4 

SCIENCE VS. CRIME

Vidocq, the first head of the Sûreté, had begun the practice of taking a scientific approach to the detection of crime, even though his primary tools were his phenomenal memory and his psychological insight into the criminal mentality. As the nineteenth century advanced, however, the police increasingly used new scientific discoveries in their work. Chemistry and physics, as well as statistics, physiology, biology, psychology, and the new social sciences of anthropology and sociology all made contributions to crime fighting. Developments in technology, such as the microscope and the camera, gave detectives even greater power. Over time, a science of criminology was born and the modern detective came into being.

i

Émile Zola’s description of a naturalistic novelist’s work could be used equally well as a pattern for the criminologist: “The novelist starts out in search of a truth… he starts from known facts; then he makes his experiment, and exposes [the character] to a series of trials, placing him amid certain surroundings in order to exhibit how the complicated machinery of his person works.… The problem is to know what such passion acting in such a surrounding and under such circumstances would produce from the point of view of an individual and of society… Finally you possess knowledge of the man, scientific knowledge of him, in both his individual and his social relations.” ¹ It was just such knowledge that enabled one relentless detective to bring to justice the most celebrated criminal of his time.

“To kill without remorse is the highest of pleasures,” wrote Pierre-François Lacenaire. “It is impossible to destroy my hatred of mankind. This hatred is the product of a lifetime, the outcome of my every thought. I never pitied any one who suffered, and I don’t want to be pitied myself.” ²These were the words — written as he faced the guillotine — of the most notorious criminal to appear in the decade after Vidocq’s retirement from the Sûreté in 1827. At heart a dandy with literary pretensions, Lacenaire sought to project himself as the greatest criminal of his generation. Though most of his crimes were petty ones, his self-promotion invited others to attempt to use him as a doorway into the criminal mind.

Born Pierre-François Gaillard, the son of a wealthy iron merchant in Francheville, he grew up with a profound sense of resentment. In his memoirs he recalled that his older brother was the favored son in the family. When Pierre was sixteen, he and his father had passed through the town square with the guillotine looming over it. “Look,” his father had said, “that is how you will finish up if you don’t change your ways.” ³ Lacenaire saw this moment as a turning point in his life. “From that moment,” he wrote, “an invisible bond existed between me and the frightful machine.”⁴

As a young man, he went to Paris to study law; it was at this time that he adopted the name Lacenaire. Because the money his father sent him was not enough to survive on, he worked at many jobs, never achieving the success that he believed he deserved. Inspired by the Greek war for independence, Lacenaire went off to join the rebel forces. When he returned to France in 1829, he found that his father was bankrupt. Lacenaire had to fend for himself.

According to his memoirs, around this time Lacenaire fought a duel with the nephew of Benjamin Constant, a politician and writer. Lacenaire was the victor, and though the duel was not fatal, he claimed that the experience made him see how he could kill a person without remorse.

It was also in 1829 that Lacenaire served his first jail term, having been convicted in a swindling scheme. He was soon on the street again, and for the next three years he wrote lyric poems, songs, and essays. As no one would pay much for his literary creations, he continued his career of petty fraud, which brought him a second short prison sentence. After his release, the editor of Bon Sens, a radical political journal, asked Lacenaire to write an exposé of French prison life. This gave him a chance to express his contempt for authority and brought him some fame as well. “In this atmosphere… the wretched youth finds himself blushing at the last remnant of innocence and decency which he had still preserved when he entered the prison; he begins to feel ashamed that he is less of a scoundrel than those about him, he dreads their mockery and their contempt; for, make no mistake, there are such things as respect and contempt even in the galleys, a fact that explains why certain convicts are better off in jail than in a society which has nothing for them but contempt.” ⁵

Working for Bon Sens brought Lacenaire a forum but little money. Few others shared his delusions about his artistic talent, so in 1834 he embarked on the path of crime yet again. As a career choice, it was a mistake, for he was often inept in carrying out his criminal plans. At the time, banks sent messengers to their customers’ homes and offices to collect deposits. Since the messengers often carried large sums of money, Lacenaire thought they would make fine victims.

He took on a partner, Pierre Victor Avril, a former carpenter. “I was the intelligence, Avril the arm,” Lacenaire wrote later. ⁶ He requested a bank to send a messenger to a certain address, giving a false name. When the messenger arrived, however, the porter of the building told him that no one of that name lived there. On Lacenaire’s second attempt, no messenger showed up.

Coming up with a new plan, Lacenaire remembered a former friend from prison, a man named Chardon, who now lived with his bedridden mother. Unwisely, he had once told Lacenaire that she had saved a hoard of money. One December morning, Lacenaire and Avril knocked at Chardon’s door. Chardon, too trusting, allowed his former prison mate inside. Without a word, Lacenaire stabbed him with a dagger and Avril used a hatchet to deliver a deathblow.

