The Killer of Little Shepherds

by Douglas Starr

  Given the notion of a primitive tendency, the connection between vagabonds and crime seemed unavoidable, especially since unemployment and the sensational coverage of crime rose in tandem. Lacassagne himself, usually given to more measured assessments, described vagabonds as simple, impulsive beings who responded to two primitive stimuli: “hunger and sexual desire.”20 That, he explained, was why theft and rape topped the list of vagabond-related crimes. Ignoring the possible complicating factors, he noted that any time a region experienced an influx of vagabonds, serious crime in that area rose, as well. So pervasive was the fear that, in 1885, France had passed a law prescribing life sentences for vagabonds and habitual criminals, many of whom went to the penal colony of Devil’s Island off the coast of Guyana.21 Police arrested beggars by the thousands, detaining forty thousand for vagrancy in 1900 alone.22 Those who did not go to jail or to the colonies received one-way train tickets from cities back to the countryside.

  At noontime on Easter Day, 1895, Antoinette-Augustine Marchand, a twenty-six-year-old fruit vendor and mother of four, was walking home from the farmers’ market a few miles south of Lyon. She had had a profitable morning selling oranges, and her earnings made a bulge in her right pocket. As she pushed her handcart up a path near the Rhône, she noticed a vagabond dozing by the roadside. Marchand had heard rumors about a maniac on the loose, and she warily eyed the sleeping figure as she passed by. She was just about to step over some railroad tracks when she felt herself grabbed from behind. Marchand immediately threw herself up against a stone wall to protect her right pocket, but she quickly realized her assailant had another purpose.

  “I felt his knee lifting my undergarment all the way up to my stomach,” she said.23 “He had opened his trousers. He held me with his right hand around me and with his left he was touching my sexual parts. He told me to hold still.”

  She could smell the foul odor from Vacher’s suppurating ear, see every detail of his scar and grimace. He held her so tightly that her right arm went numb. A knife blade glinted near her throat. She shrieked and thrashed wildly. She stabbed her fingernails into his eyes, which briefly loosened his grip. When he bobbled the knife, she wrenched herself away with a violent twist, dashed to the other side of the tracks, and started hurling rocks at his face. She kept him at bay until two men arrived and Vacher ran off. “I didn’t stop quaking for eight hours,” she said.

  “I lodged a complaint [with the mayor’s office],” said Marchand, “but nothing ever came of it.”

  Six

  Identity

  In all of France there could not have been two men more different than Joseph Vacher and Alexandre Lacassagne. Vacher was wild, rootless, primitive, ruled by his impulses and sexual appetite. Lacassagne personified the bourgeois qualities of order, education, and dignity; he was regular in his habits, a voluminous reader, dedicated to service, restrained, and self-deferential. They were the opposite ends of the spectrum of human nature, as exemplified by a popular book at the time, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  Lacassagne was rich in family and personal relationships, but of the more than twelve thousand volumes of books and papers he left behind, almost none was of a personal nature. He defined himself by his work as a scientist and wrote about it with humility and reserve. Still, one can find hints of the man’s character and life between the lines of his scientific papers, in the compassionate and heartfelt obituaries he wrote about deceased colleagues, and in the testimonials given by colleagues and former students. In 1901, to celebrate Lacassagne’s induction into the Legion of Honor, more than seventy colleagues and former students gathered at the Maderni Restaurant in Lyon, where in long, formal toasts, one after another praised their “dear master” for his scientific accomplishments, his work ethic, his humility and independence, his teaching and guidance. They saw him as the father figure to an intellectual family.

  Lacassagne’s home life was generally a contented one, marked by hard work and the pleasures of a bourgeois intellectual existence. In 1882, two years after he moved to Lyon, he married Magdeleine Rollet, the daughter of a prominent professor of hygiene. She bore two sons and a daughter: Antoine, Jean, and Jeanne. The sons became internationally known medical researchers; Antoine, a pioneering oncologist, treated Sigmund Freud’s terminal throat cancer. The Lacassagnes lived in an apartment in Lyon and moved twice over the years into increasingly upscale neighborhoods. They spent summers in the family cottage northwest of the city, on the banks of the Loire River. Constructed of traditional plaster and stone, with a red tile roof, it stood on a knoll surrounded by ancient beech, apple, and cherry trees. Outside was a quaint little well with a decorative crank and a bell to summon their guests to dinner. The door knocker gave visitors a preview of Lacassagne’s macabre sense of humor: a bronze casting of the left hand of a female criminal.1 It was not the only such artifact. At their apartment in Lyon, he kept a set of dinnerware on which he had reproduced criminals’ tattoos. On special occasions, a guest might be just about finishing his boeuf bourguignon, only to find DEATH TO THE AUTHORITIES inscribed underneath.2

