Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  This is a classic example of “linkage blindness,” which remains to this day one of the greatest challenges to serial-murder investigations: an inability by a police agency to recognize links from multiple cases to a single perpetrator. It’s been an issue in the currently unsolved Long Island Serial Killer (LISK) case. Dumollard was getting away with his serial attacks in the 1860s as easily as Ted Bundy got away with his in the 1970s when police failed to connect him with a series of multi-jurisdictional murders.

  The Capture of the “French Wolf”

  Dumollard so far had been both careful and lucky, but when he targeted Marie Pichon in May 1861 he carelessly brought her to the train station at Montluel, into the police jurisdiction where he lived. After arriving in the evening at the small railway station in Montluel, where he was seen by witnesses who recognized him, Dumollard proceeded to lead Marie Pichon away on foot toward what he told her was her new place of employment.

  Pichon would later recount to police what happened next:

  Placing my trunk upon his shoulder he desired me to follow, saying we had now a walk of an hour and a half, but that, by taking cross paths, we should quickly reach our destination. I carried, in one hand, a little box: in the other, my basket and umbrella. We crossed the railway and walked for some distance along the parallel road, when the man turned suddenly to the left and led me down a steep descent, skirted on both sides by thick bushes. Presently he faced round, saying that my trunk fatigued him, that he would conceal it in a thicket and come back for it with a carriage on the morrow. We then abandoned the path altogether, crossed several fields, and came to some bushes, in which he hid the trunk, saying we should presently see the chateau. After this, we traversed other fields, twice crossing over places that looked like dried-up water-courses, and, finally, through very difficult ways, rather scrambling than walking, arrived at the summit of a little hill.

  I must mention something that had attracted my attention. Throughout the walk my guide seemed remarkably attentive, constantly cautioning me to mind my steps, and assisting me carefully over every obstacle. Immediately after crossing the hill I spoke of, his movements began to give me uneasiness. In passing some vines he tried to pull up a large stake. It, however, resisted his efforts, and, as I was following close on his heels, he did not persevere. A little farther, he stooped down and seemed to be endeavoring to pick up one of the large stones that lay about. Though now seriously alarmed, I asked, with all the indifference I could command, what he was looking for? He made an unintelligible reply, and presently repeated the maneuver. Again I inquired what he was looking for,—Had he lost anything?

  “Nothing, nothing,” he replied; “it was only a plant I meant to pick for my garden.” Other singular movements kept me in a state of feverish alarm. I observed that he several times lagged behind, and, whenever he did so, moved his hands about under his blouse as though in search of a weapon. I was frozen with terror. Run away I durst not, for I felt he would pursue me; but I constantly urged him to lead the way, assuring him I would follow.

  In this way we reached the top of another small hill, on which stood a half-built cottage. There was a cabbage-garden, and a good wheel road. My very fear now gave me the necessary courage. I resolved to go no farther, and at once said, “I see you have led me wrong. I shall stop here.” Hardly had the words left my mouth, when he turned sharply round, stretched his arms above my head, and let fall a cord with a running noose. We were at this moment almost in contact. Instinctively, I let fall everything I carried, and with both hands seized the man’s two arms, pushing him from me with all my strength. This movement saved me. The cord, which was already round my head, only caught and pulled off my cap. I shrieked out, “My God! My God! I am lost!”

  I was too much agitated to observe why the assassin did not repeat his attack. All I recollect is, that the cord was still in his hand. I caught up my box and umbrella, and flew down the hill. In crossing a little ditch, I fell and bruised myself severely, losing my umbrella. Fear, however, gave me strength. I heard the heavy steps of the murderer in pursuit, and was on my legs again in an instant, running for life. At that moment, the moon rose above the trees on my left, and I saw the glimmer of a white house on the plain. Toward this I flew, crossing the railway, and falling repeatedly in my headlong course. Soon I saw lights. It was Balan. I stopped at the first house. A man ran out, and I was saved.

