Is this a congenital type, the indication of a race, a sign of inner degeneration? Isn’t this really an acquired characteristic?
Isn’t it true that by frequent repetition the traits that are mimicked become persistent, even physiological?
Over the years, Lacassagne collected sixty-two autobiographical notebooks from more than fifty inmates of the Saint-Paul prison. The narratives showed him, one case at a time, how criminality developed. They revealed dark stories of domestic violence, disease, sporadic education, and the death of loved ones.3 Some of the most voluminous and revealing writing came from the hand of Émile Nouguier, the gang leader who, with Annet Gaumet, had murdered Madame Foucherand, the café owner on the rue de la Villette. During the year he spent in prison awaiting trial and execution, Nouguier filled six notebooks, which he titled “Memoirs of a Sparrow, or the Confessions of a Prisoner.”4 The writings described a life that seemed destined to end with murder and the guillotine. Raised by an abusive criminal of a father, Émile ran away from home as a child, only to find upon his return that his father was committing incest with the boy’s sister. He left home permanently at the age of twelve, working variously as a farmhand, circus worker, pimp, and thief. He flirted with anarchism, spent at least two terms in prison, reconciled briefly with his father on his release, and then became the leader of a gang in Lyon. It was at that point that he and his gang broke into Foucherand’s apartment and killed her. The only tender episode in the entire life story seemed to have been the moment of his birth, which he likened to the hatching of a sparrow. Gratified by Lacassagne’s attention, he tried to aid him in his research, and compiled a dictionary of criminal slang.
Henri Vidal, who stabbed four women to death on the French Riviera, wrote a 227-page manuscript for Lacassagne, striking in its self-analysis and reflection. “The thing that astonishes me most in my situation,” he began, disarmingly, “is that … I have always had a repugnance for blood.”5 The chapters reflected his stages of emotional development: “The Origins of the Hatred of Women,” “My Regrets,” “Falling Off the Bicycle,” and “My Mother’s Temperament.” Vidal used his memoir to dispute the experts’ findings that he was legally responsible and fit to stand trial. “Listening to your discourse, I simply realize that you, gentlemen, haven’t understood my case as it really is: no, you do not understand because you read me too quickly,” he wrote. “You do not pay attention to many details you think are important but which are precisely the ones that make my case very different from those you have come across so far.”
Charles Double, a homosexual who led a notoriously dissolute life, killed his widowed mother in an argument over money and showed no remorse or reaction to the sentencing. The public reviled him for his stone-hearted demeanor. It was only in his memoir that he dropped his cool façade, revealing the depths of his tortured soul, the pain and self-loathing that a homosexual suffered at the turn of the century:
To me, the word[s] female-monster seems to approach the truth.6 A homosexual is a kind of monstrosity, a castoff, a partial being, something out of step with the rest of the world, a subject of study and wonderment for science. Society does not admit these beings. It rejects and condemns them without stopping to examine them.
I entered this life with a soul full of terror.… I have always had this secret premonition that my existence will be crossed by a great catastrophe … that my proud and sensual soul needed to be shattered and humiliated. Beings like me don’t know middle roads or half measures. Stuck between the angel and the demon, we crawl in the fetid ruts of shameful and criminal joys.… Such is the destiny of poor, sick creatures like myself.
On the eve of his entry into the Vacher murder case, Lacassagne felt pulled by competing obligations. As one of the world’s foremost interpreters of forensic evidence and examiner of the criminal mind, he saw lawbreakers not as biological “others” but as complex human beings influenced by their environment. He did not despise them. He believed in the rehabilitation of ex-prisoners: “to support them, direct them, counsel them, and even help them erase the memory of their punishment.”7 Yet as a protector of the social order, he was implacable about the need to punish offenders, especially those who, in full possession of their faculties, had committed murder. “Society has the right to defend itself,” he wrote.8 “We are far from the time when the guillotine can be relegated to the warehouse of ancient artifacts.” He felt strongly that a society lacking the will for self-protection would find itself ravaged by crime, just as a person who neglected to attend to his hygiene would find himself ravaged by disease. Compassion, even pity, should not trump the values of order, self-discipline, and social responsibility. And so in this context, too, he once again employed his famous aphorism: “Societies have the criminals they deserve.”9
Seventeen
“A Crime Without Motive?”
