The Killer of Little Shepherds

by Douglas Starr

  Vidocq, the world’s first celebrity detective, was worthy of a book—and indeed, Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo based characters on him. A thief, forger, and legendary escape artist, Vidocq began to cooperate with authorities as a jailhouse informer, thus shortening his sentences. Upon his release, he realized he could capitalize on his street knowledge and his friendships among criminals and became an agent particulier (special agent) for the Paris Préfecture of Police. He eventually formed his own bureau, called the Bureau de Sûreté (Security Bureau). Working in disguise, he and his squad of ex-cons would infiltrate taverns that criminals liked to frequent, gain their confidence, trick them into revealing information, and hustle them or their friends. Sometimes they would employ an indicateur—an ex-con who would walk ahead of the police and tip his hat when he passed a suspect he recognized. They frequently hired mouchards (snitches) and moutons (sheep), who would inform from within prisons. When Vidocq published his memoirs in 1829, he became the forerunner of all celebrity detectives.

  Vidocq’s methods became standard throughout the countryside, and in many other countries, as well. Alan Pinkerton, the detective who formed the first U.S. detective agency, referred to himself as the “Vidocq of the West.”17 But as effective as Vidocq’s methods seemed at the time, their inherent problems eventually became apparent. He ran up huge numbers of arrests, but many were false arrests or entrapments. Suspects who were pressured to confess sometimes told police what they wanted to hear, rather than the truth.

  If those methods were questionable in Paris, they proved virtually useless among the rural French. Law enforcement was relatively new in many parts of the countryside, and its representatives were seen as outsiders. Certain ordnances, such as those against illegal harvesting or poaching, did not earn respect. Peasants had their own ways of dealing with offenders, whether by individual or collective violence, or the kind of ongoing harassment targeted against Grenier, Bannier, and others. To them, the law was something to avoid, or perhaps to manipulate as a way to settle grudges.

  Vacher profited from it all. It was the rare magistrate who would detect a pattern, or could imagine that one man would commit so many crimes.

  Sexual murderers, of course, were not completely unheard-of. In the decade prior to Vacher’s rampage, Jack the Ripper had murdered and mangled five prostitutes in London. The crimes were horrific, but people could console themselves with the fact that the victims belonged to a disgraceful profession and all lived in a single small neighborhood. There had also been monsters in France, such as Louis Menesclou, who in 1880 lured a four-year-old girl into his apartment in Paris and then raped and strangled her. Part of his notoriety was due to the fact that the police broke in just as he was in the act of burning the little girl’s body; one of her severed arms was protruding from his pocket. But that was a single incident. There was also Pierre Rivière, who in 1835, in his cottage in Normandy, took a pruning hook to his mother, sister, and brother. But nothing came close to what was now taking place. To imagine crimes on the scale of Vacher’s, one had to cast back to 1440, when the nobleman Gilles de Rais, one of Joan of Arc’s brothers in arms, was hanged and excommunicated for the rape and murder of literally hundreds of children.

  The very scale and nature of Vacher’s crimes worked to his advantage. At the time of his arrest in Baugé, he had killed at least seven people and assaulted many more, in towns more than six hundred miles apart. One magistrate, Louis-Albert Fonfrède of Dijon, who started keeping a dossier on the killings, thought there might be a contagion of crime, what police would later call “copycat killings.” People saw implications of Pasteur’s germ theory everywhere, including the idea that criminality might be contagious. But the other magistrates would focus only on a murder in their particular jurisdictions.

  Vacher saw his time in prison as yet another sign of benevolence from above. After his release on April 6, 1896, he wrote a letter to a friend, alluding to his feeling that somewhere, somehow, he was fulfilling a destiny. “My program never varies.18 Ever since my family cast me out I have continued to serve my unique master and let myself be blown by the winds of chance.”

  As he thought about his blessings, he decided to make a pilgrimage to a place where he could thank the Holy Mother for her protection along his strange and dangerous path. It would be a long journey, a walk of hundreds of miles, to the southern border of France. More people would die along the way, but Vacher knew that blessings would await him. He was going to Lourdes.

  Twelve

  Born Criminal

  The 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris was renowned as an international showplace of modern technology, science, and culture, but it also served as a massive gathering place for the world’s scholars and intellectuals. From May to November, when more than thirty million attended the exhibits, 120 scientific congresses took place, including the International Congress of Zoologists, the International Congress of Dermatology and Syphilology, and the International Congress for Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism, attended by Sigmund Freud.

  One such meeting was the Second International Congress of Criminal Anthropology (the first had taken place in Rome in 1885).1 This was an organization founded to address central questions in the study of criminals: Why did most people live normal, peaceful lives, while a small number committed violence and mayhem? What was the seed of the criminal instinct? And what could authorities do to suppress it?

