The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (16 page)

The police on duty at Bodasse’s apartment reported that nothing unusual had happened except that Voirbo had dropped by to see his friend. It turned out that Voirbo was a police spy who pretended to be an anarchist and attended meetings of radicals to report on their activities. The policemen, not knowing that he was in fact a suspect in the murder, accepted him as one of their own and told him what they were doing in Bodasse’s place.

Annoyed that Voirbo must now know that he was a suspect, Macé decided to call him in and confront him. He saw before him a short, stout man with a high hat and long coat. Voirbo was very calm and confident and answered questions precisely. He explained that he had been worried about his old friend and that as a member of the secret political police, he had used his contacts to investigate his disappearance. His chief suspect, he told Macé, was a butcher named Rifer. Rifer was a gambler and heavy drinker who hung out in low-class dives. Macé was not deceived, but he agreed that Voirbo should keep up his surveillance of Rifer. In fact, Voirbo was pushing the hapless Rifer to heavier drinking; the butcher soon suffered a bout of delirium tremens and was taken to an asylum, where he died the same night.

As soon as Voirbo learned of the butcher’s death, he hurried to Macé to report. He was astonished when Macé placed him under arrest. A search of Voirbo’s pockets revealed that Macé was just in time. Voirbo had a false passport and a ticket for steamship passage to the United States on the following day. He was to have left for the port of Le Havre that very afternoon.

Taken before the
juge d’instruction,
Voirbo was defiant. He refused to be photographed, making faces so that capturing an image was difficult. Macé knew that he was dealing with a clever man and went looking for more proof. He visited Voirbo’s young wife, Adélia, who had brought a dowry of fifteen thousand francs to her marriage. Pale and delicate, she struck Macé as naive. Before meeting Voirbo, she had planned to enter a convent and become a nun. Expressing shock that her husband had been arrested, she told Macé that the dowry and some Italian stocks belonging to Voirbo were kept in a strongbox. But when Macé asked her to open it, she discovered that it was empty. Searching the premises, the detective found in Voirbo’s workshop items that seemed strange for a tailor: huge sharpened shears, heavy flatirons, a metal mallet, and a large butcher’s cleaver. There was also an old iron spoon that had been used for melting lead. Finally, Macé found some cord very much like that which had been used to tie the bundles found in Lampon’s well.

Voirbo’s cellar yielded more. The detective noticed that the bung on one of the two casks of wine was higher than on the other. He removed it and discovered a string attached. He drew up from the barrel a tin cylinder. When he broke it open, he found the Italian securities for which Bodasse had been killed. There was only one missing — the one Voirbo had used to make his final rent payment on his former room.

Macé had a fair idea of where and how Bodasse had been murdered; now he set out to re-create the scene of the crime to prove his hunch. Scouring the crime scene as a source of clues was one of Vidocq’s ideas. Later, Bertillon would take extensive photographs of crime scenes and measure them as carefully as he measured suspects’ faces. But Macé’s experiment produced its own spectacular result, one that made such examinations a regular part of the investigation of violent crimes. Collecting Voirbo and several officers from the station, he took them to Voirbo’s former room in the rue Mazarine. With the help of the concierge, Macé arranged it exactly as it had been when Voirbo lived there. Given the small space, he realized that Voirbo would have had to dismember the body on the table in the middle of the room. He noticed that the tiled floor had a sharp slope that ended under the bed.

With a theatrical flourish, Macé picked up a carafe of water. “I notice a slope in the floor. Now, if a body had been cut up on a table here in the center of the room, the effusion of blood would have been great, and the fluid must have followed this slope. Any other fluid thrown down here must follow the same direction. I will empty this jug on the floor and see what happens!”
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With that, he poured out the water on the tiles. Everyone present watched it gather in a pool beneath the bed. Voirbo remained tight-lipped as Macé ordered that the tiles there be removed. As each tile came up, dried bloodstains could clearly be seen on the sides and underneath.

