The Killer of Little Shepherds

by Douglas Starr

  Two more cases had fallen into place: that of Marie Moussier, who had been wed shortly before her murder, and that of Rosine Rodier, whose brother Vacher had terrified during an encounter.

  “And in Saint-Étienne-de-Boulogne, in the Ardèche?” asked Fourquet, referring to the murder of Pierre Massot-Pellet.

  “If I’m not mistaken it was also a little shepherd; he could have been twelve or fourteen years old, guarding his flock like the others; it was in the mountains; I killed him next to a hut and I mutilated him.”

  “And now we arrive at the last one, near Lyon, in Courzieu,” said Fourquet. He was referring to Pierre Laurent, whose murder had first drawn Fourquet to the case.

  “That one … he was passing up the road with a pair of cows; it could not have been any later than midnight and I took him on the other side of the hedge. So … do you think I’ve been lying?”

  “No, Vacher, this time, I believe you.”

  Later, Fourquet tried to implicate Vacher in a crime that had taken place in 1890. Vacher denied it. The first time he ever killed, he insisted, was in May 1894, a month after his release from Saint-Robert. Vacher recalled that he was walking near the village of Beaurepaire when he came upon a girl of about nineteen or twenty years old. Overtaken by a sudden rage, he beat her in the head, strangled and stomped her, and then took a razor to her throat and chest.

  Fourquet had never heard of this murder. He sent a telegram to the authorities in Vienne, the administrative capital of the region that included Beaurepaire, asking if they had anything on file. Within hours, he received a telegram confirming that Eugénie Delhomme, a young woman who had worked in the silk mill, had been murdered in exactly the manner Vacher had described. A few days later, they went through the same process in uncovering the murder of Aline Alaise.

  The case exploded in the national press.6 Under headlines such as THE SHEPHERD KILLER, VACHER THE RIPPER, and THE RIPPER OF THE SOUTHEAST, the story of the worst serial killer in centuries became a sensation, temporarily eclipsing the Dreyfus affair. Reporters flooded the small town of Belley, overwhelming the local telegraph office. People thronged around the courthouse, jostling to get a peek at the suspect and shouting abuse whenever they caught a glimpse of him. He would yell back, “Long live anarchy!” and “I am innocent before God!”7 The situation became so volatile that Fourquet had a secret underground passage reopened so guards could bring Vacher to his office without setting off riots. Later, Fourquet took to interviewing Vacher in his cell, unarmed and unguarded in order to maintain the prisoner’s confidence.

  Reporters had a field day describing the protagonists, digging deep into their supply of sensational adjectives. “He is as repugnant physically as he is morally, this being whose face convulsively contorts and grimaces, this cripple whose defects repulse even the ugliest prostitutes,” wrote a reporter for La Dépěche de Toulouse.8 “His eyes shine with a savage flame,” wrote a reporter for Le Petit Parisien.9 Other correspondents described him as the “bloody wanderer,” “the ripper,” or simply “the monster.” The illustrated weeklies ran full-page lithographs portraying Vacher in the act of slaying young women, their eyes wide in terror, their mouths in mid-scream. In one paper, multiple panels showed Vacher committing a progression of murders, under the headline THE CRIMES OF A MONOMANIAC.10 Fourquet, in contrast, was the “man of the hour,” a coolheaded, sharp-witted hero, a magistrate with a common touch who could psychologically disarm even the slyest of criminals.

  Both men tried to manipulate the coverage. Fourquet granted interviews, leaked the results of some interrogations, and occasionally let reporters sit in on others. Vacher, when Fourquet allowed him to talk to reporters, tried to make his case for insanity, telling the story of the rabid dog and explaining how he was an “anarchist of God.”

  “My victims never really suffered,” said Vacher, trying to minimize the cruelty of his acts.11 “With one hand I would seize their throats and with the other I would kill them [with a razor].” He claimed that the collective agony of all his victims could not have exceeded a total of ten minutes.