A low moaning in the next room attracted Lacenaire’s attention. It was the bedridden mother, and the two thieves showed her no more mercy than they had the son. Looking for hidden valuables, they overturned the mattress on which she was lying, suffocating her. They ransacked the house, taking everything that looked valuable. Despite what Chardon had said, the loot was worth no more than seven hundred francs — far less than they had expected. But the killers celebrated what they considered a “perfect crime” by washing off the evidence of their crime at a Turkish bath, followed by a dinner at a fancy café.

Emboldened by this success, Lacenaire struck again two weeks later, trying the messenger scam again. Posing as a M. Mahossier, he appeared at a bank and arranged to cash a forged check. The teller told an eighteen-year-old messenger named Genevay to take three thousand francs to the address Lacenaire had given. Because Avril was not available, Lacenaire’s accomplice this time was a man named François, also known as Red Whiskers. After the messenger put the bank notes on the table and turned to leave, François attacked him from behind with a file. He was as inept as his partner, failing to kill Genevay, whose screams brought neighbors to the scene. Both of the would-be robbers fled.

Genevay survived and gave the police a description of his attackers. He noted that Mahossier had a copy of Rousseau’s Social Contract hanging out of his pocket. Vidocq’s successor at the head of the Sûreté, M. Allard, assigned his chief inspector, Paul-Louis-Alphonse Canler, to the case. ⁷Canler had won a reputation as the Sûreté’s best detective because of his uncanny ability to read the minds of criminals and because he was incredibly persistent. He was a shoe-leather detective at heart — which he had to be: a social scientist named Honoré-Antoine Frégier had published a lengthy work in 1840 in which he claimed some sixty-three thousand criminals were living in Paris — nearly 10 percent of the population. ⁸

Canler assumed that Mahossier was not the real name of the man he was after, but he also knew that criminals often used the same alias many times. So he began to visit lodging houses, looking through registers for the name. After a tedious search, he found a seedy place with the name Mahossier in the register. The concierge’s description of him sounded like the man who had stabbed the bank messenger — a distinguished-looking man with a high forehead, silky mustache, and smooth manner. She also remembered that he had stayed there once before under the name Bâton.

Canler interviewed five hundred people before he found a thief named Bâton and arrested him, even though he did not match the description of Mahossier. The inspector clung to his theory that following the trail of names would lead him to the culprit. Bâton, given plenty of brandy during questioning, revealed that he knew someone who fit the description of the man Canler was looking for — a nattily dressed man with a high forehead. Bâton knew him as Gaillard, Lacenaire’s real name.

Canler went back to checking the registers of flophouses. When he found a Gaillard, the innkeeper remembered that the man in question had left some papers behind. These included some republican songs and poems — a link with Canler’s only other clue: the copy of Rousseau that the perpetrator had carried.

The detective was sure he had identified his man, but he still had to find him. He got a break when Avril, Lacenaire’s accomplice in the double murder, was arrested on another charge. Hoping for leniency, he offered to help Canler. He told him that the man known as Gaillard had a rich aunt who lived in the rue Bar-du-Bec. When Canler went to see her, she admitted she had a disreputable nephew whom she feared. Indeed, she had put a grille on her door because she feared that he would murder her someday. The aunt gave Canler his quarry’s current name: Lacenaire.

Canler issued a general alert throughout France with Lacenaire’s description. On February 2, 1836, the police arrested a man at Beaune. It was Lacenaire, trying a new scam: selling forged bonds. He was brought back to the Paris Prefecture, where he greeted Canler politely. He admitted that he had robbed the bank messenger but at first refused to give the name of his accomplice. When told that his cohort in the double murder had cooperated in his capture, he confessed to that as well, revenging himself on Avril and Red Whiskers for good measure with further incriminating testimony. When Canler pointed out, “You realize, of course, that it will finish you,” Lacenaire replied, “I know that. It doesn’t matter so long as it finishes them too.” ⁹ His sense of grievance had overcome self-preservation.

The trial of the three criminals — Lacenaire, Avril, and Red Whiskers — began in the Cour d’Assises ¹⁰ of the Seine on November 12, 1836. The highlight of the trial was Lacenaire’s speech to the court. Dressed in a stylish blue coat, he reached heights of self-dramatization, portraying himself as an alienated genius at war with society. He mesmerized those present in the courtroom, and reporters wrote everything down for the next day’s newspapers. Since Lacenaire had already declared that he was eager to meet his fiancée, the guillotine, the death sentence for him and Avril was almost anticlimactic.