Realizing that the game was up, Voirbo broke down and confessed. He had needed money to show his fiancée in order to prove that he would be an equal partner in the marriage. Bodasse was a miser who hoarded his money, and he refused to lend it to Voirbo. On December 13, 1868, Voirbo had lured Bodasse to his apartment, battered him unconscious with a flatiron, and then slit his throat. Afterward, dressed only in his underwear, Voirbo had chopped up the body. Later he wrapped it and threw pieces into the Seine from the Pont de la Concorde. Though he thought that he had cleaned up the mess thoroughly, he had failed to notice the recess beneath the bed. After sewing the legs in calico bags, he had indeed dropped them in the well on rue Princesse. To make sure the head would sink in the water, he had melted some lead and poured it into the mouth. Afterward, he had moved to the rue Lamartine and in January 1869 had married Adélia.

Ultimately, Voirbo cheated the guillotine: while he was in jail awaiting trial, he cut his throat with a razor that had been hidden in a loaf of bread. No one knew where he got it. Perhaps some of his friends in the secret police had given it to him as a hint.

It was the detective, not the criminal, who emerged as a celebrity from this case. Macé wrote an autobiography in which he told how he walked alone at night in the most dangerous parts of the city, satisfying his “desire to see all and know all.”
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Macé even established his own
musée criminal,
or museum of criminality, where he displayed artifacts from actual crimes, including murder weapons.

He first reached fame with his brilliant solution to the Voirbo case and indeed devoted an entire book,
Mon premier crime,
to it, continuing in the tradition established by Vidocq. Macé’s writing shows the clear influence of Edgar Allan Poe, indicating that the Paris police were well aware of detective fiction. Macé makes Voirbo sound particularly like one of Poe’s characters in describing what happened after he hit Bodasse with a flatiron:

Not a sound escaped him. His head sank on to the table, his arms hung down inert. I was astonished, and satisfied with my strength and skill.

Then, blowing out the light, I opened the window and pulled the shutters to. In silence and darkness I listened to discover if he stirred. But I heard nothing, except his blood which fell on the floor, drop by drop! This monotonous drop, drop, drop, made my flesh creep. Still I kept on listening, listening. All of a sudden I heard a deep sigh, and something like a creaking of the chair. Désiré was moving, he was not dead! Suppose he were to cry out. This thought restored all my presence of mind to me. Lighting a small lamp, I saw the body had moved sideways, he was then still living. He was certainly no longer in a condition to make himself heard, to call for help, but his death-agony might be spun out and I did not want to see him suffer a long while. I therefore took a razor, approached him from behind and placed my hand under the chin of my ex-friend. Yielding to my pressure, the head rose up and then fell backwards. The lamp was shining full on his blood-smeared face. His round eyes were not yet lifeless — for a moment they fastened on the blade of the razor I was holding above him, and suddenly assumed such an expression of terror, that my heart beat violently. It was necessary to put an end to it. The same way a barber does when about to shave a customer, I pressed the blade just below the Adam’s apple, where the beard commences, and with a vigorous sweep I drew the blade from left to right. It entirely disappeared in the flesh, the head fell lifeless on the back of the chair.
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iv

L’Affaire Gouffé started as a missing persons case. On Saturday, July 27, 1889, a man reported that his brother-in-law, Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé, a Parisian court bailiff, had disappeared. Gouffé, a middle-aged widower with three daughters, had last been seen on the twenty-sixth. The inspector on duty did not think the matter was terribly serious. Gouffé was a known philanderer and might just have been on some amorous adventure. But when he was still missing on the thirtieth, the case was referred to Marie-François Goron, the chief of the Sûreté.

Goron was a small, fair, asthmatic Breton with a waxed mustache and pince-nez. He could be brusque in manner, but he was passionate about hunting criminals. Like Vidocq, he commanded a troop of “beaters” who posed as ex-convicts while roaming the dens of the Paris underworld. Goron had also developed new techniques for questioning criminals. He subjected suspects to alternating light and dark cells, and rotated bread and water with sumptuous meals. (His interrogation rooms were called “Monsieur Goron’s cookshop.”
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) He went so far as to promise suspects women if they talked. These techniques proved successful, and Goron took full credit, for he was a genius at garnering publicity; newspapers frequently ran flattering stories about him.

