The Killer of Little Shepherds

by Douglas Starr

  Police fell back on the investigative methods they had followed for decades, relying on denunciations, rumor, and innuendo, even when physical evidence pointed to the contrary.10 They would round up suspects on the merest suspicion and hold them in jail until, police hoped, one of them cracked.

  Assuming that the murder was a crime of passion, they arrested the victim’s most recent lover, a young man named Eugène Dorier. There was no physical evidence against Dorier and the young man had an alibi, but the police held him for twenty-nine days.

  Next, they arrested a young man named Louis François, who they felt had had a motive to harm the victim. Eugénie had an illegitimate baby and for a time claimed it belonged to François. Searching a trunk of Eugénie’s belongings, police found some letters from him in which he angrily denounced her allegation. A couple of witnesses thought they had glimpsed François near the crime scene, though they could not agree on the time. His clothing bore no traces of mud or blood, and friends of Eugénie said she had long since conceded to François that the baby was not his. Despite this, he was arrested and remained in jail for four months without trial.

  Meanwhile, someone had come forward with a bloody knife and a cap from the crime scene. The police made no attempt to find their owner.

  Their final suspect was Louis Lacour, a servant of the factory owner. Lacour had lost his watch a few days before the crime, and it turned up in a rivulet not far from the struggle. It mattered not to the police that Lacour had an alibi; arresting him would show that they were active and eager. In a clumsy attempt to build a case against Lacour, they visited the parents of François. The police insisted to the mother that the only way she could clear her son was to inculpate someone else in the killing.

  “Could it have been Lacour?” asked an officer.11 “Yes or no—do you accuse Lacour?”

  The mother said she could not. The police made it clear that until she did, her son would remain in jail. In time, she relented, and the police arrested Lacour.

  The police now had three suspects in jail, based on no evidence. Had they bothered to cast a wider dragnet, they might have talked to Victorine Gay, a fifty-five-year-old woman in a neighboring town who had been stalked by a stranger while guarding her sheep earlier in the day the killing occurred.12 He got close enough for her to see the scar on his cheek and his sagging right eye before she took flight. That same day, a Beaurepaire woman named Eydan had been tracked by a disfigured vagabond, but she was rescued by her husband before the stranger could attack. A third woman, Mélanie Pallas, saw the same vagabond creeping up on her from about thirty yards away. She kept walking and loudly conversed with an imaginary companion, convincing the stranger that she was not alone.

  All three women described the same stranger, and the last incident took place only a few hundred yards from where Eugénie Delhomme was killed. In fact, the very night of Eugénie’s killing, half of Beaurepaire was out looking for the mysterious stalker; the police never made the connection between those events and the murder. They already had their suspects. It was not until three thousand citizens signed a petition that the police granted François his freedom.13 They released the other young men, as well. Still, with the murder unresolved, suspicion in the small town remained high, making life so difficult for the young men that they all had to leave. Lacour found work in the small city of Vienne, in the Rhône Valley, about halfway between Beaurepaire and Lyon. François and Eugène enlisted in the army for service in Algeria.

  Eugénie Delhomme’s elderly father had walked eighteen miles from the village of Charmes to attend his daughter’s funeral.14 Along the way, he collected flowers and lovingly wove them into a bouquet. During the funeral, attended by all the factory workers, he placed the bouquet over the crude wooden cross that stood as Eugénie’s marker. Then he threw himself into the open grave and wailed. He stayed at the cemetery, crying piteously, for days. He became a ghostly presence in the town, calling out for his daughter, handing out rosaries, and asking strangers to pray for her. Eventually, his family confined him to an asylum, where, after a few months, he died.

  This, the first murder Joseph Vacher had committed, surprised even him. He remembered slogging up the trail and coming upon a young woman. Something about the moment—a bump, a flash—ignited a strange feeling inside him.

  “A kind of fever came over me … of revulsion and craziness,” he would say later.15 “I tried to contain myself, but the rage made me stronger. I let go of everything and threw myself at my victim.”

  After he dragged the body behind a hedge, he washed himself in a rivulet and kept walking. Soon he was in another département, where no one had heard about the crime.

  And so began “this terrible, errant, and mysterious life, not knowing where I was going,” he would say.16 “Ever after that, to the four corners of France, I have been shaking out this bag of burdensome abominations that I inherited at Dole.”

  Four

  The Institute of Legal Medicine1

  The Institute of Legal Medicine in Lyon occupied two floors of a building across the Rhône River from the Hôtel Dieu Hospital and up the street from the university’s medical faculty. There, amid the graceful dignity of the university’s domed buildings, Alexandre Lacassagne devoted his career to bringing the study of forensics into the modern era. It would be a new kind of work, based on practical training, extensive research, and the translation of that research into standardized procedures. It did not carry the glory of Pasteur’s discoveries or the history-changing paradigms of Darwin’s. Perhaps for those reasons, his name is mostly forgotten. But in terms of human benefits—villains brought to justice, innocent people freed, the overall civilizing effect on society—the impact of Lacassagne’s work was immense.