Lacenaire became a celebrity, and while he awaited execution, visitors flocked to his prison cell, where he presided over a virtual salon for writers, doctors, scientists, and journalists. He gave visitors calling cards bearing the inscription “Pierre-François Lacenaire, fiancé of the guillotine.”¹¹Gifts of fine food and wine as well as messages of goodwill flooded into the prison from ladies of the highest society. One man offered Lacenaire an expensive coat, which he refused on the grounds that he would not be able to give it much wear. The literary world fawned on him; both Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier came to visit and listen to him recite his poetry.

Lacenaire also found time to write his memoirs, certainly the most notorious such document up to that time. With them, he finally achieved his longed-for literary success, interspersing his poetry with the account of his life. While he claimed that he had modeled the memoirs on those of Vidocq, Lacenaire’s are marked by self-pity, with few descriptions of crimes and many more romantic explanations of why he became a criminal. His rationalizations further reveal him as a highly intelligent man who used the injustices — real and perceived — of society to excuse his behavior. This view led him to see himself as a victim and any crime as defensible. ¹²

Scientists came to his cell to examine and measure him, trying to find the essence of what made him a criminal. Adherents of the pseudoscience of phrenology claimed to be able to determine a person’s personality from examination of his skull, and right before the execution, a phrenologist came to make a model of Lacenaire’s head.

Lacenaire was concerned that his execution be handled just right. He wrote, “I make no secret of it — it would have been very disagreeable to me to have been dispatched by a provincial executioner.” ¹³ Thus he was displeased to learn that he would meet his fate at seven in the morning, when he would have preferred noon to attract a larger audience.

On January 9, 1836, a cold and foggy day, Lacenaire and Avril were led to the guillotine at the Saint-Jacques barrier on the south side of Paris. Though the authorities had tried to keep the time and place of execution secret and had hastily erected the guillotine at night, a crowd of five hundred people appeared — as happened at almost every execution.

Avril went first, and the execution proceeded without incident. Then Lacenaire looked at the executioner and said: “Nothing simpler. I am not afraid.” ¹⁴ But when he placed his head on the block, the blade made it only halfway down before becoming stuck in one of the grooved sides. The executioner hauled it up again, and as he did, Lacenaire looked up at the triangular blade. It was the last thing he saw.

Lacenaire had one last contribution to offer. On the eve of his death, he had spoken to a Dr. Lelut of the Bicêtre Prison. One of the scientific questions of the time was whether consciousness continued after the head was severed from the body. Did decapitation instantly end consciousness? This was just the sort of thing that interested Lacenaire, and he had promised that he would give a signal by winking — specifically, closing his left eye and leaving the right one open. Dr. Lelut stood over the basket that caught the severed head of the criminal, but could see no movement of the eyelids at all.

ii

People have used poisons to dispatch their enemies from ancient times. Through experience or experiment, several reliably fatal substances were identified, including mercury, antimony, hemlock, and henbane. But over the centuries the most popular poison has been arsenic. From ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy, arsenic murders were common. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, white arsenic (the powder form) was even called poudre de succession, or “the inheritance powder,” because of its common use.

The advantage of arsenic as a poison was that it was tasteless and colorless, so that it would be undetectable when mixed with food or drink. Also, the symptoms of the poison could be confused with cholera, a very prevalent disease at the time. Thus police and judges had no way to ascertain whether a victim had died of poison or something else. The only way to convict someone was to catch him or her in the act of administering the poison.

That began to change at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1787, the German chemist Johann Daniel Metzger discovered that when substances with arsenic content were heated over charcoal and a copper platter was held above the vapors, the platter became covered with a white material that was arsenous oxide. ¹⁵

It was now possible for investigators to test for arsenic, though their methods didn’t work well under certain conditions. It was found, for example, that traces of arsenic occur naturally in the human body. One man in particular was to help solve these problems: Mathieu Joseph Bonaventure Orfila, today remembered as the “father of toxicology.” Born in Minorca in 1787, the young man developed a passion for chemistry and medicine. In 1811, he went to Paris, where he became a doctor of medicine and set up his own laboratory to study poisons. Two years later he published a two-volume work on toxicology that was highly regarded throughout Europe.

In his lab, Orfila experimented on animals to try to understand the chemistry of poisons, particularly arsenic. He showed how the poison passed through the stomach and intestine to other organs such as the liver, spleen, and kidney and finally permeated the nerves themselves, ¹⁶demonstrating that even when no poison remained in the stomach, it would show up in other parts of the body. He further discovered that the arsenic was easier to detect when the animal tissue was charred.

Orfila still faced the problem posed by trace elements such as iron, zinc, and iodine, which occur naturally in the body and may conceal the presence of arsenic. The solution was found by James Marsh of the Royal British Arsenal, who developed the Marsh tube. Marsh’s discovery was based on the principle that when either sulfuric acid or hydrochloric acid is mixed with any liquid containing arsenic and brought together with zinc, a chemical reaction results, producing the gas arsine. Marsh’s device was a U-shaped glass tube in which the elements could be combined and a scientist could check for the presence of arsine.

