“It is over,” he concluded. “We put down the pen and leave this long work like a nightmare; that is to say, discouraged and exhausted.”
It had been a long journey, not only for Lacassagne but for the endeavor he represented. Through the centuries, his profession had come through dark times of trial by fire and of persecution through rumor and torture to a time when scientists first began to analyze evidence—and now to this golden age of forensic discovery. Science had become part of detective work, used not only to identify the “who,” “when,” and “how” of a crime but also to deduce the criminal’s mental state based on crime-scene analysis—something unthinkable a generation earlier. Justice had been advanced by the unification of science and law. But even the best and brightest in those fields, as Lacassagne would admit, would wrestle with doubts about the moral rectitude of their decisions.
Months after the debate had died down, Émile Gautier wrote an essay about Vacher in a volume called The Year in Science and Industry, in which he gave the case a philosophical perspective.
“What’s clear is that the most sophisticated science is still powerless to penetrate the mysteries of the human mind, which cannot be determined mathematically or by its chemical constitution, or by its molecular state,” wrote Gautier.39 “And maybe it’s there, in the regions that are still inaccessible to our sharpest senses, our most perfect instruments, and our most subtle methods—[there] that dwell the secrets of [a murderer’s] psychology.”
* In 1896, Toulouse gained widespread attention when he conducted a lengthy psychological study of Émile Zola, with his cooperation. The study described the famously combative and neurotic author as a “high functioning neuropath.” Like many papers at the time, it pointed out the fine line between insanity and genius and in no way diminished Zola’s reputation. (Henri Mitterand, Zola: L’Honneur, 1893–1902, vol. 3 [Paris: Fayard, 2002], pp. 228–246.)
* In 1848, Gage, a railroad worker, survived a massive brain injury when an iron rod penetrated his skull. The rod destroyed part of the frontal lobe of his brain, after which his personality changed from dependable and respectful to unstable and surly.
* The French were not alone in their fascination with the brains of intellectuals. Later in the century, the American Anthropometric Society and the Cornell Brain Association began “securing elite brains for scientific study.” By 1906, they had collected more than seventy. (Edward Anthony Spitzka, “A Study of the Brains of Six Eminent Scientists and Scholars Belonging to the American Anthropometric Society, Together with a Description of the Skull of Prof. E. D. Cope,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 21, no. 4 [1907], p. 175.)
* Although a highly developed speech center can be correlated to eloquence, the brain’s motor area deals only with fine motor control. Vacher’s long-distance walks were strictly a product of cardiovascular fitness.
* Actually, he might have had the brain of a syphilitic. As a teenager, Vacher had contracted syphilis, which creates a thickening of the meninges when it reaches its advanced stage. At that stage, the disease can lead to seizures, dementia, and other signs of brain damage.
Twenty-three
Postscript
The Vacher case quickly faded from the public mind. Unlike Jack the Ripper’s abominations, Vacher’s crime spree had been resolved, so it no longer had the power to tantalize the public. Besides, there were always more murders and scandals for the tabloids to cover.
Vagabondage continued to be a problem in France and much of Europe. Several legislators seized on Vacher’s circumstances to inflame the public against vagabonds and pass increasingly repressive measures, such as opening more “paupers’ depots” and upping the quotas for exile to Devil’s Island. Nothing seemed to diminish their numbers until World War I, when millions were sacrificed as cannon fodder. After the war, people began to think differently about vagabonds and the poor. They were no longer the “other,” who had been put in their position by their own moral and genetic deficiencies, but, instead, unfortunate fellow citizens. Rather than using punitive measures, countries throughout Europe initiated social welfare programs to help the unfortunate get back on their feet. By the mid-1920s, nearly forty million people were receiving unemployment insurance in Europe, greatly reducing the number of drifters.1 After the Great Depression, the United States initiated similar social programs.
Devil’s Island, where many vagabonds and criminals had been exiled, stopped taking new prisoners in 1938, and it was shut down in 1952. The former prison colony became a tourist attraction. Years later, with the advent of the space age, the French government built a rocket-launch center on the island, a facility that it shares with the European Space Agency.2 The island’s proximity to the equator makes it ideal for shooting satellites into geosynchronous orbit.
The guillotine, already in decline when Vacher was executed, continued to wane in popularity, except for a surge during the Nazi regime. The last public execution by French civil authorities was that of the murderer Eugène Weidman, which took place in Paris in 1939.3 After that, executions were moved within prison walls. France eliminated the death penalty in 1981. The asylums of Dole and Saint-Robert operate as clean, modern, humane facilities. They are no longer formally referred to as asylums, but as “specialized hospital centers” for mental disease. The Saint-Paul prison in Lyon, where Lacassagne interrogated Vacher for months, was replaced by a new facility in 2009.4
After the Vacher case, Lacassagne called for the government to set up an agency to collect data nationwide on unsolved crimes, for without Fourquet’s innovative data gathering and analysis, Vacher’s crime spree would have remained undetected. In 1923, police forces from twenty countries formed an organization in Vienna to share such information: the International Police Commission.5 It fell dormant during the Nazi years, but after the war, it was reestablished in Paris under a new name: Interpol. In 1989, the organization moved its headquarters to Lyon.
