Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  regular necrophiles, who may occasionally engage in sex with the living but prefer sex with the dead;

  homicidal necrophiles, who will kill the living in order to have sex with their corpses;

  exclusive necrophiles, who are able to perform sexually only with the dead.11

  It is a paradox of forensic scientific objectivity to classify a homicidal necrophile who kills people in order to have sex with their corpses (stage nine) as being one stage less severe than one who can only perform sexually with those already dead (stage ten).

  Lee Mellor classifies necrophiles in a different way. He charts them on a graph between four fluid intersecting poles mapping a point by how long the corpse has been dead (warm to cold poles) balanced against the degree to which the necrophile preserves or mutilates the corpse (preservative to destructive poles). It’s a scale that is more fluid in the dichotomy between the “disorganized, destructive, warm werewolf” type and the “organized, preservative, cold vampire” type of necrophile serial killer.12

  Not everybody agrees on the criminality of necrophilia. Psychology historian Dany Nobus, for example, challenges how necrophilia’s “diagnostic confusion with necrosadism and lust murder continues to inform contemporary views on the subject . . . the spurious identification of necrophilia with necrosadism and lust murder often continues to pervade popular and scientific accounts alike.”13

  The term “necrophile” itself was coined by Belgian psychiatrist Joseph Guislain in 1850, during the psychiatric debate that followed the Bertrand trial. Nobus has traced the term’s first appearance in print to Guislain’s 1852 French-language textbook Leçons Orales sur les Phrénopathies (“Lectures in Psychology”), featuring transcripts of lectures he delivered two years earlier.14

  Despite Marchal’s best efforts, the court rejected his insanity plea and Bertrand was convicted of violating Article 360 of the French Criminal Code, “Violation of a Grave or Tomb,” which was directed at preventing grave robbing for valuables and the theft of cadavers for sale to medical schools, a minor offense carrying a penalty of three months to one year in prison and/or a fine between 16 and 200 francs. He received the maximum punishment of one year in prison.15

  Contrary to all the reports of his suicide in 1850, after serving out his sentence François Bertrand was not even dismissed from the French army. Upon his release he served briefly as a private in a light infantry battalion in Algeria, and then settled in the Normandy port city of Le Havre, where he had the lucrative post of quartermaster for the army. On May 21, 1851, he married Euphrosine Corscelie Delauney, a seamstress. They apparently had children and remained married until Bertrand’s death (cause unknown) on February 25, 1878, at the age of fifty-four.16 Bertrand is not known to have committed any further crimes.

  Robert Krafft-Ebing, the forensic psychiatrist and author of Psychopathia Sexualis, who would later popularize Guislain’s term “necrophilia,” along with “sadism” and “masochism,” was only nine years old at the time of the Bertrand case. But the psychiatric debate about fetishes, paraphilias such as necrophilia, and their relationship to compulsive serial behavior in the case of Bertrand had a tremendous impact on Krafft-Ebing’s later work and on our understanding of what drives serial killers to perpetrate murders accompanied by rape, mutilation and sometimes necrophilia.17 The statistical estimates of necrophilia in cases of serial murder range from a high of 42 percent of cases to a low of at least 11 percent (chapter two).

  France’s First Modern Serial Killer: “The Wolf” or “Killer of Servant Girls,” 1861

  On May 26, 1861, at about two p.m. in Lyon, France, the country’s third-largest city, an unemployed domestic servant, Marie Pichon, was crossing the busy Guillotière Bridge over the Rhône River. Lyon was in the heart of France’s industrial belt and its large middle class employed many domestic servants. Marie was on her way to a servants’ employment agency in the hope of securing some desperately needed work. It was there on that bridge that she would encounter her serial killer and survive to tell the tale.