Marsh published a paper on his device in 1836, and Orfila saw its potential immediately. Meanwhile, Orfila had improved on his earlier method of charring the sample with nitric acid to remove “animal matter.” He also showed that traces of natural arsenic appeared only in the bones and therefore did not interfere with testing of body organs. In addition he realized that the ground where a body was buried might contain arsenic, which should be taken into account in cases of exhumation in determining whether arsenic poisoning had been the cause of death.

Orfila’s work earned him enormous respect, and he was named dean of the Medical School of Paris in 1831. (One of his colleagues there was Marie-Guillaume-Alphonse Devergie, the first man to use a microscope in practical forensic pathology.) For his part, Orfila would make history as the first expert to use the science of toxicology to convict a person of murder.

Marie Lafarge developed delusions of grandeur at an early age. Born Marie Capelle in 1816, she was the daughter of one of Napoleon’s favorite officers. Her maternal grandmother was a natural daughter of Philippe-Égalité, duc d’Orléans, whose legitimate son Philippe, the so-called Citizen King, had ruled France when Marie was a teenager. Though she could claim a noble lineage, Marie never became securely established in the aristocratic society that she aspired to. After the deaths of her parents when she was a teenager, she was shuffled between two aunts.

Still, Marie was educated in fine schools in Paris, where she learned the proper etiquette and made friends of high social standing. She grew to be a striking young woman, tall and slender, with a porcelain complexion and jet black hair. Despite her intelligence, Marie lived in a fantasy world of ideal love, turning down one proposal of marriage by saying it was impossible for her to marry a “commoner.”

When Marie was twenty-four, one of her aunts decided it was time to marry her off and placed her name with the De Foy Matrimonial Agency in Paris, which specialized in pairing well-born men and women. She got a response. The man, Charles Joseph Pouch Lafarge, claimed to be a wealthy ironmaster with a huge estate, Le Glandier, in Corrèze in southwestern France. He provided drawings showing a beautiful château that looked out over a splendid landscape. Marie fantasized herself as the mistress of her own private realm.

When she met Lafarge, reality began to set in. He was a large, crude twenty-eight-year-old man with little education and no culture. What Marie did not know was that he was a bit of a fraud as well. He had misrepresented his wealth, hoping for a woman with a large dowry to invest in his iron business, and Marie’s dowry of 100,000 francs looked very good to him.

Marie tried to back out of the arrangement, but her aunt insisted. In August 1839, within two weeks of their first meeting, the two were married. Marie set out for Le Glandier with her new husband and her servant Clémentine. On the trip to the estate, Charles’s manners offended Marie. He ate noisily with his hands, ignoring napkins and licking his fingers. When she tried to engage him in conversation, he exclaimed, “For God’s sake, stop talking!” ¹⁷

As Marie reached the château, she experienced another shock. Le Glandier was a seedy, dilapidated wreck. Inside, conditions were even worse. Rats scampered over the floor, and the smell of decay and animal excrement attacked Marie’s refined nose. She was so horrified that she locked herself in her room with Clémentine and refused to see anyone. She sent her maid with a letter to Charles, begging him to let her leave, promising he could keep the dowry and her possessions and even agreeing to take the blame for the failure of the marriage. She also threatened to poison herself with arsenic if he would not release her — a threat that would later take on sinister significance.

Charles’s mother persuaded her son to make concessions. He agreed to allow Marie to renovate the estate and begin a round of social activities. Her piano was sent from home and she received a subscription to the Paris newspapers. Finally, her husband would not claim his “marital privileges.” ¹⁸ For a short time she was mollified. But she soon found out that there was no money to clean up the estate, and no opportunities for her to have a social life in this place. Marie began to plot another way to escape from her husband: murder.

She proceeded with caution and hid her embittered state. In letters to her aunts in Paris, she described a happy life. “All my new family are delightful and kind to me. I am admired. I am adored,” she wrote. ¹⁹

In December, learning that her husband was taking a trip to Paris, she persuaded him that they should both make out wills, naming each other as beneficiaries. He agreed, and Marie gave Charles part of her dowry for expenses and wrote letters of introduction to powerful friends who might invest in his business. But unknown to Marie, Charles was a cheat as well as a boor — he secretly made out another will leaving all his possessions to his mother.

Right after Charles set out on his journey, Marie ordered some arsenic by mail from a druggist named Eyssartier in a neighboring town. She claimed that she needed it to use against the rats that infested the château. Then Marie asked her mother-in-law to make some cakes to send Charles for his Christmas holiday in Paris. Marie personally wrapped the package, including a small portrait of herself with an affectionate letter.

