The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (19 page)

In early January 1910, a policeman named Deray was killed, allegedly while attempting to arrest Liabeuf. Prefect of Police Lépine stood at the grave of the murdered policeman, in a section of Montparnasse Cemetery reserved for those killed in the line of duty, and promised that Deray’s killer would be brought to justice. He issued instructions that his men “must not hesitate to use weapons in cases where they were in danger of serious bodily injury.” Paris, he said, was “the refuge for too many bandits and justice treated them too tenderly.”
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Many Parisians, particularly in the working classes, felt differently. Another view of the killing of the policeman came from the pen of M. Hervé, editor of
La Guerre Sociale,
the most extreme socialist newspaper in Paris. “Do you know,” he wrote, “this Apache who has just killed Deray is not lacking in a certain beauty, a certain greatness, not often found in this century of feeble wills and beastlike submission. He has given a fine lesson of energy, perseverance, and courage to us revolutionists. He has set a fine example to the honest workmen who are every day victims of police brutality. Did you ever hear that one of them avenged themselves?”
⁵³
The radical journalist was sentenced to four years in jail for publishing these words.

The police finally caught Liabeuf during a raid on a house in Montmartre. It seemed surprising that he was taken alive, but he soon remedied that. While in jail, he overpowered a guard who was bringing him food and made his way to the roof. A standoff resulted, and his lawyers were called to persuade him to come down. Despite their pleas, Liabeuf remained on the roof until a brigade of firemen arrived to retrieve him. Crying out, “To hell with the police and long live anarchy!” he threw himself to his death.
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vii

Among those who attempted to discover the roots of the apaches’ criminal behavior and rage was Edmond Locard, the greatest of French criminologists, born in 1877. After studying medicine and law, he became Lacassagne’s assistant before setting up his own crime lab at Lyons in 1910. Locard was a forensic pioneer in many fields. He became particularly adept at handwriting analysis, forgery detection, and dental comparisons.

In studying the apaches, Locard was influenced by Lacassagne’s views that urban crime was different from rural crime. He further sought to understand the apaches through their art, which he collected. Examples often depicted such scenes as murders and guillotinings.

Locard felt that fiction could be a source of real-world inspiration. He wrote:

I hold that a police expert, or an examining magistrate, would not find it a waste of his time to read [Arthur Conan] Doyle’s novels. For, in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the detective is repeatedly asked to diagnose the origin of a speck of mud, which is nothing but moist dust. The presence of a spot on a shoe or pair of trousers immediately made known to Holmes the particular quarter of London from which his visitor had come, or the road he had traveled in the suburbs. A spot of clay and chalk originated in Horsham; a particular reddish bit of mud could be found nowhere but at the entrance to the post office in Wigmore Street.… Holmes also insists upon the interest or fascination to be found in collecting tobacco ashes, on which he says he has “written a little monograph concerning one hundred and forty varieties.” I must confess that if, in the police laboratory at Lyons, we are interested in any unusual way in the problem of dust, it is because of having absorbed the ideas found in Gross
⁵⁵
and Conan Doyle.
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One of Locard’s cases showed that Locard had read Poe as well as Conan Doyle. Police were mystified by a series of jewel thefts in wealthy homes. Each of the thefts took place in broad daylight, and there were no signs of forced entry. The intruder came in through an upper-story window and each time took just one piece of jewelry, even though there might be many pieces in the room. Suspicions fell on young boys, but there was no proof.

Locard came on the case. He had adopted the use of fingerprints while others still clung to outmoded systems of identification. Now he asked to see photographs of the window ledges where the intruder had apparently entered. Checking the fingerprints carefully, he became convinced that the prints were not those of a human. The great detective came to the conclusion that the thief was a monkey. The next step was to find it. Locard ordered the city’s organ grinders, who ordinarily used monkeys, to come to the police station in three days. When they arrived, all the monkeys were fingerprinted, and Locard compared their prints with the ones from the crime scenes. The guilty monkey was retired to a zoo, and its owner was arrested.

The most important of Locard’s many contributions to criminology was Locard’s Exchange Principle, which remains the basis of modern forensic science. It states that a criminal will always take something away from the scene of the crime and will in turn leave something behind. In essence, Locard declared that every contact leaves a trace of the victim and of the perpetrator.

Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him. Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the fibers from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool marks he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects. All of these and more, bear mute witness against him. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value.
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Though technology has made great advances since Locard’s day, his principle is still the starting point for all crime scene investigations.

Locard himself certainly made good use of it in 1912 when the body of a young woman, Marie Latelle, was found strangled. Investigators found that she had a boyfriend, Émile Gourbin, who was very jealous. Marie apparently liked to flirt with other men to tease Gourbin. Was it possible that she had gone too far?

Gourbin, however, seemed to have a perfect alibi. Tests on Marie’s body indicated that she had died around midnight. Gourbin had been playing cards with friends when the clock struck twelve. While Locard questioned him, he took fingerprints and also scrapings of the material under Gourbin’s nails. Examining the scrapings under a microscope, Locard found pink dust. Further testing showed that the dust was face powder from a woman’s makeup kit. Police searching Marie’s lodgings found the same kind of makeup. Gourbin had picked up the powder while strangling his victim and taken it from the crime scene.