  A man suddenly rushed up from behind her, catching her attention with a light pluck at her dress. He asked if she knew where a servants’ employment agency was located. He appeared to be in his fifties with a long, dark beard, an aquiline nose and very prominent blue eyes. He was clad in a blue workman’s shirt, big shoes, and a gray hat with a large brim. Had he raised his hat, Marie would have seen that his head was strangely shaped, large at the base of his neck but coming almost to a cone at the top, covered in long, thick hair. A prominent scar or tumorous growth of some sort was visible on his upper lip. Marie would later say that she immediately recognized him as a “country person” by his clothing and comportment. His manner, however, was self-possessed and polite and Marie kindly told him that she herself was on the way to an employment agency seeking work as a servant and he could accompany her to the office.

  What a happy coincidence, he exclaimed delightedly. His employer in the nearby town of Montluel, about twelve miles from Lyon, had urgently sent him to the city to hire a house servant. According to Pichon’s statement, he said to her:

  “I have exactly the thing to suit you, I am gardener at a chateau near Montluel, and my mistress has sent me to Lyons with positive orders to bring back a house-servant, cost what it may.”

  He enumerated the advantages I should enjoy, and said that the work would be very light, and the wages two hundred and fifty francs, besides many Christmas-boxes. A married daughter of his mistress paid her frequent visits, and always left five francs on the mantelpiece for the maid. He added, that I should be expected to attend mass regularly.

  The appearance, language, and manner of the man gave me so strong an impression of good faith, that, without a minute’s hesitation, I accepted his offer, and we accordingly left by the train, which arrived at Montluel about nightfall—half-past seven.18

  As she left the train station in Montluel and followed the man through the dusk along a road leading out of the small town, Marie’s night of horror was about to begin at the hands of France’s first modern serial killer. Some thirty years before Jack the Ripper, this serial killer would be dubbed by the French press “the Wolf,” in the long tradition of “werewolf serial killers.”

  THE BRAVE NEW WORLD LIKE NO OTHER BEFORE

  Marie Pichon and her assailant lived in a world that had been radically and rapidly transformed since the age of Little Red Riding Hood, werewolves and witch-hunters. Industrialization transformed Western civilization at its core. For some twelve thousand years the primary occupation of human beings had been growing and selling food and processing natural resources: tilling the land, hewing the wood, looming the cotton by hand and turning the clay. Arable land was the most valuable commodity in the old world, a key to wealth and power. In the preindustrial world the majority of ordinary people lived in the countryside in communities in which they were often closely tied by kin and clan relationships. These communities policed themselves through compulsory vigilance committees or citizen “watch and wards” during the night or by other unofficial means including lynching and vigilante mobs.

  Two things transformed this world in the most spectacular way: steam power and the telegraph. Thirty years earlier, Marie’s trip from Lyon to Montluel twelve miles away would have taken several hours. Now the trip by train took her and her assailant less than an hour. Steam power not only manufactured things faster, but it also moved people and goods faster and printed information faster and in more copious amounts and distributed it faster too. It also moved serial killers and their victims greater distances, not only to each other but away from potential witnesses.

  The other source of this transformative speed was the telegraph, or what Tom Standage, in his history of it, called “the Victorian Internet.”19 It is not an exaggeration to describe the introduction of the telegraph in 1845 as being like the arrival of the Internet. Beginning in 1845 we h
ad the capability of moving information at near-Internet speed—at least, at the speed of an electric current down a copper wire, one message at a time, without, of course, the bandwidth of today’s fiber-optic Internet.

  The world began to accelerate. People not only received new information faster, but they could now act on it faster, sometimes almost in real time. In government, business, diplomacy and warfare, not only could information be conveyed faster, but the logistics of deploying resources, troops or munitions were accelerated by the telegraph and steam power. The public too was covered in this new telegraphic information net, as daily news was telegraphed to newspapers and printed overnight on steam-driven presses and available to readers by the next morning.