When Charles received the present on December 18, he found a single large cake, instead of the six small ones that his mother had baked. Not suspecting anything, he had a piece of it. Within a short time he began vomiting and suffered from violent cramps. Servants found him writhing with pain on the floor of his hotel room. A doctor was called, but he could not stop the vomiting. The diagnosis was extreme dysentery. Charles slowly recovered but could not travel until January 3, when he telegraphed his family that he was coming home.

The day before Charles arrived, Marie ordered more arsenic from Eyssartier, telling him there were many rats. When the family physician, a Dr. Bardon, came to examine Charles, she asked him for arsenic as well. Though Marie personally tended to him, Charles did not improve and even seemed to get worse. As his condition declined, members of the Lafarge household became suspicious of Marie. Some claimed to have seen her put white powder in his food. When she was confronted with the accusation that she was trying to murder her husband, she called a groom named Alfred, who claimed that he had personally beaten all the arsenic Marie had ordered into a paste, which he had stuffed into the nooks and crannies of the château to kill the rats.

On January 13, a new doctor, named Lespinasse, was called to the estate to look at the now desperately ill patient. He was told that many in the household believed that M. Lafarge was being poisoned by his wife. After examining him, the doctor concurred. In his opinion, Charles Lafarge “is indeed being poisoned to death — all the symptoms show it. But it is too late to save him. He is a dying man.” ²⁰ The diagnosis was correct: Charles died the next day.

Marie’s mother-in-law called her to the bedside of the corpse and accused her of killing Charles. Marie remained calm, answering the accusations only with a stony stare before retiring to her room. A few hours later, Mme. Lafarge called the police to the château. The local magistrate, named Moran, arrived on the fifteenth and listened to the accusations. He took evidence that members of the household had collected — the remains of food that Charles had eaten, including eggnog, soup, and sugar water. So suspicious had the servants been that they had even preserved some of Charles’s vomit for examination.

The doctors who had attended Charles in his last days were called in to do an autopsy. They removed the stomach, tying the ends together so that its contents were saved for examination, before the rest of the body was buried. After testing, the doctors declared that they had found arsenic in the stomach of the deceased, as well as in all the foods that Charles had ingested. The only substance that did not show arsenic was the rat paste that Alfred the groom had turned over to them. Magistrate Moran thought that he had enough evidence to charge Marie with murder. On January 25, she was arrested and taken to the jail in the town of Brives.

The crime became a cause célèbre. Marie declared that she was being persecuted by anti-royalists because of her links to the royal family. Throughout the country, people took up sides for or against her. Some saw her as a saint, a political martyr because of her royal blood. Other people saw her as a liar who had killed her husband to avoid having sex with him. Not until the Dreyfus case of the 1890s would a trial so divide the country.

Marie received more than six thousand letters in prison, most of them showing support. Some of them, often heavily cologned, were proposals of marriage. Others promised support in her legal defense. Money poured in, as well as such lavish gifts as perfumes, wines, lingerie, and expensive foodstuffs. Marie clearly enjoyed her celebrity, fantasizing that she was the Marie Antoinette of her time. Writing her memoirs in prison, she portrayed herself as “the poor reviled one.” ²¹

Her trial began on September 3, 1840, in the town of Tulle in the Dordogne region. Gendarmes had to be stationed to keep back the crowds, though it was a hot day. All the inns in the vicinity were filled with journalists and curiosity seekers who had arrived from all over Europe. The prosecutor opened what he saw as a very strong case. He described Marie’s unhappiness with the marriage and read to the jury the letter she had written Charles on her arrival at Le Glandier, emphasizing her reference to arsenic. He linked her purchases of arsenic to Charles’s bouts of illness: Her first purchase came only a few days before she had sent her cake to Charles in Paris. Her second was one day before he returned home, where he steadily grew worse after eating food that she fed him. One of the most damning pieces of evidence seemed to be the chemical analysis of the so-called rat paste, which turned out to be bicarbonate of soda. The prosecutor drew the conclusion that Marie had substituted bicarbonate for the arsenic when she gave the material to the groom and used the real arsenic to poison her husband. When Marie was asked why the “arsenic” she had given to the groom was harmless, she cheerfully answered, “Now I understand why the rats continued coming. Bicarbonate would never stop them.” ²²

But Marie’s high-powered Paris lawyer, Maître Paillet, was ready to refute the prosecution. In Paris, he had shown Orfila copies of the autopsy and chemical reports, and Orfila picked holes in them. The local doctors in Brives were using outdated methods and were inept to boot. During one of their analyses, the test tube had exploded. Paillet grilled the doctors about their knowledge of the newest developments in toxicology, exposing them as woefully behind the times. He asked the doctors if they had ever heard of the Marsh apparatus, developed just four years earlier; they had not.