  Inside the country house, books, papers, and photographs covered the walls and every flat surface.3 Scientific papers competed for shelf space with poetry, philosophy, literature, and the children’s drawings. There were albums stuffed with sepia-colored photos from family vacations and souvenir postcards of the Paris Exposition. In the hallway upstairs hung two formal portraits of the family dogs, Tibia and Péroné (in English, Tibia and Fibula), named for the two bones of the lower leg, perhaps because of their tendency to get underfoot. Also on the second floor was a room called the “gallery”—a long, narrow, high-ceilinged room with a wall of windows overlooking the river and three walls covered with photographs. There were numerous snapshots of Lacassagne over the years, increasingly bald-pated and portly, but always with a smile under his walrus mustache. One photo shows him and his family picnicking by the river; others show them sitting in a rowboat and standing with houseguests by the exterior rear wall. There was a photo of playful Uncle Louis, who, after visiting the Egyptian pavilion at the World Exposition, had dressed up as an Arabian sheikh smoking a water pipe. “I smoke only Nile brand” read the handwritten caption. There was a graph drawn by Dr. Lacassagne to chart Antoine’s physical and intellectual progress: a line curving upward to show the child’s growth from 85 centimeters to 180 centimeters, and his academic development from toddlerhood to his baccalaureate degree. There were newspaper caricatures of Lacassagne performing his famous autopsy of Gouffé. Another photo taken at a conference, with Lacassagne standing amid a cluster of bearded colleagues wearing straw hats and bowlers, features a man in the back row gaily pointing with his umbrella to a sign reading SECTION D’ANTHROPOLOGIE. The one sobering note in the collection of happy artifacts was a large black-framed photo of his wife, Magdeleine, looking thoughtful and serious in a high-buttoned black jacket. A brass plaque on the frame indicated her lifespan: 1856-1893. Her premature death was one of the few heartbreaks of Alexandre Lacassagne’s life.

  If identity and one’s place in society was of paramount importance in the Belle Époque and Victorian eras, it was the defining issue in criminal science, as well—the keystone for the young practice of forensics and an ongoing theme at Lacassagne’s institute. Its importance was obvious: Without clearly establishing the identities of the victim and the perpetrator, it was impossible to make a case for the prosecution, or to avoid wild miscarriages of justice.

  Never was that principle more vividly illustrated than in the notorious Tisza-Eslar affair, solved by Lacassagne’s counterpart in Vienna, Professor Eduard von Hofmann.4 The affair began on April 1, 1882, in the village of Tisza-Eslar in Austria-Hungary, when a fourteen-year-old housemaid named Esther Solymossy disappeared. After a month of searching yielded no results, suspicions began to focus on the village’s Jewish community. Guided by rumor and prejudice, the regional magistrate decided that the town’s Jews must have killed Esther, drainin
g her blood to make unleavened bread for the Passover celebration.* He and his men produced evidence for his theory by confining and torturing several of the town’s children until one of them, the feebleminded son of the rabbi’s assistant, implicated his father and at least a dozen other Jewish citizens.

  A month later, a body was found floating in a river, bearing Esther’s clothes but no visible wounds. If this body turned out to be Esther’s it would prove that she had died far from the village and would thus exonerate the Jews. Hoping that would not be the case, the magistrate brought in two local physicians to identify the body. The doctors, who had never conducted a criminal autopsy, may well have been influenced by the magistrate’s opinion, for they concluded that the cadaver in the river could not possibly be that of the fourteen-year-old girl. After looking over the corpse’s “general development,” they concluded the growth patterns of various bones, including the complete fusion of the frontal bones of the head, could belong only to an eighteen- to twenty-year-old. They also noted that the sexual organs of the corpse were so swollen that she must have had frequent sexual intercourse—highly unlikely for a fourteen-year-old child. The skin of the corpse’s hands and feet, unlike that of Esther, who spent her life doing hard manual labor, was tender and white.

  News of the murder caused riots in Budapest and other centers with Jewish populations. Talk of pogroms was filling the air. Meanwhile, a liberal member of Parliament asked two young forensic experts at the University of Budapest to exhume and examine the body and send their report to Professor von Hofmann. The professor had written three textbooks on legal medicine and had won international renown after the disastrous fire at the Vienna Ring Theater in 1881, when he sorted out the jumble of bones and teeth to identify the remains of more than three hundred victims.

  Von Hofmann spent several weeks comparing the new report on the corpse with the original autopsy and doing his own laboratory work. He concluded that the autopsy provided by the local physicians was so rife with errors as to be useless. Among their many mistakes, von Hofmann noted, was their assertion that the fusion of skull bones did not occur until the victim’s late teens. In reality, such fusion would have taken place by age two. Von Hofmann attributed the victim’s vaginal swelling not to sexual activity but to prolonged submersion, which had caused the soft tissue to swell; he had seen enough drowning victims to know that. The delicate appearance of the victim’s hands and feet was not due to a pampered upbringing, as the doctors had suggested, but to the sloughing off of the outer skin layers caused by extended time underwater.

  Von Hofmann supplemented the reports with laboratory experiments. He obtained three cadavers from the hospital—the bodies of individuals aged fourteen, eighteen, and twenty years old—and compared their stages of development with that of the body found in the river. In every category that he could examine or measure—teeth, skeletal dimensions, individual bones—the body in the river differed markedly from those of the two young adults but correlated to that of the fourteen-year-old. The body in the river, he concluded, must have been Esther’s.

