menacing vagabond with dark hair, heavy eyebrows, and a scar on his cheek shortly before the attacks. The newspaper referred to him as “a new Jack the Ripper.”8
Because the Laurent killing had taken place in the jurisdiction of Lyon, Benoist could draw upon a resource that his counterparts in rural areas could not—Lacassagne’s Institute of Legal Medicine. The day after the murder, Dr. Jean Boyer, a former student and now a collaborator of Lacassagne, arrived to examine the crime scene and the body.9 His training and precision were evident in his report. No wound or stain went unnoticed, undescribed, unmeasured, or untested. After noting the location, size, and shape of brown stains on the trousers, Boyer cut them out and subjected them to the Van Deen test. Within seconds, they turned sapphire blue, a positive indication for blood. Brownish stains on the victim’s pocketknife tested negative. To determine their origins, Boyer treated them with a mixture of hydrochloric acid and ferrocyanide. The resulting blue—a different shade, produced by a different set of reactions—indicated the presence of iron: rust. He also found whitish stains on the seat of the pants, but microscopic examination did not reveal sperm.
Detail by detail, he proceeded, noting each blot on the blood-soaked clothing and each piece of flesh that had been spotted on the ground. The fact that the body’s limbs were stiff with rigor mortis told him that the killing had taken place within the previous seventy-two hours. The mortal wound was a series of deep, hacking stabs to the left-center side of the throat. The angle of the wound and the presence of notches along its borders told Boyer that the assailant had stood behind the victim and thrust the knife into the throat with two or three deep, tearing stabs.
Unlike most medical examiners, Boyer adhered to his mentor’s instructions to examine the anus if the crime scene suggested a sexually related attack—a disagreeable procedure that involved cleaning the tissue, examining it very closely, and then palpating it with the fingers to determine the muscle tone (this in an era before doctors wore gloves). Boyer performed the steps conscientiously and found small tears in the anal mucosa. Those tears would not have occurred after death, when the anus would have gone slack. The evidence led Boyer to reconstruct a scenario in which a single attacker crept up on the child, grabbed him around the throat, and then stabbed him, threw him or let him collapse to the ground, performed unspeakable sexual mutilations, and sodomized the dying body.
None of these details ran in the newspapers. Either the doctors did not release the information or it was felt that public taste could not abide it. No matter—even the vague set of facts that appeared in the press were more than enough to panic the citizenry. According to Le Lyon Républicain, the killing had “literally terrorized the countryside.”10
The inhabitants do not dare to go out by themselves at night; shepherds find it difficult to lead their flocks away from habitation. A mother of a good family was so frightened that she removed her daughter from service as a domestic with a farming family in Courzieu. A butcher crossing the woods in a carriage was so frightened by seeing a stranger that he whipped his horse in a panic to flee. These little incidents show the state of mind of inhabitants of the region. They don’t feel safe anymore.…
If traditional French police work had shortcomings, it also had strengths, especially in terms of amassing information. The best practitioners were connoisseurs of paperwork. Vidocq became famous for his swashbuckling exploits, but he was also a great collector of files. The floors at his headquarters in the dreary Sûreté in Paris groaned under the weight of more than three million papers pertaining to tens of thousands of criminals. Bertillon, who developed the anthropomorphic technique and quantified each criminal as a unique set of measurements, collected tens of thousands of file cards. Once arrested, a criminal’s “anthropomorphic card” would follow him permanently. The central impulse of late-nineteenth-century “scientific policing” was to characterize the criminal as a series of measurements and traits and to identify his crimes by what Lacassagne referred to as a “manual of operation.” For that, one needed records.
Fourquet started generating paperwork. Working alone “in the silence and solitude of the night,” he created two charts for entering information.11 One chart was devoted to the method of the crime, and Fourquet used it to sort all the data he could find from the autopsies and police reports. He listed the eight crimes down the left side of the page. Across the top he created categories, such as the position in which the body was found, the probable murder weapon, the status of the head, neck, chest, and abdomen, and whether the victim showed signs of rape or other significant “mutilations.” Within those categories he filled in the specifics of each crime.
