The Killer of Little Shepherds by Douglas Starr Read Free Book Online Page A

detail, he proceeded, noting each blot on the blood-soaked clothing and each piece of flesh that had been spotted on the ground. The fact that the body’s limbs were stiff with rigor mortis told him that the killing had taken place within the previous seventy-two hours. The mortal wound was a series of deep, hacking stabs to the left-center side of the throat. The angle of the wound and the presence of notches along its borders told Boyer that the assailant had stood behind the victim and thrust the knife into the throat with two or three deep, tearing stabs.
    Unlike most medical examiners, Boyer adhered to his mentor’s instructions to examine the anus if the crime scene suggested a sexually related attack—a disagreeable procedure that involved cleaning the tissue, examiningit very closely, and then palpating it with the fingers to determine the muscle tone (this in an era before doctors wore gloves). Boyer performed the steps conscientiously and found small tears in the anal mucosa. Those tears would not have occurred after death, when the anus would have gone slack. The evidence led Boyer to reconstruct a scenario in which a single attacker crept up on the child, grabbed him around the throat, and then stabbed him, threw him or let him collapse to the ground, performed unspeakable sexual mutilations, and sodomized the dying body.
    None of these details ran in the newspapers. Either the doctors did not release the information or it was felt that public taste could not abide it. No matter—even the vague set of facts that appeared in the press were more than enough to panic the citizenry. According to
Le Lyon Républicain
, the killing had “literally terrorized the countryside.” 10
    The inhabitants do not dare to go out by themselves at night; shepherds find it difficult to lead their flocks away from habitation. A mother of a good family was so frightened that she removed her daughter from service as a domestic with a farming family in Courzieu. A butcher crossing the woods in a carriage was so frightened by seeing a stranger that he whipped his horse in a panic to flee. These little incidents show the state of mind of inhabitants of the region. They don’t feel safe anymore.…
    If traditional French police work had shortcomings, it also had strengths, especially in terms of amassing information. The best practitioners were connoisseurs of paperwork. Vidocq became famous for his swashbuckling exploits, but he was also a great collector of files. The floors at his headquarters in the dreary Sûreté in Paris groaned under the weight of more than three million papers pertaining to tens of thousands of criminals. Bertillon, who developed the anthropomorphic technique and quantified each criminal as a unique set of measurements, collected tens of thousands of file cards. Once arrested, a criminal’s “anthropomorphic card” would follow him permanently. The central impulse of late-nineteenth-century “scientific policing” was to characterize the criminal as a series of measurements and traits and to identify his crimes by what Lacassagne referred to as a “manual of operation.” For that, one needed records.
    Fourquet started generating paperwork. Working alone “in the silenceand solitude of the night,” he created two charts for entering information. 11 One chart was devoted to the method of the crime, and Fourquet used it to sort all the data he could find from the autopsies and police reports. He listed the eight crimes down the left side of the page. Across the top he created categories, such as the position in which the body was found, the probable murder weapon, the status of the head, neck, chest, and abdomen, and whether the victim showed signs of rape or other significant “mutilations.” Within those categories he filled in the specifics of each crime.
    He devoted the other chart, also a grid, to the identity of the criminal. He listed the crimes down the left side of the page and the physical