At 8:40 a.m., Vacher, surrounded by guards, marched into the courtroom, dressed in velour and wearing his white rabbit-fur hat. With his head up, eyes directed halfway to heaven, he seemed to affect the posture of a saint. But his portrayal was unconvincing. His raggedy beard, which came to a point under his chin, made him appear slightly satanic. His right eye, half-closed with paralysis, exaggerated the emotions portrayed by the left, which, in its frantic wandering, gave Vacher an alternately ferocious and desperate look. With his clawlike fingernails and hyperactive limbs, he seemed less a martyred saint than a barely controlled animal. He brandished a rolled-up sheaf of papers. “Glory to Jesus!” he proclaimed.7 “Long live Joan of Arc! Glory to the great martyr of our times! Glory to the great Savior!” And, incongruously, “He who only hears the bell ring only hears a sound.”
The audience started laughing and making gestures to the press gallery. Vacher took his place on a raised platform surrounded by waist-high bars. At 9 a.m., the bailiff announced, “Court is in session! Hats off!”
Vacher briefly fumbled with his cap as the president of the court, Adhémar de Coston, entered, wearing the traditional red robes. He had heard the commotion, and he did not intend to tolerate indignities. He pinned Vacher with a stare. “Listen to me well,” he commanded the defendant. “I will not put up with any violence in this room. On your part, all your gestures and demonstrations will be useless. You are not going to behave here as you often did in prison. I’m absolutely firm and will use, if the case warrants, all the powers of the law and restrain you by force if necessary. Remember that.”
Vacher remained silent. De Coston turned his attention to the audience and warned them not to misbehave. “I notice several ladies in the room,” he added. “I should warn them that during these discussions there will be some things that are a bit difficult for feminine ears. So I would encourage them to leave.”
“We waited several minutes,” wrote a reporter. “Nobody left, and then everyone laughed.”
In the French criminal court system, the judge plays a more active role than in the Anglo-American system, acting more as inquisitor than as a referee. (The French and Continental structure is known as the “inquisitorial” system, while the Anglo-American is known as the “adversarial.”) Referred to as the “president of the court,” he or she questions witnesses and defendants, based on the dossiers prepared by the investigating magistrate. The prosecuting and defense attorneys say relatively little. They make opening and closing statements, add their own questions for the witnesses, and can object or offer supplementary information in the course of the trial. It’s the president’s job, through questions, to develop a body of facts that the attorneys can try to interpret for the nine jurors.
Typically, the defendant testifies first in the inquisitorial system (in contrast to the American system, in which the defendant likely testifies at the end of the trial, if at all). De Coston had scheduled the trial for three days, the first of which he would devote to Vacher’s testimony. During the second day, he would begin questioning the forty-nine scheduled witnesses, including Vacher’s childhood acquaintances, regimental comrades, and people who had encountered him as a vagabond. During the third day, the president would call medical experts to testify about the defendant’s mental state.
The bailiff now read the charges against Vacher. It was a long, discursive document, recounting the murder of Portalier, the discovery of his body, the sightings of Vacher in the area, the details of his crime spree, and the experts’ conclusions about his sanity. The president explained that even though the defendant was alleged to have committed many crimes, for the purposes of this trial he was being charged with only the killing at Bénonces, which fell within this court’s jurisdiction. Reading the charges took a half hour. Vacher had remained silent under the reproachful eye of the president, but he pantomimed his objections by smacking his lips, making throat-slitting gestures, and biting his thumb—all to the “general hilarity” of reporters.
At that point, Vacher’s defense attorney, Charbonnier (his first name was never recorded, either in the press or in official documents), rose to his feet. He was an aging legal lion known for his gravitas, eloquence, and opposition to capital punishment. Some said he resembled an elderly Victor Hugo, with his thick white beard, piercing eyes, and craggy face. Charbonnier told the court that the treatment Vacher had received in Saint-Paul prison had been so deplorable as to invalidate the results of the medical exams. Charbonnier asked the president to appoint a new team of alienists to examine his client in a medical setting—preferably in Paris, where, he believed, Vacher would be treated more fairly. The prosecuting attorney, Louis Ducher, whom newspapers described as an “incontestable authority with a real talent for words,” asserted that justice already had been too long delayed. De Coston denied Charbonnier’s motion.