  The science of forensics was a recent development compared with the millennium-old history of medicine.2 Scholars allude to early roots of forensics in Roman and Greek times and the Middle Ages, but those references are more rhetorical than real. Many cite a thirteenth-century Chinese book entitled Hsi-yuan lu (Instructions to Coroners) as the first text on how to investigate cases of suspicious death. The document advised investigators to mark carefully the wounds that appeared on the body, taking note of those that appeared above vital organs and comparing their shapes with any weapons found at the scene. But it also gave information more folkloric than true—for example, that all male accidental drowning victims floated facedown and all female victims floated faceup. In 1533, the Holy Roman emperor, Charles V of Germany, enacted a penal code, the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, requiring a “serious examination and, if necessary, opening of the body” in cases of violent death. The document, while creating a legal foundation for forensic science, was very much a product of its age. Rather than sanctioning whole-body autopsies (a practice frowned upon by the Church), it advised coroners simply to widen the wounds to determine their angle and depth. It also prescribed penalties for witchcraft and laid out guidelines for obtaining confessions through torture.

  As the Church loosened its prohibition of autopsy, a better understanding of human anatomy emerged. Doctors learned that the body did not consist of four humors sloshing to and fro in a delicate balance, but of organs, such as lungs and a heart that pumped blood. The effects of violence on that anatomy also became clear. In 1575, Ambroise Paré, a barber-surgeon and battlefield physician who became surgeon to four kings, wrote the first of his oeuvres (works), which instructed investigators about wounds, fractures, and damage to internal organs. Later, Paolo Zacchia of Rome, physician to two Popes, wrote medical texts about detecting signs of poisoning, abortion, and violent death. German physicians developed the “hydrostatic test” to use in cases of suspected infanticide. They removed the lungs and put them in water. If the organs floated, it meant the infant had been born live and taken its first breaths; if not, the baby had been stillborn.

  Still, these works bore the limitations of their times. Most authors continued to give credence to sorcery and provided medical gui
delines on the use of torture. Well into the eighteenth century, physicians believed that a woman could be impregnated by the devil, and that severe alcoholics sometimes died from spontaneous combustion. Many believed that if a murderer was brought into the presence of his victim, the wounds of the corpse would “bleed afresh.”

  It was not until the nineteenth century that a related series of social and scientific developments made modern legal medicine possible. After the French Revolution, control of the nation’s hospitals passed from the Church to the state and the medical profession, and many more bodies became available for autopsy. (Many “heroes of the guillotine” were dissected.) Torture was on the wane throughout the modern world, which forced prosecutors to turn to other methods, such as analyzing evidence, to solve crimes. Chemistry was rapidly maturing as a science. It became possible to use laboratory tests to identify poisons such as arsenic, which—odorless and tasteless and producing cholera-like symptoms—previously had been undetectable.* The science of bacteriology, pioneered by Pasteur and Robert Koch, helped medical examiners understand the process of putrefaction and the changes that take place in a corpse over time. The medical autopsy was becoming routine, along with the microscopic examination of tissues and the spectroscopic analysis of blood. Many of the great universities of Europe had established chairs in legal medicine, including Edinburgh, Berlin, Kraków, Prague, Vienna, and Moscow.

  Yet, as with any new science, the state of the art outpaced its practice. Knowledge and expertise spread slowly in that era. Justice informed by misconstrued forensic evidence produced irregular, even monstrous, results.

  That was the case in the notorious prosecution of Pauline Druaux in the small town of Malaunay, northeast of Paris, in 1887.3 On Easter morning, passersby heard a woman screaming for help out the window of her apartment. Rushing inside, they found Pauline Druaux standing over the bodies of her husband and brother-in-law. Madame Druaux seemed woozy and flushed, as though she had been drinking. Two local doctors examined the bodies. They saw no external markings or wounds, but they did observe rose-colored blotches on the skin, some bloody foam around the lips, and a reddish tint to the urine that had seeped from the bodies. In their autopsy report, the doctors referred vaguely to some bleeding in the victims’ stomachs, bleeding and congestion of the lungs, and bloody lesions in the intestines. The blood seemed exceptionally red. The doctors also noticed tiny particles of a local beetle species in the cadavers’ fecal matter and vomit. This, they felt, gave them the clue that they needed. They had heard stories that one could produce a poison from beetle bodies, known as “Spanish fly.” They had never seen this poison before nor isolated it from the victims’ stomachs or tissues. But based on the lesions in the digestive tract, the traces of foreign matter in their excretions, and the fact that Pauline had caught her husband in bed with another woman, they turned in a report of death by poisoning. After a short trial, she was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  That would have been the end of the case, but within a year another couple had moved into the apartment and had died. Sometime after that, another young couple moved in and became gravely ill with symptoms that included light-headedness and vomiting, but they survived. Their cat was found dead in the basement.

