The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (18 page)

Things went worse for Eyraud. Although the jury members recommended that he be spared from execution, the justices ignored them in passing the death sentence, and the president of France, Sadi Carnot, turned down Eyraud’s plea for mercy. On February 3, 1891, Eyraud was led to the guillotine. He considered his sentence unfair, telling newsmen earlier, “It was
her
idea, not mine. Why should I forfeit my life alone? Why not the woman, too?”
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On the streets of Paris, vendors were selling miniature replicas of the trunk with a little corpse inside. The souvenirs were inscribed “L’Affaire Gouffé.”
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v

Dr. Lacassagne would have a long and influential career as a pathologist. A true intellectual who had interests in the social sciences and philosophy as well as biology, Lacassagne worked to make medicine an integral part of psychology and forensics, cutting-edge fields of the time.

He also took a strong stand against the widely accepted theories of Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso was a pioneer Italian criminologist and the inventor of the first polygraph. In 1876, his book
Criminal Man
presented his theory of the “atavistic” or born criminal. Lombroso held that criminal deviance arose because of biological traits that made criminals less fully evolved than other members of society. These throwbacks could be identified by outward physical traits that Lombroso called stigmata. Such traits included a low forehead, bushy eyebrows, and long arms that gave the individual an apelike appearance. Other indicators of criminal tendencies were excessively large or small hands, too large jaws or cheekbones, oversize lips, and ears of unusual size. Another bad sign, though not a biological trait, was tattooing, which signified primitive instincts.

To reach these conclusions, Lombroso had studied more than five thousand skulls of criminals and felons. He concluded that there were two different kinds of criminals. The first was the born criminal, which he believed made up about 40 percent of the criminal population. Such people were hopeless cases, biologically inferior and thus doomed to degeneracy. The physical characteristics of the second group, which Lombroso termed “criminaloids,” were not so easily distinguishable from those of noncriminals. Criminaloids were more strongly influenced by external factors in choosing to commit crime. Crimes of passion, for example, were criminaloid actions.

Many drew the conclusion from Lombroso’s work that if criminals could be identified by physical traits, then they should be detected and restrained before they committed crimes. (In fairness to Lombroso, he advocated more humane treatment for prisoners and believed that the death penalty should be greatly limited.) But Lacassagne would stress the important role society played in fostering criminal behavior. Injustices and the pressures of life, he felt, were more important than inbred traits in creating a criminal. Lacassagne expressed this principle in his motto:
“Les sociétés ont les criminels qu’elles méritent”
(“Societies have the criminals that they deserve”). His ideas were put to the test when Lacassagne dealt with the notorious case of a serial killer, Joseph Vacher, who earned the nickname the French Ripper. In fact the nickname was an understatement: Vacher killed more people than his London counterpart did.

Joseph Vacher was the fifteenth son of an illiterate farmer. As a young man, he joined the army and rose to the level of noncommissioned officer. While serving in the military, he fell in love with a young woman who failed to return his affections. When his army service was over in 1893, he begged her to marry him. She refused in a manner that made him think she was mocking him. Enraged, Vacher shot her four times in the face, but although she was badly injured, she survived.

Vacher then tried to kill himself, firing two shots into his skull. He failed at this too, although one of the bullets remained permanently lodged in his head. Vacher was left with brain damage that paralyzed the muscles on the right side of his face and damaged his eye, which often leaked pus and gave him a grotesque appearance.

Following a year in a mental institution in Dole, near the Jura Mountains in eastern France, Vacher was released after doctors declared him “completely cured.” They were wrong.

At age twenty-five, Vacher became a drifter who worked as a day laborer and begged for food. He committed at least eleven homicides over the three-year period from 1894 to 1897. (There may have been more that he did not confess to.) His victims included a number of teenage girls and boys — shepherds who were tending their flocks in isolated fields — most stabbed repeatedly and sometimes disemboweled, raped, or sodomized.