  From August 10 to 17, delegates representing twenty-two countries gathered in the amphitheater of the Faculty of Medicine. They discussed important issues regarding the causes and prevention of crime, topics that included “Do Criminals Present Any Peculiar Anatomical Characteristics?”; “The Infancy of Criminals”; and “Causes and Remedies for the Repetition of Crime.”2

  They took field trips to the Sainte-Anne asylum, where the chief physician, Valentin Magnan, introduced them to some of his patients, and to the Préfecture of Police, where Alphonse Bertillon demonstrated his method for identifying repeat offenders. They attended lavish parties, the grandest when Prince Roland Bonaparte, the great-nephew of Napoléon, held a reception at his hotel.3 Prince Roland, an enthusiastic follower of science and anthropology, went to great lengths to please his guests. He persuaded Thomas Edison, who was visiting Paris, to awe and entertain them by playing music on the phonograph, Edison’s marvelous invention.

  Prince Roland was a collector of cultural and scientific artifacts. One of his treasured items was the skull of Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat. She had become something of a cult figure in the ninety-six years since her execution—smaller and more delicate in myth than in real life, more elegant of speech, braver in her final moments, and almost Christ-like in her readiness to forgive her executioners. To scientists devoted to understanding crime, it must have been fascinating to wonder what had turned such an “angel” into a killer. So they were thrilled when the prince allowed them to study the contours of this unique and historic skull.

  That was when cordiality became strained.4 Cesare Lombroso examined the skull and said it bore all the physical hallmarks of what he called the “born criminal.” For more than a dozen years, Lombroso had been promoting the idea that certain people were biologically destined to be criminals, and that he could identify them by physical traits. These signs, or “stigmata,” as he called them, were only the surface indicators of a primitive brain, one that predisposed its owner to impulsive brutality. Now, beholding the skull of Corday, he quickly identified a host of such stigmata—the general asymmetry; the vaguely masculine appearance; the broad, flat skull cap; and, most important, an indentation at the back of the head that he called the “occipital fossette.” This was beyond doubt the skull of someone destined to commit murder.

  In sharp rebuttal, Dr. Paul Topinard, president of the French Anthropological Society, said that he found nothing unusual about the flattening of the skull cap or the depression at the back of the head. He proclaimed the skull “regular, harmonic, w
ith all the delicacy and soft but correct curves of female skulls.” As for the general asymmetry, nearly all human skulls “showed a difference or distinction on the one side or the other,” he said. The Viennese anatomist Moritz Benedikt, while acknowledging that the skull might exhibit certain minor anomalies, saw nothing that would link them to any personality traits. As for the occipital fossette, it no more indicated a tendency to crime than a “predisposition to hemorrhoids.”

  Lombroso’s theory of criminal anthropology had gained a wide following since he introduced it in 1876. An opposing school of thought had surfaced, as well, and, that summer in particular, had gained much support. Led by Lacassagne, the “French School,” or “Lyon School,” as it was called, maintained that crime did not arise from accidents of heredity, but from the social environment. Born in the wake of the theories of evolution and heredity, this was one of the earliest instances of the nature-nurture debate, which eventually would extend to almost all human behavior, from intelligence to gender differences. The debate would pit Lombroso and Lacassagne against each other for decades, arising continually in scientific meetings and after every high-profile crime. It would raise questions about human nature that remain open to this day.

  Cesare Lombroso had much in common with Alexandre Lacassagne.5 He, too, was born to a middle-class family and had been a precocious medical student who wrote noteworthy theses at prestigious universities—in his case, the universities of Pavia, Padua, and Genoa. Like Lacassagne, he spent several years in the army, during which time he studied the men around him, measuring thousands of soldiers to chart the physical differences among people from the various regions in Italy. He also conducted a study of the soldiers’ tattoos, which he correlated to criminal behavior. Later, while stationed in Pavia, he measured and studied patients in mental asylums; still later, while chair of Legal Medicine and Public Hygiene at the University of Turin, he studied the inmates of the local prison.

  Unlike Lacassagne, who was large and expansive, Lombroso was a small, bearded man, modest and unpretentious. “He has a mild, attractive face,” wrote a British colleague, Maj. Arthur Griffiths, “round, apple cheeks as chubby as a child’s; still, quiet eyes behind his spectacles.”6 But he shared with his French counterpart an intellectual self-confidence. Those eyes would “flash brilliantly as he warms in the fight for his principles.”

  Several new ideas influencing scientific thought helped shape Lombroso’s thinking, as well. In the 1850s, Dr. Paul Broca founded the world’s first anthropological society in Paris. Anthropology, a new branch of science, explained and categorized human culture by the use of extensive measurement and quantification. His work set off a mania for measurement of the human body. He also established the principle of cerebral localization—that different parts of the brain have specific functions—as a result of his autopsies of patients with aphasia.* Meanwhile, some people, including Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton, felt that the theory of evolution carried a dark corollary: If the human species evolved from a primitive form, then those primitive seeds lay dormant within all Homo sapiens, ready to sprout in susceptible individuals. Finally, Dr. Augustin Morel, the French psychiatrist who discovered dementia, proposed his theory of degeneration, which argued that sometimes weak traits, such as simplemindedness, become magnified from one generation to the next, so that in certain families, successive generations become increasingly defective.