  These changes also transformed how serial killers navigated the urbanized and newly networked world, in which smaller, intimate, rural “organic communities” were supplanted by much larger, anonymous, urbanized “organized societies” where one was no longer identified by who they were, but merely by what they were: a factory worker, businessman, shoemaker, teacher, student, policeman, prostitute, vagrant, victim or, yes, once we finally named them, serial killer.

  Martin Dumollard: Profile of a Serial-Killing Village Creep

  Martin Dumollard, the serial killer who approached Marie Pichon on the bridge in Lyon, had already murdered at least three women and perhaps six or more. Dumollard was what we would today classify as an “organized” serial killer, painstakingly stalking and luring his victims into his trap. He used his charm and the promise of lucrative employment to entice young women to accompany him from the busy city and its many witnesses to his lonely, wooded killing grounds in the countryside outside the small town of Montluel.

  Dumollard was born on April 21, 1810, in the neighboring village of Tramoyes, to a Hungarian revolutionary refugee by the name of Peter Demola, who changed his name to the more French-sounding Dumollard. Demola was an affluent landowner but an active antimonarchist and was wanted back home for plotting to assassinate the emperor of Austria-Hungary. During the Napoleonic Wars, Austro-Hungarian forces invaded part of France, and the family fled to Italy. There, Martin’s father was identified, arrested and sentenced to death. Four-year-old Martin apparently witnessed his father’s horrific execution by écartèlement, or quartering. His legs and arms were tied to four horses which tore his limbs from his torso while he was still alive. Martin would never be the same after seeing that.

  Martin and his now impoverished and widowed mother returned to Tramoyes, where he was put to work as a shepherd taking care of a local landowner’s herd. Dumollard probably did not have much of a childhood, but if he did, his cone-shaped head and the tumorous growth on his lip probably did not endear him to other children. It must have been a lonely existence, just the kind of loneliness in which damaged children develop their cycle of homicidal fantasies.

  In 1840, despite his deformities, Martin managed to woo and marry Marianne Martinet, who worked as a servant for the same landowner as he. Marianne must have been dysfunctional in her own ways, because the two of them embarked on married life by making off with some of their employer’s sheep. Martin was quickly arrested for the theft and served a one-year prison sentence. He and his wife eventually settled in the nearby village of Dagneux, abutting the town of Montluel. In 1844 Martin was again convicted, for petty theft, and sentenced to thirteen months in prison. Other than that, Dumollard attracted little attention. When his name first came up as a suspect in the murders, the town’s mayor had no idea who he was.

  The Dumollards lived in a ramshackle house and stable by the road in Dagneux and were unfriendly, showing themselves only when peddling small secondhand articles and clothing at local markets. Martin Dumollard was ill-tempered and kept strange nocturnal habits. Villagers would later recall that when he arrived home in the late hours of the night he would shout out to his wife a secret password so loudly that all the neighbors knew it by heart. But he did not come into open conflict with anybody and he kept to himself, as did his wife.

  The First Victim

  On February 28, 1855, six years before Marie Pichon’s encounter on the bridge in Lyon, hunters came across the nude body of a woman in a thicket at Pizay, near the village of Tramoyes, where Dumollard had been born and about six miles northwest of his current residence in Montluel-Dagneux. The victim was covered in freshly dried blood and had been killed by six blows to the head. Her clothes were missing except for her handkerchief, a collar, a black lace cap and a pair of shoes found nearby. It was assumed that she had been sexually assaulted. The body was brought to the church in Tramoyes, where it was photographed in the hope the woman could be somehow identified.

  She was thirty-six-year-old Marie Baday, a servant who had been last seen in Lyon three days earlier. She had told acquaintances that a man from the country had offered her a well-paying position as a domestic if she could take the job immediately. On the same day that Marie Baday left Lyon with the stranger, another servant girl in Lyon, Marie Cart, had received the same offer from a strange-looking man with a disfigured lip from the country, but she delayed in deciding whether to accept the offer.