Paillet called his own experts — three noted chemists from Limoges. They were asked to use Marsh’s method of measuring the amount of arsenic in Charles’s stomach. The chemists reported the results of their tests on February 5, dealing a severe blow to the prosecution’s case. The conclusion was that “in the materials presented to us no trace of arsenic is contained.” ²³ The court record noted, “These final remarks produced an indescribable commotion in the court… Madame Lefarge, clasping her hands, raised her eyes to heaven.” ²⁴ Paillet “wept tears of triumph.” ²⁵Couriers rushed to the nearest telegraph in Bordeaux to spread the word throughout France. The news elated Marie’s supporters everywhere.

The prosecutor was not ready to give up. He pointed out that Paillet had referred to Orfila as France’s leading expert on poisons, but Orfila had not personally examined the evidence in the case. The counsel for the defense had often said that chemists could make errors. Did this not also apply to the chemists from Limoges? The prosecutor had learned that Orfila had stated that in cases of arsenic poisoning, arsenic is not always found in the stomach, but in other organs, such as the liver. Had the Limoges experts tested anything but the stomach? As it turned out, they had not. The prosecutor insisted that Orfila himself should be called on to testify. Perhaps this move was one of desperation, for he could not have known what Orfila would say.

The defense attorney had little choice but to assent. Orfila was asked to come to Tulle, and he agreed. Lafarge’s body was exhumed and samples of other organs were taken from it. (The stomach was found in the drawer of a court clerk, where it had decayed considerably.) Nonetheless, Orfila set up the Marsh apparatus and set to work under the eyes of several of the other experts who had testified. He continued through the night of September 13 and appeared the next morning before a hushed court to give his opinion. Orfila declared that there “is arsenic in the body of Lafarge.” ²⁶Anticipating objections, he said that the poison did not come from the reagents with which he tested the material, nor from the earth around the coffin, which he had also tested. He further testified that the arsenic he found was not the arsenic compound that was naturally found in the human body. Only the bones, the scientist explained, have minute amounts of arsenic. The presiding judge asked the key question: “Do you consider the amount of arsenic obtained by you to be sufficient to indicate murder by poisoning?” ²⁷

Orfila went further than that. He declared that considering the victim’s symptoms, there was no doubt he died from the administration of arsenic. The jury found Marie guilty on the toxicological evidence. She collapsed and had to be carried to her cell, where she sobbed for two days.

Unswayed by Marie’s noble lineage, the judge sentenced her to hard labor for life and public exposure in the pillory at Tulle. Marie’s appeal was rejected, but King Louis-Philippe reduced his cousin’s sentence to life imprisonment.

Sent to Montpelier Prison, Marie corresponded with Alexandre Dumas and wrote her memoirs, along with a tragedy, The Lost Woman. In 1852, after she contracted tuberculosis, Napoleon III released her from jail. She died six months later in a spa in the Pyrenees, without ever having confessed to the murder. Her memoirs merely added to the legend — which many still believed at her death — that she was a martyr.

The Lafarge case was a milestone in criminological history, establishing the standard for expert scientific testimony. Chemists would subsequently develop tests for other kinds of poisons, and trial attorneys for both sides would continue to call dueling experts, as they do to this day.

iii

During the Christmas season of 1869, human remains began turning up all over Paris. Body parts wrapped in packages appeared in different areas of the city — a human thighbone was discovered in the rue Jacob, and a thigh with flesh still attached, wrapped in a sweater, was pulled out of the Seine. These gruesome discoveries were taken to the Paris mortuary, where it was concluded that they came from the same person. But there was no clue to the identity of the victim of such a hideous crime.

On December 19, the proprietor of a riverside laundry near the Quai Valmy told the police that he had seen a short, stout man with a mustache taking pieces of meat from a large hamper and scattering them in the Seine. On being asked what he was doing, the man claimed that he was “baiting the river” so that he could catch fish on the following day. The laundryman recalled only that the man was short and wore a long coat and tall hat.

In January, the owner of Lampon’s Eating House, a small restaurant in the rue Princesse a few blocks south of the Seine, noticed a bad odor coming from his well. Customers started to complain that the water tasted foul. On investigation, the owner fished up a smelly package wrapped in cloth. When he cut it open, he was horrified to find the lower portion of a human leg.

He went to the local police to report his discovery and found a friend, Sergeant Ringué, who came to the restaurant to view the latest ghastly find. The discovery reminded Ringué of a man that he had stopped and questioned late on the evening of December 22. The man had been carrying a large hamper and a package that he said contained some hams. He told Ringué that he had just arrived from Nantes and was carrying his luggage to his room on the rue Princesse. Ringué had let the man go on his way but now regretted that he had not looked inside the package. He further recalled that the man was short and wore a tall hat.