  This hodgepodge of emerging ideas, plus Lombroso’s own observations, prompted him to see the criminal not as an individual who exercised free will, but as the product of biological and evolutionary forces. He was drawn to the possible links between brain structure and criminal behavior. In December 1871, while dissecting the body of the infamous robber Giuseppe Villella, he saw something that would change his thinking forever: a small hollow at the base of the skull, and under it an enlarged section of the spinal cord. Although abnormal in humans, the feature was common, he claimed, in the lower apes, rodents, birds, and in some “inferior races in Bolivia and Peru.”7 He described that moment as the most exciting of his young career: “At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.”8

  He called the deformity the “median occipital fossa” (the word fossa means “groove” or “pit”), and he found it in one miscreant after another. To him, it was the “totem, the fetish of criminal anthropology,” because it symbolized the inherited, biological nature of the criminal impulse. Because the feature normally appeared in primitive animals, he saw people who possessed it as evolutionary throwbacks, helpless in the grip of “atavistic” behaviors, such as poor impulse control, lack of empathy, brutality, and selfishness. “Theoretical ethics passes over these diseased brains as oil does over marble, without penetrating,” he wrote.9 In time, he detected other primitive “stigmata,” including a small skull, a low forehead, a large jaw and face, jug ears, long arms, and thick eyebrows that tend to meet in the center. These features revealed an evolutionary past that surfaced within certain unfortunate individuals.

  In 1876, Lombroso published a book describing his research and hypothesis, L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man). Over the years, the book grew from a first edition of 250 pages to a fifth edition of nearly 2,000 pages; published in three volumes, it was richly illustrated with photographs and measurement tables. Lombroso was tireless: He wrote more than thirty books and one thousand articles on the biological roots of criminality. In 1893, he published The Female Offender, which described the atavistic impulses that ruled women criminals and prostitutes. (In general, he saw women as a more primitive version of men, with their smaller skull capacity and “childlike” emotions.) Later, he wrote a book that described genius as a type of insanity. Meanwhile, he gathered a coterie of bright young scientists, including Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo, whose collective work became known as “the Italian School.” In 1880, they launched a journal called Archivio di psichiatria ed antropologia criminale (Archives of Psychiatry and Criminal Anthropology).

  Lombroso never stopped measuring, collecting data, and dissecting, and over the years he expanded what he saw as the causes of criminality. While he originally saw criminals as a single hereditary type, he eventually divided them into several categories. Some were less dangerous than others. One group, which he called “criminaloids,” had none of the stigmata of the born criminal, but these individuals became involved in crime later in life and committed less serious crimes. Another group comprised criminals of passion: otherwise upstanding citizens who committed violence on impulse, perhaps against an unfaithful spouse, and immediately repented. Another group, “mattoids,” included political criminals, such as anarchists and assassins, who were mentally unbalanced but not atavistic.10 In this group, he included Charles Guiteau, who assassinated President James Garfield. All in all, after subtracting all the less dangerous categories, Lombroso concluded that about 40 percent of lawbreakers were congenital criminals.11 He said that all epileptics were born criminals, as well.

  Identifying the born criminal, he said, would help address the problem of rising criminality by focusing on the person and not just the crime. Physiognomy could become the prosecutor’s tool. Lombroso frequently gave expert testimony, exposing the stigmata of the accused. In one case, a court in southern Italy called him in to help decide which of two brothers had murdered their stepmother. He designated the brothers as “M.” and “F.”12 After examining the siblings, Lombroso testified that “M. represented more clearly the criminal type, exhibiting huge jaws, swollen sinuses, extremely pronounced cheekbones, a thin upper lip, large incisors … and left-handedness.” M. was convicted.

  It was important to Lombroso that society could use his theory for prevention. He suggested reeducating children with atavistic tendencies and designing prison sentences to fit the convicted. He di
sagreed with the prevailing system of setting the punishment strictly according to the severity of the crime. Instead, he felt justice should focus on the criminal, giving judges wide latitude in dealing with the accused. Those who did not fit the category of congenital criminals could receive lighter sentences, or be rehabilitated by community service. Insane criminals should be sent to asylums, he argued. Natural-born criminals should receive longer sentences and be monitored after their release. The most hard-core among them would be executed, given life terms, or exiled.

  It was understandable that Lombroso’s work, playing as it did into the era’s mania for measurement and fascination with the dark side of human nature, found widespread international support. Almost overnight, “criminal anthropology” became a respected field of scientific study. Not only did it present a longed-for explanation for crime but it played into a latent desire to see the criminals as “other.”* “Beautiful faces, it is well-known, are rarely found among criminals,” wrote Henry Havelock Ellis, the noted British physician and social reformer (and later, eugenicist) in his book The Criminal, which incorporated many of Lombroso’s ideas.13 “The prejudice against the ugly and also deformed is not without sound foundation.” He conceded that while a certain number of anomalies might be found in normal persons, the degenerate displays “not the mere presence of such anomalies, but their presence in a more marked form and in greater frequency.”