This confluence of social, technological, and economic factors led to the world’s first media explosion. In Paris alone, there were seventy-nine daily papers at the turn of the century. Le Petit Parisien, the largest newspaper in the world at the time, had one and a half million readers.8 The “big four” newspapers in Paris* had a combined readership of more than four million. There was an explosion of 257 daily papers in the country, not counting hundreds of weeklies, biweeklies, triweeklies, leaflets, and special editions.
With millions of semi-educated readers and Darwinian competition for space on the newsstand, the newspapers ran headlines that screamed for attention, as did their American and British counterparts. A favorite subject was crime—not only because crime rates were rising, but because the stories were so melodramatic. Newspapers brayed about the “army of criminals” who were terrorizing society, be they the gangs of urban youths known as “apaches,” or the uncivilized “vagabonds,” who preyed upon the country folk. Crime was high drama: Nothing attracted and titillated readers more than stories of a man shot by a jealous lover or a woman ravished by a gang of thugs. “Sang à la une!” went the expression: the bloodiest stories should go on page one. The women victims in these dramas were always beautiful and virtuous, and fought valiantly before meeting their deaths. In the case of Augustine Mortureux, for example, even though the evidence showed that she probably died quickly, certain newspapers portrayed her as fighting courageously. Because so many cases went unsolved, the big papers would send special correspondents to the scenes of infamous crimes to see if they could crack them.
Many newspapers also published weekly literary supplements, or illustrated editions, which, using the new halftone technology, offered full-cover renditions of the biggest story of the week, along with a dramatic telling of the story. Whole families would crowd over these editions every Sunday, gasping at the latest adventure or horror tale that the artists and reporters so graphically recounted. The coverage would include ballads, called “laments,” that were written to commemorate the event. One special edition of a paper was headlined ten murders for a penny and promised all the “horrible details” within.9
Dijon was the battleground of a media war between two particularly feisty publications—a leftist weekly called Le Bourguignon Salé (The Salty Burgundian) and an archconservative daily called Le Bien Public (The Public Good). In an effort to gain readers, each tried to outdo the other by ramping up accusations against Grenier and fabricating stories about the incompetence of the authorities who refused to indict him. The newspapers acted as an echo chamber for every rumor from every person with a grudge against Grenier. When the police seemed reluctant to act on those rumors, the newspapers portrayed it as a sign of official corruption. “The authorities would like to pretend to believe that the assassin is some poor devil,” wrote the editor of Le Bourguignon Salé, who believed the upper class to be the source of all evil.10 “But there is more vice on high than down low, and more crime as well!”
The lack of evidence against Grenier meant nothing to these columnists, who found plenty to write about by relying on innuendo. In one typical attack, the editors of Le Bien Public directed readers to the inevitable conclusion that Grenier must have committed the crime.
Who knows if he did not see the young Augustine and conceived a desire to possess her?11 …
Who knows if Augustine recognized him and, not having reason to be afraid of him, did not flee? …
Who knows if, facing her resistance, alarmed by her pleas and the barking of her dog, he didn’t lose his head and, driven by a kind of erotic insanity, wanted to end the situation with two blows of the knife that brought immediate death?
The papers also implicated anyone known to be a friend of Grenier, such as Madame Gaumard. “Who but a woman would have taken the victim’s little shoes?”12 argued the editors of Le Bourguignon Salé. “Who but a woman would detach the earrings with such delicacy?”
“Witnesses” emerged who said they could implicate Grenier in the killing.13 Most of them had no direct knowledge of the murder but were using the legal system to settle old grudges. Augustine’s father, Émile, who quickly became convinced that Grenier was the killer, wrote anguished denunciations in the press. Grenier consulted a lawyer in Dijon about suing for slander. In his absence, authorities rifled his home and found a pair of trousers stained by a tiny drop of blood. Grenier explained that he had been standing next to his servant, who had slaughtered a rabbit for dinner one night—an alibi that his servant confirmed. At one point, when Grenier was riding on horseback, a mob surrounded him with the intention of lynching him; he managed to gallop away.