The young policeman went to his superior, Gustave Macé, the police commissaire of the district. Then unknown, Macé was on a career path that would, ten years later, bring him to the top of the Sûreté. Now he was an eager young man, fascinated with his work and very ambitious. Macé went to the restaurant and discovered another parcel in the well, which he fished out with difficulty. Like the first, the package was wrapped in black calico, sewn shut. Within lay a second severed lower leg, encased in a drab cotton stocking on which was stitched in red thread the initial Bwith a small cross on each side of it. Macé noticed that the sewing was very fine, probably done by a professional.

The first pathologist to do a medical examination on the legs concluded that they were those of a woman and that the killer had not been very adept in the dismembering. He estimated that the legs had been in the well for about a month. The well was emptied, but no further body parts were found. Next, Macé, like Canler trying to trace Lacenaire, started the tedious work of going through a list of eighty-four females reported missing in the previous six months. Unfortunately, he found none who could be connected to the embroidered stocking.

Then Dr. Auguste Tardieu took a look at the evidence. A former student of Orfila’s, he was now the foremost forensic physician in France. After a thorough examination, he declared that Macé was wasting his time looking for a woman. “These remains,” he said, “are those of a man advanced in years.… The feet are larger than those of a woman. The dismemberment has been done skillfully by a cleaver or chopper. The cuts were made soon after death. There has been a considerable effusion of blood. I observe also that there is a clearly marked scar on one leg, only recently healed. But without the head it will not be easy to establish the identity, and the murderer appears to have taken good care to conceal that most important piece of evidence.” ²⁸

This information put Macé on the right track. He was now convinced that the other human parts recently discovered in Paris were part of the same victim whose legs were in the well at Lampon’s. He believed that the murderer must live near the rue Princesse; the man questioned by Ringué must have been frightened into dumping his incriminating burden into the well instead of taking it to the Seine, and he had to have been sufficiently familiar with the area to do so. The concierge of the building where Lampon’s was located, an old woman, told Macé that an outsider could get to the well only if he knew about a small button on the outer door that worked a string latch.

Macé was still looking for someone who was skilled at sewing. When he asked if any tailor had ever lived in the building, the concierge told him about a Mlle. Dard, a seamstress who had lived there but was now singing at café concerts. She had done piecework for a tailor who visited often. When Macé located Dard, a pretty young woman, she gave him the name of her tailor friend, Pierre Voirbo. He used to live nearby in the rue Mazarine, but very recently he had married and moved away. Her description of him matched that given by Sergeant Ringué and the witness who had seen someone scattering meat into the Seine. Dard suggested that Mme. Bodasse, the aunt of one of Voirbo’s friends, might know where Voirbo was.

Inspector Macé noted the matching initial B and had Mme. Bodasse brought for questioning. She said she had last seen Voirbo when he had gone to a concert with her nephew, Désiré Bodasse, who lived in the rue Dauphine. That was on December 13, a month earlier, and she hadn’t seen Désiré since, but that did not worry her, for he was eccentric and sometimes disappeared for periods of time. Macé asked her to describe Voirbo. “He was short,” she said, “and generally wore a long overcoat and a tall hat.” ²⁹

On a hunch, Macé took Mme. Bodasse to the morgue to show her the stocking with the initial B. Shocked, she said it had belonged to her nephew. She herself had sewn the B and the two crosses on the stocking. She identified her nephew’s leg by a scar which had come from a fall on the jagged edge of a bottle. Macé was now sure he knew the name of the victim, and he had a good idea who his killer was.

Macé went to Bodasse’s apartment at 50, rue Dauphine. No one answered his knock, but the concierge claimed that he had seen light in the room each night. Indeed, after gaining entrance to the rooms, Macé found a candle still flickering, making him think that someone had tried to make it seem as though Bodasse was still living there. There was another notable absence: Mme. Bodasse had told Macé that her nephew had a strongbox containing valuables hidden in a secret compartment of his old bureau. It was gone. Further search turned up a slip of paper hidden in the case of a silver watch; it contained a list of numbers of Italian securities. These could easily be negotiated, for they were payable to the bearer.

Macé assigned two policemen to keep watch over Bodasse’s rooms while he proceeded to Voirbo’s old apartment on the rue Mazarine. The concierge of the building confirmed that Voirbo and Bodasse were very good friends, though she did think it strange that Bodasse had not been at Voirbo’s wedding. She recalled that the two men had argued about Bodasse’s stinginess. Voirbo had been angry when his friend had refused to lend him ten thousand francs for the wedding. Most interesting of all was the story told by Voirbo’s former maid. When she had arrived to clean his apartment on the seventeenth of December, she found that it had already been scrubbed down — some of the floor tiles were still wet. She was surprised, for Voirbo had not been very tidy and never cleaned his own room. When she asked him why he had done so this time, he claimed that he had spilled some kerosene on the floor accidentally. Even more incriminating was the fact that when he was about to move to a new place, he paid his remaining rent with an Italian stock certificate. Macé was able to determine that it bore one of the serial numbers from the list found in Bodasse’s watchcase.