Goron would later write memoirs that he described as “social photographs that, without retouching, by their unadorned simplicity and horror, conveyed the truth.”
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Contrary to his assertion, his accounts came close to crossing the line of voyeurism, confusing the literary and popular with the real. Perhaps that was not too surprising, given his claim that his memoirs were an attempt to “raise the roofs of the houses of the capital” in order to see the “human perversity” found there.
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Taking over the case of the missing bailiff, Goron visited Gouffé’s office on the rue Montmartre. He discovered burned matches in front of the safe, which had not been broken into. A sum of fourteen thousand francs was found hidden behind some papers. The hall porter told Goron that a man had gone upstairs on the twenty-sixth, the night of Gouffé’s disappearance. Though the man opened the door with a key and stayed there for a while, he was a stranger whom the porter had never seen.

Looking into the missing man’s background, Goron found that he had a prodigious sex life — he visited many women regularly and was known to have a taste for kinky sex. Thus the suspect list included husbands who might have had a motive for murdering him. Paris newspapers regaled readers with stories of Gouffé’s escapades.

The bailiff’s finances were in order, so it seemed unlikely he had run away — particularly leaving fourteen thousand francs behind. Suicide also seemed unlikely in a person with such a lust for life. Goron sent descriptions of Gouffé to all the police stations in France in the hope that someone had seen him. He was a slim man, five feet nine inches tall, with chestnut hair and a carefully cropped beard. Goron also asked his assistants to look through out-of-town newspapers for stories about missing bodies. His curiosity was aroused when he read that on August 13, a road mender in Millery, a small town near Lyons, had followed a bad smell to a canvas sack hidden in some bushes. He almost fainted from the stench when he opened it and found the body of a dark-bearded man. Goron sent a query to Lyons but was told that the dead man’s physical characteristics were different from Gouffé’s. The Lyons police made it clear that they did not want any help from the capital.

On August 14, the Lyons coroner, Dr. Paul Bernard, conducted an autopsy. The advanced stage of decomposition of the body made it difficult to study, but Bernard came to the conclusion that the victim had died from strangulation. He estimated that the age of the man had been between thirty-five and forty and that his hair and beard were black.

A few days later, a traveler’s trunk was found on the banks of the river. The odor inside marked it as the container in which the body had been transported. Two labels indicated that the trunk had been shipped from Paris to Lyons-Perrache on July 27, with the year indistinct but thought to be 1888.

Goron, not trusting Dr. Bernard’s findings, sent Gouffé’s brother-in-law, named Landry, to Lyons with a Sûreté officer to take a look at the corpse. The Lyons morgue was on a barge anchored in the Rhône River, and a hideous stench arose from it. Landry, taken aboard, held a handkerchief to his nose and took only a quick glance. He said that the corpse was not Gouffé, for it had black hair, much darker than his brother-in-law’s had been.

Goron was not to be deterred. He continued his investigation in Paris. In September an informer told him that on July 25, Gouffé had been seen with a lowlife named Michel Eyraud and Eyraud’s mistress, Gabrielle Bompard. The couple had vanished from Paris on July 27, the same day the bailiff had disappeared. Goron assigned men to look for the pair, but without success.

He further investigated the labels that were on the trunk in Lyons, checking the baggage shipment registry for July 27 in both 1888 and 1889. In the latter year, a trunk weighing 105 kilograms had left Paris, bound for Lyons. Goron was certain that the Millery corpse had been transported from Paris in the trunk, but he still had to establish that it was Gouffé.

Goron himself arrived at Lyons and talked to Dr. Bernard, the local coroner, who showed him a strand of the dead man’s hair. It was indeed black, but after Goron dipped it in distilled water and washed away the blood and grime, it came out chestnut. Goron demanded that the corpse be exhumed from the cemetery and sent to Jean Alexandre Eugène Lacassagne, professor of forensic medicine at the University of Lyons.