  At one point, Vacher posed for a sketch artist from the Lyon newspaper Le Progrès.12 “Not bad,” he said, looking at the picture. “But don’t make the eyebrows so close together. It makes me look menacing.”

  Another time, Fourquet allowed photographers access to Vacher. The prisoner refused to cooperate unless they agreed to certain conditions: He had to be photographed wearing his white rabbit-fur hat—a symbol of purity—and holding a ring full of keys, which he said symbolized the keys to heaven. He had borrowed them from a prison guard.

  Newspapers sent reporters into the hinterland to trace Vacher’s wanderings. Some of the most vivid reporting was done by Albert Sarraut in La Dépěche de Toulouse. The reporter followed Vacher’s “bloody odyssey,” trekking to villages, interviewing family members of the victims, and portraying the widening circles of grief and chaos.13 Sarraut told stories of the falsely accused, such as Bannier and Grenier, the agony of their families, and the wooden-headed refusal of victims’ relatives to accept the true version of events. He told of numerous small encounters with Vacher—the accordion playing, the handwriting lesson. He looked for early signs of Vacher’s proclivities, interviewing Dr. Dufour of the Saint-Robert asylum, former members of Vacher’s regiment, and Abbot Chevrolat, who was responsible for the Marist monastery. The abbot, not wanting to discuss any details, blandly explained that Vacher had been dismissed from the monastery because he was not “suitable” for the vocation. Overall, he added, young Vacher’s conduct had been good: He was calm, and always accomplished his tasks.

  “And now what do you think of him?” Sarraut asked. The abbot gave a dismissive wave of his hand.

  “It doesn’t much matter if he is found to be a degenerate or not.14 It is necessary to rid society of whatever threatens it. There is no choice but to cut off his head.”

  In the midst of this coverage, Sarraut received a poignant letter from two members of Vacher’s family. They thanked him for not branding the entire family with Joseph’s crimes as many others had done.

  “You are the only one who really understands our misfortune and misery,” wrote Marius and Léonie Vacher.15 “Whenever I see the news vendors on the way to school tears begin to well up in my eyes and I have to turn around and take another path. We are innocent of all that, but we have already begun to pay. Our lives will be sad for a very long time.”

  The investigation was unprecedented in the history of police work. Never had so many people over such a broad area given testimony about so many related crimes. It was propelled not only by the number of murders and the geographic area over which they had taken place but also by two modernizing developments—the telegraph system and the mass-market newspapers. The breaking news stories of Sarraut and other reporters (made possible by the telegraph network) reached millions of readers. Many readers would see a photo of the suspect, remember something, and then come forward with recollections; these, in turn, would spark others. At the same time, Fourquet sent out dozens of telegrams and interrogatories to regions where Vacher had been sighted. Huge numbers of those with information emerged who might never have heard of the case in earlier days, when rumor and word of mouth spread the news.

  Normally, under French law, Vacher would have traveled for questioning to each of those departments where he was suspected of a crime. But the number of cases made that logistically impossible, so the dossiers piled up on Fourquet’s desk. He spent weeks sorting through the information, working daily from 7:00 a.m until midnight, separating “true” from “maybe true” and “false” while filling in blanks of the suspect’s history and crime spree. In July, when he had sent out his letter to 250 magistrates, only seven had bothered to respond. Now, in the fall of 1897, he received eighty-eight dossiers of unsolved murders from across the country that authorities thought bore the signature of Vacher.

  Amid the growing public furor, Fourquet continued interviewing V
acher in his cell. Vacher recited his crimes with a brutal simplicity, as though killing someone was no more traumatic than picking fruit:

  One night along the road I met a young girl of about eighteen to twenty. I attacked her like I did with all the other victims and cut her throat.… Several days after that I killed a young shepherd in the same manner.… I soiled [raped] this victim after the murder.

  He described the killing of Victor Portalier with a similar eerie detachment, adding the gruesome detail, “after I killed him I … bit off his testicles.”