Confronted with this evidence, Gourbin confessed. He told Locard that he had established his alibi by changing the time on the wall clock where he had been playing cards. Thus, when the game ended at what the other players thought was midnight, it was in reality half an hour earlier.

Locard, whose career continued till his death in 1966, acknowledged the debt he owed to two
maîtres.
One was Lacassagne; the other was Alphonse Bertillon, who was regarded even by Sherlock Holmes’s creator as the highest expert on crime in Europe. Bertillon was the scion of a brilliant family, whose members were so devoted to intellectual pursuits that they donated their bodies to be dissected and examined after death for the advancement of science. If anyone could have used the most recent technological advances to find the
Mona Lisa,
it was this tortured and flawed individual.

5

THE MAN WHO MEASURED PEOPLE

É
mile Forquet, the judge who received Joseph Vacher’s confession, had done a bit of detecting himself to bring the serial killer to justice. Forquet liked to collect and review the files of unsolved cases. He then arranged them according to the categories of crimes and types of injuries, along with reports of people seen in the vicinity. Noticing a pattern, he realized that witnesses’ reports seemed to point to a single person. Forquet circulated copies of a card that used a system of identification known as bertillonage to describe the ears, nose, scars, and eyes of this man. The responses he received helped him to identify Vacher, and when the man was finally in front of him, Forquet pressed him to confess.

Alphonse Bertillon’s method of identification, which he had named anthropometry, or “man measurement,” was by 1900 in general use by police departments all over Europe and the United States. So great was Bertillon’s fame that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even mentioned him as a rival to Sherlock Holmes. In
The Hound of the Baskervilles,
a prospective client arrived to consult Holmes. As his friend Watson recalled the scene, the client said:

“I am suddenly confronted with a most serious and extraordinary problem. Recognizing, as I do, that you are the second highest expert in Europe —”

“Indeed, sir! May I inquire who has the honor to be the first?” asked Holmes, with some asperity.

“To the man of precisely scientific mind the work of Monsieur Bertillon must always appeal strongly.”

“Then had you not better consult him?”

“I said, sir, to the precisely scientific mind. But as a practical man of affairs it is acknowledged that you stand alone. I trust, sir, that I have not inadvertently —”

“Just a little,” said Holmes.
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i

Bertillon came from a family renowned for intellectual achievement. His maternal grandfather, Achille Guillard, was a doctor and statistician who coined the term
demography
in 1855 and had written one of the first books on the subject. In the early years of the Second Empire, a time of such political repression that it was illegal for citizens to assemble in groups larger than three, Guillard ran afoul of the authorities and was tossed into prison. There he shared a cell with a young doctor named Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, who had been arrested for tending the wounded on both sides of the street fighting. They were not in jail long, and on their release, Guillard introduced Dr. Bertillon to his daughter, Zoe. The two were soon married. Zoe Bertillon was a brilliant woman who argued the merits of the philosophical systems of Comte and Spinoza with Jules Michelet, a family friend and France’s foremost historian of the time. Lean and graceful, taller than her husband, she kept her home in simple republican good taste. In 1862, Zoe and a friend started a school called the Free Society for the Professional Instruction of Young Women, which emphasized intellectual subjects.

Her husband, Louis-Adolphe, was one of the first members of the Anthropology Society of Paris, founded by his brilliant friend the surgeon Paul Broca. Broca wished to create “a scientific society where one would have the right to draw all the philosophical consequences from one’s observations.”
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When Louis-Adolphe was asked to join, he expressed concern that he was not knowledgeable in this field. “I wouldn’t be able to render it any service,” he said, “as I don’t know a word of anthropology.” Broca was unfazed. “Neither do I,” he responded. “All the more reason to learn it or, rather, to create it, because in truth, it doesn’t exist!”
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Though the founders of the society had little knowledge of their subject, they would become the pioneers of the field in France. They saw anthropology as a way to express their progressive ideas about humanity and identify “all that is still present of the savage and barbaric in our modern civilizations.”
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Among the things they wanted to do away with were the priesthood, militarism, the cult of authority, and the subjugation of women.

Louis-Adolphe was also a founder of the Society for Mutual Autopsy, whose members agreed to donate and dissect one another’s brains after death to promote the advancement of science. Fifteen years earlier, in 1861, Paul Broca had demonstrated through a postmortem that the left frontal lobe of the brain controlled speech. When it was damaged, speech was impaired in a symptom called “Broca’s aphasia.”
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Broca further developed several instruments to measure and classify skulls,
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the highest classification being “brachycephalic.” Conan Doyle used Broca’s terminology in his writing. Like Holmes, the archvillain Professor Moriarty is brachycephalic, and at their first meeting, he greets Holmes with the comment: “You have less frontal development than I should have expected.”
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(Despite Broca’s proclaimed progressivism, women and people from non-European cultures were believed to have smaller and therefore inferior brains.)