Vacher interjected that he had something to say. With the court’s permission, he began to read from a prepared statement. In a voice sometimes mumbling and sometimes uncomfortably loud, he retold the now-familiar story of his life and the circumstances that led to his insanity. After several minutes, the president interrupted.
“Is this going to take much longer?” he asked.
“Please, Monsieur le Président, I have only three pages to read. My case is serious—I need to be understood.”
“Do it quickly, then.”
Vacher kept reading, his strange intonation drawing snickers from members of the audience, who quieted when the president shot them menacing glances. Vacher lashed out against those who had wronged him, including Louise Barant and Dr. Dufour, who had pronounced him cured at the Saint-Robert asylum. He saved most of his venom for Lacassagne, who, after four months of observation, had never showed any “confidence” in him. He continued for half an hour, then suddenly stopped.
Then de Coston commenced the formal questioning. Beginning with the standard questions of identity (name, birthplace, age, occupation), he led the suspect step-by-step through his personal background, up to the crime at Bénonces. Despite the simple, factual nature of the questions, Vacher kept returning to the issue of his insanity, saying it had all begun with the incident with the dog. But now he added a new element to the story:
Ever since then, at certain times, and especially when I’m exposed to the sun in the countryside, I would feel this rage and an immediate violent insanity. I fought it! Oh! Yes, I fought it! Terrible battles raged within me.… The sickness would take me all of a sudden at the moment when I least expected it. And then without even being conscious of it, I threw myself on my first victim. I stabbed, I killed the innocents!
In other words, it was not just the dog bite, the medicine, the bullet in his head, and his mistreatment at the asylum that triggered his “rages,” but exposure to bright sun, as well. This reverse vampirism was all the more striking because Bram Stoker’s popular novel about a monster who became active in the absence of sunlight had been published just the year before.
At noon, the court recessed.
Court was scheduled to reconvene at 1:00 p.m., but the mob clamored so loudly at the courthouse entrance that things had to be delayed for an hour. The morning market had closed by now, and the crowds who had been there now flooded to the courthouse. De Coston sat impatiently for a few minutes, then strode to the front door and angrily confronted the hundreds of people. He berated them for wasting their day by trying to force their way into an overcrowded courtroom. They should go to work and provide for their families! He ordered the soldiers to push the crowd away, slammed the front doors, and marched back inside.
Now de Coston focused his questions on the crime at Bénonces. The bailiff had given the jury maps of the town, with each important site marked by a red X. By way of setting the context, the president told the jury about Victor Portalier, how the boy who came from questionable family circumstances had turned himself around to become an exemplary young man. He described the murder and explained how the boy’s friend came upon
the horrific crime scene. Turning to Vacher, he asked, “And the author of this abominable crime—was it you? Were you the one who chose the victim?”
Vacher shook his head: “Chose, you say?”
“How would you like me to put it?” asked de Coston.
“As you know, it was my sickness that chose my victims.…”
“In any case, witnesses saw you wandering around the area of the murder.”
“I don’t know how to respond to that,” said Vacher. “I crossed the paths of many people.”
“And so you do not deny having passed by Bénonces?”
“Without doubt, because I confessed to it.”
The president asked him to describe in his own words what happened when he crossed Portalier’s path.
“I don’t know exactly what I did, but I do know that I gave him a terrible death. It was the fit that came over me … what do you want? When one is afflicted like I am, one suffers terribly.”
Several audience members began snickering.
“This demonstration is disgraceful!” snapped de Coston. “Anyone capable of laughing at such a moment perhaps ought to be seated with the accused.”