To their credit, Fonfrède and Tondut did everything in their power to quell the panic while continuing to mount a professional investigation. In the fall of 1895, however, they left on their annual vacations. Into the breach moved two inexperienced officials, who let the situation get out of hand. A simpleton named Rouard who lived in the forest now came forward to allege that he had seen Grenier crouched over Augustine’s body with a knife. Much of his story did not accord with the known facts; nevertheless, it was deemed credible.
Local people had erected a crude wooden cross at the spot where Augustine had died. The cross became a magnet for pilgrims: All day long, people would place bouquets at the memorial, cross themselves, and pray for the dead girl. Many carved graffiti on the surrounding trees that said “Death to Grenier” and (loosely translated) “Grenier the scoundrel.”14 A friend of Grenier owned the property, and he had the graffiti scratched out. The vandalism continued, however. Seeing how the graffiti tormented his friend, the property owner ordered his workers to cut down the trees in a wide perimeter around the crime scene, remove the cross, level the ground, and post NO TRESPASSING signs.
This inflamed the populace even more. Seeing a chance to latch onto public sentiment, the editors of Le Bourguignon Salé started a fund-raising campaign to build a permanent monument to Augustine at the crime scene. It would be a two-meter-tall obelisk of stone, surrounded on four sides by an iron railing. The memorial, wrote the editors, “will not be so easy to destroy.”15 Erected as a “permanent protest against crime,” it would be an accusatory call to a justice system that was “powerless against the rich and forceful against the poor!”
Pending the monument’s construction, the newspaper declared that August 27 would be Augustine Mortureux Day, with demonstrations at the girl’s grave. More than five hundred people flocked to the cemetery.16 All along the roadways, vendors were hawking sheet music with a lament about the atrocity; called “The Crime of the Bois du Chêne,” it was set to a popular folk air. It told the story of Augustine’s murder, and inserted a new character into the tale: a honeybee buzzing frantically in her ear, trying to warn her away from the oak forest: “Return, my child, with eyes so soft, to your mother. Flee far from these woods; for in the bushes waits an assassin with black intentions. Fear this hyena.”
Hundreds of people sang those lines as they trudged to the cemetery. The very air vibrated with rage. Madame Ragougé, head of the local tobacco workers’ union, gave a stirring eulogy, in which she promised the dead girl that her killer would not go unpunished. “Rest in peace, dear Augustine, because justice will be done.” Augustine’s mother, devastated at having forced her daughter to walk alone through the woods, threw herself on the grave. The father shouted, “If the judge doesn’t want to cut off Grenier’s head, I’ll do it myself!”
“That’s right!” someone yelled. “And no one would dare condemn you!”
A rumbling began somewhere in the crowd—a few harsh and scattered cries that grew into a chant and then a rhythmic roar: “Death to Grenier! Death to the assassin!” In moments, the crowd of mourners was transformed into a mob set on vengeance.
Barricaded into their house not half a mile away, Grenier and his family could hear that roar. He had called in several relatives and armed them with rifles. The police had expected trouble and had blocked the ro
adway with an intimidating line of armed guards.
The mob came running. Seeing the armed presence at Grenier’s, they veered off to find a softer target. They found it at Madame Gaumard’s unguarded home a few hundred yards away. They knew she had to be implicated and that Grenier must have paid her off to keep quiet. They surrounded her house and began pelting it with stones. Her husband was away at the time, and she cowered inside with her daughters. Windows began shattering. Not satisfied with mere vandalism, the mob improvised a battering ram: This was a crime that cried out for vengeance! Just as the heavy wooden door began cracking, a contingent of police arrived and drove the crowd away.
A couple of months after this incident, the substitute prosecutors, acting on Rouard’s accusations, arrested Grenier on suspicion of murder. They put him in a cell with two petty criminals—an arsonist and a smuggler—who, in return for lighter sentences, promised to report anything he might say. The region continued to boil.