The Saint-Paul prison stood near the southern edge of Lyon, steps from one of the city’s two train stations and only a few blocks from its most fashionable shopping district.1 It was not quite twenty-five years old when Vacher arrived, but it already had taken on a look of antiquity. The high walls and towers, built of heavy brown blocks, created an oppressive Gothic appearance. The entrance, a pair of massive wooden doors set in a turret, gave the impression of a castle in a folk tale, one that did not just admit visitors but swallowed them.
As dreary and dour as the structure may have seemed, it was modern for its day. The building employed a radial architecture that was much in vogue in prison construction. Six wings of three-story cell blocks radiated out from a central structure, like the arms of a starfish. That way, guards positioned in the center could monitor activity in all the wings. Between the wings were wedge-shaped exercise yards, commonly called camemberts for their resemblance to cheese wedges. The most unusual feature of the prison was the chapel, fitted with special pews, boxlike partitions closed on three sides and with a shoulder-height opening at the front. The structure restricted each man’s line of sight, so he could look only forward at the priest or upward to God.
Vacher was transferred there at the end of December 1897 and placed in the maximum-security wing. Lacassagne had previously visited Vacher in Belley, along with two medical collaborators—an asylum director, Dr. Fleury Rebatel, and Dr. Auguste Pierret, clinical professor of mental illness at the University of Lyon and chief medical officer of the asylum in Bron. Vacher had greeted them like saviors—at last he would be talking with people who could understand him.
During their visit, Vacher, over many hours, disgorged his life story, and his argument that he was not legally responsible. When the doctors returned after a lunch break, he had decorated himself and his cell, as if to present a visual montage of insanity. He had fastened a commemorative medallion of Lourdes to his shirt, and with a piece of chalk, he’d drawn a cross on one shoe and a heart on the other. He had festooned the walls of his cell with newspaper illustrations of himself. Under one he had pasted a cutout of a grandfather clock with a handwritten caption: “It is time.”2
The doctors felt they needed to observe Vacher over a period of weeks, or even months, and requested that he be sent to the prison in Lyon. Two weeks later, the guards woke him at five in the morning and told him to get ready. He showed no surprise, signed a release without protest, and then abruptly threw himself to the floor. Two guards bound him and carried him to a horse-drawn carriage, then bundled him onto the train. It was chaos at the station, with Vacher yelling, “The government wants my head, and they’ll have it!”3 At the transfer station on the way to Lyon, he thrashed about and shrieked, “Make way for Vacher the Ripper! They want my head!”
The question of Vacher’s legal responsibility was a key aspect in the case, and it touched on one of the most troubling issues in legal medicine. As the young sciences of neurology and psychology advanced, scientists were finding an increasing number of criminals who belonged in an asylum rather than in a penitentiary. But in the lax and insecure French asylum sys
tem, a ruling of not guilty by reason of insanity often was tantamount to early release. That raised the stakes regarding Vacher. This would be the first case involving a serial killer who claimed that, by reason of insanity, he bore no legal responsibility for his crimes.
For centuries, crime and punishment had fit a simple equation: Crime was a sin, and those who committed sins should be punished. Those who seemed to act by compulsion—against their own free will or better judgment, so to speak—were thought to be sorcerers or possessed by the devil. It was their fault if they were too weak to resist.
With the birth of the science of psychology in the nineteenth century, that point of view began to change. According to the new medical theories, it was no longer Satan who created the compulsion to do evil, but diseases of the mind.4 British courts acknowledged that idea in a landmark case in 1824, in which a man named Arnold shot and wounded a Lord Onslow. Arnold was clearly a raving lunatic—so much so that Onslow himself pled for the judge not to impose the death sentence. The court sentenced Arnold to life imprisonment, ruling that he was so “deprived of his understanding and memory” that he no more understood his actions than “an infant, a brute or wild beast.”