The audience muttered in protest and then quieted down. The president turned back to Vacher. He asked him how, if he was in the grip of insanity, he could have had the presence of mind to drag the body under a hedge and then exercise such skill in making an escape. Vacher replied that after the murder he experienced a brief moment of clarity. De Coston suggested that the real reason Vacher acted so effectively was that he understood full well the crime he had committed and dreaded the punishment.
“Punishment! I don’t give a damn about punishment,” Vacher said. “I am justified in the eyes of God. I acted in a rage. That is my misfortune. I was agitated, and trembling.”
“If you are not afraid of punishment,” asked the president, “why did you not confess during your first interview to the assassination of Victor Portalier? At first, you denied it.”
“I confessed when I realized that I was not responsible, that I was no more guilty than those who let me out of the asylum of Saint-Robert.”
“And after your confession, in order to cast doubt on your sanity, you [suddenly admitted to] a quantity of other crimes.”
“I never use the word quantity” Vacher said. The audience started muttering.
De Coston was incredulous. “You wandered to nineteen departments, killing and eviscerating. During that time, did you not know you were committing these crimes?”
“Yes, but if I’d wanted to, I could have committed many more, because I had one hundred chances to kill. But I killed only when my sickness came over me.”
There was grumbling from the audience, curses and shouts. Vacher turned to the spectators and yelled, “I will defend my innocence as I want to!”
Now the president broadened the line of questioning, eliciting testimony about Vacher’s three-year killing spree. The bailiff distributed maps to the jury, with a red cross marking each place where a body had been discovered. De Coston asked Vacher how many murders he had committed. Vacher counted on his fingers: eleven.
De Coston: “Including Portalier?”
Vacher: “Including Portalier.”
“Now I’m going to see how good your memory is,” said de Coston. “The count is this: six girls, four boys, one old woman.”
“Yes, it is I who did that,” said Vacher. With each new recitation of the murders, he became increasingly vexed: How could the president fail to understand his state of mind during the killing spree? He was insane: legally irresponsible. “Yes, I killed, and then I soiled and mutilated the cadavers. But the guilty ones, the only guilty ones, are the doctors from the Saint-Robert asylum, who, instead of keeping me locked up, let me go running into the countryside!”
His complaint was now blossoming into a tirade. He insisted that he was an instrument of God, because the horror of his crimes would awaken society to the horrible conditions in the lunatic asylums. He served as a living example of the asylums’ neglect. “I’m not a rogue! Yes, I fell upon these people and gave them a terrible death, the details of which I don’t even remember. I did this, I did that. What do you want, when a fit comes over you, when you have a rage like mine! Do I know what got hold of me? I was like a beast!”
“A ferocious beast,” added de Coston.
“Yes, because I was bitten by a ferocious beast.”
Charbonnier stood up to remind the jury that Vacher was charged with a single crime—the murder at Bénonces. The president had no business bringing in all the others, he asserted. “You are putting questions to my client that are aside from the fact,” he told de Coston.
“He’s right!” said Vacher. “All that is none of your business.”
De Coston snapped that it was up to him to determine which questions were relevant. More to the point, Vacher based his insanity defense on having committed multiple crimes, which made those murders the business of the court.
The president was growing edgy. Rather than being allowed to run a smoothly professional and dispassionate trial, he was being dragged into exactly the kind of circus he had been determined to avoid. His nerves were rubbed raw by Vacher’s intransigence and the audience’s disrespectful behavior, and he found himself drawn into unnecessary and nonsensical exchanges. Late in the day, Vacher seemed to have trouble understanding a question. “Can you repeat that?” he said. “I am so tired.”
“So am I,” said de Coston, “tired and disgusted at having been bathed in blood from the beginning of this day.”
Vacher: “And whose fault is that?” It was the president, after all, who had directed this line of questioning.