  As soon as Druaux’s attorney heard of these events, he petitioned for a new trial. Eventually, the court consented to his demand and assigned a panel of three medical experts to review the case, including Paul Brouardel. Brouardel and his colleagues noted the presence of a lime kiln next door to the Druaux apartment and the fact that under certain weather conditions, the fumes from the stack inundated the residence. On reviewing the autopsy report, Brouardel found that most of the observations were consistent with exposure to carbon monoxide—a relatively frequent occurrence at the time, given the era’s improper ventilation. The colorless, odorless gas, emitted by combustion, binds with the hemoglobin in the blood more readily than oxygen. The victim suffocates because the carbon monoxide displaces the oxygen. Hemoglobin that combines with carbon monoxide instead of oxygen turns an especially bright red—hence the ruby color of the patients’ blood and the red splotches on the skin. Internal organs become congested and bloody. The gas deprives the brain of oxygen, which makes the victim feel woozy and light-headed, as if drunk.

  What amazed Brouardel was that even though doctors clearly described the signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, “not for a minute” did they imagine the cause. “The thing that is most extraordinary is that [Madame Druaux] was condemned to a life sentence of hard labor even though the experts could not say what poison she used.” Based on the new forensic analysis, Druaux was released after serving nine years in prison and received an indemnity of forty thousand francs. There was a flurry of articles after her release, some of which recommended medical review panels, but the furor faded and nothing was done.

  In another case, a woman named Adèle Bernard was imprisoned for having an abortion.4 After three months in jail, she gave birth to a child. The court released her.

  Lacassagne routinely saw that kind of incompetence in the course of his own consultations. The reason, he felt, was not that the state of science was primitive—as he showed in the Gouffé case, it could be strikingly sophisticated—but that the awareness of that science was not widespread. Outside the great centers of learning, medical jurisprudence was a rough practice, carried out hastily by inept practitioners. The problem was not limited to France: Forensic science in England was years behind that on the Continent, in part because England’s coroners, originally designated to protect the financial interests of the Crown, had only rudimentary medical training. The United States had no licensing laws or training at all for its coroners, who often were awarded their positions by the local political machine.5 In return, a coroner would produce findings that agreed with those of the police, refer next of kin to well-connected undertakers, and turn a blind eye to crimes committed by the privileged.*

  Lacassagne was appalled by the typically “scandalously insufficient” autopsy report—a few scribbled lines recorded hours or even days after the dissection.6 Despite the requirement to perform an autopsy when a body was found in their district, many doctors avoided responding. The work paid poorly and was objectionable and potentially dangerous—a doctor who pricked his bare finger risked coming down with fatal septicemia. Those who agreed to perform autopsies tended to be novices or rural physicians with limited experience in criminal matters. “These are doctors who during their studies have never seen a hanged person, a strangled person, [or a] little victim of child molestation,” wrote Lacassagne. “In some of these cases, the medical expert is nothing more than the apprentice or a beginner.” He was so disenchanted with rural practitioners that he suggested the justice system bypass them entirely and equip a fleet of horse-drawn carriages with newly invented refrigeration units to convey bodies directly to major hospitals and universities.

  It was easy to criticize the country doctor, especially if one had not walked in his shoes. Dr. Paul Hervé, a rural practitioner, wrote a passionate defense of himself and his colleagues, explaining that in a given week he might have to deliver a baby, patch up a foot that had been punctured with a pitchfork, or even treat a farmer’s animals for infections. And then a knock on the door would come in the middle of the night—a garde-champêtre, or rural constable, summoning him to do an autopsy on a mangled body. (In this regard, Hervé echoed Dr. Coutagne’s complaints about the rigors of rural autopsy.) With no refrigeration to delay putrefaction, he would have to respond immediately to the call. He remembered one case on a dark, rainy late-December day, only a few hours before nightfall. Forced by circumstances, he and the officer fashioned a table from a door and two sawhorses and set it up in the brightest place they could find—in the middle of a field. The policeman lit lanterns in the darkening gloom, but their glow changed the look of things, distorting appearances and colors. Hervé raced through the dissection, careful to avoid wounding himself. “The more that I hu
rried, the more my hands and forearms became soaked with blood and unnamable liquids,” he wrote.7 From time to time, he would rinse his hands in a bucket, scribble his observations on a page, and then pick up his scalpel again. “I could barely see [when] I made my last cut.”

  Fearing his haste might have caused a misjudgment, he wrapped several of the organs in gauze, stuffed them in his briefcase, and took the “macabre package” back home; he would examine it the next day in his office. He felt he had every right to complain:

  Oh you knowledgeable masters who operate in the great cities … you ignore these problems!

  You have at your disposition perfectly equipped laboratories; you have morgues of the latest models—maybe even refrigerators to conserve pathological samples that you can study and review. But we, the poor disinherited, you ask us to act quickly to see a body once and come to our conclusions. What responsibility!

  A doctor is not God, he is a man who is fallible. And as it happens in science, despite his attention and goodwill, he can make mistakes.

  When Lacassagne assumed his position in 1881, forensic education was theoretical and lecture-based—not a good fit for Lacassagne’s warm, interactive personality. He felt that what students really needed was practical experience. So in addition to the conventional lectures on anatomy, law, and the physiology of wounds, he added a significant practical component, exposing his students to all sides of the criminal equation, from visiting convicts in Saint-Paul prison across town to assisting medical experts in preparing their court testimony.