  That last detail, which Vacher insisted on again and again, could not have been true. Dr. Ravier Gaston, who performed the autopsy, testified to Fourquet that the wound at the site of the removal was “very neat.”16 It bore the sign of a sharp cutting instrument, wielded with skill. Fourquet felt that the suspect had invented that detail to bolster the argument that he was insane. “It’s the sickness that wants it,” Vacher had told him when explaining the sudden urges.17 “Maybe children exert a sort of attraction for me.”

  Indeed, ever since his initial confession, Vacher had embarked on a campaign to prove that he was not legally responsible. In his interviews with Fourquet and the press, he asserted that a kind of “rage” sometimes came over him that he found himself powerless to resist. He elaborated on the claim when a reporter for Le Lyon Républicain interviewed him about his motivations:

  Why did I kill? I don’t know; it just came over me.18 I had fits; I don’t know why. It’s the poison that wanted to get out.

  And the mutilations—how do you explain them?

  I don’t know what happened after the murders. But when I left, I was relieved; I felt better. Moreover, if God did not command me to kill, it wouldn’t have happened.

  Do you have any remorse for your victims?

  No, because God wanted it.

  Your fits are less frequent now that you’re here. You haven’t tried to kill anyone.

  Yes, but look—the last person that I took I let go without harming her. It could be that the sickness has passed over me.

  By late October, Vacher had confessed to ten murders. Fourquet felt he was still holding something back. When a newspaper in Lyon expressed skepticism about Vacher’s confessions and accused Fourquet of being gullible, the investigator decided to use it to his advantage.

  “I’m furious with these journalists,” he said as he showed the article to Vacher.19 “What an accursed race. They always have to dirty someone.”

  Vacher read the article. “Those bastards,” he muttered. “Listen—I’ve got a surprise for them. We’ll see who’s the liar.” And he told Fourquet about a murder he had committed that no one could possibly know about.

  The previous May, he had been staying in an abandoned house in a suburb just west of Lyon, and a boy dressed like a vagabond had come by. He killed the boy and threw his body down an unused well.20 The well was enclosed in an abandoned courtyard, said Vacher. No one would ever come upon the victim. He gave vague directions to the scene.

  News of the latest confession galvanized people in greater Lyon. Police and amateur searchers alike fanned out across the countryside, peering into every abandoned well they could think of. Several newspapers sent out search teams, hoping for the scoop of the year.

  People searched fruitlessly for two days. And then, on Sunday morning, October 24, the brigadier of the gendarme unit in Tassin-la-Demi-Lune, a nondescript village five miles west of Lyon, sent an officer to a location he vaguely remembered, one that bore a resemblance to the place Vacher had described. As the officer approached, he could see details click into place: a derelict house across from an old factory, set at an angle to the road; a courtyard; a well by a cherry tree and an elderberry hedge. He peered into the well and was almost knocked flat by the stench. He and a few other men borrowed a grappling hook from a neighbor and dropped it down. When they hauled it up, it was weighted with human remains.

  “When will this horrible nightmare end?” wrote Albert Sarraut.21

  The next day, Alphonse Benoist, the investigating magistrate of Lyon, arrived at the well, along with Dr. Boyer, of the Institute of Legal Medicine, and several firemen and police. With a crowd of spectators jostling for a view, a couple of firemen pumped out the water and poured phenol down the well in order to disinfect it. They lowered a candle and determined if there was enough oxygen. A fireman climbed down a knotted rope to the bottom, then started collecting remains and putting them in a wooden box that had been lowered down next to him. When the odor became too much to bear, the first man came up and a second went down. They worked until nightfall and again the next day. A tibia came up, then a hip bone, then some vertebrae. Again and again, the empty box descended and returned with its cargo. A pile of bloody clothing was found in the house.

  As people pushed for a view of the crime scene, a Madame Larraboire came forward to say she thought the clothing belonged to François Bully, who had once done some gardening for her. Bully, a seventeen-year-old, had left home to become a vagabond because his relationship with his parents was so tempestuous. He had been wandering for about a year, but he had disappeared sometime in late May.

