The Killer of Little Shepherds

by Douglas Starr

  Hans Gross, the great Viennese criminologist, had written about the art of interrogation in Criminal Investigation. Gross dismissed the conventional practice of using pressure, or even torture, to force confessions. Instead, he favored employing the newly developing science of psychology—understanding and exploiting the suspect’s temperament and luring him into revealing information. To do that required a new kind of interrogator—not the shrieking intimidator, but one who displayed a certain “absence of passion,” wrote Gross.2 “The officer who becomes excited or loses his temper delivers himself into the hands of the accused.”

  In relating the characteristics of a skilled interviewer, Gross could well have been describing Fourquet. The ideal person would be one “who knows men, who is gifted with a good memory and presence of mind, who takes pleasure in his work and zealously abandons himself to it.” Such a man “will not allow himself to be carried away” by anger. No matter how monstrous the crime, he must maintain his sangfroid; if necessary by “constantly repeating to himself these words, ‘It is my duty.’ ”

  Gross saw the interview as a complex discussion, or series of discussions, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Before the session, he said, the interviewer should prepare by researching the suspect and the crimes in order to have the information readily at hand. The investigator should begin the discussion not with the crime, but with events early in the suspect’s chronology. Gradually, he should lead the suspect to the crime, “in the hope that he will begin to speak about it himself.” During the discussions, the interviewer should not seem threatening, but maintain a neutral, almost beneficial stance. The suspect should not get the impression of being forced to confess, but given the opportunity to unburden himself. The interviews should be long and repetitive. That way, the magistrate could use multiple versions of the same events to tease out the truth. “We take notes and establish certain periods,” wrote Gross, “then we make him go over the story again a little later, and then note the impossibilities, the contradictions, the gaps.” Thus, he concluded, one arrives at the truth—not with brutality, but with preparation, intelligence, and patience.

  It is not clear whether Fourquet had read Gross’s work, but he seemed to have closely followed his procedures. With a calm, easygoing manner, Fourquet began his line of questioning at a point in time well in advance of the murders. He asked Vacher how he’d spent his time since leaving the regiment.

  Vacher spoke freely.3 He told Fourquet about his days in the army and about the “great heartbreak of love” that had caused him to shoot his fiancée and himself. He talked about the asylums at Dole and Saint-Robert and about the years he’d spent as a vagabond. He spoke about how difficult it was to get hired because “people ridiculed the deformity of my mouth … and because of the bad odor that came from the pus from my ear.” He talked about his travels to the hinterlands of France.

  “You also traversed the departments of Rhône, Loire, l’Ain, and Savoie,” Fourquet interjected.

  Oh, yes, replied Vacher.

  And then the investigator made a mistake. Jumping ahead too quickly in the chronology, he pointedly asked Vacher about Bénonces. “You are inculpated to have been there … and to have killed Victor Portalier, who was living in that locality.”

  Vacher saw the trap and avoided it. He denied ever having traveled to Bénonces, and he dared Fourquet to produce a witness who had seen him in the area. When Fourquet brought in someone to testify the next day, the man was too shaken to be of any use.

  Fourquet knew he had risked his entire case. There were no witnesses to the murders and no definitive forensic evidence. The fact that Vacher had passed through the areas where the killings had occurred would not be enough. “It was all a presumption,” Fourquet admitted, “and a presumption by itself would not suffice.” The only way to bring the criminal to justice was to trick him into making a valid confession. He had to get Vacher talking again.

  For three weeks, they did nothing more than “squabble,” as Fourquet wrote in his memoirs. Fourquet would ask questions; Vacher would evade them. Increasingly desperate, Fourquet dealt what he called his “last card”: He told Vacher that he planned to release him.

  “I now see that you’re not the man I am looking for,” he said. “They made a mistake at Tournon. You’re the fourth person who’s been sent to me and the fourth I will have to let go.” He told Vacher he would release him in a few days, after some final interviews.