He devoted the other chart, also a grid, to the identity of the criminal. He listed the crimes down the left side of the page and the physical characteristics of the criminal across the top, such as age, height, hair color, and scars or any other “particular signs.”
Having filled both tables with rows and columns of information, Fourquet underlined in blue all the common elements. Under this spiderweb of blue lines, certain patterns emerged. For example, almost all the bodies showed huge gashes across the throat: “The placement of the wounds was essentially the same.” Several bodies showed a “vast wound” from the sternum to the pubis and an “evisceration” of the abdomen.
It became clear to Fourquet that this pattern of crimes represented a single methodology. The murderer would kill his victims by slashing the throat with a very sharp knife or razor. He would kill victims in one place and drag them to another, often behind a hedge. Then he would mutilate the corpses.
There was a similar confluence of facts about the suspect. Witnesses described a vagabond of about thirty years old with black hair and eyebrows, a black beard, and dark eyes. Several described a grimacing mouth, a big sack on his shoulder, and a menacing air.
Fourquet next moved to create a more precise profile. From the dossier about the Portalier case, he chose a dozen witnesses who had given fairly clear descriptions, summoned them to his office, and led them back through their testimony. He grilled them about particulars: age, height, physical description. He asked in what manner the suspect had presented himself, how they would describe his language and attitude, and if there were any particularities about his face, such as wounds.
The work was painstaking and took weeks. Finally, on July 10, he sent out a warrant called a “rogatory letter” to 250 magistrates throughout France.12 Under the heading very important he put his colleagues on alert for a vagabond about thirty years old, of medium height, with black hair and beard, black eyes, and a bony face. They should be aware of “particular signs,” including “a twisted upper lip that contorts into a grimace whenever he speaks.… He expresses himself with some difficulty because of the deformity of his mouth.… His right eye is bloodshot and the lower lid of that eye is slightly scarred.… He carries a big hobo’s sack and a large club.…
“This may be the man the newspapers are calling ‘Jack the Ripper of the Southeast,’ ” Fourquet concluded. “Telegraph me in case he is discovered.”
By the time Fourquet had sent out the arrest warrant, Vacher had made his way to the Ardèche, a rugged area about eighty miles south of where he had killed the Laurent boy. In July, a cobbler sold a small black-and-white dog to Vacher for four francs. Vacher named her Loulette.13 He also acquired a tamed magpie, which he kept tethered on a string. The next day, several people saw him begging in front of a tavern, with his animals and an accordion.
“It occurred to me to test if he really could play,” a teacher named Vital Vallonre recalled.14 “I said, ‘Pla
y “the Marseillaise,” ’ but he didn’t really know how.”
A few days later, Vacher slept in the attic of a farming couple and their four daughters. He repaid their kindness by playing the accordion and making funny faces for the girls and other neighborhood children.
An elderly widow whom he met shortly thereafter, Madame Ranc, asked what he did for a living. “I’m looking for a position as a shepherd,” he said. “You’re out of luck, monsieur,” she replied, “because there are no flocks around here.”15
She recalled: “He lowered his head and gave me a slightly vicious look and then took up his accordion and again began to play. ‘Where do you come from?’ I asked. ‘From a mental asylum,’ he replied. He seemed menacing.”
On August 2, Vacher approached the farm of a man named Régis Bac and begged for some stew. He ate some and offered the rest to his dog. When the dog turned away, he said, “If you don’t want to eat it, I’ll kill you,” and smashed in her head with his club.16 Then he did the same to the magpie. Bac said he was “horrified” by this brutality, and he gave Vacher a shovel so he could bury his animals. Vacher did so and left. His bloodlust was rising.