  When the case went to trial in 1883, von Hofmann’s report shattered the prosecutor’s case. The defendants were set free and a pogrom averted.

  Lacassagne considered the Tisza-Eslar affair so important that he published the professor’s report in the first edition of the Archives of Criminal Anthropology, even though the trial had taken place three years before. Von Hofmann had demonstrated a principle that Lacassagne embraced: that every physiological detail, no matter how small, was important, and that those tiny clues could add up to reveal a person’s identity.

  In that same first edition, he published a paper by his friend and colleague Alphonse Bertillon, who, working on another aspect of criminal identity, moved police work into the modern era.5 Bertillon (Bertiyohn) was an underachiever in a family of scientific luminaries. His father, Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, was a founding member of the Paris Anthropological Society, and his brother Jacques was a prominent doctor and medical statistician. Yet despite his scientific pedigree, Alphonse showed little promise, briefly attending medical school, drifting through several jobs in England and France, and finally getting a job at the age of twenty-six as a low-level clerk in the Paris Préfecture of Police, mainly through the influence of his father. There, in a dreary basement office where he baked in the summer and froze in the winter, he spent his days copying thousands of descriptions of known criminals onto index cards.

  Then, as now, a relatively limited number of offenders committed most crimes. Under French law, first-time offenders tended to receive lenient sentences, in order to encourage their rehabilitation; repeat offenders were given long prison sentences or exiled to Devil’s Island. Traditionally, the authorities had branded the people they arrested, but when they abandoned the practice as inhumane in the 1830s, recidivists would disguise their identity by changing their names, hair color, or facial hair. To fight back, police amassed huge collections of card files and photographs, sorted according to birthplace and name. Criminals, however, gave false information, rendering the entire system useless. In desperation, the police chief in Paris offered a ten-franc bonus to any officer who recognized a repeat offender.6

  Alone in his office with his piles of cards, Bertillon couldn’t stop thinking about the information he was copying. He had grown up in a home full of calipers and gauges, of botanical specimens and scientific discussions. One of his father’s mentors, the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, had told him that every human body was unique and that the chances of two adults having even one body measurement precisely in common was about one in four. Perhaps there was a way to diminish those odds, to define a person’s identity more narrowly. Bertillon reasoned that if the chance of two people having one physical measurement in common, such as height, was one in four, then adding another measurement—height plus length of the skull, for example—would again reduce those odds by a fourth, making them one in sixteen. Adding a third measurement, such as the length of the left foot, would decrease them by a fourth yet again, making them one in sixty-four. Finally, he calculated that if he took eleven measurements, the odds of any two adults having all those dimensions in common would be less than one in four million. And so, years before the advent of fingerprinting, he devised a system that promised to become the world standard for identification.

  Using Bertillonage, as the method came to be called, a trained expert would take eleven specified measurements, including the length and width of the head, height, and the length of the left foot and several other physical dimensions, and enter them all on a card, or fiche anthropomorphique.7 Police would keep this card with thousands of others, nested in overlapping categories of small, medium, and large for each head length, height, foot size, et cetera. The system was organized so logically and simply that a trained clerk could work his way through the categories and produce a positive ID in a matter of minutes. During the first year of experimental use, Bertillon identified three hundred repeat offenders. By the end of that year, the French prison system introduced the method to all the nation’s penitentiaries, and in 1888 it became mandatory in all the nation’s police stations. Soon police forces throughout the world adopted the system, including those in other Western European countries, India, and Russia. In 1897, it became the official technique of the FBI’s forerunner, the National Bureau of Identification. Later, a method was devised to transmit Bertillon numbers as a code over telegraph. For the first time, a fleeing criminal’s identity would reach police in a foreign country—even across an ocean—before he or she could arrive.

  “The prisoner who passes through [Bertillon’s] hands is … forever ‘spotted,’ ” wrote the American journalist Ida Tarbell, who visited Bertillon in his lab.8

  He may efface his tattooing, compress his chest, dye his hair, extract his teeth, scar his body, dissimulate his height. It is useless. The record against him is unfailing. He cannot pass the Bertillon archives without recognition; and, if he is at l
arge, the relentless record may be made to follow him into every corner of the globe where there is a printing press, and every man who reads may become a detective, furnished with information which will establish his identity. He is never again safe.

  In time, Bertillon added photography to the practice, taking one full-on photograph of the face and one in profile. He insisted on such exactitude for the photographs that both the chair and the camera tripod were bolted to the floor. The practice became universally employed, and it was known in the United States as the mug shot. He added descriptions to the file card, such as whether the suspect had a mole or a tattoo, and called the dossier a “portrait parlé” (“speaking portrait”).

  Bertillon’s most celebrated case involved the era’s most notorious terrorist, a swashbuckling anarchist known as Ravachol.9 The anarchist movement had been growing since the 1870s—first as a political movement, then as an increasingly violent one as acts of defiance and repression escalated into bloodshed.* The terrorism was abetted by the development of dynamite, which became the first easily available weapon of mass destruction. In 1892, after clashes between anarchists and police, a bomb exploded in downtown Paris, wrecking the apartment of a judge. Then another explosion demolished the home of a prosecutor, seriously injuring several people.