In August 1897, Vacher assaulted a young woman in a field in Tournon. Her screams brought her brother and father rushing to her aid. They subdued Vacher and brought him to the local police. Called before a judge, Vacher made the shocking admission that he had slaughtered numerous people. In October, Vacher wrote a full confession for the judge, Émile Forquet, describing himself as suffering from urges he could not control. Vacher claimed that these urges came from a childhood bite by a rabid dog, which he said had poisoned his blood. A quack doctor’s treatment had made the condition worse. Vacher admitted that as his victims were dying, he drank blood from their necks.
⁴⁴
Vacher argued that he was not culpable because his motive was neither theft nor vengeance.

The case became a national obsession. The scarred face of Vacher, wearing the white rabbit-fur hat he had made himself, holding the accordion he carried with him in his murderous travels, appeared in every newspaper in France for a year. The French people were already fearful of the many homeless, out-of-work vagabonds who roamed the land; Vacher gave that fear a terrifying face. Nursery rhymes were written about him to frighten children.

Excited by his growing fame, Vacher began to think of himself as a great man. He boasted that he was a scourge sent by God to punish humanity. “I am an anarchist, and am opposed to society, no matter what the form of government may be,” he declared.
⁴⁵

His sense of publicity caused him to ask to be tried separately for each murder in the territory where it was committed. He would agree to discuss his crimes only if the interviewer published his words in one of the leading French newspapers.

The full story of his crime spree will never be known. He began to boast of more murders as he recalled them. When investigators checked his new stories, they found corroboration — and bodies. Corpses were discovered in the midst of thickets and in abandoned wells. Vacher was quoted as saying, “My victims never suffered for, while I throttled them with one hand, I simply took their lives with a sharp instrument in the other.”
⁴⁶
In fact, it appeared that after Vacher attacked and stunned his victims, he often experienced a frenzy in which he brutally slashed and mutilated them.

These seemingly insane rages were followed by cunning attempts to elude capture. In one case, he killed a shepherd boy and walked away. Soon he was overtaken by a gendarme on a bicycle, who asked him for identification papers. Vacher showed his discharge papers as a noncommissioned officer of a regiment of the Zouaves. “Why, that is my old regiment,” exclaimed the gendarme. “I am hunting for a man who has just cut a boy’s throat. Have you seen any suspicious characters?”

“Oh, yes,” answered Vacher. “I saw a man running across the fields to the north about a mile back from here.”
⁴⁷

In January 1898, Vacher showed he was still capable of murderous rages. The warden of his prison unwisely allowed himself to be alone with Vacher, who nearly beat him to death with a chair. The warden’s screams brought other guards to his rescue.

Judge Forquet retained jurisdiction in the case and assigned a team of doctors, led by Alexandre Lacassagne, to examine the defendant. The panel was asked to decide whether Vacher was sane enough to stand trial. A strong case could be made against that, because of his earlier stay in an insane asylum. Lacassagne had been interested in the Jack the Ripper murders of the 1880s in England and had written a monograph on what the photographs of those crime scenes revealed. Now, studying Vacher allowed him to apply modern theories of the human psyche to a serial killer.

Lacassagne and his panel spent five months examining the defendant’s behavior, interviewing him and those who had known him. Vacher had a history of “confused talk,” spells of delirium, and persecution mania. He was openly delusional at times and even went into mad rages when seen by the panel. Neighbors recalled him torturing and mutilating animals as a child. During his military service, some officers claimed, he had demonstrated a violent temper.

