On July 10, 1897, Fourquet telegraphed (or “t-mailed”) to the 250 magistrates in France what we would today call a BOLO (Be On the Lookout) for a vagabond with a grimace, a scarred right eyelid and a deformity around the mouth. A magistrate in nearby Tournon telegraphed back that he had recently sentenced a vagabond matching the description to three months in jail for attempted rape. Not only did he match the description, but he was also very violent and raging, so much so that the photographer in Touron was too frightened to photograph him.
The attacker was identified as Joseph Vacher, a twenty-eight-year-old former sergeant in the French army and apparently a mentally disturbed vagabond.
The victim had been an adult woman collecting pinecones in the forest with her husband and three children. She was about fifty yards away from her husband when she was suddenly ambushed and thrown to the ground by Vacher, who attempted to strangle her. The children’s screams brought her husband running. After a struggle he managed to subdue Vacher and hold him prisoner until the gendarmes arrived. What struck a chord with Fourquet was the comment the prisoner made: “I would have preferred a thirteen-year-old girl . . . I’m a poor, miserable, handicapped man. I love women, but they find me repulsive, so I attack those I can. Even in a whorehouse the women won’t have anything to do with me. I’m so pitiful . . . That bitch! If she hadn’t screamed so much, it would be all over by now and I would be in another district.”9
Fourquet had Vacher transported to him under escort by train to be interviewed in the unsolved Portalier murder. Deep down Fourquet had a hunch that the other seven similar murders had been committed by the same perpetrator. While today an investigator would tap into a suspect’s cell phone account and credit card records to track their past movements, there were no such things in Fourquet’s time. Continental Europe did have a robust system of passports, identity cards, local sojourning and residence registrations and hotel and guesthouse logs, but Vacher had been a homeless vagabond sleeping in barns and haystacks. Nor was there any security camera footage that might have incidentally caught a homeless person passing in its view for Fourquet to look for. The only way he was going to find out if Vacher was near any of the locations of the unsolved murders at the time in question was if Vacher told him he was. He needed a confession. Without it, his hunch was useless.
“The Jesuit”
Joseph Vacher was born in Beaufort, Isère, in western France, on November 16, 1869, to farmers Pierre Vacher and Marie-Rose (Rosalie) Ravit. Rosalie was forty-four years old when she had Joseph. She was fifteen years younger than Pierre and was his second wife. Joseph, the thirteenth of fifteen children (two from the previous marriage), was a twin whose brother Eugène (some sources claim sister Eugénie) was accidentally baked or smothered to death when a large, hot loaf of bread taken from the oven was carelessly laid on a bed in which the one-month-old infants were sleeping.10
Joseph’s mother, Rosalie, was said to be ultrareligious and prone to hallucinations, and after the tragic death of one of her twins, she must have been prone to a lot more religion and hallucinations. Understandably, she was said to be overprotective of the surviving twin. A dominant, overprotective mother and a passive father are common factors in the childhoods of many serial killers. The theory is that a serial killer’s behaviors are sometimes rooted in an inability to successfully negotiate his masculine autonomy from his mother. When a boy cannot achieve this autonomy, or when there is no solid foundation from which to negotiate this autonomy, a sense of frustrated rage develops in the child, and he subsequently carries the anger toward women into adolescence and adulthood.
For example, “Hillside Strangler” Kenneth Bianchi, who, with his cousin, raped, tortured and killed ten women snatched off the streets or lured to an auto upholstery shop. His adoptive mother was hysterically concerned with his health when he was a child, and she constantly dragged him to hospitals with ailments she imagined he had.
Canadian serial killer Peter Woodcock’s foster mother was highly controlling and relished the challenge of her troubled foster child’s behavioral problems. Upon being arrested for murdering three children, Woodcock worried about only one thing: “My fear was that Mother would find out. Mother was my biggest fear. I didn’t know if the police would let her at me.”
Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, is remembered as a normal child except for his strange need to constantly cling to his mother’s skirt. Joseph Kallinger’s mother refused to allow him to play outside, flogged him with a whip, beat him with a hammer, threatened to cut off his penis and selected his wife for him. Ed Gein so worshipped his widowed, religiously fanatic mother that he preserved her bedroom as a shrine in his otherwise filthy and disordered house (but not her mummified corpse, as in the Hitchcock movie Psycho).
Mother launched Jerry Brudos on his path to shoe-fetish murders when he was five. Edmund Kemper’s mom used to force him to sleep in the basement under a floor hatch with a heavy dining table pushed over it. She was one of Kemper’s last victims. Henry Lee Lucas’s mom beat his father and sent little Henry to school dressed as a girl. She was one of his first victims. The “mommy dearest” school of serial-killer psychopathology is a familiar one.
When Joseph Vacher was ten he was licked by a stray dog and the hysterical Rosalie insisted he undergo a folk remedy against rabies. Family and neighbors would later say that Joseph’s character changed after that incident. He himself would later claim he had been “poisoned” by the homemade antirabies medicine. Perhaps because of the hysteria associated with the dog incident, and psychologically tuning in to lingering werewolf legends, Joseph became bad-tempered and prone to violent, animal-like outbursts. He nearly choked his brother to death in one of his rages. Angry that he was asked one day to watch the family cattle, he broke the legs of several. Although a bright and intelligent student, he was a feared and violent bully at school. Playmates began to avoid him.
Vacher was also grandiose and pompous and, like his mother, driven by a religious messianic zeal. On a school trip into town when he was ten, while a teacher was distracted for a moment, Vacher took his fellow students into a church, seated them in the pews and climbed into the pulpit and gave a sermon. Vacher himself would later recount that he was obsessed with violent sexual fantasies of raping, mutilating and killing “like a werewolf” but that he would resist them by compulsively walking long distances, a compulsion that would enhance his future vagabond killing career.
Vacher’s childhood rages and the fear other children had of him are reminiscent of the childhood of necrophile-cannibal serial killer Arthur Shawcross, the “Genesee River Killer,” who murdered and raped a boy and a girl in two separate incidents in Watertown, New York, and was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years but paroled after twelve. He then settled in Rochester, where he proceeded to murder twelve prostitutes. Like Vacher, Shawcross was remembered by family and friends as compulsively walking or biking enormous distances, usually to fishing holes, like the ones where he murdered the two children and later would take his prostitute victims to kill and conceal for sex with their corpses later. The principal difference between Vacher and Shawcross was that Shawcross appeared to have learning disabilities, while Vacher was remembered as intelligent and articulate.
Vacher was thirteen years old when his mother died in May 1882. The next year he went to work as a farmhand, like a typical rural boy his age. On June 18, 1884, a ten-year-old boy, Joseph Amieux, was found in a nearby barn, raped and murdered. At the time nobody suspected Vacher, and the murder of Amieux is the first of some of the sixteen murders later attributed to him in addition to the eleven he would confess to.
Still burning in the messianic light of Jesus, Vacher joined a Catholic monastery as a novice at the age of fifteen. At first the monks were impressed by his devotion, intelligence, beautiful handwriting and charismatic preaching abilities. They sent him out to teach children on several occasions, but he was expelled from the mo
nastery two years later after he was caught masturbating fellow novices.
Vacher returned to his hometown to work in the fields but had to flee after he was accused of attempting to rape a twelve-year-old boy in 1888, the year that Jack the Ripper would do his thing. Vacher fled to his sister’s house in Grenoble, where he contracted venereal disease while frequenting prostitutes. The venereal chancre sores became infected, and he had to undergo a painful removal of one of his testicles, which is said to have made him even crazier than he already was. A fellow patient at the hospital recalled that he was nicknamed the “Jesuit” for his clerical pretensions, his preaching and his propensity to attempt to fondle the nuns.
After his release from the hospital Vacher went to work in a stationery store in Lyon but was dismissed after attacking a fellow employee in a rage. Vacher found employment elsewhere but was dismissed for harassing women and children and for openly professing anarchist ideals.