  In the meantime, he asked Vacher for some assistance. For the past several months, Fourquet said, he had been gathering information for a book about vagabonds, and he would interview each vagabond who came his way. Would Vacher be interested in telling his story?

  Vacher replied with a cynical smile. To prove his sincerity, Fourquet showed him the stacks of information he had been gathering. He explained a theory he was developing about vagabond migration—how they would head south for the winter and then work their way north, following a succession of harvests: grapes, chestnuts, olives, and sugar beets. “In other words, you follow the same laws that guide the migratory birds. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  “So you see, I’m not trying to trick you.”

  Little by little, Fourquet won Vacher’s confidence. Over the next several days, he asked him to share his observations of the countryside. It was then that Vacher explained how the people in Brittany and Savoie tended to be hospitable and how the people around Tours were standoffish with strangers. Stealthily, Fourquet began to lead him in certain directions.

  “You don’t really have it so bad, you vagabonds,” he said. “You get to stay for free in the Riviera when we up here are freezing in the snow. A magistrate like me doesn’t get such a nice offer. You were in Nice, weren’t you?”

  “Yes. I also went to Menton to see one of my sisters who lived in that city in 1894, once in April and another time in November.”

  Fourquet remembered that the murder of Louise Marcel had taken place in that area in November 1894. He asked about other cities and locations. Vacher mentioned that among other places, he had visited Lourdes.

  “Lourdes? By foot? Impossible!”

  Vacher proudly responded that not only had he made his way to Lourdes but that he had covered much of the rest of France by foot, as well. The judge led Vacher to a map on the wall. With Vacher’s guidance, he traced his finger over several of the departments and villages that Vacher had visited. As his finger passed over various locales, signals went off in Fourquet’s head about the murders. Casually, so as not to alarm Vacher, he let his finger pass over an area southwest of Lyon where a murder had taken place in the month of September. Vacher had mentioned having taken a couple of dangerous falls in that area. By way of disguising the intent of his inquiry, Fourquet said, “There must have been snow there when you slipped over those cliffs.”

  No, Vacher said, there could not have been snow because he had passed through that area in September. Yes, thought Fourquet. In November, the suspect said, he had traveled to the Var and then to Varenne. Yes again! Fourquet knew of crimes at those times and locations: the murder of Louise Marcel in the Var in November 1894; that of Marie Moussier in September 1896, and that of Rosine Rodier a few weeks later. And so they continued their collegial discussion, Vacher holding forth on the adventures of a vagabond and Fourquet making mental notes for his list. Later, he would construct a series of maps connecting the dots of Vacher’s ragged itinerary and the murders. “Things were lining up in a very interesting way,” he noted.

  On October 7, Fourquet brought in a dozen people from Bénonces and paraded them before the suspect, one after the other. Ten of the twelve positively identified him as a vagabond they had seen the day of Portalier’s murder. Two had been too frightened to testify, but they later insisted that he was indeed the man. At one point, Vacher shouted at a woman in an effort to intimidate her.

  “You dare say, madame, that you saw me in your area? You are a liar. I’ve never s
et foot there—not in 1895 or at any other time, understand?”

  The woman stood firm. “It is you who are the liar, monsieur. You came to my house around eight o’clock on the morning of the crime and I gave you some soup. I can tell you the very thing that stuck in my mind: When I was serving you the soup, I said, ‘I’m not very rich.’ And you replied, ‘It’s not the rich people who give the most.’ ”

  Vacher backed off, snarling threats.

  Now came time to spring the trap. Armed with the testimony and the knowledge he had gathered about Vacher’s itinerary, Fourquet ordered the guards to bring the prisoner to his office. He began a speech that he hoped would break the suspect’s resistance.

  “When you were first transferred here, I had an instant when I thought that you would not be here for a long stay,” he began. “I imagined, in effect, that the witnesses would not recognize you. But today all that has changed. You are formally recognized by everyone without a doubt … it is henceforth proven without any possible argument that you are the author of the murder of a young shepherd from Bénonces.”