The “wild beast” ruling became the standard in many countries. In most cases, it was easy to apply because judges and juries could readily see that certain defendants were insane. But sometimes a defendant’s condition was less obvious.
In 1843, a Scottish woodcutter, Daniel McNaghten, shot and killed Edward Drummond, secretary to Sir Robert Peel, the former British prime minister. McNaghten, obsessed with the notion that Peel had been plotting against him, shot Drummond in a case of mistaken identity. To all appearances, McNaghten seemed a normal man. Alienists, however, testified that he was delusional. The jury acquitted him, and he was sent to Bethlem Asylum.* The queen and prime minister objected, and the case went to a highly publicized appeal. Out of that controversy emerged the “right from wrong” formulation: that a defendant could be acquitted if he was “laboring under such a defect of reason” that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong.
French law took a parallel course. Criminal insanity was not legally recognized before the French Revolution—criminals were punished regardless of their mental state—but in 1810, the post-revolutionary government passed a new legal code that spelled out citizens’ rights and obligations. Article 64 of that code said an act would not be considered a crime if the accused “was in a demented state” while committing it. Like the “wild beast” standard, this rule was not difficult to apply in cases of obvious insanity; often, it was enough for neighbors and family to bear witness. But as the definition of insanity evolved from “total madness” to the less obvious “loss of reason,” the article’s vagueness became problematic. The issue was magnified by the fact that, unlike in England, there were no special asylums for the criminally insane in France. A man found not guilty by reason of “diminished responsibility” would be sent to an ordinary asylum (albeit to a high-security wing), where his release would depend on the judgment of the director. A murderer could be released in as little as a few months if the director asserted he had been cured. (Vacher’s confinement after he shot Louise amounted to less than a year.) Unfortunately, as the science of psychology became more nuanced over the decades, the legal regulations did not.
This widening gap between medical science and legal codes led to wildly inconsistent verdicts. In 1885, for example, an Italian immigrant laborer went on a drunken rampage through Paris, killing one man and injuring several others.5 When medical experts looked into the case, they learned that he had spent weeks in a compressed-air chamber underground while laying pylons for the Pont d’Austerlitz. They concluded that changes in air pressure had made his brain so sensitive that he could not be held responsible for his behavior while drunk. The court sentenced him to five years’ forced labor.
The experts’ judgment was less charitable in highly publicized or notorious cases. As mentioned earlier, all France was horrified by the case of Louis Menesclou, who raped, killed, and dismembered a four-year-old child. The man was clearly deranged, but he was declared legally responsible and was guillotined. Afterward, when experts autopsied his brain and found numerous lesions, they decided, to their regret, that he probably had been insane.6
A similar concession to public outrage occurred in the United States after the assassination of President James A. Garfield. The assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, shot the president, he said, on instructions from God.7 Guiteau, who had a history of erratic behavior, ranted during his trial, sometimes literally foaming at the mouth. Yet the prosecution’s medical expert, Dr. John Gray, superintendent of the state asylum in Utica, New York, testified that Guiteau had acted entirely from wounded vanity and disappointment from not having been named ambassador to France—a position the accused somehow felt he deserved. Guiteau was found responsible, pronounced guilty, and hanged. Just as with Menesclou, the doctors who autopsied Guiteau found traces of brain damage—in this case, possibly indicating syphilis-induced insanity.*
——
Clearly there was a need to align medical and judicial doctrine about criminal insanity and legal responsibility. Yet scholars could not decide how. In 1890, writing in the journal Annales médico-psychologiques, jurist Louis Proal summed up the dilemma.
Public security is compromised if we wrongly consider a suspect as sick who was [legally] responsible and deserves to be punished.8 But can we imagine a more terrible mistake [in condemning] a sick person who deserves our pity? In which proofs can [we] be certain to condemn only the guilty ones and absolve only the sick people?