On October 2, 1890, Vacher enlisted in the French army and showed sufficient intelligence and leadership to be sent to junior noncommissioned officers’ school, from which he graduated near the top of his class. He was promoted to corporal. His fellow soldiers, however, recalled that he was prone to violent outbursts and abused soldiers under his command. His temper was so violent that his men feared to go to sleep at night without keeping their bayonets nearby. When Vacher was turned down for promotion to sergeant he flew into a rage and slashed his throat in an apparent suicide attempt. This episode did not prevent Vacher from being promoted to sergeant after his release from the military hospital.
Like the serial necrophile Sergeant Bertrand before him, Sergeant Vacher fit well into the ranks of the French army despite his stormy personality. At the same time, Vacher wanted to get out. He applied for a family-hardship discharge but was refused. His barrack mates would later testify that Vacher was already fantasizing about becoming a vagabond and was hoarding pieces of military equipment like canteens and field mess kits for his future wanderings.
In the spring of 1893 Vacher met nineteen-year-old Louise Barrand (Barant) while on a riverside promenade. He seemed charming, intelligent and gallant in his sergeant’s dress uniform. She was smitten on the spot by the well-spoken military man and accepted his invitation for dinner that evening in a nearby café, where Vacher, to her horror, immediately proposed marriage while warning her that he would kill her if she ever betrayed him. Louise of course bolted, but Vacher now relentlessly pursued her for weeks with gifts, letters and unannounced visits. Eventually Louise was forced to escape Vacher by returning to her hometown, but Vacher stalked her there.
On June 25, 1893, he appeared unannounced at her door and confronted her. When she refused to leave with him, he drew his service revolver and shot her. The first shot went through her mouth, taking out several teeth and a piece of her tongue; two more shots grazed the top of her head as she collapsed to the floor into a pool of blood. Assuming he had killed her, Vacher pressed the handgun to his head and shot himself twice. Both Louise and Vacher survived his typically French-military marksmanship but were disfigured for the rest of their lives.
Vacher was declared insane, unable to stand trial, and was packed off to a mental hospital, where he had a bout of suicidal rage and paranoid ranting and raving and even escaped, trying to make his way back to Louise. He refused surgery to remove a bullet lodged behind his ear, accusing the doctors of conspiring to murder him. The bullet in his head provoked a constant flow of stinky pus seeping and bubbling out from his inner ear, which witnesses later reported smelling and seeing. Because of nerve damage from the gunshot wounds his right eyelid was left permanently open, the right side of his face was disfigured by a grimace and his speech was slurred. But the charismatic and articulate Vacher regained control of his situation. Failing to escape, he now resorted to an “I’m so sorry. I was temporarily crazy, and I will never do this again” performance in the psychiatric hospital; ten months later, on April 1, 1894, Vacher was set free as “cured.”
Medically discharged from the French army, Vacher now had nothing to do except enjoy his fantasy of compulsively walking, wandering and killing. He melted away in the traffic of 400 thousand homeless vagabonds tramping the back roads and villages of France where the rural people’s hospitality and charity often sheltered and fed this army of the destitute.
Six weeks later, on a rainy Saturday evening, May 19, 1894, about forty miles from the psychiatric hospital from which Vacher had been released, Eugénie Delhomme stepped out the silk factory door for a breath of fresh air as Vacher was randomly passing in the alley outside. And that’s how it often happens, completely at random.
Vacher would later confess that he was suddenly overcome by rage, that he strangled, stomped and slashed the young woman on an impulse and that she was his first murder victim. No doubt the young woman reminded him of Louise. After this killing, Vacher began to wander and range thousands of miles between 1894 and his arrest in 1897, seeking casual labor or begging for food and shelter while killing on impulse along the way.
