The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection by Dorothy Hoobler, Thomas Hoobler Read Free Book Online Page B

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