  This time when the incident and description of the assailant with his deformed lip were reported to the police, the news quickly made its way into the towns of Montluel and Dagneux. Dumollard “the Wolf” had struck too close to home. Within the day village gossips and informants brought to the police’s attention the strange, unfriendly couple that resided in Dagneux and the husband with his eccentric nocturnal habits and the distinctive deformity on his lip.

  Police descended upon Dumollard’s house and found what we recognize today as a serial killer’s typical stash of trophies: articles that obviously did not belong to Dumollard’s peasant wife, Marianne. There were items of a style typically worn by servant girls, whose employers demanded an “upscale” look: tailored silken dresses, linen, pieces of lace, ribbons, gowns, handkerchiefs, shoes, cheap costume jewelry. Some bore traces of blood; others had been roughly washed and wrung out. Police inventoried an extraordinary 1,250 items. A gendarme commented, “The man must have a charnel somewhere.”

  Both Martin Dumollard and his wife, Marianne, were taken into custody, as it was obvious she was aware of the stash of property. Now witnesses in Montluel came forward to report that Dumollard had been seen back in December 1858 arriving at the train station in the company of another young woman. Her baggage had been checked at the station but had never been retrieved.

  Dumollard’s wife, Marianne, confessed that on the night her husband was seen with the missing woman at the station, he “came home very late, bringing a silver watch and some blood-stained clothes. He gave me the latter to wash, only saying, in his short way, ‘I have killed a girl in Montmain woods, and I am going back to bury her.’ He took his pickax and went out. The next day he wanted to claim the girl’s luggage, but I dissuaded him from doing so.”

  The Investigation and Trial of the Dumollards

  The Montmain woods were located just beyond the northern limit of Dagneux, and Dumollard’s house. The Dumollards were now brought to the location. Marianne was unable to point out the burial site and Martin refused to say anything. Eventually the search party detected an anomaly in the ground and began to dig there. They uncovered the skeletal remains of a female with a severe skull fracture. She was never identified.

  The next day, the search moved to a communal wood, slightly north. This time Martin was more cooperative. He claimed that he was in the employ of two mysterious men who paid him to lure women from Lyon and deliver them into their hands in the countryside. They would murder the women, he said, and as a reward give him the victims’ belongings. He pointed out a site in the woods where police then uncovered a well-preserved body of a female lying on her back, her left hand on her chest and a clump of soil clutched in her other hand, which seemed to indicate that she had been buried alive and attempted to dig herself free but suffocated in the earth.

  Dumollard stated that his two mysterious patrons had also killed Marie Baday, whose body had been found at Pizay back in 1855, and that they also on separate occasions threw the corpses of three women off a bridge into the Rhône River. His wife, he said, was aware of the murders and burials and would wash the blood from the clothing, which she either wore herself or sold at markets.

  In the end, police linked Dumollard with three corpses, one of which was never successfully identified, and to the attempted murder of seven women, including Marie Pichon. After his statement that his employers threw three women into the Rhône River, he was also suspected in the deaths of several women pulled from the river in the early 1850s, but the cases were too old to be conclusively link
ed to him.

  Husband and wife were both put on trial in January 1862.

  Marianne took the stand and testified that on two occasions her husband had brought clothing belonging to girls he said he had killed. She stated that she noticed some were stained with blood but she did not mention it to him. She described their relationship as being on “indifferent terms,” with him frequently staying away nights or returning home late. Typical of female accomplices of male serial killers, she claimed that she remained with him and did not report his crimes because she was afraid of him.

  The prosecution displayed items believed to have been taken from victims. There were 70 handkerchiefs, 57 pairs of stockings, 28 scarves, 38 caps, 10 corsets, 9 gowns and a multitude of other miscellaneous items. Some of the items were apparently stained with blood. (A definitive test to distinguish bloodstains from similar stains like those caused by rust, paint, plant spores or chewing tobacco was developed that year by Dutch scientist J. Izaak Van Deen, but not in time to be available for use in the Dumollard case.) Witnesses in court identified some of the items belonging to family members murdered by Dumollard.

