The Killer of Little Shepherds

by Douglas Starr

  Unlike scores of other prisoners at Saint-Paul, Vacher never admired Lacassagne—perhaps because of the professor’s skepticism. Once Vacher realized that Lacassagne was not an ally, he decided he would tell him nothing more. There would be no meeting of the minds, not even temporarily, as with the prisoner and Fourquet. The daily interviews would produce no catharsis or confession, just a repetitive hammering away between two men of unbendable wills. Vacher seemed to take pride in the challenge and saw their interaction as a game. “So you see, Monsieur le Docteur,” he said one morning to Lacassagne, assuming an air of bravado, “the most difficult part of your mission will be to get to know my state of mind.”12

  Once, Lacassagne thought he saw an opening. He was questioning Vacher about a murder for which he was suspected but had not confessed. Every time the professor had brought up the subject previously, Vacher had retreated into petulant silence. This time, however, Vacher seemed to listen, his head tilted attentively and his hands clasped behind his back. Lacassagne thought the prisoner might finally say something on the subject. Suddenly, Vacher shrugged his shoulders melodramatically, started pacing, and blurted, “You know something—I’ve really had enough of you.13 I’m only going to say what I want to and no more. I’ve spoken enough. Consult my interrogatories with the judge. It’s over; I have nothing to add.” And then he shut down again.

  In an attempt to break down Vacher’s defenses, Lacassagne started a conversation about the members of Vacher’s old regiment. The effort brought a rebuke from the prisoner:

  The lack of confidence you have in me is something that you deserve.14 Do you remember the day when you allowed yourself to almost offend my self-respect and patriotism, speaking of the little and big victories of my colleagues during my military service? You were right to ask my opinion but chose [the wrong tone and] moment to do it.

  Lacassagne wrote with equal irritation:

  Here is the theory of Vacher: I am not responsible because I was insane.15 It was necessary to know my mental state, during my wandering life.…

  Vacher has always counted on the impunity that he gained during his stay in a mental asylum. The doctor declared him cured, but today he [insists] that he was still sick when they let him go.

  We have seen that he knows how to organize his thoughts toward simulating a delirium, disguising or blocking his confession, and his insistence on being declared nonresponsible during his wandering life. All this is too adept to be coming from an insane person.

  That is not to say that Lacassagne’s visits convinced him that Vacher was legally responsible. What they showed the professor was that he could not draw conclusions from conversations with Vacher. The suspect would always dissimulate and would always weigh the effect of his words. No, in order to get to the bottom of this case, to determine if the accused was insane, Lacassagne would have to let the evidence speak. He now turned to analyzing the forensic evidence gathered at the crime scenes.

  Not having conducted the autopsies himself, Lacassagne had no guarantee of their quality or precision. Aside from two that his colleague Jean Boyer conducted, all the procedures were carried out by doctors with varying levels of expertise and took place in rough rural settings. The body of Vacher’s first victim, Eugénie Delhomme, was not examined until four days after the body was found. Rosine Rodier’s body was examined in a foggy pasture in the middle of the night, the area lit poorly with lanterns.

  There were so many lapses in forensic technique. In Lacassagne’s Handbook he had stressed, for example, the importance of checking for anal rape, as pederasty was becoming more widely recognized as a crime motive. Since Vacher had a bottle of lubricating oil among his possessions, and doctors had found traces of oil on some of the bodies, it was particularly important in this case. Yet in only two instances had doctors checked for anal rape. Lacassagne showed the eleven crime-scene reports to a sketch artist, who drew the bodies in the positions they had been found. Using the drawings, autopsy reports, and Vacher’s confessions, Lacassagne started to list common elements.

