Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  The trial was reported in an early example of popular true-crime literature, a pamphlet printed in 1590 and translated into English and widely distributed throughout Europe at the time.33

  [Peter Stubbe] . . . from his youth was greatly inclined to evil and the practicing of wicked arts even from twelve years of age till twenty . . . gave both soul and body to the Devil forever, for small carnal pleasures in this life, that he might be famous and spoken of on earth.

  Stubbe appeared to be a functioning member of the community:

  He would go through the streets in comely habit, and very civilly, as one well known to all the inhabitants thereabout, and often times he was saluted by those whose friends and children he had butchered, though not suspected for the same . . .

  Within the span of a few years, he had murdered thirteen young children, and two goodly young women pregnant with child, tearing the children out of their wombs, in most bloody and savage ways, and after ate their hearts panting hot and raw, which he accounted dainty morsels and best agreeing to his appetite.

  Stubbe, it was reported, had even raped and impregnated his daughter and then murdered and cannibalized her child.

  As every successful true-crime narrative calls for a motive, Stubbe’s murders are attributed to a pact with the Devil, in which he was given a magic belt (or girdle) that when worn would transform him into a werewolf in whose guise he could enjoy his bloodlust.

  Conveniently as he was escaping the scene of his latest murder with hunters closely behind him in pursuit, Stubbe . . .

  . . . slipped his girdle from about him, whereby the shape of a wolf clean avoided, and he appeared presently in his true shape and likeness, having in his hand a staff as one walking toward the city. But the hunters, whose eyes were steadfastly bent upon the beast, and seeing him in the same place metamorphosed contrary to their expectation, it wrought a wonderful amazement to their minds; and, had it not been that they knew the man so soon as they saw him, they had surely taken the same to have been some Devil in a man’s likeness; but for as much as they knew him to be an ancient dweller in the town, they came unto him, and talking with him, they brought him by communication home to his own house, and finding him to be the man indeed, and no delusion or fantastical notion, they had him brought before the magistrates to be examined.

  The pamphlet concludes that Stubbe was condemned on October 18, 1589 . . .

  . . . judged first to have his body laid on a wheel, and with red hot burning pincers in ten different places to have the flesh pulled off from the bones, after that, his legs and arms to be broken with a wooden ax or hatchet, afterward to have his head struck from his body, then to have his carcass burned to ashes.

  This pamphlet is probably the earliest unambiguous historical account of an “ordinary” serial killer in the sense that we have of serial killers today. Stubbe is living as a prominent and respectable citizen in the community he is secretly victimizing, just like serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was a successful contractor and “good neighbor” who had the honor to host the first lady Rosalynn Carter on her visit to Chicago. Typical of serial killers, Stubbe is reported as “inclined to evil” from the age of twelve to twenty.

  Pierre Bourgot and Michel Verdung—France, 1521

  A less certain account is of Pierre Bourgot and Michel Verdung, the Werewolves of Poligny, who were executed in 1521. They were supposedly a pair of serial-killer werewolves who, thanks to a pact with the Devil, transformed into homicidal creatures. The two of them killed a random woman (or child, in other accounts) gathering peas in her garden, murdered and ate a four-year-old girl, killed another girl and drank her blood and ate parts of her neck, and killed a fourth girl, aged eight or nine. Bourgot confessed that he “had broken her neck with his teeth because she had once refused his request for alms; and as soon as he had done the awful deed, he begged then and there for alms in honor of God.”34

  Gilles Garnier—France, 1574

  Gilles Garnier was convicted for multiple murders committed while he was allegedly a werewolf in France in 1574. The case report reads:

  The said Garnier on the day of Saint Michael, being in the form of a werewolf took a young girl ten or twelve years old near the woods of Serre, in the vineyard of Chastenoy a quarter of a league from Dole, and there he killed and butchered her, as much with his hands in the semblance of paws as with his teeth, and ate the flesh of her thighs and arms, and had carried some to his wife. And for having taken another girl, and killed her to eat her, if he hadn’t been prevented by three people, as he has confessed. And fifteen days later, for having strangled a young child ten years old in the vineyard of Gredisans, and eaten the flesh of his thighs, legs, and belly. And since then for having killed, while in the form of a man, and not that of a wolf, another boy twelve to thirteen years old, in the woods of the village of Perouse, with the intention of eating him, if he hadn’t been prevented from doing so, as he confessed without being forced or coerced. He was condemned to be burned alive, and the sentence was carried out.35

  “Werewolf or Demon Tailor of Chalon”—France, 1598

  A case of an unnamed urban, community-functioning “werewolf” similar to Peter Stubbe was reported in 1598 in Chalon, France. The trial records of the sixteenth-century Jeffrey Dahmer–like serial killer have not survived, allegedly destroyed by authorities because of their obscene content. The name of the defendant was destroyed along with the court records in a process of Damnatio memoriae (“condemnation of memory”), but fragmentary surviving sources describe the offender as a tailor who lured children into his shop, where he raped them, slit their throats and then “powdered and dressed” their corpses and ate them.

  When his shop was raided, authorities discovered a barrel containing the partial remains of numerous victims, reminiscent of the chemical barrel of body parts found in Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment in 1991. Whether the unnamed tailor himself claimed to be a werewolf is unclear, but he was nicknamed the “Werewolf of Chalon” or “Demon Tailor of Chalon.”36

  Jean Grenier—France, 1603

  The 1603 case of Jean Grenier, a thirteen-year-old boy accused of serial killing as a werewolf in Coutras, near Bordeaux in southwestern France, is one of the better-documented cases and a seminal case in Europe’s “lycanthrope epidemic” and early-modern forensics.

  According to his own testimony, Jean either ran away from home or was run off by his father after he began a nocturnal life as a werewolf. Grenier testified that his stepmother had witnessed him “vomit up from his throat the feet of dogs and the hands of little children.”37 Horrified by what she saw, she refused to return home until his father drove him away.

  Homeless, the boy roamed in the vicinity, begging, and frequently approached young girls tending sheep in the fields. He caught the attention of local authorities after a group of girls reported a disturbing encounter with him. The account of the case states:

  The appearance of the lad was strange. His hair was of a yellowy red and densely matted, falling over his shoulders and completely covering his narrow brow. His tiny pale-gray eyes twinkled with a look of hideous savagery and cunning, from deep sunken hollows. His complexion was of a dark olive color; the teeth were strong and white, and the canine teeth protruded over the lower lip when the mouth was closed. The boy’s hands were large and powerful, the nails black and pointed like [a] bird’s talons. He was poorly clothed, and seemed to be in the most abject poverty. The few garments he had on him were in tatters, and through the holes the emaciation of his limbs was clearly visible.38

  The girls stated that the boy made advances toward them, declaring that he would marry the prettiest among them, and then he said to them:

  Every Monday, Friday, and Sunday, and for about an hour at dusk every other day, I am a wolf, a werewolf. I have killed dogs and drunk their blood; but little girls taste better, their flesh is tender and sweet, their blood rich and warm. I have eaten many
a maiden, as I have been on my raids together with my nine companions. I am a werewolf! If the sun were to set I would soon fall on one of you and make a meal of you!

  The girls fled in terror, and their account of the strange encounter piqued the interest of authorities, as over a period of months an infant and several girls in the region had been found viciously murdered, mutilated and partly cannibalized. The boy was eventually identified by another girl, thirteen-year-old Marguerite Poirier, who had been complaining to her parents that the beggar boy had been scaring her with his stories of being a werewolf while she was tending to sheep.

  Jean had often stated to her that he had sold himself to the devil, and that he had acquired the power of roaming the country after dusk, and sometimes in broad day, in the form of a wolf. He had told her that he had killed and eaten many dogs, but that he found their flesh less appetizing than the flesh of little girls, which he regarded as an ultimate delicacy. He had told her that this had been tasted by him not unfrequently, but he had specified only two instances: in one he had eaten as much as he could, and had thrown the leftovers to a wolf, which had come up during the meal. In the other instance he had bitten to death another little girl, had slurped up her blood, and, being in a ravenous condition at the time, had consumed every portion of her, except the arms and shoulders.