———
The real killer was long gone. Immediately after the murder, Vacher had fled through the oak forest. He washed in a creek, shed his bloody trousers, underneath which was a clean pair, and took a clean shirt from his bag. Breathless and hungry, he came upon a farmhouse occupied by two girls and demanded they let him in. They slammed the door in his face, locked it, and set their dog on him. Later, Vacher met a man wearing a Legion of Honor medal who was walking with two women and a child. They told him that they had heard frightening rumors of a vagabond with a terrible face who was prowling around the woods like a savage.
Vacher kept walking. He covered nearly thiry-five miles over the next day and a half, heading northeast, in the direction of Paris. On Monday afternoon, the day after the killing, he stopped at the simple home of a widow, Madame Girardot, and asked her if he could heat his lunch on her stove. He told her that he had been bitten by a dog, and she washed and bandaged the wound. She offered him bread and wine to supplement his meal. After he ate, he thanked her, blessed her, and then, feeling expansive, started making small talk. He told her about his background as a sergeant and about his wanderings through France. By the way, he asked, had she heard about the horrible crime at the Bois du Chêne, near Dijon? Someone had killed a girl by the side of the road. In fact, he himself had seen the cadaver. He knew about the crime because he’d walked by that area around ten in the morning and a crowd had already gathered.
The newspapers had not yet reported the crime, and the crowd had not gathered until late afternoon. Madame Girardot did not know that, and had no reason to doubt Vacher’s story. Still, something about his tale struck her as strange, and she wanted to remember to tell her grown children next time they visited. She found a piece of paper and wrote down the date: May 13, 1895.17
A week and a half later, Vacher showed up at the farm of a man named Lachereuil, about ten miles to the north. He told the farmer that he had just been in Paris; then, moments later, he corrected himself and said that he had come from Semur-en-Auxois (the location of Madame Girardot’s house). The farmer noticed that Vacher was wearing shoes that were too small, with the fronts cut open to make room for his toes. Vacher told him that someone had stolen his own shoes while he was sleeping by the side of the road. The farmer gave him a pair of wooden clogs, at which point Vacher took out his knife, cut the shoes he had been wearing into small pieces, and threw the pieces in a brook. After Vacher left, the farmer—struck by this behavior and having read about the Mortureux killing—ran to tell the mayor. The mayor sent the police after Vacher. They questioned him briefly but let him go after he showed them his regimental papers.
Life was getting too complicated in Burgundy. He started walking south.
News of the Mortureux killing and its aftermath traveled to Paris, where it made gripping tabloid copy. In September, Le Matin sent a star reporter to the Dijon area to investigate—Marie-François Goron, hero of the Gouffé case and many others, who recently had retired as the head of the Sûreté. Le Matin had hired him to cover all matters criminal. Goron interviewed everyone with any involvement in the affair, including Augustine’s father, who bemoaned the lack of thorough police work. Why, he asked, hadn’t the authorities confronted Grenier with Augustine’s puppy, which surely would had recognized the murderer? Why had the coroner—“a man who doesn’t know anything”—neglected to look closely into the murdered girl’s eyes? After all, everyone knew that the eyes of the dead retained the last image they had seen.
“I tried to get him to see things with a bit more sangfroid,” Goron reported, “but it was in vain.”18
After several days of investigation, Goron concluded that there was not one piece of evidence or reliable testimony that could connect Grenier to the crime. The local people angrily turned on Goron, accusing him of being paid off by Grenier. The local authorities had so bungled the case, and the population had become so inflamed, he wrote, that the region was condemned to “perpetual lynch law.” Soon after this case, Goron retired from his brief stint as a journalist and founded one of Europe’s premier detective agencies.
Some weeks later, Fonfrède and Tondut returned from their vacations. Horrified at what had taken place in their absence, they summoned Rouard to their offices for an official inquiry.19 Standing in front of a group of court officials, he repeated his testimony about seeing Grenier at the crime scene.
“And do you see Grenier now?” they asked him.
“Yes, there he is, right behind you.”
The man behind them stood up and introduced himself as Mr. Bourdon, a substitute prosecutor.