Fourquet had so little confidence that other magistrates would pay attention to his bulletin that he was pleasantly surprised when he began to get responses, even fruitless ones. Over the next several weeks, three suspects who had been arrested for vagabondage were brought to his office. The first two bore some of the physical features identified in the arrest warrant, but the key witnesses from Bénonces could not identify them. The third, whom police delivered to Fourquet’s office in August, initially fit the profile so completely that Fourquet experienced “an instant of false joy.”17 The man was the right height and had the right coloring. He had the menacing air and the hobo’s sack. When police opened the sack, they found two exquisitely sharpened straight razors and a huge knife with rust-colored stains. But when Fourquet examined the knife closely, he saw that it had been made in Spain. That, plus the syle of the suspect’s beret, prompted Fourquet to ask the man if he came from Basque country. The suspect confirmed that. He had come to France a few months ago, but had been living in Spain at the time of the Portalier murder.
“Is that where you got that knife?” asked Fourquet.
“Precisely.”
“Are those traces of blood on the blade?”
“Yes. In fact, it’s human blood.”
“So, have you killed someone?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t concern you. It was someone I had a quarrel with on the other side of the Pyrenees. He threw his knife at me.… I avoided it, picked it up, and used it to kill him, and then I saved it as a souvenir.”
Fourquet let him go.
In late August, Fourquet received a letter from the magistrate in Tournon, a town on the Rhône River, about fifty miles south of Lyon.18 A man was being held in the local jail on a charge of “outrage to public decency”—attempted rape. He seemed to fit the profile Fourquet had circulated. Fourquet asked his colleague to send a photo. The colleague replied that the town’s only photographer found the prisoner so menacing that he could not bring himself to aim a camera at his face.
——
The village of Champis, deep in the Ardèche, was not easy to reach. Starting from Tournon, one would have to walk or ride a horse several hours westward into desolate countryside. One would climb ridge after ridge, past looming granite cliffs and leprous old castles. Eventually, one would enter a “wild and tragic” area, oppressive in its “silence and abandonment.”19
“I swear that I don’t know any passage that is more discouraging or punishing,” wrote journalist Albert Sarraut of La Dépěche de Toulouse when he visited the region in the fall of 1897. Unnerved by the trek, Sarraut described the region as a “chaotic mass of hilltops and mournful peaks with somber and black ravines, enormous masses of granite.” The woodlands were dense enough to form “a veritable thicket.” So tangled and dark were the forests and undergrowth that Nature herself must have conspired to create a place where malefactors could dwell, “absolutely certain of impunity.”
The village itself was a cluster of primitive dwellings that looked as though they had tumbled down a ravine and settled near the bottom. A short distance away, in a little stone house, lived Séraphin Plantier, his wife, Marie-Eugénie Héraud, and their three young children. It was the simplest of homes, with a kitchen, a common room, and a single bedroom.
On the morning of August 4, the family walked into the forest to collect pinecones for fuel. Séraphin and his seven-year-old son Fernand took one path; Marie and the two younger children, six and three, took another. They were separated by about fifty yards. She had put the two children down to play and was stooped over, absorbed in her work.
Suddenly, she heard a crackling of leaves and felt something heavy land on her back. “At first I thought it was an animal,” she said, “but when I turned my head, I could see it was a man dressed in velour.”20 An iron hand grabbed the nape of her neck; another locked around her throat with such force that it immediately cut off her breath. She felt herself violently thrown onto her back. She tried to defend herself, kicking, gouging, and yanking her attacker’s mustache. “I could not let him do what he wanted with me,” she said later. Unable to subdue her quickly, the attacker let go for a moment and reached for something in his bag. In that split second, she took a quick breath and started shrieking. One of her children started screaming, as well.