  All the victims had been killed in isolated areas without any witnesses. All were much smaller and weaker than Vacher—thus clearly not capable of effective self-defense. Ten of the victims’ bodies had massive cuts to the side of the throat, accompanied by other brutalities. (The body of the eleventh victim, recovered from the well, was nothing more than bones.) At ten of the crime scenes, investigators had found one or more huge puddles of blood, at a distance from where the body lay. The body itself was almost always hidden—either under a bush, as in the case of Vacher’s first victim, Eugénie Delhomme, or in a deserted shed, as with his second victim, Louise Marcel. Only two of the victims showed defensive wounds on the inner surfaces of their fingers or palms. None of the bodies had contusions on the back or the back of the head. In cases where the crime had taken place in enclosed areas, such as in shepherds’ huts, there were no traces of blood on the walls.

  These forensic details gave Lacassagne enough information to recreate Vacher’s method of attack. “One can see in the circumstances of the killings that the victims were assaulted and murdered in almost identical conditions,” he wrote.16 “Vacher did not improvise: He always follows the same method.”

  According to Lacassagne’s reconstruction, Vacher would walk for miles along commonly traveled roads but leave for his “hunt” along paths that skirted the edge of forests. There, he would prowl for solitary adolescents, whose “young flesh fascinated and appealed to him.” (Lacassagne pointed out that with the exception of one victim, the sixty-eight-year-old widow Morand, all Vacher’s victims had been young.) Vacher would approach a shepherd and take a quick look to make sure there was no one around. (The young shepherd Alphonse Rodier was spared an attack by the last-minute appearance of some workers in the distance.) Then he would violently seize the victim’s throat. Vacher was strong and had unusually long fingernails, and his first victim displayed telltale scratches. Later, as he gained confidence and practice in stabbing, he made throat wounds so large that they obliterated the scratches. Autopsies revealing crushed larynxes nonetheless demonstrated that strangulation had taken place.

  Vacher would seize his victims so quickly and powerfully that almost none had the chance to struggle or scream. Most blacked out or went limp, at which point he placed them on the ground and slit their throats. Lacassagne deduced that Vacher always proceeded in this manner because, as noted earlier, only one of the bodies displayed the kind of contusions on the back or the back of the head that a violent fall would have produced. Only one victim, the widow Morand, showed the kind of contusions that would have resulted from a fall, as Vacher seemed to have immediately stabbed her as he broke into her kitchen. Moreover, if the victims had been stabbed while in an upright position, the blood from the jugular vein would have spurted, possibly to a distance of several feet. The lack of blood spatter at any of the crime scenes ruled that out.

  Vacher’s “maneuver of choice,” wrote Lacassagne, was so efficient that he never was wounded or scratched. In two cases—those of Louise Marcel and Pierre Laurent—strangulation was incomplete, and although the victims struggled, as indicated by defensive wounds, they were not able to resist in any serious way. In only one case, that of Madame Plantier, did the victim escape as Vacher was executing the first part of his maneuver.

  “It is certain that Vacher was behind the head or on one side of the victim [when he slashed them]; otherwise, he would have been literally covered with blood,” wrote Lacassagne. “The blood spread onto the earth without reaching Vacher. This would explain why there was very little blood on his clothing.”

  Medical examiners noted that the backs of the clothing were blood-saturated and that the organs and hearts of the victims had been completely drained. As for the puddles of blood, Lacassagne deduced that the first one revealed the initial attack, where Vacher killed the victim and let as much blood as possible drain away. He would then drag the body out of the puddle to a second spot, where, n
ow that it was lifeless, he would proceed with mutilation or rape. Finally, he would move the body to a hiding place—behind rocks, under bushes, or in a hollow covered with branches or leaves. In some cases, he would make a hasty attempt to cover the bloody puddles with dirt.

  Then he would walk for many miles, often through the night, putting enough distance between himself and the crime scene to escape the initial search parties. He always carried a change of clothing and frequently shaved and then regrew his mustache and beard.

