The first question the experts needed answered was whether the bullets Vacher shot into his own head had lodged in an area that could affect his behavior. Lacassagne arranged for a well-known radiographer, a Dr. Destot, to x-ray Vacher to locate the projectile. This was one of the first times in history that the new technology was used in legal medicine.15 An earlier case took place in 1896 during a civil suit in Nottingham, England. A dancer had fallen on some steps in the local theater and broken an ankle. The theater owners claimed she exaggerated the injury, but their argument fell apart when an X-ray showed the bone had been broken.
Vacher submitted to the forty-five-minute procedure, joking with the attendant about his days in the regiment. Vacher asked him if he had been reading the papers and seeing what people were saying about him. Then his mood suddenly darkened. “They’re idiots,” he snapped.16 “They’re trying to put 200 murders on my back. I’ve had enough of it.” And then he became cordial again.
The guards and other prisoners were discovering how volatile the new inmate could be. He might be gay and expansive and spend the day singing, then suddenly turn ugly and brutal. He treated his guards like servants, and the other prisoners like inferiors. “You don’t have the right to keep me within these walls … and with criminals!” he wrote to the chief prosecutor of Lyon.17 “I think you are capable of letting an innocent man die.” He demanded to be moved to a private cell.
Vacher was indeed moved to his own cell, where he spent most of his day humming contentedly. But his newfound tranquillity did not last. “Suddenly, without any apparent reason, he would become morose, sneaky, and brutal,” wrote a prison official.18
His outbursts were volcanic. One Sunday in March, as he was preparing to attend mass, he pushed his guards aside, kicked through the heavy wooden door to his cell, and scrambled into the hall.19 He was sprinting full-bore toward the chapel when one of the guards tackled him. He was returned to his cell and bound in a straitjacket. During the night, he ripped it apart. The next day, guards moved him to a special isolation cell, with a pallet instead of a bed, and shackled his hands and feet. He declared he would commit suicide and started banging his head against the wall. The jailers noticed that he was careful to let his left shoulder strike first so as not to cause himself any real harm.
He went on a hunger strike, proclaiming that he would not eat again until the authorities recognized his innocence. “For [six days] he has energetically refused all nourishment,” the prison director wrote to Lacassagne.20 “Before I choose to force him to eat I think I should inform you of the situation to discharge my responsibilities.” Lacassagne went to see the prisoner. Vacher greeted him warmly, reached out for a handshake, and then squeezed the professor’s hand until it hurt. He wanted to show that despite his state of privation, God was giving him the power of a “strongman at a country fair.”21 An alert guard later noticed a more prosaic reason for Vacher’s fortitude: Other prisoners had been slipping him food. The professor was not amused.
Meanwhile, Vacher had been writing. His output was prodigious, and he made copies of most letters he wrote. He wrote to nearly everyone he had encountered in the course of his wanderings, including Louise Barant, her parents, other members of his regiment, and people in the two asylums where he had stayed, as well as to Fourquet and to himself. He wrote a two-page poem reflecting on the pleasures of roaming the countryside:
Oh! Lovely solitude!
Element of good spirits,
So many things without study
You have taught me.22
My God! That my eyes are so happy
To see from our mountaintops
Such vast plains,
Such beautiful houses! …
From here I can hear thousands of noises,
Hunting horns, hinds and sheep;
I often find myself surprised
In the midst of such reveries.
Old ruined castles,
Old cities in decay
Against which the mutinous years
Have deployed their insolence!
He wrote to Madame Plantier, whose escape from his attack had ended the killing spree: “I am truly honored to salute you.…23 I wish that for what you did for justice God will give you back everything He owes to you for the past, present and future.” But he chided her against feeling too proud. “You can congratulate yourself for my arrest, but don’t forget [the role] of Divine Providence.”
