Gross advised the questioner to establish a bond with the prisoner and “help” him relieve himself of his burden of guilt by making confession a pleasure for the suspect: “We must smooth their way, render their task easy,” Gross declared. “Who sees always in the accused a fallen brother or one wrongfully suspected, he will question well.” It’s a technique frequently used by American police today: “Man up, get this off your chest, you’ll feel better about everything . . .”
Fourquet’s interview of Vacher was going to be textbook perfect as advised back then by Gross, and as advocated by the FBI today.14 According to the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin in 2012, the best strategy in questioning a psychopath and extracting a confession is to exploit his propensity for boredom and need for thrills by keeping him engaged. “Law enforcement officers should be aware of the psychopath’s early-onset boredom and be prepared to incorporate strategies to keep the individual stimulated and interested.” The recommended strategies include “letting suspects write down ideas and comments for discussion, or having the psychopath act as a teacher giving a course about criminal behavior and providing opinions about the crime.”15
Investigators and psychologists all stress the importance of researching the suspect’s life and especially the details of his crimes. Psychopaths can be insulted, offended and bored if an investigator makes a factual mistake about his life history or crimes, even if he denies having committed them. The FBI article urges investigators to be calm and collected, especially in the crucial first-impression stage of an interview. Any nervousness or fidgeting on the examiner’s part is immediately perceived by the subject as a weakness, and the subject can lose interest in engaging in a “game” with the examiner. Keep switching things up and keep it interesting, the FBI urges, or else the subject can stop paying attention or cooperating. Because of his narcissistic, grandiose sense of self-worth the psychopath will always perceive the examiner as an inferior. The FBI advises interviewers to set aside their own egos.
Premises in past successful interviews of psychopathic serial killers focused on praising their intelligence, cleverness, and skill in evading capture as compared with other serial killers . . . As distasteful as it might be, investigators should be prepared to stroke psychopaths’ egos and provide them with a platform to brag and pontificate. It is better to emphasize their unique ability to devise such an impressive crime, execute and narrate the act, evade capture, trump investigators, and generate media interest about themselves.
As psychopaths tend to deny responsibility for their actions and blame the victim, the interviewer can minimize the seriousness of the charges by suggesting that the victim might have been “asking for it.” Do not appeal to the suspect’s feelings of pity or regret for the victims or their families, the FBI advises; he has no empathy or sense of guilt. Placing the victim at fault works much better. By keeping the psychopath amused, talking, bragging and preaching the interviewer can carefully collect contradictory statements or revealing evidence.
To rattle and disorient the psychopath, ask how he or she felt about the victim, or about being investigated and arrested. Psychopaths do not “feel” and are disoriented when asked to describe emotions which are foreign to them. Psychopaths can feign the outward appearance of emotions, but they don’t know how to describe them effectively in words. Suggesting that mistakes were made in the crime can further upset a psychopath’s balance and induce them to reveal just how smart and efficient the murder really was. Bonding or finding a common ground with a psychopath can work as long as the interviewer can maintain an illusion that the psychopath is in the center of the common ground. The experiences, opinions and character of the interviewer are of no interest to the psychopath; he is the center of his own universe.
Fourquet’s Interview of Vacher
Fourquet carefully inspected the items Vacher carried in his bag; along with his accordion and camping gear, these included an assortment of sharp knives and a jar of lubricating oil. Fourquet made a mental note of the items, remembering that autopsy reports showed that lubricant was found on some of the victim’s bodies. Rather than launching into a hostile, accusatory line of questioning, Fourquet mildly told Vacher that he was interested in the problems of vagabonds in France and asked him about the hardships of being on the road, about the items he had in his bag, where he had acquired them and how he used them while traveling. Vacher felt he had a rapport with gendarmes and other figures of authority because of his own service in the French army. By engaging him as a “military” man, Fourquet got Vacher easily and openly chatting about his military career and the shooting episode that ended it. As he was doing this, Fourquet was assessing Vacher’s speech, body language and demeanor while he felt comfortable in order to later recognize Vacher’s demeanor and “tells” when he was nervous or lying.