  “One has to ask,” wrote Lacassagne, “if the constant repetition of this series of bloody maneuvers is the work of a cannibal—but a responsible cannibal—or, to the contrary, of an unconscious lunatic.” To the professor, the entire progression of the crimes, despite their perversity, indicated the kind of planning and presence of mind that only a sane man could possess. “There is no doubt he chose the hour, the victim, the place.” From the moment Vacher began stalking each victim, “he obeyed a preconceived plan that followed a deliberate and logical process according to systematic ideas.… He encountered numerous travelers along the main routes, but his rage never overtook him. It only happened far from habitation.”

  His killing technique was fast and efficient, executed with a “precision and practice” that demonstrated a “calm, imperturbable intent.” The killer’s actions “would take audacity, sangfroid, a total self-possession.”

  Lacassagne pointed out that during the course of Vacher’s peregrinations, there were particular episodes when he demonstrated the kind of lucidity one did not associate with a madman. After he killed the widow Morand, he locked her door and threw away the key, prolonging the gap between crime and discovery. Minutes after he killed Aline Alaise, when a farmer in a horse-drawn carriage came upon him, Vacher had the presence of mind to make up a story about having an accident that gave him a bloody nose. When a policeman caught up with him after he attacked twelve-year-old Alphonsine Derouet, he was clever enough to win the officer’s confidence and send him off on a chase for the “real” suspect.

  Once Vacher killed his victim, he would sometimes slip into an erotic frenzy. Yet, even those actions, in Lacassagne’s view, would not exempt Vacher from legal responsibility, for they took place after his carefully planned executions. At that point, “the complete possession of the cadaver exalts him; then, and only then, can he freely deliver the blows [that excite him], localized at the genital organs.” According to Lacassagne, those actions portrayed sadism, a recently coined term to describe people who took pleasure inflicting pain. The term “does not in any way imply insanity,” wrote Lacassagne, and those who engaged in such practices did not deserve society’s protection. If their predilections took them into the realm of criminal behavior, then as criminals they should be judged.

  Lacassagne, like Fourquet, felt that Vacher had committed many more crimes than he had confessed to. The dossiers that came in from around the country indicated to him that Vacher had probably committed twenty-five to twenty-seven murders, rapes, and other violent felonies. Yet Vacher had confessed to only eleven, all of which occurred after his attempted shooting of Louise. Lacassagne suspected that Vacher was compiling a selective confession—a menu of crimes specifically chosen to portray an uncontrollable lunatic. Interestingly, although some of his alleged crimes involved theft—Augustine Mortureux’s earrings and shoes, Marie Moussier’s wedding band, and the vagabond Gautrais’s two hundred francs—Vacher adamantly denied having stolen. Fourquet had seen this denial as stemming from a perverse sense of honor, but Lacassagne disagreed. He saw it as a way for Vacher to deny ever having had a logical motive.

  “Finally,” wrote Lacassagne, “and this is an important point—he always had enough money to not be arrested as a vagabond.” That, along with his military papers, helped him evade arrest for three years.

  After four months of studying Vacher—visiting his family, evaluating his heredity, observing his behavior, analyzing crime scenes, and poring over volumes of testimony, confessions, and medical reports—the experts were ready to submit their analysis. Using the terminology of the day, they concluded that he was “not an epileptic, not an impulsive.” He was an immoral and violent person. He occasionally suffered temporary attacks of “melancholic delirium with ideas of persecution and suicide.” Yet, if at any point in his life he was alienated, he was “cured and was in a responsible state by the time he had left the Saint-Robert asylum. If he acted insane during his incarceration, it was [only] because he simulated insanity.” Vacher was, to put it simply, a criminal. “[He] should be considered as responsible, and this responsibility is in no way attenuated by any preceding psychological troubles.” In the eyes of the experts, the killer of little shepherds was legally accountable, and ready to stand trial.