It was into this intellectual community that Alphonse Bertillon was born on April 24, 1853. Not surprisingly, anthropometric techniques and measurements were part of Alphonse’s life almost from birth. When Alphonse was very young, his father had a biologist friend feel the heads of his two sons. The doctor proclaimed that both had “methodical and precise” minds and would be capable of scholarly work. When Alphonse was three, he and his brother imitated their elders by measuring with ribbons everything that they could get their hands on.

Both the Guillard and Bertillon families were experts in the new study of statistics, particularly as it related to human affairs. Louis-Adolphe was pleased when his elder son, Jacques, followed the family tradition and became a renowned statistician himself. Alphonse too seemed likely to head in that direction. He was particularly fond of quoting a sentence from his father’s works about the purpose of science being to find order within what seems to be chaos.

Unfortunately, Alphonse found that schools were not to his liking. At six, he was kicked out of his first one for lack of discipline. His home tutor also found Alphonse a problem, for the boy hid in a cupboard at lesson time, took the teacher’s glasses, and teased him so dreadfully that the tutor quit. Sent to the Rossat Institute in Charleville, a school for problem children, Alphonse was expelled from there as well, when he was eleven. In his teens he attended the lycée at Versailles and there he accidentally set fire to his desk while using a spirit lamp to make hot chocolate. When the teacher investigated the source of the smoke, Alphonse clamped down the lid of the desk, refusing to let the teacher open it, and for good measure hit him over the head with a Greek dictionary. He was sent home once more.

After France suffered its ignominious defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870, eighteen-year-old Alphonse was called up for his required army service, possibly to the relief of his long-suffering father. The young man stood five feet ten inches tall — well above the average for his day — and his physical presence won him the respect of his fellow conscripts and the officers. He attained the rank of corporal, probably the first distinction he had ever achieved in life. Even so, a military career was not for him; he suffered from many tics and ailments, including migraine headaches and nosebleeds. He was so unmusical that the only way he could distinguish bugle signals for reveille and roll call was to count the notes. After his discharge he contracted typhoid fever. Perhaps these physical hardships were a reason for his lifelong sour disposition, which manifested itself in sarcasm and unsociability as well as habitual suspicion of others’ motives.

Two years later, however, after studying on his own, he passed the national examination, the
baccalauréat,
in science and literature. Clearly, Bertillon had a fine mind, but he wanted no more of formal schooling. Nonetheless, he failed to demonstrate the qualities required to hold a job — first as a bank clerk and then as a French teacher in an English school. He was sarcastic with co-workers and had a bad temper; it appears that in order to maintain control of his emotions, he needed to keep everything slow and steady. Around 1879, however, he met an upper-class Swedish woman and fell madly in love. For unknown reasons, marriage was impossible, but they exchanged letters and pictures. It appears to have been an obsession that lasted a lifetime. Bertillon never revealed her name to family or friends, but he kept her photograph and letters until his death. The young man dedicated himself to her memory and used it as a goad to find some kind of success in the world. He began that search by asking his father for help in finding a job.

ii

There seemed no chance that Alphonse could follow an academic career like his father and brother. But his father had done statistical work for the Municipality of Paris and used his influence to obtain for his errant son a position as a junior clerk in the Prefecture of Police. Alphonse began work in March 1879, just short of his twenty-sixth birthday, in the corner of a storage cellar that was steaming hot in the summer and so cold in the winter that his gloved fingers could barely hold a quill pen. Making a pittance, Bertillon plunged into the tiresome task of copying the identification forms that were required to be filled out for each prisoner.

Ever since the branding of convicted criminals with a hot iron had been outlawed in 1832, there had been no sure way of knowing whether a person accused of a crime had been in police custody before.
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A clever person could even get a new birth certificate if he knew the date and place of birth of someone whose identity he wanted to steal. In Bertillon’s time, it was still up to the police to determine on sight if they had seen a prisoner before. Officers of the law were, in fact, offered a reward of five francs for each individual they could identify (a practice that, according to one authority, resulted in police offering to share the five francs with prisoners who would admit to having been arrested before — whether they had been or not). And, of course, identifications produced merely by someone’s memory were always subject to challenge.

Vidocq had prided himself on his prodigious memory for faces and names to catch criminals by whatever name they were going under. He had started the first documentary records with descriptions of criminals in words and drawings. After his retirement, the records continued to expand. In theory these forms should have proved useful by being compared to other records to find a match. But because newly arrested suspects frequently gave false names, and since the descriptions given by arresting officers were hopelessly vague (“tall, dark-haired, average build”), the forms were in practice totally useless. In the 1860s, police had started using photographs of known criminals. But these were often taken from family or friends of the suspect and could be in any pose. Moreover, they had to be searched through one by one. This was the big problem with the identification records: the larger the collection grew, the more unwieldy it became.

In 1871, the Communards, as one of their last acts, had destroyed many of the police records and pictures. The Paris police subsequently had to rebuild their photographic records from scratch. By the end of the decade, the prefecture had about sixty thousand images in its possession. The quality of these varied with the skill of the photographer, and there was no way of classifying records by the image on them, so only by chance — and then without certainty — would two cards made at different times be matched with each other.