In a moment, her husband arrived. He was not a big man—even by the standards of the day, he was scrawny—but he fought like a lion. He started hurling rocks at Vacher and then launched himself bodily onto him.21 Vacher smashed Plantier in the eye with a cane and stabbed him in the knee with scissors, but Plantier kept coming. Chaos reigned, with Plantier hammering with his fists, Marie screaming and beating the stranger with a stick, and little Fernand throwing rocks, most of which were bouncing off his father. Several times Vacher nearly broke free, but each time Plantier tackled and pummeled him. During the battle, Vacher yelled that it was not he who had attacked Marie, but a comrade who had taken flight.
In a few minutes, several neighbors arrived, subdued the attacker, and dragged him to a nearby roadhouse. Plantier set off across the rugged countryside for the nearest gendarmerie, about six miles away.
The owner of the roadhouse threw Vacher into the massive stone stable that adjoined the café. In an effort to unnerve his captor and the customers, Vacher continued to utter the most vile references about Marie, and he insisted on his right to sexual gratification, adding, “although I would have preferred a thirteen-year-old girl.”22 Sometimes he pleaded for sympathy: “I’m a poor, miserable, handicapped man. I love women, but they find me repulsive, so I attack those I can. Even in a whorehouse the women won’t have anything to do with me. I’m so pitiful.” Then anger: “That bitch! If she hadn’t screamed so much, it all would be over and I would be in another département by now.”
None of that endeared him to the five men who were guarding him. Twice he tried to escape; each time, the owner, Dupré Charlon, “tapped” him hard enough to thwart the attempt. Later, when Vacher asked for water, Charlon filled his glass from a bucket.
“Pig! You’re giving me water from a bucket that your goats drink from.”
“If it’s good enough for a goat, it’s good enough for you,” said Charlon.
The next time he refilled Vacher’s glass, he let some water slop onto Vacher’s foot. Vacher threw the glass at Charlon’s face, but he dodged it and hurled the bucket at Vacher’s head. Vacher kicked at Charlon’s stomach. Charlon parried and gave him a “tap” that sent him sprawling.
After six hours, Plantier returned with two policemen. Vacher eyed them and said with an air of self-satisfaction, “It’s not you I respect, but your weapons.” When he saw that the gendarmes meant business, he jokingly commanded, “Okay, let’s march!” As they led him away, he called out in a military cadence, “One-two, one-two!”
/> They took him to Tournon, where a court sentenced him to three months and one day for “outrage to public decency.” They would have charged him with a more serious crime if the rape had been successful, but the attempted assault qualified only as a misdemeanor.
Vacher expected an uneventful confinement. No one had ever connected his crimes before; he knew the incompetence of the rural police. He fully expected that after three months he would be free again and that he would leave the region and again give thanks to Mother Mary for watching over him. The magistrate in this town, however, read his paperwork. He remembered Fourquet’s bulletin and sent back a reply with a description of his prisoner. In the course of further correspondence, he explained that Vacher still had a few months remaining in his prison term. He asked Fourquet whether he wished to wait until the sentence ran out or if he wanted to interview the suspect now. Fourquet wrote back: Transport the prisoner to Belley at once.
Fifteen
The Interview
It was a wild train ride from Tournon to Belley via Lyon.1 Two guards hustled Vacher into a second-class car that had been cleared of all passengers, locked the doors, and handcuffed him. During the two-hour journey from Tournon to Lyon, he jabbered about how he admired the police and how his sentence in Tournon had been overly harsh. Then, just as the train was passing over a bridge, Vacher bolted for an open window. He had almost cleared it when one of the guards latched onto his shins. For seconds, Vacher dangled over the void, the guard inside acting as a counterweight, until some passengers in a neighboring car came to help. Later, while waiting in the station in Lyon for the connecting train to Belley, he screamed anarchist slogans and cursed the vileness of the French bourgeoisie.
Now in Belley, he faced his inquisitor. For a long while, Fourquet peered at the suspect, comparing the features he saw with those on Vacher’s Bertillon card. Affecting a tone of friendly interest, he looked through Vacher’s bag and asked where he had acquired each of his possessions.
The Killer of Little Shepherds Page 18