In the end, the medical experts concluded that Vacher’s crimes reflected an extremely sadistic personality that, while very rare, was not a manifestation of insanity. The panel of doctors arrived at this judgment primarily because Vacher had been able to clearly state and remember his crimes and appeared to be sufficiently aware to be fit to stand trial. Lacassagne wrote, “Vacher is not an epileptic nor is he an
impulsif.
He is a violent, immoral man who was temporarily overcome by delirious melancholy with his ideas of persecution and sucide… Vacher, cured, was responsible when he left the Wiant-Rokebert asylum. His crimes are those of an anti-social, a bloody sadist, who believed in his invincibility.… At the present time, Vacher is not insane: he fakes madness. Vacher is therefore a criminal and he could be considered responsible, this responsibility being scarcely attenuated by his previous psychological problems.”
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Vacher, now twenty-nine, was put on trial for eleven murders. He entered the courtroom shouting, “Glory to Jesus! Glory to Joan of Arc! To the greatest martyr of all time! And glory to the Great Savior!”
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The defense lawyers, as expected, tried to convince the jurors that Vacher was insane and not responsible for his actions. But the opinion of Lacassagne and his experts doomed Vacher. He was found guilty and sentenced to death on October 28, 1898.

On the last day of 1898, Vacher was executed at Bourg-en-Bresse, capital of the department of the Ain in eastern France. Magistrate Forquet reported his last words as he was being prepared for the guillotine: “You think to expiate the faults of France in having me die; that will not be enough; you are committing another crime; I am the great victim,
fin de siècle.
”
⁵⁰
Louis Deibler, the national executioner, was performing his last execution, and a huge crowd had turned out. Vacher refused to walk and had to be half dragged, half carried to the guillotine. He protested his innocence and pretended to be insane right up to the end. Deibler, wearing a top hat and frock coat with his trademark umbrella, released the blade to the singing and wild applause of the crowd.

Afterward, the medical experts studied the serial killer’s skull. Vacher’s brain was cut up and sections were sent to interested criminologists. One of the recipients was the Italian clinic of Cesare Lombroso, who claimed to find indications of criminality in its sample.

vi

When the
Mona Lisa
was stolen, the chief of the Paris police was M. Louis Lépine. A legendary figure, Lépine was a small man with a white beard who always wore a bowler hat and an old-fashioned morning coat as he walked the boulevards of Paris. He liked to see with his own eyes how his police were performing, and his men knew that he could turn up at any time in unexpected places. He demanded high performance and was unsympathetic to anyone who didn’t deliver it.

Jean Belin, who joined the police in 1911, remembered his boss:

Lépine was a remarkable character: a man of undoubted if unpredictable ability, with idiosyncrasies and prejudices no one could overcome. He had ruled that no man more than five feet seven could be admitted to the detective force. At the same time, no uniformed constable was allowed on the streets unless he was five feet nine. And I came in between. Lépine contended that an ordinary uniformed cop ought to be impressive by reason of his height and physical fitness. On the other hand, a detective should be unobtrusive in appearance. In these respects he was inflexible. He went even further. He insisted on personally inspecting every recruit. If an applicant for the plain-clothes branch had red hair, or a pot belly, or other marked distinguishing feature, he had no chance. In every circumstance he must appear just plain ordinary. A mole on the face or a scar on the hand was sufficient disqualification no matter how able the man might be.… I have come to the conclusion that in the long run he was probably right. In real life a man with the distinctive appearance of a Sherlock Holmes or the beard of a Hercule Poirot would never get near his quarry.
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Lépine had to deal with several high-profile cases during his tenure, including the
Mona Lisa
theft and the notorious Bonnot Gang of bank robbers. But it was an ongoing threat that probably caused him the most anxiety: the growth of the apaches, the young street criminals who had been glamorized by fashionable Parisians.

Women apaches, known as
gigolettes,
were important members of the gangs. When police raided dance halls looking for weapons, the young women would conceal their companions’ knives, guns, and blackjacks under their clothing. A woman known as La Grande Marcelle was a sort of apache queen whose followers carried out her orders without question. Several murders of women concierges, killed for the rent money that they collected, were attributed to Marcelle’s gang. Her companion was Jacques Liabeuf, regarded as one of the most vicious of the apaches. He became famous for the special outfits that made him a fearsome adversary: Liabeuf wore a bulletproof waistcoat and a suit with brass sleeves and wristbands bristling with sharp points that inflicted grave damage on anyone trying to grab him. He carried a pistol but preferred an enormous knife for fighting.