By now, Grenier had been incarcerated for forty-five days. Questioned by officials, the two informants in his cell said there was no doubt that Grenier was the murderer—they had heard him confess in his sleep. But when police separated the informants and interviewed them, the details of their stories did not jibe. The authorities released Grenier.
Several miles away, a mob was gathering on the road that led from the courthouse to Grenier’s property. In the quickening dusk, they could see the lamps of his carriage. A group of men spread out across the road. As the coachman pulled up to avoid them, several men closed in from the sides and yanked the reins from his hands. The coachman swore and reached for his pistol, but a dozen hands grabbed him. Someone cracked a baton against his head. Several men leaped onto the running boards and yanked open the doors, only to find the carriage empty.20 Grenier had anticipated an ambush and had escaped by train to Saint-Jean-de-Losne, where his in-laws lived, some twenty-five miles away. His wife and children joined him there, and they never returned home again.
* Le Petit Parisien, Le Petit Journal, Le Matin, and Le Journal.
Eight
The Body Speaks
If there was a lesson to be learned from Grenier’s travail, it was that the word of a “witness,” whether given in court or used to incite a mob, was not always reliable and therefore not useful in solving a crime. In recent years, legal and psychological experts were finding that even actual eyewitnesses could not fully be trusted. There were many motivations to lie—jealousy, hatred, calumny, superficiality, ignorance, fear. Magistrate Émile Fourquet, who wrote a book about false testimony, described instances in which people who knew nothing came forward, like Rouard. The man simply wanted “to play a role in a memorable affair.”1
Alienists were discovering that certain witnesses might lie even when they believed they were telling the truth. In an analysis of the Tisza-Eslar affair, the neurologist and hypnotism expert Dr. Hippolyte Bernheim wrote that fourteen-year-old Moritz Scharf, already a simple and suggestible boy, was so frightened and coerced that he fell into a kind of hypnotic state, falsely condemning his own father for murder. Bernheim described the phenomenon as a “retroactive hallucination,” in which certain people, under pressure, come to believe a false version of events.2 (Modern psychologists use the term false memory.) Defense attorneys condemned the police’s “preventative detention” and “pressure cooker” tactics, which forced wi
tnesses to tell them what they wanted to hear. “What difference is there, in effect, between the [medieval] torturer … and the police agent who badgers the defendant without stopping to the point of exhaustion [and lack of] sleep?”3 wrote Maurice Lailler and Henri Vonoven in their 1897 book, Les Erreurs judiciaires et leurs causes (Judicial Errors and Their Causes). “Psychological torture is less brutal and more refined, but it accomplishes the same results.” Others, reflecting the prejudices of the time, asserted that certain people were unreliable to begin with. “Women lie,” wrote Émile Zola, the novelist and social commentator, who normally sympathized with the powerless in society.4 “They lie to everyone, to judges, to their lovers, to their chambermaids, even to themselves.”
People might lie, but evidence did not, and evidence was becoming the gold standard of police work. Lacassagne wrote that the time had come for “testimonial” proof to be replaced by the “silent testimony” of evidence from the crime scene.5 Lacassagne and his colleagues developed an intellectual process to sort it all out. They organized their inquiries as a simple series of questions: Who was the victim? When did this person die? How did he or she die? What physical traces connect the victim to the killer?
On February 18, 1896, a trunk was delivered to Lacassagne at the morgue. Inside the trunk was the body of a man named Étienne Badoil, who was lying on his right side in a fetal position.6 According to the only witness, his lover, Élise Piot, the man had died by a tragic mistake. The two had been having an illicit affair. They had been in her apartment the previous evening, when they heard the heavy footsteps of her common-law husband, a grocery clerk named Matillon. According to the young woman, Badoil climbed into the trunk next to the bed and wedged himself into a fetal position, and she closed and latched the lid. She and Matillon went out for a few hours, returned home, and went to sleep. It was not until the next morning, she said, that she remembered about Badoil; on opening the trunk, she found him dead of suffocation.
The Killer of Little Shepherds Page 10