  Marguerite’s parents at first dismissed the complaints of their daughter as childish flights of imagination. (In a similar case of parental skepticism, Ed Gein, Psycho necrophile serial killer, occasionally babysat children for neighbors. The children, while playing in his house, saw shrunken human heads, skull cups and suits made of mummified female skin and reported this to their parents, who laughed off the stories.) One day little Marguerite came home early in a distraught state and recounted that, with her shepherd’s staff, she had beaten off the boy after he transformed into a strange animal that attacked her. She described it “as resembling a wolf, but as being shorter and stouter; its hair was red, its tail stumpy, and the head smaller than that of a genuine wolf.” The vagrant boy Jean Grenier was taken into custody and questioned, and quickly confessed to the attack, stating, “The charge of Marguerite Poirier is correct. My intention was to have killed and eaten her, but she beat me off with a stick. I have only killed one dog, a white one, and I did not drink its blood.”

  When pressed, Grenier confessed that he had once entered an unguarded house in a small village, the name of which he did not remember, and had found an infant asleep in its cradle. As no one was around to stop him, he snatched the baby out of its cradle, dragged it behind the garden, killed it and ate as much of it as satisfied his hunger. He claimed that he shared the remains with a wolf. He also confessed to murdering a girl as she was tending sheep in the parish of Saint Antoine de Pizon. She was wearing a black dress, he remembered, but he did not know her name. He said he tore her to death with his nails and teeth, and then ate her. Six weeks before his capture he had fallen upon another child, near a stone bridge in the same parish, but was prevented from killing her by a passerby.

  There was earnest and extensive investigation into Grenier’s confessions. They were not accepted at face value. The authorities assembled witnesses, recorded testimony and carefully reviewed the details of the confessions to ascertain their veracity. The mutilation and murder of the girl wearing the black dress was confirmed and Jean was escorted to the scenes of the crimes by the court, which meticulously reviewed his firsthand familiarity with the victims and the circumstances of their deaths. The possibility that Grenier had been delusional was extensively explored by the court.39

  In his testimony before the court, the boy claimed that when he was ten or eleven years old he had encountered a mysterious black figure he knew only as the “Master of the Forest,” who “signed him with his fingernail” and gave him a wolfskin and an ointment that when rubbed on his body gave him the physical prowess and appetite of a wolf.

  To the court of that time this was an admission that Grenier had made a pact with the Devil; it was an open-and-shut case of witchcraft, a capital crime. In June 1603, the court sentenced the boy to be put to death by hanging and then to be burned in the public square. But the case did not end there.

  The Grenier Appeal and Werewolf Forensics: “They Are Aware of the Pleasure They Experience When as Wolves.”

  Much had changed by the 1600s since the early werewolf trials of the 1400s and 1500s. We often assume that the principle of the insanity defense is a modern phenomenon emerging from the famous 1843 case in Britain of Daniel McNaughton, who was charged with murdering a man whom McNaughton in his delusionary state mistook for the prime minister, whom he believed was conspiring against him. In a precedent-setting judgment, McNaughton was acquitted by “reason of insanity” and confined for the remainder of his life in an insane asylum, where he died twenty-two years later.

  Even today the principles of legal insanity in Anglo-American jurisprudence are known as the McNaughton rules (sometimes spelled M’Naghten), which state that an incapacity to discern the difference between right and wrong or to perceive or understand the consequences of one’s actions mitigates the criminal culpability of a perpetrator. But the principles of insanity pleas go back much earlier.