Many people ended up hosting him in their homes or on their farms and remembered the talkative and strange Vacher, who played an accordion and preached and pontificated like a mad prophet. He even befriended some of their children. But whenever nobody was looking and Vacher saw boys or girls alone during his travels, he fell on them, strangling them, cutting their throats and raping and mutilating their corpses. His extraordinary compulsive traveling kept him one step ahead of the authorities until the summer of 1897, when he was arrested in his failed rape attempt. Vacher probably considered himself lucky to escape with just a three-month prison sentence and was biding his time until his scheduled release when Fourquet ordered him to be brought before him for questioning in the unsolved Portalier murder.
INTERVIEWING SERIAL KILLERS: THE ART AND SCIENCE OF INTERROGATING PSYCHOPATHS
Today we make an easy and familiar assumption that Joseph Vacher was probably a psychopath, but in Fourquet’s time that concept had not been fully developed or described adequately. In the same way serial killers had been around for ages but not described or labeled, psychopaths have been around forever. We did not adequately describe them until 1941, when American psychiatrist Dr. Hervey Milton Cleckley published The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality. In it he described a rational, functioning, unfeeling, destructive personality type that appears sane and healthy behind a “mask of sanity.” It was a personality type that had appeared in courtrooms throughout the nineteenth century, always described as rational and nondelusional, but obsessed with a monomania or a homicidal mania, like Sergeant Bertrand, or Jesse Pomeroy, or the two “belfry” killers. Before the term “psychopath” was adopted, they had been referred to sometimes as “moral imbeciles.”11
Psychopaths can be very clever and manipulative, especially so of psychiatrists. There are a number of cases on record in which serial killers have been convicted of murder but persuaded prison psychiatrists and parole boards that they were “cured and reformed,” were released and went on to kill more. (Arthur Shawcross and Edmund Kemper are the most notorious examples.) Having shot his girlfriend and attempted suicide, Vacher persuaded his psychiatrists that he was “cured” and fit to be released after only ten months’ confinement.
When Joseph Vacher was brought to Émile Fourquet for questioning, the examining magistrate was immediately struck by his oddly pompous demeanor. Fourquet observed that Vacher was a stormy little spark plug of micro facial tics and wandering eye movements; with foul-smelling pus leaking out of his ear from his self-inflicted head wound; constantly shape-shifting his face from distorted, crazy-eyed, drooling monster to very normal, thoughtful, friendly and attractive. There was a theatrical grandiosity to the man. Like a disfigured male model he could freeze and pose his face to display his “good side”—which he did for many of the subsequent press photographs he sat still for, cl
utching in his hand the “keys to heaven” loaned to him by prison guards and wearing what became his trademark white rabbit-fur hat symbolizing innocence. Vacher had a slight difficulty speaking because of his facial tic, but otherwise he appeared to Fourquet smart but cagey in his steadfast denial of having committed any crime other than his “mischievous” attack on the woman, for which he felt his three-month sentence was much too harsh.
Medical sciences historian Douglas Starr, in The Killer of Little Shepherds, a recent and definitive account of the Vacher case, writes that it is not known if Fourquet had read the chapter on questioning psychopaths in Hans Gross’s 1893 Handbook for Examining Magistrates as a System of Criminology, one of the many manuals on forensic sciences and criminological techniques published by German and French forensic specialists who were beginning to standardize investigative techniques between 1870 and 1900. (Alexandre Lacassagne, for example, published a pocket-sized “Vade-mecum” [“come with me”] manual for medical examiners called out to crime scenes.)12
Torture had been throughout history a routine component of questioning by authorities, and while in many European countries torture had been recently abolished, the questioning of a suspect was still typically hostile and implicit with threats just short of torture. In his handbook, Gross advised interrogators to be firm but fair, friendly and dispassionate with the suspect, and above all nonjudgmental no matter how horrific the circumstances of the crime.
Gross advised that the investigator distance himself from threats, intimidation and any hostile emotional approaches to the prisoner: “Calm and absence of passion are also indispensable. The officer who becomes excited or loses his temper delivers himself into the hands of the accused, if the latter, wiser than the officer, preserves his sangfroid, or even with happy foresight, sets himself deliberately to exasperate his questioner so as to get the better of him.”13
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