As part of his interest in criminals’ autobiographies, Lacassagne gave Vacher a notebook. The accused filled it with scribblings over the months, eventually titling it “The Case of Joseph Vacher: His Self-Defense.”24 Yet if Lacassagne hoped to gain any insight, expression of regret, or revelation from Vacher, he was soon disappointed. Vacher’s first letter to his doctors was a tiresome recitation of previously known facts and grandiose statements. “They say that curiosity ends where concern for national safety begins,” he wrote, and cataloged the misfortunes that had befallen him—all in a single run-on sentence.25 He said he would be willing to provide new details of his wanderings, but only if he could first release them to the press. Lacassagne, who had an abhorrence of pretrial publicity, did not agree.
Vacher wrote steadily to the doctors, with the intention of highlighting his insanity. Some letters began with the now-familiar heading of “God—Rights—Obligations” in block letters. Some bore a return address, “Lyon—Jerusalem,” reflecting his religious obsession. (The town of Belley became “Bethlehem.”)
“From where comes my malady?” he wrote to Drs. Lacassagne, Pierret, and Rebatel.26 He fell back on “the bite of a rabid dog.” He enumerated certain “supplements” that had worsened his condition:
1. The bitterness of a painful operation to my sexual parts at the hospital in Lyon.
2. The bullets in my head and the infirmities that followed from the unfortunate event at Baume-les-Dames [when he shot Louise and himself].
3. Bad memories of the sad asylum at Dole.
Sometimes he would fawn over the doctors, as he had at the Saint-Robert asylum. Other times, he would remind them of their “heavy mission” in determining his sanity. Sometimes he would make quasi-religious statements about his purity: “One is truly strong when one feels innocent and has faith.”27 Sometimes he would try to unnerve his inquisitors, as when he wrote Dr. Pierret’s name on a piece of paper and drew a knife under it—“to make sure he does not betray me.”28
Early in his imprisonment, Vacher argued, as he had with Fourquet, that he was overcome by uncontrollable rages—proof, he said, that he was insane. By late February, though, he was advancing a theory of temporary insanity. Acknowledging the “sad state I was in during my wandering,” he said that he had now settled into a better state of mind.
Understand that at the present time my infirmity is not as pronounced, that I am not so repulsive to people.…29 [T]he infection of the bullets in my head that with each step made me feel closer to death [has abated, as has] the heaviness and the boiling that I always had in my head.… I no longer feel compelled to sleep outdoors to avoid the laughter of malevolent people.
Signed: Jh Vacher
PS—If under these conditions I don’t deserve to be declared irresponsible, who possibly could be?
Lacassagne was unmoved. He wrote in a memo, “The real alienated do not act that way.”30
* Bethlem, which received its first patients in 1403, became notorious for brutal, filthy conditions. The hospital left the English language its nickname, “Bedlam,” to connote any hopelessly chaotic situation.
* In a tragic coincidence, shortly after the trial, Dr. Gray himself was shot by an insane man. The perpetrator of this crime, Henry Reimshaw, having been released after eighteen months in an asylum, claimed to have been sent on a mission from heaven.
Eighteen
Turning Point
How the “real alienated” behaved was a grave concern to turn-of-the-century criminologists, because many offenders were faking mental illn
ess. As asylums proliferated and medical experts increasingly became involved in trials, word had spread in the criminal world about the possibility of being sent to an asylum and the relatively easy life one could lead there. In 1888, Dr. Paul Garnier, medical director of the Préfecture of Police in Paris, wrote that in the previous two years he had noticed that criminals were employing the ruse with “uncommon frequency.”1 He attributed the increase to the 1885 retribution law, which sentenced repeat offenders to Devil’s Island. Criminals would rather spend time in an asylum than be sent to that hellhole for life.
Garnier was not alone in recognizing the problem, nor was France the only country in which it occurred. By the early 1890s, the criminal handbooks of several nations included warnings about feigned insanity and advice on how to detect it. The 1892 edition of A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, a handbook used by British and American detectives, cautioned investigators to be alert for overacting. “In real insanity, the person will not admit that he is insane; it is in the feigned state that all his attempts are directed to make others believe that he is mad.”2 Investigators noted a variety of faked behaviors, including mutism, paralysis, amnesia, mania, epileptic fits, melancholy, delirium, hunger strikes, and suicide attempts. Mania seemed to be the most common affectation, because “the vulgar notion of insanity is that it is made up of violent actions and vociferous and incoherent language.”
