The Killer of Little Shepherds

by Douglas Starr

  Contacted by a reporter, the prince readily conceded that he could not prove the artifact’s identity. “An absolute proof cannot possibly exist, and so we must content ourselves with the tradition,” he said.34 He recalled that in 1889 he had given the skull to five anthropologists, asking them if it was the skull of a criminal. “Three of them answered affirmatively and the other two said no: Which are we to believe?”

  * Joseph Franz Gall, who developed phrenology earlier in the century, had suggested the same general principle of localization. He divided the brain into twenty-seven “organs,” each with character traits such as friendship, guile, word memory, and kindness. His insistence that the relative importance of each of those organs could be detected by corresponding lumps in the skull consigned his work to the realm of pseudoscience. Yet despite his derisive treatment by historians, his basic idea of localization holds true.

  * Many people saw the mentally ill as “other,” as well. Henry Maudsley, the British psychiatrist, referred to the criminally insane as a “distinct class of creatures doomed to evil” who were easily identified by their “scrofulous, often misshapen” heads. (Laurent Mucchielli, “Criminology, Hygienism, and Eugenics in France, 1870–1914,” in Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective, ed. Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], p. 208).

  Thirteen

  Lourdes

  The Basilica of Lourdes was but twenty years old when Vacher found his way into the town in the winter of 1896, but already it was one of the busiest pilgrimage sites in all Christendom. Decades earlier, a sickly fourteen-year-old peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous had seen visions of the Blessed Mother Mary in a grotto near the Gave River. The vision instructed her to tell the village priests to make this grotto the site of a holy chapel. One day, staggering in a holy trance, Bernadette fell to her knees in the grotto and started digging. The waters that bubbled forth became an infinite source of holiness and healing. The clergy built the church, and it became a gathering place for the tens of thousands of pilgrims who came to pray and to be healed by the waters. The migrating hordes gave rise to endless rows of hotels, shops, and eateries that catered to their more earthly requirements. By the time Vacher hiked into Lourdes, the village had become so commercial and crowded that a visitor might have had trouble perceiving the holiness.

  A contemporary traveler from England, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, wrote that the crass commercialism of Lourdes initially disappointed him, with its “incalculable crowd and oppressive heat, dust, noise, weariness.”1 The church above the grotto was a “disappointment” as well—a neo-Gothic monstrosity, all size and spires and little that spoke of grace or the soul. And yet Benson, like many people who had stayed in Lourdes for a few days, started feeling something in the air—“some great benign influence … soothing and satisfying”—that overcame his early disillusionment. “I cannot describe this further; I can only say that it never really left me during those days, I saw sites that would have saddened me elsewhere—apparent injustices, certain disappointments, dashed hopes that would almost have broken my heart; and yet that great Power was over all, to reconcile, to quiet and to reassure.”

  Vacher may have felt something similar. Like Benson, he made reference in a letter to a certain hypocrisy among the lavish displays of religion. Yet he also made it clear that he was thrilled to arrive at the place where the spirit of Mary dwelled—“the great doctor of our bodies as well as our souls.…2 What graces I asked her for this great occasion, for me, my poor parents, and my friends!”

  He spent several days in the town. If he followed the pattern of the other pilgrims, he would have lined up to light a candle at the grotto, which was festooned with hundreds of crutches discarded by those who had been healed by the waters. He may have joined the masses in Rosary Square, “crowd against crowd like herds of bewildered sheep,” as Benson had reported. Vacher may have volunteered to be one of the brancardiers—stretcher-bearers with shoulder straps and crosses who helped carry the maimed and crippled—or helped push one of the many wagonettes that deposited the sick within a hundred yards of the grotto. The supplicants lay there, “faces white and drawn with pain, or horribly scarred, waiting for some man to put them into the water.”3 He may have joined one of the nightly processions with their torches held high: “a serpent of fire … each mouth singing praises to Mary.”

  Unlike other pilgrims, Vacher did not pray for healing. He did not ask Mother Mary to restore his disfigured face or to stop the throbbing from the bullet in his ear. He did not ask her to calm his burning soul. He did not pray for the young victims of his cruelty or for those who grieved for them. He did not pray for those falsely accused, whose lives were forever shattered, or for the villagers, their sense of safety and communal life destroyed. Vacher, in fact, came in gratitude and celebration. He came to give thanks for the blessings he enjoyed, for the protection that had been uniquely his.

  It had been a long and circuitous pilgrimage that had brought him here, a walk of at least fourteen hundred miles that looped back and forth across France from the northwest to southeast. In September he had killed again—this time in Allier, a region northwest of Lyon. Marie Moussier, a just-married nineteen-year-old, was the victim.4 The medical examiner had never seen such savagery: Moussier’s nose was disfigured by bite marks.

  Through it all, Vacher continued to feel watched over, protected. A few weeks after the Moussier killing, he was wandering in a dense fog in the Haute-Loire, about ninety miles south, when he came upon a thirteen-year-old shepherd boy, Alphonse Rodier. He was just about to throw himself at the boy when something alerted him to some witnesses nearby. He retreated. A couple of days later, still in a dense fog, he came upon the boy’s fourteen-year-old sister, Rosine.5 This time, there were no witnesses.

