Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  A common theme was the capture of traveling Victorian virgins by pirates or lustful Turks, the women discovering the pleasures of sex by being raped in a harem. Children were portrayed as sexual beings intent on seducing the family butler. Scenes of bondage, flogging and sex were intermixed; sex was almost always linked to pain and the loss of female virginity—often in childhood and accompanied by copious blood. Sold in cheap, popular, magazine-like multipart editions, in an age when print encompassed all available media, this literature had a tremendous impact on the imaginations of the bored, frustrated and repressed males among whom, no doubt, dwelled Jack the Ripper.

  There is no evidence that pornography spawns serial killers, but it can function as a facilitator, in the same way as alcohol or drugs, or true-crime detective magazines or for that matter even passages in the Bible condemning harlots, and similar little pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that makes up the structural underpinnings of complex serial-killer fantasies, psychopathologies and behaviors. Pornography can also function as a conditioner. Unlike the Bible, pornography, especially pictorial, is not, as often claimed, “watched” or “read,” but masturbated to. When women complain, “My man is watching porn on the Internet,” one wants to snicker. The problem is not that he is “watching” porn; it’s that he is compulsively masturbating to it. For somebody with a paraphilic addiction, pornography can become a sexual-response conditioner to self-selected sadistic or other transgressive fantasies.

  It is interesting that while so many medical, psychiatric, sexual and philosophical terms derive from ancient Greek gods or Greco-Roman words, “sadism,” although the fact of it has presumably always existed, is entirely modern as a term, deriving from the late-eighteenth-century figure the Marquis de Sade (as is “masochism,” derived from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch [1836–95]). Or as French philosopher and social critic Michel Foucault argued,

  Sadism is not a name finally given to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive cultural fact which appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century, and which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination: unreason transformed into delirium of the heart, madness of desire, the insane dialog of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.36

  ELEVEN

  The French Ripper: The Forensics of Serial Murder in the Belle Epoch, 1897

  Who sees always in the accused a fallen brother or one wrongfully suspected, he will question well.

  —DR. HANS GROSS, HANDBOOK FOR EXAMINING MAGISTRATES, 1893

  Justice withers, prison corrupts and society gets the criminal it deserves.

  —DR. ALEXANDRE LACASSAGNE, FATHER OF SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRIMINOLOGY

  A decade after Jack the Ripper, police across the channel in France were faced with a series of their own “ripper” murders. Unlike the British, the French were already experienced with serial killers like Martin Dumollard, Louis-Joseph Philippe and Eusebius Pieydagnelle, not to mention the serial necrophile vampire François Bertrand. Yet their seminal serial- killer case was more daunting than the Jack the Ripper murders, within the urban confines of Whitechapel. The French Ripper left a migratory trail of murders covering a vast and mostly remote rural territory of southeastern France. This case was thoroughly modern not only in terms of its investigation (albeit without the benefits of fingerprinting and DNA) but also in its psychiatric and legal debates about the killer’s sanity when, unlike Jack the Ripper, he was identified, apprehended and put on trial. It can be classified among the earliest serial-killer cases successfully solved through modern forensic techniques and advanced investigative strategies.

  Joseph Vacher—“Southeast Ripper”—“Killer of Little Shepherds”—France, 1897

  In late-nineteenth-century France, young female textile workers lived and worked far from their rural homes, like Mexican maquiladora laborers or Chinese migrant factory workers today: in big suburban mills with dormitories and cafeterias where they labored, ate and slept. It was a grueling, wage-slave life, but it was better than anything they ever had before, the ultimate paradox of industrial-era disposable labor exploitation.

  Eugénie Delhomme was a pretty twenty-one-year-old peasant girl, a single mother who found work in one of those textile mills in Beaurepaire, a small town south of France’s industrial center of Lyon, the same city where Martin Dumollard trolled for his victims thirty years earlier. Eugénie worked six days a week in the deafening clatter of mechanical looms. It was an exhausting shift that began at five a.m. and ended fifteen and a half hours later at eight thirty p.m., with short breaks for lunch and supper in the communal dining hall. She earned just enough to send money to her aging father and her daughter back home in the country.

  On Saturday, May 19, 1894, at about seven thirty p.m., an hour before her shift ended, Eugénie rose from her workstation and said she was taking a short break to get some air in the alley outside the doors. Her supervisor commented that it was beginning to rain but she was insistent. Eugénie was a reliable worker but she had a reputation for having several boyfriends in the nearby town, and the tolerant supervisor might have assumed she was stepping out to meet a boyfriend; or perhaps she wanted to sneak a smoke.

  Nobody was alarmed when she did not return to her station; she might have left early in the last hour of the long workweek. No one was worried enough to search for her around the factory grounds in the rain and dark. The next morning, she was not in her dormitory nor did she make her usual appearance in church. Later that afternoon a shepherd woman came across Eugénie’s body dumped under a hedge about two hundred yards from the factory door.