Which proofs indeed? Could the mere fact of committing a senseless murder—as opposed to a murder with motive, such as adultery, robbery, or an argument over honor or money—constitute prima facie evidence for insanity? One lawyer made that argument during a trial in the early years of the century. The man on trial had murdered two children whom he had just happened to walk past in a park. “A crime without motive? Are you not, Messieurs members of the jury, struck by all that these words mean; a crime without motive!9 And what a crime! The murder of two children! But who is he who does not immediately respond: This man is mad.”
That may have been a compelling philosophical argument, but it never held weight with judges or juries. The legal system required a more specific approach, one in which trained experts could evaluate individual cases. Over time, high-profile murder cases in France featured panels of medical experts who would examine the defendant and give an opinion—although judges and juries were not obligated to follow them. Yet even within that well-established structure, many thought that the criminal’s mental condition should not affect the verdict—that a crime was a crime, regardless of who had committed it.
“If I am bitten by a viper or a rabid dog, I do not care to know whether the animal is responsible for its misdeed or not,” argued Dr. Gustave Le Bron. “I try to protect myself by preventing it from doing any further harm or harming others: This is my only concern.”10
Even larger questions loomed about protecting society, ones that involved citizens not yet born. This was the era of Darwin and Pasteur, and the conceptual mixing of evolution and contagion gave rise to harsh judgments about those whose existence would harm the greater good. In 1898, at the same time that Lacassagne and his colleagues were evaluating Vacher, the alienist and writer Maurice de Fleury argued in his book The Criminal Mindthat for the good of the human species, insane criminals should be removed from the breeding pool:
[W]e care for them; we raise them in cages, we preserve them from death.11 For what purpose, God Almighty!
Is it really human to allow these monsters, these creatures of darkness, these nightmarish larvae to breathe? Do you not think, to the contrary, that it would be more pious to kill them, to do away with that ugliness and unconsciousness that cannot be made noble, even by suffering? I glimpse the possibility of the legal, authorized elimination of all these incurable bein
gs. Death without suffering, almost a consolation, a release: a gentle death, hardly sad, and annihilating useless ugliness and narrowing the intolerable field of feigned horror, of evil for no reason.
These arguments weighed heavily on Lacassagne and his colleagues as they examined Vacher. The issue was further complicated because the two alienists who had spent the most time with Vacher, the directors of the Dole and Saint-Robert asylums, had come to contradictory conclusions—the first that he was insane and the second that he was cured. And so as the media announced Vacher’s arrival in Lyon, it was with full awareness of the case’s implications. A columnist for Le Petit Parisien warned about the danger to society if Lacassagne and his colleagues decided that Vacher was not legally responsible: “Is he insane? That’s the question of the day for the scientific alienist.…12 And if it should be answered by ‘yes’ as everyone assumes, what should one do with him? Submit him again to a healing regime so that once he is restored he will recover the right to return to his exploits?”
Albert Sarraut voiced an equal but opposite anxiety. What would it say about modern society if this “wild animal with a human face” were found to be as sane as any other citizen?13 “Vacher is a monster, yes; the most odious and dreadful of monsters. But is he conscious of what he does, is he in possession of his reason? For the honor of the humanity that he at least physically resembles, we must hope for the contrary.”
A couple of days after his arrival in Lyon, Lacassagne and the two other experts, Rebatel and Pierret, visited Vacher.14 They had agreed to divide the case into three areas of investigation: Lacassagne, the lead investigator, would examine the years of Vacher’s crime spree; Pierret would scrutinize Vacher’s heredity and family history; and Rebatel would evaluate his behavior in prison. Vacher had calmed down considerably after the train ride, and when the three men arrived, he said he was happy to see them and generally felt well. They all chatted genially for an hour. His only complaint was that other prisoners kept asking him questions during his walks in the courtyard.
The Killer of Little Shepherds Page 21