  On March 4, the man returned to Lyon offering Cart the same job. This time she turned him down, but introduced the polite emissary to a friend of hers, Olympe Alubert, who immediately accepted the generous offer. The two of them arrived at Tramoyes at dusk. The man led Alubert into the same woods at Pizay where Baday had been found several days earlier. Today the thickets at Pizay are known locally as the Bois de la Morte—the Forest of the Dead.20

  It’s unclear whether Olympe had heard about or read in the Lyon newspapers about a dead woman found in the woods recently, and if she had, whether she knew that those were the woods the man was leading her into, but something in the situation alerted her intuition. As they approached the woods, she inexplicably took fright and ran off, seeking shelter in the first house she could find. Olympe did not have much to report to the police other than the suspect’s physical description, including the deformed lip. Being six miles away from the village where Dumollard resided, he might as well have been a thousand miles away. Despite advances in communications, telegraph wires did not reach into the smaller villages of the countryside and even if they did, there was no systematic communication protocol between various police departments.

  On September 22, 1855, Josephte Charlety was lured from Lyon by the same man. During the trip to her supposed new place of employment she too began to feel uneasy by his questions about her life savings. Claiming to be too tired to continue that night, Charlety stopped at an inn, agreeing to meet the man the next morning to continue the journey. Instead she stood him up and survived.

  On October 31, twenty-two-year-old Jeanne-Marie Bourgeois was lured in Lyon by a man matching the same description and, also on intuition, fled from him during her voyage. By now police had arrested a suspect in the killing of Baday and were ignoring reports from “hysterical” women about their encounters with the strange man. Bourgeois was called in to view the suspect and stated that it was not the same man. Eventually the suspect was released.

  In November 1855, Victorine Perrin was lured from Lyon. As he led her down a road some people approached and Dumollard fled with her belongings. Again a report was filed with police, but in a different jurisdiction. Even though by now authorities in various jurisdictions had the same reports of a man with a disfigured lip, and even the public was aware of the description, people in Dumollard’s town did not make the connection (or if they did, they hesitated to report their suspicions to the police).

  After his arrest, police would retrace Dumollard’s movements between 1855 and 1861. They learned that he trolled for his victims in Lyon so frequently that he was known at his favorite hotel, where he would stop overnight. Police collected reports of numerous young women seen in his company, including a young woman whom he claimed was his niece, who spent the night with him at the hotel. Her identity and he
r fate were never determined, but hotel staff called as witnesses at Dumollard’s trial identified some of her belongings found in his possession.

  Dumollard’s method was almost always the same. He would take the train from his small town into Lyon and descend into the urban crowd, trolling the main thoroughfares for his ideal victim: a servant girl in desperate need of employment. (He would recognize unemployed domestics by their manner of dress, their youth and the fact that they were in the street during working hours.) His opening ploy would be to ask directions to a servants’ employment agency, as he did with Pichon. If his victim was, as he hoped, an unemployed servant seeking work, he would lay out the bait.

  On January 17, 1859, Dumollard lured unemployed servant Julie Fargeat into the countryside some twenty miles northwest of Montluel-Dagneux. When he attacked her in a wooded area her screams brought Simon Mallet, a local farmer, to her rescue. Dumollard fled with Fargeat’s belongings. But when she reported the attack to police, she was charged with vagrancy for failing to produce her identity papers, which Dumollard had run off with. We must not forget that in continental Europe the primary function of police until recently was to suppress popular rebellion and keep order among the working classes. They were not there to “protect and serve” all citizens, as police are mandated today.

  On April 29, 1860, Dumollard lured Louise Michel to the same area. She managed to escape him to find refuge in a farmhouse belonging to Claude Aymond. Dumollard in the meantime fled across a field where he encountered Simon Mallet, one of the farmers who the year before had come to the aid of Julie Fargeat. Aymond and Mallet together went to their local police magistrate to report the attacks but the magistrate dismissed the notion of a “swollen lip” linking the two cases to the same offender. The report was filed away and not circulated beyond the small jurisdiction.