Fourquet questioned Vacher for three weeks, but every time he approached the subject of the unsolved Victor Portalier murder, Vacher vehemently denied being anywhere near the location of the murder and quickly clammed up. Fourquet in the meantime stayed mute about his suspicion that Vacher had committed a whole series of other murders. He did not have the slightest evidence indicating that Vacher had even been near the locations of the murders when they were committed. All he had was a hunch based on his own analysis of the signatures left at all the crime scenes. He needed a confession from Vacher, but Vacher was no fool and he evaded every trap set for him.
Finally, Fourquet resorted to a ploy. He told Vacher that he was now convinced that Vacher was innocent and, pending a few days of paperwork, he was going to be sent back to serve the rest of his three-month jail term in peace. Vacher’s disappointment was almost palpable. No more lively duels of intellect with Fourquet; only the boredom of his jail cell. Fourquet humbly asked Vacher for help with his manuscript on vagabonds, asking if he would “do him the honor” before they parted ways of reading it and sharing with him his superior experience and observations of being on the road—perhaps he would even be mentioned in the forthcoming book.
Vacher was practically beaming with pride at the opportunity to pontificate on his days of vagabonding, and for the next three days he recounted his experiences. Fourquet would pose naïve questions or challenge Vacher’s statements, manipulating the egotistical Vacher to draw on specific examples from his vast experiences on the road. Subtly and strategically Fourquet questioned and challenged Vacher’s accounts, manipulating him to respond argumentatively with precise dates and locations. Not realizing that Fourquet was eyeing him for a whole series of murders rather than just the one unsolved murder in his district, Vacher babbled away about where he went and when, and what he observed during the last three years. By the end of the three days, Fourquet had secured Vacher’s own admission of having been in the vicinity of the eight unsolved murders at the times they had occurred.
Then Fourquet suddenly turned on Vacher, coldly telling him that he was implicated in eight murders and, to Vacher’s shock, meticulously rattling off the entire timeline, victim by victim, and listing in detail everything that Vacher had done. Vacher was taken back to his cell, “staggering like a drunk,” according to Fourquet’s memoirs.
Later that day Fourquet was brought a letter from Vacher. In it Vacher confessed,
Yes, it was I who committed all the crimes you blame me for . . . and all of this in a moment of rage. As I said to the doctor from the prison medical service, I was bitten by a rabid dog around the age of seven or eight, but I’m not so sure, although I remember taking a remedy. Only my parents can assure you of the bitings. As for myself I always believed . . . that it was the medicine that corrupted my blood.16
This was good but not enough. “Yes, it was I who committed all the crimes you blame me for” was not going to be sufficient to indict Vacher for trial on the various counts of murder. Fourquet spent several more weeks maneuvering and manipulating Vacher’s ego to get him to confess in detail, case by case. Fourquet re
alized that Vacher was angling for an insanity plea and another short stay in a psychiatric hospital instead of the guillotine. Vacher’s argument was basically, “Who in their right mind would kill eight children the way I did?”
Fourquet “advised” Vacher that to prove his insanity, he needed to give the details of all the murders, that without the details, Vacher would be charged in only the one murder in his district and his claims to insanity would go unheard. He cleverly put Vacher in the position of wanting to prove that he’d committed each of the eight murders.
Vacher at first was reluctant, but again Fourquet played on his narcissism. Seeing that Vacher had a huge ego and was a big newspaper reader, he assured Vacher that if he confessed he would arrange for the newspapers to print the confession along with his portrait, further advancing his insanity claim in a public forum. Vacher eagerly agreed. Suddenly the “Killer of Little Shepherds” had a name and a face. Jack the Ripper might have been the first unidentified modern celebrity serial killer, but Vacher was the first identified one. Of course once Vacher’s account and photo appeared in the newspapers throughout France, there came a wave of new witnesses who recognized him.