Enough. Court was adjourned at 6:15 p.m. The spectators filed out and the correspondents rushed off to file their stories. The reporter from Le Lyon Républicain, openly siding with the prosecution, thought Vacher seemed “intimidated” by the court and by “this man in the red robe who spoke to him in a severe tone. He seemed a bit disoriented.” Albert Bataille of Le Figaro skewered Vacher’s outrageous behavior. Even those doctors “who are inclined to see the alienated everywhere were not duped by this monster,” he wrote. “I wasn’t either. I could see it in a single audience—and after all the nitpicking in the jousting with the president, my judgment is fixed.” Bataille, like so many others who watched the performance, already had decided that Vacher was faking.
The second day began more calmly than the first. Vacher, still dressed in velour and his trademark white hat, entered without making any proclamations. He joked with the officers and offered autographs to soldiers and correspondents. Sidling up to Charbonnier, he examined his attorney’s ermine robe, felt the fur, and assured him it was of very good quality but that he preferred rabbit fur. An even bigger crowd packed the courtroom, attracted by the gossip and news reports, with more women in attendance. When the proceedings began, Vacher offered to read another statement, but the president cut him off. He hoped to move briskly to the witnesses. But first he needed to question the defendant about his professed insanity. He reviewed Vacher’s dog-bite story and the other factors that Vacher said caused his mental alienation. Then he asked him about his contention that the sheer magnitude of his killing spree demonstrated insanity.
“You invoke the number of your crimes as proof of your irresponsibility,” said de Coston.
“Of course,” said Vacher. “I invoke their number and their atrocity. A person in a normal state would not be able to do that.”
Then de Coston asked Vacher about his obsession with Joan of Arc. Vacher explained that one of his cell mates in Belley had loaned him a biography, “and I was struck by the resemblance of the missions between that young woman and me.” The spectators began muttering. “Yes,” Vacher insisted over the noise, “she was a great martyr like me, who came in another form and another time.… I love her like I love Christ, who was another great savior in his day.”
De Coston continued: “According to med
ical experts, you are a simulator. Your two systems of defense are based, one, on the professed dog bite and, the other, on the professed providential mission. And yet, they don’t go together.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” replied Vacher, becoming agitated. “You don’t know what I think or what I thought. But if you had seen me out there as a wild beast, when the sun was striking my poor head half to death, you would not say that I had my sanity, you monster.” He shouted, “Yes … monster!”
The audience members started yelling their objections.
“The insults from a wretch like you cannot be allowed to enter this courtroom,” said de Coston over the rising storm.
“Don’t say that I’m a wretch! But if I am, it’s your fault—yes, you as the representative of society!”
“We can’t let you go on like that! We can’t let you continue disturbing this courtroom!”
“Do what you want, you misérable! As for me, I am right before God, and I don’t give a damn about what people think!”
De Coston threatened to have the defendant removed and to continue the trial without him. Charbonnier begged the court to be patient with his client. The man was agitated and needed some rest. He spoke quietly to Vacher and managed to calm him. It was ten in the morning.
The president spent the rest of the morning interviewing witnesses from Bénonces. Portalier’s boss, Jacques Berger, told how Victor was a timid and gentle young man. Victor’s young friend Jean-Marie Robin described how he had gone looking for Victor when his cows wandered down from the meadow, and then found his friend’s eviscerated body. The country guardian, Joseph Marcel, testified about arriving at the meadow and summoning the gendarmes. Others placed Vacher in the area during the hours just before the killing. One woman described how Vacher came begging for milk on the day of the killing and became furious when she told him she did not have any. Vacher tried to turn her words against her. If only she had given him milk, he said, the crime might never have been committed. He explained that when the sun made him crazy, milk would sometimes calm him. The woman’s lack of generosity made her equally as complicit in the murder as he was. Then a young shepherd named Alexandre Léger nervously testified about how Vacher had tried to lure him into the woods.
The Killer of Little Shepherds Page 24