  At the institute, Dr. Boyer was separating, sorting, and identifying the body parts to determine when the murder had taken place and the victim’s identity. Based on the state of decomposition, he estimated the crime had occurred a minimum of four months before the body was found.

  Identifying the victim would be a more complicated task, given the fragmentary nature of the remains.22 Following the procedures in Lacassagne’s Handbook, Boyer examined the growth plates a few inches from the ends of the long bones. They had not fully ossified, nor had the pieces of the hip bone, which would have tended to solidify at about age seventeen. He further noted that the two branches of the jawbone came together at an angle typical of a young adolescent. All this indicated, according to Boyer, that the victim was no older than fourteen. Dental evidence indicated that the victim was at least twelve.

  To calculate the victim’s height, Boyer compared key bones with the tables compiled by Rollet. He concluded that the victim had been between 1.38 and 1.42 meters tall—between four feet five and four feet seven.

  In short, the victim had been killed at least four months ago, just as Vacher had confessed. He was between twelve and fourteen years old, and no taller than four feet seven. According to Boyer’s anthropometrics, the victim could not have been François Bully, who was seventeen years old and at least five six.

  Meanwhile, magistrate Benoist had received a letter from Belgium that, in an unexpected way, confirmed Boyer’s findings:

  Very surprised to hear of my murder by Wacher [sic].23 I am eager to let you know, however, that I am quite well, but without a penny.

  François Bully

  Several days passed, and still no one had any idea who the victim might be. And then, at the end of October, a woman came forward to say that her fourteen-year-old son, who had been working on a farm near Tassin-la-Demi-Lune, had been missing since May. She went to the magistrate’s office in Lyon, where she recognized the clothing as her son’s—specifically a rip in the collar that the boy’s grandmother had patched. Later, at the institute, Boyer showed her the jawbone and asked her if she recognized any dental patterns. Sobbing, she made the identification: Certain teeth were missing, and two were crossed in a particular way. Vacher’s eleventh victim was a fourteen-year-old boy named Claudius Beaupied.

  Newspapers now reported that Vacher displayed a new attitude. Formerly talkative and engaging, he had become taciturn and contemptuous. He ceased responding to Fourquet, declaring that he would say nothing more unless the newspapers published a new batch of his letters, which would make his case for insanity. Fourquet would not allow it. In at least fifteen more interviews over the next several weeks, he tried unsuccessfully to shake Vacher’s resolve.

  He knew that his part in the case was now over. It was time for the legal investigation to become a medical and psychol
ogical one. He contacted Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne.

  Sixteen

  Professor Lacassagne

  By the time Fourquet contacted Lacassagne, the professor had reached a plateau of fame and credibility that he would occupy for the next thirty years. His books had become forensic classics; his journal was considered the authoritative source on all things related to criminal science, and his students had fanned out over Europe.

  Lacassagne constantly searched for a deeper understanding of how the individual criminal developed. In the late 1890s, he embarked on a several-year experiment in which he asked notorious prisoners to write autobiographies. He provided them with notebooks and pens, gave them advice on developing their ideas, and visited every week to check on their progress. In exchange, he would give them tobacco and sweets and lend a sympathetic ear. For many of the prisoners, Lacassagne was the only person who had shown the slightest curiosity about them or their lives, and they came to see him as a friend and confessor. “Oh, dear benefactor, how much meaning you are giving to my life!” wrote one murderer.1

  The prisoners’ musings revealed much. An anarchist named Émile Gautier, an intellectual with a law degree who spent three years in jail, wrote a forty-two-page memoir, which appeared in the Archives of Criminal Anthropology. He described prison as a “hothouse for poisonous plants,” where anyone who was not a lifetime offender learned to become one. Gautier was well acquainted with Lombroso’s hypothesis. Based on what he saw in fellow prisoners, he offered his own dissenting view of “born criminals” and their traits:

  Their cringing and timid ways, the cunning of their looks, something feline about them, something cowardly, humble, suppliant, and crushed, makes them a class apart.2 One would say, dogs who had been whipped; hardly, here and there, a few energetic and brutal heads of the rebels.