  Furthermore, said Fourquet, he knew that Vacher had killed many people in several regions throughout France. “I will prove to you that I know everything you have done.… You were already known to the authorities. It was only a matter of apprehending you.”

  Then, in a rapid-fire delivery, Fourquet disgorged everything he knew, or thought he knew, about Vacher’s bloody wanderings. In a portentous voice free of all doubt, Fourquet told how, on November 20, 1894, Vacher had killed thirteen-year-old Louise Marcel and mutilated her corpse in an isolated barn; how, on May 12, 1895, he had killed seventeen-year-old Augustine Mortureux on the side of the main road from Dijon to Paris; how, on August 24, 1895, he had killed an old woman, the widow Morand, in her house in the Savoie; and how, eight days later in Bénonces, he had killed sixteen-year-old Victor Portalier as the shepherd was guarding his cows in a meadow. He recounted to Vacher how he had gone to the Ardèche, where, on September 29, 1895, he had killed a fourteen-year-old shepherd named Pierre Massot-Pellet; how the following year he had killed nineteen-year-old Marie Moussier while she was guarding her flock; how he had killed a fourteen-year-old shepherdess named Rosine Rodier; and, most recently, how, on a road near Lyon between 11:00 p.m. and midnight on June 18, 1897, he had killed a thirteen-year-old boy named Pierre Laurent, who was walking home with two cows.

  All this was said almost as a single sentence—a torrent of accusations and crimes that Vacher never imagined anyone had connected.

  “I should add that you raped or defiled all these victims,” said Fourquet. “Numerous witnesses have seen you and recognized you, and I will bring them here to identify you in person.

  “Guards, take him back to his cell.”

  The effect of this recitation was “so rude, so unexpected, so disconcerting,” recalled Fourquet, that the suspect did not have the strength to object. “He left our office pale and staggering like a drunk.”

  Around seven that evening, Fourquet was sitting down to dinner when one of the guards knocked at his door. He had a letter from Vacher—a signed confession. Barely coherent, it began with a slogan, written in block letters, that Vacher would make a trademark of his writings:

  GOD—RIGHTS—OBLIGATIONS4

  [DIEU—DROITS—DEVOIRS]

  Belley, 7 October 1897

  TO FRANCE

  So much the worse for you if you think I am responsible. Your way of acting by itself makes me pity you. If I kept the secret of my misfortune it’s because I believed it to be in the general interest, but since apparently I am mistaken I have come to tell you the whole truth. Yes, it was I who committed all the crimes you blame me for … and all of this in a moment of rage. As I said to the doctor from the prison medical service, I was bitten by a rabid dog around the age of seven or eight, but I’m not so sure, although I remember taking a remedy. Only my parents can assure you of the bitings. As for myself I always believed … that it was the medicine that corrupted my blood.

  In his rambling letter, Vacher recalled how he had told his brother in Geneva that he frequently experienced urges to kill. Even before that, as a fourteen-year-old working in the fields, he sometimes felt the need to commit murder. He would suppress the impulse by hiking to the point of exhaustion. It was lucky, he said, that he never encountered anyone during those fevered walks. At some point in his life, the compulsion became too strong to resist.

  He had now decided to confess, he explained, because “I feared that the malicious world would lay the blame on my poor parents who have had to suffer so much … since I have been roaming around France like a rabid [animal] guiding myself only by the sun.”

  And finally, a benediction:

  Let those who think they are crying over me cry over themselves.

  It would be better for them to be in my place.

  Help yourself, and God, who makes everything possible and whose reasons no human can understand, will help you.

  Signed, Vacher J.

  Fourquet knew the confession was only a beginning. The document was a collection of unfocused, self-justifying statements that lacked crucial details; indeed, for legal purposes, it contained only a single worthwhile sentence: “Yes, it was I who committed all the crimes you blame me for.” Fourquet knew that in order to refer this case to the prosecutor, he had to build the confession into something more specific and coherent.