  It was a horrific scene reminiscent of the probable first victim of Jack the Ripper, Martha Tabram. Eugénie was found nude except for a chemise pulled down and up to around her waist. It was immediately evident that her clothing did not get into a state of disarray as a result of her struggles, but because she was disrobed in a frenzy by her murderer.1 The rest of her torn bloodstained clothing, corset and scarf were found nearby. The examining physician determined that Eugénie had been first grabbed by the throat and thrown to the ground and strangled. As evidenced by the trampled grass and the bruises on her hands, the young woman had put up a struggle. The killer forced his hand over her mouth to stifle her cries, leaving her lip torn and bruised, and cut off her oxygen supply while keeping her pinned down with his legs and other hand. He then cut her throat with his left hand, severing her jugular vein to hasten her death. When she was dead or nearly dead, the killer, then in a rage, kicked and stomped her torso, chest and pubic area, his boots leaving distinctive imprints on her body. Finally, he used his knife to excise the areola of one of her breasts and left it hanging by a strip of flesh about two or three inches in length. Afterward the killer dragged her body behind the hedge where she was found. There were no signs of vaginal rape, and the physician neglected to examine the victim for signs of anal rape.2

  In 1894, forensic medical procedure had been reasonably well developed and systemized over the previous fifty years. We saw how in the Jack the Ripper case, physicians were able to reconstruct how the victims were attacked and in what order the various injuries and mutilations took place.

  Over the next few weeks police arrested three different suspects, all of them men who were known to have some connection to the victim. The assumption was that this was a singular crime of passion. Even though shortly before the murder three women reported being stalked and approached menacingly near the crime scene by a stranger, a vagabond with a hideous grimace, the police for the next four months focused on the “crime of passion” motive before the case went cold.

  During the Dumollard case in the 1860s French police were criticized for not having linked various murders in the region where Dumollard used to sally forth to Lyon to stalk, lure back and kill his victims. Since then, police divisions endeavored to be aware of what was happening in the next division, but this awareness and sharing of information did not extend
beyond bordering divisions.

  But Eugénie’s murderer was a different species of serial killer than Dumollard or presumably Jack the Ripper was. This was a migratory serial killer who, after killing Eugénie, washed up in a creek, spent the night sleeping concealed in a haystack and the next day tramped along the back roads an extraordinary distance of forty miles, several police districts away, where nobody was even aware of Eugénie’s murder.

  As the killer compulsively walked enormous distances, thirty to forty miles a day, thousands of miles a year, through remote villages in southeastern France, carrying his hobo sack, seeking casual work or handouts of food and shelter, playing an accordion for coins, along the way he ambushed, killed, raped and mutilated two women and at least nine teenagers—four boys and five girls ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen—often shepherds tending their flocks alone in isolated locations.

  His escalating mode of attack had some similarities to Jack the Ripper. He strangled his victims quickly as he forced them to the ground and cut their throats to kill them. As evidenced by the blood pools left at the crime scenes, he apparently first drained the blood from the victims before dragging the corpses away to dry ground. Then he would go at the victims’ bodies, mutilating them, but unlike Jack the Ripper, he raped them vaginally and anally after they were dead, sometimes using lubricant to aid the necrophilic act. Sometimes he severed or excised the genitals completely and ripped their torsos open, pulling out the intestines and harvesting organs. The victims were all found with their throats cut and their genitals mutilated and exposed like the victims in Whitechapel. These were classic “warm,” destructive, necrophilic “werewolf” lust serial killings.

  Despite the horrific character of the killings, the French police were in a complete state of linkage blindness. After all, some of the crimes occurred six hundred miles apart. Considering that eighty years later, police in the US in the 1970s linked by telephone and telex were blind to the series of murders committed by Ted Bundy, it is hard to fault the French police in the 1890s when it came to interjurisdictional murders.

  It was not as if the authorities had overlooked the incidence of these extraordinarily savage murders. One investigator in Dijon began cataloging the murders, but on the assumption that they were a viral, contagious phenomenon, a homicidal epidemic in a form of “copycat killings.” While French police could conceive of a single perpetrator killing multiple victims, they could not conceive of him doing it over such vast distances. Unlike the place-specific Jack the Ripper, the French Ripper was a migratory-type serial killer, a Henry Lee Lucas without a car.

  The “Killer of Little Shepherds,” or “Southeast Ripper,” as he was called in the French press, had another advantage working for him. As a vagrant, he was part of a huge anonymous population of rootless and destitute people overrunning France as a result of industrial labor practices. Industrial labor was “disposable” in the nineteenth century (like “contract” labor in the twenty-first century). There were no unions, job security or benefits. Workers could be summarily dismissed for the day, the week or forever, if they were not needed. There was no severance, unemployment insurance or welfare. Very few laid-off workers returned to their dead-end rural homes; most just hit the road, seeking a few days’ more employment at their next destination, before being laid off again. It was an endless migratory cycle. With mechanization in agriculture increasing rural unemployment and a worldwide recession in the 1890s, an estimated 400 thousand vagrants were tramping the roads of France, looking for a meal in the next town or farmhouse—nearly 1 percent of the entire French population was dispossessed and homeless, ready to join the less-dead.3 It was not just the industrial-age city that gave serial killers an anonymous crowd to hide in and feed on; the industrial-age country road did so too.