Hans Gross, the Austrian criminologist, recommended that investigators carefully review a prisoner’s statements, “some of which are deliberate and cunning, while others are awkward and stupid.”3 That contradiction in tone, he said, was a sign of dissembling. He urged inspectors to observe the suspect’s eyes:
No intelligent man has an idiot’s eyes, and no idiot has intelligent eyes. The whole physiognomy, the deportment, the gestures, may deceive, the eyes never; and whoever is accustomed to watch the eyes will never be taken in.… Remember also that the shammer, when he thinks no one is looking, casts a swift and scrutinizing glance on the Investigating Officer to see whether or not he believes him.
Journals were rife with cautionary reports. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the Viennese alienist, wrote about a prisoner who killed a former mistress with a pocketknife and then simulated insanity by refusing to speak or eat and bashing his head against the wall.4 Later found to be eating in secret, sleeping soundly, and faking his self-battery, he was convicted and executed.
Garnier wrote a lengthy article about feigned insanity cases and how he uncovered them.5 One felon, a twenty-five-year-old habitual thief named Troyé, affected insanity when he learned he would be deported to a prison colony. He fell into silence and sat for days curled up in a corner of his cell, his left hand trembling. He resisted all attempts to engage him. One day, Garnier remarked to the prisoner that his right hand was now trembling instead. Having failed to keep his symptoms consistent, Troyé confessed to the sham. Another prisoner feigned hallucinations, went silent, and stopped eating. After a few visits, Garnier said to a colleague in a loud voice that he recognized this particular syndrome and that he would soon expect to see a period of mania. When the prisoner adopted the new symptoms the next day, Garnier knew the insanity was feigned. Another prisoner, who had been starving himself and banging his head against the wall, simply gave up after three days. “It’s understandable that I would not want to leave for the country of savages,” he explained.
Garnier’s most ambiguous case involved a thirty-year-old man named Paul-Joseph Cavène. Cavène had written several threatening letters to a former mistress, who had married another man. He had also assaulted the woman’s husband, for which he was arrested. Alienists who administered a psychological exam noted Cavène’s turbulent youth, troubled history, and delusions of grandeur: He would spout “empty and meaningless sentences, spoken with a ridiculously emphatic tone.” They concluded that Cavène was psychologically diminished, but not enough to deserve legal immunity. The court sentenced him to eight days in jail.
Shortly after his release, Cavène threw acid in his former mistress’s face and tried to gouge out her eyes with his fingers. After this, his second arrest, alienists found that his symptoms had worsened. He hallucinated about his victim and ranted about seeing her perfect face in his dreams. When reminded that her face was no longer perfect and that he was the one who had disfigured her, he showed utter surprise. Routine questions drew tirades and outbursts. He wrote grandiose verses in which he compared himself to Spartacus and Toussaint-Louverture, the liberator of Haiti. He looked forward to seeing his name in the press.
Yet the alienists felt the behavior was too purposeful and systematic. Granted, Cavène was bizarre and impulsive, but the exaggerated nature of his new symptoms led them to believe that he “borrows the language and demeanor of someone who is hallucinating and haunted by ideas of persecution.” A former cell mate of Cavène said he had spoken of his plan to attack his ex-mistress and “escape punishment under the pretext of mental alienation.”
This was a new phenomenon for the experts: a somewhat alienated individual who feigned extreme insanity in order to escape justice. “A man presenting these deviations,” they wrote, “should be placed in an asylum under the strictest surveillance.”
Cavène was sent to the Bicětre asylum in Paris and was released a few months later. He renewed his threats to his ex-mistress and her husband. This time, when Cavène went after them in a public garden in Paris, the husband shot him several times with a revolver. After a stay in the hospital, Cavène was sent to the Sainte-Anne asylum in Paris, then transferred to an asylum in the countryside. He escaped and returned to Paris for vengeance—a plan that was sidetracked by the police. At the time of Garnier’s most recent report, Cavène was interned in the Sainte-Anne asylum, with no indication of how long he would remain there.