  Nineteen

  The Trial

  On Wednesday, October 26, 1898, dawn brought an overcast sky in Bourg-en-Bresse, a market town about sixty miles northeast of Lyon and capital of the department of Ain. Nevertheless, a sense of festivity filled the air. Wednesday was market day, when people from all over the district thronged the streets. But there was another reason for the carnival atmosphere: On this particular Wednesday, the trial of the most fearsome murderer of the century would begin.1

  Portraits of Vacher were displayed in the stores; street vendors hawked special newspaper editions and pamphlets heralding “The Crimes of Vacher, the Jack the Ripper of the Southeast.” Their verses titillated the public with a flavor of the upcoming testimony.

  He begins the series2

  Of crimes so perverse

  And strikes with such fury,

  Such fury, such fury …

  Another:

  Little shepherds full of sorrow

  At night, take care of yourselves.3

  There are human beasts

  Inhumane, inhumane,

  Cowardly or insane assassins

  More terrible than wolves.

  So many journalists had arrived that not a room in the entire town remained free. Authorities added equipment to the local telegraph office so the correspondents’ dispatches would not overwhelm it. Reporters arrived from all the major French newspapers and most of the regional ones, from Italian and Swiss papers, and from the New York Herald and the New York Times. The Times man explained to his readers why he had traveled all the way to a provincial French town to see the trial of a man no American had heard of. Vacher, he proclaimed, would rank among “the most extraordinary criminals that has ever lived, who throws the exploits of a Jack the Ripper and almost of a Nero into the shade, and whose name will certainly be identified, like that of Bluebeard, with the legendary idea of a monster for succeeding generations.”4

  It was a busy time for news in the French press. A few weeks earlier, a dispute between France and Britain over a colonial outpost in eastern Africa had brought the two countries to the brink of war. In Paris, several ministries were in a state of crisis in the aftermath of a failed attempt to build a canal across Panama, and the Dreyfus Affair continued to divide and scandalize the nation. In fact, the Supreme Court of Appeal in Paris was scheduled to review the Dreyfus case the day after Vacher’s trial began, which made for some busy travel for the press corps. Albert Bataille, the correspondent for Le Figaro, advised his readers that he would attend the first day of the Vacher trial and then catch the night train to Paris for the Dreyfus appeal. He compared it to two plays opening on the same night: “The directors should have been in touch with each other!”5

  For Vacher, the lead-up to the trial had been less exciting. After spending four months in Lyon, he had been sent back to the little prison in Belley, where he waited another four dreary months for a trial date. Fourquet continued visiting him, in an ongoing attempt to elicit more information. But confronting a magistrate in a backwater prison was nothing like sparring with the world’s greatest criminologists, and Vacher languished under confinement.

  One day, Fourquet was in Vacher’s cell, idly chatting, when the inmate aske
d, “Are you not afraid to be in here with me?”6

  “Should I be?” Fourquet replied.

  “Do you have a revolver?”

  “No,” said Fourquet. Like Hans Gross, he felt a detective should never carry weapons while interviewing a suspect. He inverted his pockets and jangled his keys. “These are my only weapons,” he said, joking.

  Vacher reached under his mattress and pulled out a knife. Fourquet was “suffocated” by surprise; he knew that if he showed any fear, he would die. Instantly, he made up a story. “Listen, Vacher—I have just received the report from the experts. They have declared you insane, and by consequence legally nonresponsible. But if you try to kill me, regardless of what the report says, your head will fall. When one kills a magistrate, one is always condemned to death.”

  Taking advantage of Vacher’s momentary indecision, Fourquet sprang forward and snatched away the weapon. Vacher confessed that he had been hiding the knife for the past six weeks, having kept it after one of his meals. The jailer should have been fired for his negligence, but the man wept so piteously for his job that Fourquet let him go with a severe reprimand.

  Now, as the noise swelled in the courtroom in Bourg-en-Bresse, Vacher made ready for his entrance. The crowd was huge and boisterous, shoving, gossiping, ready for a show. Outside the building, a mob surged against the entrance, calling for the criminal’s death. Soldiers of the Twenty-third Regiment, from the garrison of Bourg, a famously tough contingent, were having trouble holding the mob at bay.