  In continental Europe, where Roman law was practiced until the eighteenth century, when it was supplanted by the Napoleonic code (as opposed to common law in Britain, where the McNaughton case was tried), there was a similar principle. In addition to the evidence against a defendant, his or her legal and mental culpability were routinely assessed without a special plea, as it was in the Grenier case. If insanity could be proved, such that criminal acts were committed while the accused was not in possession of full mental capabilities, the defendant could be acquitted or their sentence reduced. However, the defense had the burden of explicitly proving that the defendant was not faking insanity. Physicians were increasingly called as expert witnesses to testify about werewolf defendants’ insanity pleas.40

  In 1603 there was such an appeal to the provincial parliament at Bordeaux for clemency for Jean Grenier. Some interesting forensic arguments were put forth in favor of the boy never actually having transformed into a wolf: one of his victims had her dress slipped off intact, rather than torn away as by a wild animal. For the court, this was significant forensic evidence:

  It is remarkable that he said that it was he who lowered her dress, because he did not rip it. This is something that we observed, to show that while real wolves tear with their claws, werewolves tear with their teeth, and just like men they know how to remove the dresses of the girls they want to eat without ripping them . . . But what shows this miserable boy to be completely trained by the Devil, and won over and conquered according to the desire and intention of the Evil Spirit, is the cruelty he confessed to having committed while wearing the wolf’s skin, namely, eating children. He confessed that he had taken them by the throat, just like a wolf does. The Devil had instructed him, for he had undressed them without tearing their clothing, a particular habit characteristic of the werewolf. He confessed that he has a taste for it; the Devil awakened this desire in him.

  The court essentially ruled that werewolves are not people literally transformed into wolves but people possessed by the Devil to behave as if they were transformed into werewolves. It was the best explanation we had for serial killers back then.

  Similar to later debates on whether serial killers are legally insane—that is, whether they are aware that their acts are wrong—the lower court, in originally sentencing Grenier to death, was guided by the legal doctrine on werewolves advanced by French judge Jean Bodin in his 1580 work Demonomania of Witches. In it, he argued that while the Devil can transform a man into a werewolf, as a werewolf the man retains his human understanding.

  In other words, like our serial-killing psychopath, a werewolf, even if literally transformed by the Devil into a monster, is nevertheless aware of his wrongdoing. If so, a werewolf was not
legally insane (unable to discern the wrongfulness of his acts) and was therefore culpable for his crimes. Instead of psychiatry’s notion of psychopathy, however, the conceptual framework was theological demonology. Bodin argued:

  The essential form of man—his understanding—does not change at all, but only his body changes [in the condition of lycanthropy] . . . Men are sometimes transformed into beasts but they retain their human understanding and intelligence . . . They are aware of the pleasure they experience when as wolves . . .

  The appeals court also reviewed the possibility that Jean Grenier suffered from the disease of clinical lycanthropy as the ancients had diagnosed it. That would have been an effective insanity defense. According to the appeal verdict,

  Nothing has been neglected in this affair in order to clarify the truth of this crime, for this young werewolf was visited by two physicians, who agree that this young boy is of a black and melancholic humor. Still, he is not afflicted with the illness that is called lycanthropy, so that we do not have a case of an imaginary metamorphosis.

  Nonetheless, Grenier’s death sentence was commuted on September 6, 1603, in a remarkably modern sensitivity and compassion for his youth, circumstances and mental state. The trial record states:

  The court, in the end, takes note of the age and the imbecility of this young boy, who is so stupid and so mentally impaired, that children of seven or eight normally show more reasoning than he does. This boy is so malnourished and so undersized that one would not think him ten years old. . . . Here is a young boy abandoned and driven out by his father, who had a stepmother for a mother, who roamed the fields, without a guide and without anyone in the world to look after him, begging for his food, who had no instruction whatsoever in the fear of God, whose nature was corrupted by evil seduction, daily necessities, and despair, all conditions that the Evil Spirit exploited. The court does not want to contribute further to the misery of this young boy, whom the Devil had armed against other children. The court rules after due consideration of all matters, including the inconsistencies of his testimony and other aspects of the trial, to save his soul for God rather than judge it to be lost. Moreover, according to the report of the good monks who began to instruct and encourage him, he is already showing that he abhorred and detested his crimes, as witnessed by his tears and his repentance.