If a man like Cavène could escape and hurt people, one could only imagine the havoc that Vacher could wreak. There was a striking commonality between the behaviors in the reports of simulated insanity and Vacher’s—the haughty attitude, the delusions of grandeur, the love of publicity. There were the fake hunger strikes, the periods of mutism, and phony suicide attempts. Indeed, from the time they met him, Lacassagne and his colleagues suspected Vacher of simulating insanity. “The first impression one gets from looking at Vacher with his white rabbit-fur hat, white being the color of innocence, is that this man is putting it on,” wrote Lacassagne.6 “This is the immediate impression shared to the same degree by the most naïve observers and the most suspicious specialists.” Lacassagne seemed to have taken an early dislike to him. “We have rarely seen a defendant at the same time more haughty and more suspicious, more prudent with his words and at the same time such a ridiculous faker in his actions. He affected an inappropriate familiarity and an arrogant tone toward authority.”
Later, when he elaborated on the signs that he saw in Vacher, Lacassagne could almost have been quoting Gross’s description of the typical malingerer:
From time to time, Vacher forgets his amateur dramatics and the role he is playing and spontaneously makes quite sensible statements and comes out with quite clever replies, or with a crafty smile parries arguments directed against him and avoids leading questions.7 Often, when he feels himself being drawn away from the position he has consistently determined to take, Vacher will remain cautiously silent [or] make sporadic, deliberately unreasonable remarks, behind which he takes shelter.
It troubled Lacassagne that unlike other prisoners, whose stories evolved as he got to know them, Vacher adhered to an unchanging script. He refused to answer any questions about his crimes; he would invariably refer back to his original confession letter. “He always resorts to the main theme: bitten by a mad dog, and blood-poisoned,” Lacassagne reported. Vacher repeated this story in every correspondence and every conversation, and in the memoir he eventually submitted. If pressed to be more precise, he became irritable and menacing. Lacassagne also noted fundamental inconsistencies within Vacher’s story. He was bitten b
y a mad dog and abused at the mental asylums but was operating under the guidance and protection of “Divine Providence.” Vacher’s narrative was at once “hypochondriac and megalomaniac.” That particular combination of symptoms had never been reported by psychologists before, which made Lacassagne doubt its authenticity. It certainly was “not in agreement with his diagnosis at Dole.”
What most struck Lacassagne and his colleagues, however, was the evidence that Vacher was building a case. When Vacher arrived at the jail in Belley, the prison doctor, Bozonet, conducted a quick examination and concluded that the prisoner’s responsibility was “notably diminished.”8 A few weeks later, Dr. Léon Madeuf, an opponent of capital punishment, came unannounced from Paris to interview Vacher. (Fourquet had banned him as an unauthorized visitor, but during one of Fourquet’s brief absences, Madeuf, claiming to have been given Fourquet’s permission, tricked Bozonet into letting him in.) Madeuf never wrote a report, but he made his sympathies clear. Sensing an ally, Vacher later wrote to Madeuf that it was “absolutely necessary” to begin using the press to publicize his situation.9 If Madeuf could get the Lyon newspapers to publish his letter, then “the biggest part of [our case] will be made.” Now in Lyon, Vacher wrote to the authorities that Madeuf could bring some truth to the case.
Lacassagne and his colleagues had never seen anyone work so methodically to be sent to an asylum. It was “his only objective,” wrote Lacassagne.10 “He has not forgotten how easy it was to be let out.” Vacher sensed that concern, and he made a counterargument to the medical team: “Why haven’t I been sent to an asylum yet? I’ll tell you why: It’s because you are afraid I’ll escape.11 Escape … but why? Right now I am so well known that if I ever escaped, I would be captured immediately. No, no, I would not try to escape.”
The Killer of Little Shepherds Page 22