Lombroso continued his illustrious career long after the Vacher case. He maintained his theory of the born criminal, although over the years he added sociological factors that brought it closer to Lacassagne’s way of thinking. He tried to extend his theories beyond criminal science, pressing into the realm of art and literature, where he saw many representations of born criminals. In 1897, he had traveled to Leo Tolstoy’s village to air his theories for the literary master, who he assumed would embrace them.6 It did not go well. “He knitted his terrible eyebrows,” wrote Lombroso, and exclaimed, “All this is nonsense!” Lombroso’s theories continued to irritate Tolstoy, who in 1900 referred to them as “an absolute misery of thought, of concept and of sensibility.” Zola, too, had little patience for Lombroso’s theories, saying he gathered evidence “like all men with preconceived theses.”7 Lombroso had indeed been selective with his statistics—after his death, broad, rigorous studies proved him wrong.
When Lombroso died in 1909, Lacassagne had kind words for his intellectual opponent, calling him an “agitator of ideas, and exciter of wills.…8 [His] desire to solve new questions shone down on his students.” Lombroso willed his body to those students, who dissected their professor and preserved the remains in his criminal museum.
Bertillon recovered from his blunder in the Dreyfus case and carried on with his work, earning decorations in France and several other countries. He expanded his identification system to include the shape of the ear, which he said was unique to each individual, and the pattern of the iris. In that regard, he anticipated the science of biometrics by a century. In the early years of the twentieth century, most countries replaced Bertillonage with fingerprinting, which did not require finely tuned measuring devices and highly trained technicians. Bertillon saw the value of fingerprints and added them to his cards, but he continued to vigorously defend his old method. Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Rome, and Paris, among other big cities, attempted to use both systems in tandem. But the cost in materials and manpower was prohibitive, and fingerprinting quickly won out.<
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The limitations of Bertillon’s system became clear close to home, when a workman at the Louvre stole the Mona Lisa in 1911.9 The thief, Vincenzo Perugia, had a criminal record with Parisian police, who had recorded his fingerprints and Bertillon measurements. Unfortunately, they classified the files only by their Bertillon numbers, so when they found fingerprints on the empty picture frame, they had no way to connect them to any of their files. The painting remained missing for another two years, until Perugia was caught trying to sell it in Florence. If his records had been classified according to fingerprints, the Paris police would have identified him within half an hour. The case pointed out a serious flaw with the old system: While Bertillon measurements could be taken only from a body, fingerprints could also be lifted from the crime scene.
Bertillon pledged his brain to the Mutual Autopsy Society.10 When Bertillon died at the age of fifty-one, Manouvrier dissected the brain before the body was in the ground.
Émile Fourquet never got the recognition he deserved. Newspapers lauded him, and the people who had been unjustly accused thanked him profusely. But the legal bureaucracy never promoted him—perhaps because he crossed jurisdictional boundaries, or because his imagination made that of others seem pedestrian, or because of some other slight he may have committed. Whatever the reason, he spent the next several years shuttling from one provincial assignment to the next. Discouraged by his lack of advancement, he resigned from legal work in 1913. He wrote a book about the case, in which he confessed his disappointment. “The public and press … clamor for the magistrate who solved the Vacher case [to receive] the Legion of Honor and the promotion of his choice,” wrote Fourquet, referring to himself in the third person.11 “In the end he received neither.” In remembrance of his accomplishments, one of the hearing rooms in the courthouse in Belley was renamed in his honor and is labeled with a brass plaque.
Lacassagne’s fame grew with each passing year. He worked on many more high-profile cases, including that of Luigi Richetto, who with surgical precision decapitated elderly ladies; Henri Vidal, the notorious “Killer of Women,” who left four victims in his wake; and Bladier Reidal, a Lyon man who had sadistically slaughtered an acquaintance.1312 (Lacassagne determined Reidal was legally nonresponsible.) He continued his research into the culture of criminals and the factors that cause crime, including the observation that children of alcoholics tend to be born with psychological deformities—a phenomenon that later would become known as fetal alcohol syndrome.14 He was named an officer of the Legion of Honor and an associate of the Academy of Medicine, and he became president of many scientific and service organizations.
The only true misstep of his career occurred in the case of “the Ogress” Jeanne Weber, who in 1905 began suffocating the little children whom relatives and friends had left in her care.15 (The exact number was never determined.) Police first arrested her in 1906, after a fourth child she had been babysitting was found dead. Local physicians made a determination of death by suffocation and accused her of murder. In preparing for her trial, Henri Robert, the flamboyant attorney who had defended Bompard, insisted on a second medical opinion. The court assigned the case to Paul Brouardel and his bright young colleague Léon Thoinot. They determined that there was not enough evidence to prove murder, and the court set her free.
