The Killer of Little Shepherds

reviewed by Ben Pesta

The 19th century was the great era of French science. Pasteur, the Curies, Poincaré, Fourier, Foucault and others revolutionized medicine, physics, mathematics, and other disciplines. One name unfairly missing from this list is Dr. Jean-Alexandre-Eugène Lacassagne. In The Killer of Little Shepherds, Douglas Starr describes Lacassagne as a sort of Leonardo of forensic medicine: "As one of the early scholars and innovators of legal medicine, he had helped devise many new techniques in crime-scene analysis, such as determining how long a body had been putrefying and how to match a bullet to a gun. He showed investigators how to determine whether a dead body had been moved by examining the pattern of blood splotches on the skin. He developed procedures by which even simple country doctors could perform professional autopsies if called to a crime scene."

Starr, the author of the justly acclaimed Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce, in his new book has written the sanguinary tale of the pursuit, capture, and conviction of one Joseph Vacher, a mass murderer in provincial France in the 1890s. He has interwoven that story with a discourse about Lacassagne and the development of forensic science in the 19th century. But it seems like poor sportsmanship to mention that forensic science had nothing to do with the apprehension of the killer.

In this case, old-fashioned police work did the job, some of it good, but much of it bad. Vacher's m.o. was to seize his victims by the throat, "so quickly and powerfully that almost none had the chance to struggle or scream. Most blacked out or went limp, at which point he placed them on the ground and slit their throats." The killer then escaped on foot. He ultimately confessed to 11 murders. Reports from around France indicated that the number was probably 25 to 27 murders, rapes, and other violent felonies. It took the tireless effort and expert interrogation of Èmile Fourquet, a provincial examining magistrate (juge d'instruction), to identify and convict Vacher.

Starr highlights the parallels between fin de siècle France and our own time. Rural police, desperate to announce the apprehension of a suspect, arrested a number of the wrong men. And these people's lives were often ruined, even though they were ultimately exonerated of any crime (usually after months in jail). Vacher was an army veteran and an itinerant laborer, a "vagabond," and public suspicion and hostility toward such people displaced by poverty was much like public attitudes toward "illegals" today. Then as now, there was a lively debate about whether criminals were born, or made, or both.

Also, the mass media were emerging in the 1890s. The penny-press' motto, "Sang à la une!" ("Blood to page one!"), exactly parallels our present-day slogan "If it bleeds, it leads." Of course, the penny newssheets of the time jumped on the Vacher story. More than a century later, as Douglas Starr tells it with perspective and historical detail, it's still an engrossing yarn.

Ben Pesta is a white-collar and criminal defense attorney in Century City.

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