  At one point the judge asked Dumollard, “Do you recollect this dress?”

  “Oh, perfectly.”

  “And you, Marianne Dumollard?”

  “Of course. I have worn it.”

  “Have you not also worn a cap with marks of blood?”

  “Certainly not. I would have washed it,” she replied.

  Throughout his trial, Martin Dumollard appeared almost uninterested, calmly munching on sandwiches during breaks and insisting that his two mysterious partners had committed all the murders. Of Marie Pichon, Dumollard claimed that he was deliberately trying to scare her off to “save her” from his homicidal confederates, who were waiting for him to deliver her. He denied attempting to throw a cord around her neck and claimed that he only threw his arms around her neck to frighten her.

  At the end of the four-day trial the jury returned a guilty verdict. Martin was sentenced to death while his wife was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. A guillotine was set up in the public square in Montluel and after being allowed a last meal with his wife, Dumollard went calmly to his death, insisting to the end that it was his employers who had murdered all the victims. He was executed on March 8, 1862. His head was delivered to the medical faculty in Lyon, where, after being studied for phrenological anomalies, the skin was peeled off the skull, cured and remounted like a mannequin head; it can be viewed today in its glass cabinet in the Museum of Medical Sciences and Health in Rillieux la Pape.21

  The Psychopathology of Dumollard: Simple Robbery or Paraphilic Sex Crimes?

  The Dumollard case was extraordinary in its time, and it was covered by newspapers as far away as the United States and Australia. Although Dumollard had been nicknamed the “French Wolf” in some of the press reports, his murders were not characterized by the frenzied “werewolf” mutilation and evisceration of victims.

  The nonchalant serial murder by robbers and bandits was still a familiar crime in that epoch, and Dumollard’s collection of articles of female clothing and his wife’s collaboration in disposing of some of the belongings suggested to many that Dumollard’s primary motive was material gain, and that if any sexual assaults took place, they were secondary, opportunistic acts rather than a primary motivator. After all, he had already been convicted twice for theft, and it was impossible to be sure whether the victims had been raped.22

  None of that means that Dumollard was not pathologically driven by sexual fantasies and impulses. His sexual fantasy might have been to stalk women and take control of them by stripping them naked. It is not uncommon for a sex offender to be unable to ejaculate or even achieve an erection during the commission of his crime. Often sexual offenders get satisfaction only after they leave the crime scene and retreat with souvenirs to the privacy and security of their homes. Once there, they relive what they have just done, compulsively masturbating, sometimes with items taken from the victims—trophies or “totems,” sometimes even body parts—which act to bridge their fantasy to the reality of what they have perpetrated. (Today, photos or videos made by the serial killer of the victim often are used as masturbatory totems.)

  Dumollard’s obsessive targeting, his days-long stalking of victims like Marie Cart, to whom he would patiently return if he failed to lure them away on the first try, suggests a pathological focus and energy far exceeding the profit obtained by selling a servant girl’s clothing and cheap jewelry. If his murders were strictly about material gain, there were many easier, less risky, less time- and energy-consuming means. Dumollard was clearly driven by the pathological pleasure derived from trolling for victims and taking control of them. The victims’ belongings were trophies.

  DUMOLLARD VERSUS ALBERT DESALVO, THE “BOSTON STRANGLER”

  Dumollard might even have had issues with his peasant-shepherd class, forced upon him by his father’s execution, versus the servant girls’ marginally higher status. His case has some echoes a hundred years later in the case of Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler,” who raped and murdered thirteen women in the early 1960s. Canadian anthropologist and serial-murder expert Elliott Leyton pointed out that DeSalvo made numerous statements about his low status.23 DeSalvo felt that he had “married up” in class—his wife, Irmgard, came from a respectable middle-class family, as did his mother, who “married down” with Albert’s abusive, low-class father. Similarly, Dumollard’s parents came from the landowning middle class in Austria-Hungary before being impoverished by his father’s revolutionary activities and execution.