  After the killing, the fog became so dense that Vacher could not see more than a few yards. He despaired of being able to escape, but then, once again, came help from above. “All of a sudden, I found the route that I recognized, then I took a path that led to the railroad track that I was following before the crime,” he recalled.6 In a few hours, he was out of the district. “On that day I really believe that God saved me.”

  Vacher never stopped obsessing about Louise Barant, and he wrote to her, vowing eternal love. Louise wanted nothing to do with him. Traumatized by his attack, she remained in her village, where everyone would know the assailant on sight.7 The wounds to her tongue and lips had given her a speech impediment, which caused her unending embarrassment. Her inability to work burdened her aging father and her family financially, but they stood by her. In order to protect his daughter, her father intercepted Vacher’s letters and destroyed most of them. One, he preserved and later gave to investigators:

  Dear Louise,

  I don’t know if you are still in your parents’ village, and I don’t have any news from your dear parents.8 But my old friends Mr. and Mrs. Genin sometimes hear from them, so I dare to send you a letter through their hands.…

  As a consequence of our unfortunate drama, I still have some paralysis in my right cheek. But it’s only apparent when I talk and pronounce certain syllables. Other than that there’s no sign of it on my face.

  In case you don’t accept this [offer of] reconciliation, out of respect for all the blood that was spilled, so bravely and abundantly for you, I ask you not to say anything bad about me. If you do, it will only reflect badly on you. If we want to reexamine our past, atone, and have a new good life, it’s important that nobody other than the two of us and your own parents know about [what happened].…

  We should realize that if God wanted to test us during our youth, it’s only to our advantage, and for that we should take courage.…

  Now permit me: Louise, O! Louise to ask you a single thing: Have I lost you forever, for all eternity? Please answer me, even by a very short letter. Only then will I be able to resign myself to forget you.…


  Vacher Jh

  Rising behind Lourdes, the majestic Pyrenees were mantled in snow. Vacher had tired of the crowds and the chaos and felt the pull of the mountains once more. He decided to find his own place to worship, higher than the steeples, holier than the grotto. He waited a few days for mild weather to set in and then hiked to the top of one of the mountains. There, on the peak, in a patch of fresh snow, he wrote the following prayer on behalf of Louise: “Oh! Virgin Mary, mother in the sky, watch over her as you watch over me.9 And with all your power before God, bring her back to me one day as white as this snow.” There he felt the presence of “this good mother [who] held out her hand to me … even as I float[ed] on the dangerous winds of chance.”

  Having made his obeisance, Vacher headed south across the mountain range. He hoped to enter Spain, “a country of good oranges and nice people.”10 But Spanish vagabonds who were leaving the country warned him that every available man was being conscripted for the war in Cuba. His French citizenship wouldn’t protect him.

  In the weeks following his visit to Lourdes, Vacher’s behavior seemed to change—on the surface at least. Witnesses noticed that he now carried two clubs, the one with the initials and another with “Marie Lourdes” carved into the wood. Observers reported occasional glimmers of humanity, an affectionate side. In February 1897, he spent about a week in a remote cluster of villages in the south of France, where several people remembered him benignly. Villagers reported having seen him amusing groups of children by playing the accordion. Louise Farenc, the wife of a farmer in the hamlet of Couloubrac, recalled that on a cold, rainy day a man arrived at her house completely soaked and asked if he could dry off.11 The couple invited him to dinner and to stay. “There was a wound on his left cheek,” she recalled. “One of his eyes was smaller than the other and his mouth was twisted. We gave him a place in front of the fire that night, and we invited him to eat soup with us.” After dinner, he told them his name (“ ‘Vacher’ or Acher,’ ” she recalled). He said he was twenty-seven years old, had been a Marist monk, and then had joined a regiment. He showed them his sergeant’s chevrons, which he lovingly kept folded up in paper. He explained that his cheek wound had come from being kicked by a horse.

  Over the next couple of days, he became part of the family, reading to the two children and hugging them. “He loved to caress the children and, most of all, my son Henri [fourteen], whom he frequently called to come sit by him,” said Louise Farenc. “He told us he knew how to play the accordion, but he didn’t have the instrument at the moment.”

  Her husband agreed that Vacher had been a polite and proper guest. Their older son, Élie, seventeen, confided that when he and Vacher were alone, the visitor boasted about his enormous strength. “He showed me his hands and his well-developed muscles.12 Then he told me, ‘I’m as strong as two men and I’ve never found anyone who could resist me.’ ”

  Several days later, Vacher returned to recover a blanket he’d forgotten. He’d had a beard during his first stay with the family, but by now he had shaved. “The children cried to him, ‘You are so cute!’ ” recalled their mother. “We never saw him again.”