  The next day, he tried to reason with Vacher. The confession had been very helpful, he said, but now it was time to address some specifics. He asked Vacher to walk him through the murders, one at a time, this time with all the relevant details.

  “It is useless for me to give you any more explanations about the crimes, because you know as much as I do,” said Vacher, who now seemed broken and disheartened.5

  Fourquet explained that he knew the basics but that now he really needed the details. “It’s a rule of our profession,” he said, trying to sound collegial. “Investigating magistrates are obligated to have the accused tell all the details of the crimes they confess to.”

  “It’s useless, I tell you,” said Vacher. “And it’s too ugly. Don’t ask me to return to those ugly times. I’m not saying anything more.”

  Once again, the situation was becoming delicate. Fourquet worried that when the story of Vacher’s confession became public, the killer would see its impact and recant his statement. Conversely, Vacher might stick to the confession, which, under public scrutiny, would seem nothing more than the ravings of a madman. Fourquet’s colleague, the procurer general, whose job it would be to prosecute the case, warned him to proceed carefully, as the whole case could easily collapse. Or, he wondered, were they in the hands of a faker?

  Vacher, meanwhile, wrote to his family, expressing confidence that soon he would be back at Saint-Robert, that “humane and loyal asylum.”

  For several days, the two men were locked in a stalemate. And then, surprisingly, Vacher offered an opening. He was an avid newspaper reader—while a patient at the Saint-Robert asylum, he had read several each day. Now that word about his case was beginning to leak, he decided that he wanted to influence the coverage. If the public could see his side of the story, he felt, they would understand he was not a monster, but a damaged—even sympathetic—human being. Vacher offered to discuss the killings in detail if Fourquet could guarantee that the newspapers would publish his confession.

  Fourquet could glimpse the criminal’s reasoning. If convicted of a single homicide, Vacher would undoubtedly face the guillotine. But if he confessed to multiple crimes, people would say that a madman must have done it. “There’s not one person in a thousand who would contend that a man who committed eight murders—of which seven were children, and horribly mutilated their bodies—was not ten times insane,” he told Vacher. “And so [your] conclusion is simple: Since insane people are not responsible for their acts and the law does not punish them, they cannot condemn me. Admit that I figured out your reasoning, ha
ven’t I?”

  Vacher agreed.

  But there was a problem, said Fourquet, speaking now almost as a coconspirator. Although the evidence in the Portalier case was overwhelming, that regarding the other murders was weak. Vacher would have to supply many more details if he hoped to attempt an insanity defense.

  On October 16, Le Petit Journal, with its huge circulation, published Vacher’s confession in its entirety. Immediately after that, Vacher began talking—now giving all the details. He did not merely admit to the killings; he insisted on the veracity of his confessions, as if daring Fourquet to try to disprove them.

  He began with a murder near Dijon, “a girl of fifteen or sixteen years more or less. Didn’t she have a dog?” he said to the investigator. “And didn’t a lot of people pass along the route that morning? And didn’t I take her shoes and her earrings? … What does that tell you?”

  Fourquet recognized the murder as that of Augustine Mortureux. “For that crime, I can say that everything you told me is exact. And for the others?”

  “The old woman in Saint-Ours was eating soup when I killed her.”

  “That’s true; pass to another one.”

  “In the Var, she was the prettiest victim of all, what a shame! I took the girl on the path, and I killed her in a little barn a few meters away. Just after that I met a man who was picking olives and I spoke to him, he can tell you.”

  Fourquet recognized the case of Louise Marcel. “That’s exact. And in Allier and Haute-Loire?”

  “In Allier, near Vichy, it was a young woman, about twenty years old; she was guarding her sheep in a field. I took her wedding ring, but I threw it away so as not to be taken for a thief. Regarding the affair in Haute-Loire, it was a girl, about fifteen years old or so. I cut her throat with a knife and then mutilated her. She also was guarding a flock in a field. That morning there was such a thick fog, I thought I would get lost in the woods if God had not been protecting me.”