The following year, another of her wards was found dead. This time, Lacassagne signed on to her cause by issuing a report that asserted the facts were still not sufficient to prove murder. Soon after her release, she killed yet again. It was not until 1908, when she was caught in the act of choking yet another child to death, that the legal system finally caught up with her and sentenced her to an asylum.* “History always reminds us of our limitations whenever we are in danger of forgetting them,” Lacassagne said.16
Lacassagne retired in 1914, at the age of seventy, yet remained as active as many full-time physicians. During World War I, he cared for the wounded in Lyon’s main hospital, while his sons served as medics at the front. In 1921, he donated his personal library of more than twelve thousand books and documents, many of great historical value, to the Bibliothèque municipale in Lyon. His vigor and intellect unabated, at the age of seventy-four he wrote a book entitled La Verte Vieillesse (A Green Old Age), about the physiology of aging and about how to age well. “Old people,” he wrote, “like all living creatures, need to be active … they should love life and not be afraid of death.”17 He certainly embodied that philosophy, rising at five each morning to spend several hours studying and writing, then setting out on his daily constitutional, striding vigorously up the boulevard along the Rhône. Now and then he would stop to chat with former colleagues and friends, who were delighted to have a word with the master. “Take care not to burn yourself out,” he would counsel them.18 “Measure your efforts. Take every chance in life to live long and productively.”
On February 24, 1924, at the age of eighty, he left for his usual morning walk. He was approaching one of the bridges over the river when a car swerved around the corner and struck him. He languished for several months with a brain hemorrhage, finally succumbing on September 24. Obituaries praised his scientific accomplishments, his social contributions, his personal sagacity, and his remarkable spirit. “He lived his life like a sacred flame,” wrote a columnist.19 In his will he forbade ceremonies or speeches at his grave site. Instead, he directed that his body should be taken to the Institute of Legal Medicine, placed on the same table where he had taught for many years, and autopsied by his former colleagues and students. In that way, he wrote, one final time, “I hope to serve as both a lesson and example.”20
* On this case, too, Lacassagne’s intellectual doppelgänger Lombroso weighed in. After looking at a newspaper photo of Weber, he declared her to be a “hysterical epileptoid”—another of his many categories of born criminal.
Epilogue
The Violent Brain
Science and law have always had an uneasy alliance.
—National Research Council, 2009
The brain of Joseph Vacher—or at least the plaster cast of that brain—sits in a display case on the eighth floor of a building at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris.1 The place is a remnant of the glory days of anatomical museums, when medical students and members of the public would wander among the specimens and gaze with fascination and horror. The cast of the brain keeps company with those of about fifteen other “heroes of the guillotine,” as well as those of several great intellectuals—members of the Mutual Autopsy Society, such as Paul Broca—and “Tan,” the man whose inability to speak led to Broca’s study of aphasia.
No one visits those specimens anymore. The museum outlived its usefulness as a teaching tool and the brains sit in storage, largely unseen. A few years ago, the medical school officially closed the museum and planned to dispose of its contents. But the curators petitioned the government that the collection represented part of the nation’s historical patrimony, and the brain casts were preserved.
It is an odd thing to approach the cast of Vacher’s brain, knowing what its owner was capable of doing, and the controversy that surrounded its existence. It is gray, about the size of a Civil War cannonball, and unexpectedly heavy, being made of plaster and not human tissue. The circumvolutions seem thicker than one would expect, giving rise to unscientific thoughts about the primitive nature of the person who possessed it. A deep crevice separates the left and right hemispheres. It widens into a triangle at the back, through which one can see the top of the cerebellum. On that surface the master cast maker carved “VACHER: moulé à Lyon” (“VACHER: molded in Lyon”).
In the years since that mold was formed, forensic science has reached levels of sophistication undreamed of by Lacassagne and his contemporaries. The body surrenders clues as never before, as laboratory assays deliver precise information about blood type, electrolytes, status of the organs, traces of drugs, poisons, viruses, and bacteria. Crime scenes yield information that was completely invisible to Lacassagne
and his peers, even with their measuring devices and high-powered microscopes. Examiners use ultraviolet lights to luminesce blood and semen stains even after they have been scoured with bleach, and employ tapes and gels to capture invisible fingerprints. Mountains of information are shared, as agencies in many nations have pooled their resources in computerized databases. Fingerprint matches that formerly took days to ascertain as clerks sifted through their files in distant locations now can be accomplished in minutes with a computer. DNA analysis, introduced to crime labs in the mid-1980s, can link suspects to a victim or a crime scene with better than a billion-to-one probability.
All this technology and efficiency has created a fiction about forensic laboratories—a myth of wizardry and perfection exemplified by the popular CSI television series. These shows, watched by tens of millions of people worldwide, feature highly trained professionals working with state-of-the-art equipment, who almost always bring their suspects to justice. The episodes often pivot around a “Bingo!” or “Gotcha!” moment when a cutting-edge or even fictional technology cracks an unsolvable case. Legal professionals speak of a “CSI effect,” in which jurors, accustomed to seeing scientific perfection on TV, demand the same from real-world prosecutors, without which they tend to acquit.2 In response, both prosecutors and defense attorneys increasingly use graphic presentations to emphasize or exaggerate the certainty of their evidence.
The Killer of Little Shepherds Page 29