  Soon after that, Vacher knocked on the door of Monsieur and Madame Paul Valette. In return for a meal and a bed for the night, he gave their daughter a penmanship lesson.13 His handwriting was beautiful—large, gracefully formed letters, indicating a sensitive, artistic soul. On the crosshatched graph paper from the little girl’s notebook, he wrote and rewrote one sentence: “Among travelers there are often great minds and sometimes even great friends of God.” (“Dans les voyageurs il y a souvent de grands esprits et quelquefois měme de grands amis de Dieu.”) Across the top of the page he wrote four equations to illustrate the basic operations of mathematics: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Each involved four or five digits at a time. Clearly, the visitor had a good education.

  Yet for all the gentleness of those encounters, the predator lurked. Vacher walked to the market town of Lacaune, where he met up with a vagabond named Célestin Gautrais.14 The two had spent some time traveling together after Vacher’s visit to Lourdes, and they went to a tavern to have a drink. Gautrais told Vacher that he had two hundred francs in a lockbox at the post office, and the two went to get it. The next morning, Gautrais was found dead, his skull bashed in with a club and his pants down around his ankles. The money was gone. As the villagers gathered to gawk at the cadaver, Vacher brazenly squeezed through the crowd—just as he had done after the killing of Augustine Mortureux—and offered to help carry the body to the mayor’s office.

  Authorities speculated that Vacher had taken Gautrais’s money and used it to buy a ticket on a train heading in the direction of Lyon. Witnesses from the train recalled seeing a vagabond with a facial scar who gave off a terrible smell.

  Part Two

  Punishment

  If we now ask, “How should an Investigating Officer set about his work?” we can come to but one conclusion: “His whole heart must be set upon success.”

  —Hans Gross, Criminal Investigation, 1906

  Fourteen

  The Investigating Magistrate

  On April 17, 1897, the town of Belley in the foothills of the Alps hired a new investigating magistrate named Émile Fourquet. Belley, home to about four thousand people, was a market town and the capital of the region of Bugey, in the département of Ain. It was a scenic but undistinguished location, a jumping-off place for an ambitious young magistrate who was trying to launch his career. Fourquet, thirty-five, had earned a law degree and had served in several minor judicial roles. He was a tall and lean man, with a bald head, a flowing mustache, and spectacles. A cleft chin suggested a stubborn strength; his eyes, magnified by the spectacles, conveyed a mixture of youthful curiosity and professorial detachment. On receiving the appointment, he “burst with joy,” he wrote in his memoir. “Examining magistrate! Manhunts! It was a dream of a lifetime; an opportunity to fulfill a burning passion.”1

  Two months later, Fourquet was having morning coffee with some colleagues when prosecutor Jean Reverdet walked in with the day’s newspaper. “Look at what an extraordinary crime was committed the day before yesterday near Lyon,” he said.2

  In an article entitled “Murder of a Shepherd,” Le Lyon Républicain reported that a thirteen-year-old shepherd had been “shamefully murdered, then defiled” in the hills several miles west of Lyon.3 Pierre Laurent had been returning to his village from the fruit market on the night of June 18 when a killer attacked him. The murder was described as one of “unimaginable cruelty.”

  He first slit the boy’s throat with a knife, then he threw himself upon him … [and] sawed open the throat.… The miserable cur had no fear in satisfying his bestial passion, defiling the body and then mutilating it.…

  The little victim fell under the blows of an odious brute, who unfortunately has disappeared without leaving a trace of his passage.…

  Fourquet and the others knew that the killing had taken place in another jurisdiction, so it would not be theirs to investigate. But the details reminded Reverdet of a similar case that had traumatized their own region about two years before—the murder of Victor Portalier. “Your predecessor never discovered the killer,” he said to Fourquet.4 “They think it was a vagabond.” He told Fourquet to ask his clerk for the dossier.

  For the next several days, Fourquet buried himself in the Portalier file. He was struck by the similarities between this case and the current one. Both times, someone had stalked a shepherd boy with stealth and ruthlessness. Death was accomplished by a deep cut to the throat, followed by a hideous defilement and mutilation. Both times, neighbors had seen a menacing-looking vagabond who disappeared immediately after the killing. Fourquet noted that the authorities had failed to make the slightest headway in capturing, or even identifying, the murderer.

  “Needless to say, this horrible situation has raised concern throughout the region,” Le Lyon Républicain soon reported.5

&nb
sp; Every night, all seven brigades in the area make their rounds from farm to farm, interrogating the inhabitants, asking if they’ve seen anyone new.…

  At this point, though, none of the research has amounted to anything: not the capture of a single vagabond.… In sum, despite all the activity, the inquest is not any further today than it was on the day of the crime.

  Fourquet kept digging through the file on the Portalier case, carefully examining every deposition.6 He discovered a two-year-old letter from Louis-Albert Fonfrède, the investigating magistrate from Dijon who had tried to solve the Mortureux affair. Having noticed similarities between the killing in his area and the one of Portalier, Fonfrède had written to other magistrates in southeastern France, asking if they had seen similar cases. Fourquet knew that Fonfrède did not think that a single killer could have committed all the crimes. But Fourquet did not subscribe to the “contagion” hypothesis. The mention of common elements, however, was a “flash of light,” indicating that several cases might be related. He wrote to Fonfrède, and within forty-eight hours he received a dossier with the details of seven murders in various parts of France. Adding the Bénonces case would bring the total to eight.