Fourquet used the newspaper coverage to his advantage. When one newspaper questioned the authenticity of Vacher’s confessions, Fourquet suggested he prove his serial-killing credentials by revealing murders that Fourquet was unaware of and therefore could not have tricked him into confessing. In the end, Vacher admitted to a total of eleven murders, including a victim who had never been discovered until Vacher described the well into which he threw the body.
Émile Fourquet handled Vacher as well as any investigator would handle a psychopath-serial-killer interview today. His profiling of the various crime scenes for their unique signature, linking them together, and questioning of the suspect were as modern and thorough as those of such American “pioneers” as James A. Brussel, Pierce Brooks and the FBI behaviorists of the 1970s and 1980s. As it’s said of Thomas Edison, they did not “invent the lightbulb” of serial-murder case linkage and profiling as is often claimed, but they brilliantly improved upon it by applying modern research and statistical methodology to something we already knew and understood well by 1900 but seemed to later forget until the rise of the great serial-killer “epidemic” in the US in the 1970s and 1980s. Americans would then have to learn or relearn how to deal with serial killers, almost from the ground up. What had been a European phenomenon became uniquely American by the 1980s, to the point that books on serial murder were often prefaced with the observation that it was not exclusively an American phenomenon but sometimes even happened in Europe.
The Question of Sanity
Fourquet’s job was still not done. Having successfully gotten Vacher to confess in detail not only to the eight suspected cases but to three other cases that Fourquet had been unaware of, he now needed to take the case through trial and overcome any claims Vacher might make to insanity. Vacher was already lobbying for an early release from any psychiatric facility he might be sent to by claiming that he had been “temporarily insane” and was now healed and ready to rejoin society. That this case was unfolding in the region of Lyon was a huge benefit to Fourquet, because he had convenient access to the Lyon Institute of Forensic Medicine’s superstar, its dean, Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne.
Lacassagne and his colleagues happily agreed to examine Vacher to attest to his legal sanity. Contrary to the claims that the insanity plea was a nineteenth-century development, we’ve seen how in the Renaissance era the question of sanity was at issue in some of the “werewolf” trials. The 1843 McNaughton decision in Britain established the principle of insanity as the incapacity to discern the difference between right and wrong or perceive or understand the consequences of one’s actions, which still today defines the parameters of an insanity plea.
In earlier cases of stark-raving-mad, “foaming-at-the-mouth,” raging killers, the insanity question was limited to whether the accused was “faking it” or genuinely delusional. French forensic psychiatrists by the end of the nineteenth century developed a reputation for their ability to discern the difference between genuine and feigned insanity. Vacher, on the other hand, was lucid and clearly aware of everything he did and the criminality of it. Furthermore, there was no question of his faking his rages; numerous witnesses would testify to his having them since childhood.
But he claimed that he was not guilty because the irresistible volatile rages were a result of being exposed to rabies as a child, and were further aggravated by his self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head and his subsequent “sad” experiences being confined in the psychiatric hospital afterward and the traumas of the vagabond life he led.
To determine whether the bullet that remained in Vacher’s head might be pressing on a nerve or a part of his brain, causing behavioral anomalies, Lacassagne had Vacher’s head X-rayed, the first time this new technology had been used in a murder prosecution. The X-rays revealed the bullet was not located near any part of his brain known to be related to behavior. (By the 1850s, medical researchers had deciphered some of the different functions of the brain.)
The question of Vacher’s sanity was framed at the time in the context of obvious delusional “total madness” versus a subtle “loss of reason” and “irresistible impulses.” Lacassagne pointed out that while on the road, Vacher seemed to experience his rages only when he found himself alone with a child. He argued that Vacher had the presence of mind to choose the victim, time and place and to escape afterward in a preconceived, systematic and logical way, frequently disguising himself by shaving his beard and changing his clothing. His murders were performed coldly and precisely with the objective of taking possession of the body, as opposed to a raging kill. Noting that the Vacher crime scenes were characterized by large pools of blood a short distance away from where the bodies were found, Lacassagne concluded that Vacher would first drain the bodies of blood, then drag them away to rape and mutilate the victims. “The complete possession of the cadaver aroused him; then and only then, he freely delivered the wounds to the genital areas,” Lacassagne reported.