  Eventually this serial killer made a mistake—in 1896 he circled back to the region around Lyon and began killing in several locations in that district. This would be like a modern American serial killer choosing the vicinity of Quantico, Virginia, where the FBI’s training academy and Behavioral Analysis Unit are located. Lyon was the home of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, the premier research center in nineteenth-century forensic sciences and psychiatry not only in France, but in the world.

  The institute was dominated by Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, a pioneer in forensic anthropology, toxin analysis, blood-splatter analysis and criminal psychology. Some of forensic science’s greatest pioneers emerged from the Lyon school, like Edmond Locard, who gave us “Locard’s exchange principle”: every criminal leaves some trace evidence at a crime scene while at the same time taking some trace away from it.

  Lacassagne controversially challenged the predominant “born criminal” faction of criminology led by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who argued that a person’s hereditary and genetic makeup predetermined their criminality.4 Lacassagne maintained that psychology and social environments bred criminals, not genetics. He declared, “Justice withers, prison corrupts and society gets the criminal it deserves”—a statement that US Attorney General Robert Kennedy famously quoted in 1963.5

  ÉMILE FOURQUET AND LINKAGE ANALYSIS

  In France police investigations were led by “examining magistrates” akin to district attorneys. In April 1897, an ambitious thirty-five-year-old attorney, Émile Fourquet, was hired as the examining magistrate in Belley, a small market town sixty miles west of Lyon. Fourquet inherited an unsolved murder. Two years previously, on August 31, 1895, Victor Portalier, a fifteen-year-old shepherd boy, was horrifically murdered, raped and mutilated. He was found lying on his back with his pants pulled down around his shins; he was completely eviscerated, his intestines hanging out through a gash opened in his torso from sternum to pubis, his sexual organs severed and tossed away near his body. Locals had reported a vagabond begging for milk in the vicinity that day, but as one of the thousands of vagrants wandering France, he was never identified. All that was left was the ghastly crime scene and a description of a suspect: a man aged thirty to thirty-five years, with thick black eyebrows and a pale and sickly complexion, wearing a panama-style straw hat, carrying a small bag and a club. The one distinguishing feature was his disfiguring facial grimace around his right eye, and a bad odor of decay reportedly emanating from his right ear. He was apparently suffering from some sort of chronic facial injury or festering wound.

  Fourquet was particularly interested in this case because he was working on a personal project, a study of the criminality of vagabonds in France, and this unsolved case fit the bill perfectly. (He would eventually publish his book on the “vagabond problem” in 1908.6) Reading in the newspaper reports of similar shepherd mutilation-murders near Lyon perpetrated by “a new Jack the Ripper,” Fourquet began reviewing his cold-case file and found correspondence in it from the magistrate in Dijon inquiring about similar murders as evidence for a homicidal “contagion” theory he was developing. The magistrate believed these were “copycat” killings. Fourquet had his own idea: the spate of murders was not a “contagion” but serial homicide perpetrated by one migratory killer. On a hunch, Fourquet now wrote to every magistrate in France, inquiring about similar vagabond “werewolf” ripper-type homicides in their jurisdictions, and before long he had seven additional cases with very similar crime-scene characteristics linked to a vagabond with similar descriptions.

  Fourquet now created two charts on a grid, one cataloging various characteristics—such as body position, weapon used, types of mutilation, wounds, whether there were signs of rape, and other crime-scene details—and the other listing the descriptions of the suspects associated with each case. Fourquet began underlining in blue all the similar factors across the eight cases. Before long he had a sea of blue underlining, from the placement of the wounds, the mutilation and the MO of the perpetrator to the description of the suspect in each case. Fourquet became convinced he had a single migratory monster on his hands. The term did not exist for it, but
Fourquet had himself a serial killer.

  What Fourquet was doing in 1897, Los Angeles Police homicide investigator Pierce Brooks found himself having to do in 1958. Described by James Ellroy as “LAPD’s philosopher-king,” Brooks, a former naval officer and blimp pilot, became convinced that two separate homicides in the Los Angeles area might have been committed by the same perpetrator.7 Surmising that if one killer had murdered two victims, he might have killed three or more as well, Brooks spent weeks thumbing through old crime files and newspaper reports at the public library. Eventually he linked three “glamor girl murders” to serial killer Harvey Glatman, who in 1957 to 1958 was luring aspiring models to pose for him in true-detective-magazine-style bondage photos, and raping and murdering them as he took the photos.8

  Brooks called for the establishment of a shared, networked computer database of homicide cases. For decades nobody listened. Brooks would get his wish only in 1985, with the establishment of ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), a database of homicide cases and their characteristics (see chapter thirteen for more on ViCAP). It took twenty-seven years for Brooks to see his idea transformed into reality, eighty-eight years after Fourquet first used the strategy in his investigation of the Vacher murders. Today we rightly consider Brooks among the pioneers of linkage analysis for his rediscovery of what we had forgotten since Fourquet.

  The Arrest