  DeSalvo first came to police attention not as a serial killer but in the “Measuring Man” incidents, a series of nonviolent, almost comical sexual crimes. He would pose as a talent scout for a modeling agency and ask women for permission to measure them. While wrapping a measuring tape around their bust and hips, he would “accidentally” touch and fondle them. Many women did not even notice DeSalvo’s touch; complaints started to be made to police by angry women only when they realized that no photographer was coming to shoot their pictures.

  When he was arrested as the Measuring Man, DeSalvo told police:

  I been a poor boy all my life, I come from a bad home, you know all that, why should I kid you? Look, I don’t know anything about modeling or cameras . . . I’m not educated and these girls was all college graduates, understand me? I made fools of them . . . I made them do what I wanted and accept me and listen to me.

  Later, after he was charged in the rape-murders of twelve elderly women and one college student, DeSalvo commented on his previous Measuring Man crimes:

  Mostly, I got a big kick out of those girls around Harvard. I’m not good-looking, I’m not educated, but I was able to put something over on high-class people. I know that they look down on people who come from my background. They think they are better than me. They was all college kids and I never had anything in my life but I outsmarted them. I was supposed to feel that they was better than me because they was college people . . . when I told them they could be models that was like saying the same thing: you are better than me, you are better than anybody, you can be a model . . . Anybody with any sense could’ve found out. They never asked me for proof.

  They was times when I was doing that Measuring Man thing that I hated them girls for being so stupid and I wanted to do something to them . . . something that would make them think, even for a little while . . . that would let them know that I was as good as they was, maybe better and smarter.

  Dumollard too may have gotten psychosexual pleasure from fooling and taking control of “uppity,” well-dressed, urban servant girls who looked down their noses at a peasant with a deformed lip and pointy cone head.

  THE SERVANT GIRL FETISH

  Dumollard’s “hang-up” dovetailed with society’s new fear and mistrust of urban modernity and female mobility. As industrialization cre
ated inventory-based retail stores and accounting and clerical work that enriched the middle classes, young, single women began to leave their country homes seeking jobs other than that of a schoolteacher, which was the only socially acceptable profession for “decent” unmarried women. Young women took up residence in cities away from the supervision of their families. Some found work in factories, and eventually stores and offices, but most young, single women were employed as servants in affluent upper- and middle-class households in need of cheap domestic help.

  The potential sexual behavior of young, independent women unsupervised in the big city became known as the “girl problem.”24 For ages, the only women who went about in public spaces unsupervised were destitute vagrants and prostitutes. Now young, unmarried women were everywhere to be seen in public. Boardinghouses for single workingwomen, where they were strictly chaperoned and monitored, became a common feature of nineteenth-century cities. In the way that airline hostesses and nurses until very recently were endowed with a mythical promiscuity, all young, single, independent workingwomen were regarded as “sexually suspect”—especially servant girls, who became the focus of nineteenth-century pornography such as My Secret Life by “Walter,” so explicit that it couldn’t be published in its entirety in the US until 1966 or in Britain until 1995.25 (see chapter ten for more on the nature of pornography in the mid-Victorian era.)

  Moreover, servant girls were required by most of their affluent employers to dress presentably, to be finely perfumed and adorned. The fetishistic dimensions of servant-girl clothing, from uniforms to ordinary upscale dresses, were enormously attractive to fetishist paraphilics. (The “sexy French maid” outfit is still popular in sex-store lingerie and costume sections and trotted out with fishnets for giggles at Halloween parties.) There were so many servant girls out there that Dumollard was trolling for them effortlessly on just one bridge in downtown Lyon. They were even easier to lure away than a prostitute; after all, what prostitute would leave with a country bumpkin like Dumollard to turn a trick twelve miles away in a dark forest? (Or, at least, without a substantial show of cash up front?) But a servant girl—she was the perfect Little Red Riding Hood, ready to follow what she thought was a fellow-servant emissary from a wealthy potential employer.