According to Lacassagne, Vacher was a “sadist,” a new term recently introduced to forensic psychiatry, but as such he was not legally insane. Despite his grandiosity, paranoia, episodes of suicidal melancholy and violent rages, Vacher was fully cognizant of and responsible for his criminal actions, Lacassagne concluded, after interviewing, examining and studying Vacher for four months.
Fifty years earlier in the case of the vampire necrophile, it was argued by Sergeant Bertrand’s defense that he had been overwhelmed by a compulsion so irresistible that it was equivalent to legal insanity. Vacher was trying to make the same argument. In the 1960s and 1970s, American lawyers defending serial killers attempted to raise the “volition defense” until the Reagan-era Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act that explicitly invalidated it (see chapter seven).
The Trial and Execution of Joseph Vacher
We’ve seen that once apprehended, serial killers were often put on trial within weeks, without many preliminaries. In the case of Joseph Vacher, however, it took a year before he went on trial in October 1898, for a single count of murder, of Victor Portalier, the fifteen-year-old shepherd boy. It was of course a huge public and media circus.
As Vacher had confessed to murdering Portalier, the trial was focused on the issue of his sanity. Vacher now shifted blame to the mental hospital that had certified him sane and released him ten months after his shooting of Louise Barrand. How could he have been sane if he murdered Eugénie Delhomme six weeks after his release from the psychiatric hospital? Vacher argued. If anybody was to be blamed for the subsequent murders, then it should be the psychiatrists who released him, Vacher insisted. At one point in the courtroom he held up a hand-lettered card that read, “Joseph Vacher, the great martyr of our turn-of-the-century society and instrument of divine will.”
Lacassagne and hi
s colleagues testified that Vacher carefully chose his victims, that he systematically and calculatingly killed them to gain possession of their corpses for his aberrant sexual fantasies and that afterward he would meticulously disguise himself and flee the region, completely aware of the wrongful acts he had perpetrated. He was not “alienated” but a sadistic antisocial offender criminally responsible for the horrific crimes he knowingly perpetrated. He dismissed Vacher’s claim of having been transformed by a rabid dog’s lick as impossible according to medical knowledge.
Lacassagne described Vacher as a “sanguinary sadist” like Gilles de Rais and the recent serial killers Vincenzo Verzeni in Italy, Jesse Pomeroy in the United States and the unidentified Jack the Ripper in Britain. Lacassagne referred to Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and his description of the pathology of sexual lust fused with aggression and anger, i.e., “sadism.” His two colleagues also testified to his self-awareness and to the X-ray confirmation that his head wound had no impact on his behavior. The defense called two of its own medical witnesses, who naturally testified to the contrary.
At the end of the three-day trial Vacher was convicted by a jury in the murder of Portalier and sentenced to death. His other murders would not be tried. After an appeal two months later, on December 31, 1898, Vacher was guillotined. His head was transported to the Lyon Institute of Forensic Medicine, where it joined Dumollard’s head. No physical anomalies were found in his brain.
Vacher was our first celebrity sexual serial killer. He gave press interviews, and photos of him in his rabbit-fur hat were printed in newspapers, books and pamphlets and on postcards. Before the Vacher case, the investigation of serial killers was often improvised, with investigators shocked and surprised on discovering just how many murders their subjects had committed. The Vacher case was different. His arrest and conviction represented a concerted investigative effort based on the premise from the start that Vacher was killing a series of victims and that his type was a unique category of murderer, albeit not yet termed a “serial killer.” In many ways Vacher was what Jack the Ripper is thought to be—our first modern serial killer—except unlike Jack the Ripper, he was identified and caught. Perhaps that was why he was mostly forgotten while Jack the Ripper still has a grip on our imagination.
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