The police on duty at Bodasse’s apartment reported that nothing unusual had happened except that Voirbo had dropped by to see his friend. It turned out that Voirbo was a police spy who pretended to be an anarchist and attended meetings of radicals to report on their activities. The policemen, not knowing that he was in fact a suspect in the murder, accepted him as one of their own and told him what they were doing in Bodasse’s place.

Annoyed that Voirbo must now know that he was a suspect, Macé decided to call him in and confront him. He saw before him a short, stout man with a high hat and long coat. Voirbo was very calm and confident and answered questions precisely. He explained that he had been worried about his old friend and that as a member of the secret political police, he had used his contacts to investigate his disappearance. His chief suspect, he told Macé, was a butcher named Rifer. Rifer was a gambler and heavy drinker who hung out in low-class dives. Macé was not deceived, but he agreed that Voirbo should keep up his surveillance of Rifer. In fact, Voirbo was pushing the hapless Rifer to heavier drinking; the butcher soon suffered a bout of delirium tremens and was taken to an asylum, where he died the same night.

As soon as Voirbo learned of the butcher’s death, he hurried to Macé to report. He was astonished when Macé placed him under arrest. A search of Voirbo’s pockets revealed that Macé was just in time. Voirbo had a false passport and a ticket for steamship passage to the United States on the following day. He was to have left for the port of Le Havre that very afternoon.

Taken before the juge d’instruction, Voirbo was defiant. He refused to be photographed, making faces so that capturing an image was difficult. Macé knew that he was dealing with a clever man and went looking for more proof. He visited Voirbo’s young wife, Adélia, who had brought a dowry of fifteen thousand francs to her marriage. Pale and delicate, she struck Macé as naive. Before meeting Voirbo, she had planned to enter a convent and become a nun. Expressing shock that her husband had been arrested, she told Macé that the dowry and some Italian stocks belonging to Voirbo were kept in a strongbox. But when Macé asked her to open it, she discovered that it was empty. Searching the premises, the detective found in Voirbo’s workshop items that seemed strange for a tailor: huge sharpened shears, heavy flatirons, a metal mallet, and a large butcher’s cleaver. There was also an old iron spoon that had been used for melting lead. Finally, Macé found some cord very much like that which had been used to tie the bundles found in Lampon’s well.

Voirbo’s cellar yielded more. The detective noticed that the bung on one of the two casks of wine was higher than on the other. He removed it and discovered a string attached. He drew up from the barrel a tin cylinder. When he broke it open, he found the Italian securities for which Bodasse had been killed. There was only one missing — the one Voirbo had used to make his final rent payment on his former room.

Macé had a fair idea of where and how Bodasse had been murdered; now he set out to re-create the scene of the crime to prove his hunch. Scouring the crime scene as a source of clues was one of Vidocq’s ideas. Later, Bertillon would take extensive photographs of crime scenes and measure them as carefully as he measured suspects’ faces. But Macé’s experiment produced its own spectacular result, one that made such examinations a regular part of the investigation of violent crimes. Collecting Voirbo and several officers from the station, he took them to Voirbo’s former room in the rue Mazarine. With the help of the concierge, Macé arranged it exactly as it had been when Voirbo lived there. Given the small space, he realized that Voirbo would have had to dismember the body on the table in the middle of the room. He noticed that the tiled floor had a sharp slope that ended under the bed.

With a theatrical flourish, Macé picked up a carafe of water. “I notice a slope in the floor. Now, if a body had been cut up on a table here in the center of the room, the effusion of blood would have been great, and the fluid must have followed this slope. Any other fluid thrown down here must follow the same direction. I will empty this jug on the floor and see what happens!” ³⁰ With that, he poured out the water on the tiles. Everyone present watched it gather in a pool beneath the bed. Voirbo remained tight-lipped as Macé ordered that the tiles there be removed. As each tile came up, dried bloodstains could clearly be seen on the sides and underneath.

Realizing that the game was up, Voirbo broke down and confessed. He had needed money to show his fiancée in order to prove that he would be an equal partner in the marriage. Bodasse was a miser who hoarded his money, and he refused to lend it to Voirbo. On December 13, 1868, Voirbo had lured Bodasse to his apartment, battered him unconscious with a flatiron, and then slit his throat. Afterward, dressed only in his underwear, Voirbo had chopped up the body. Later he wrapped it and threw pieces into the Seine from the Pont de la Concorde. Though he thought that he had cleaned up the mess thoroughly, he had failed to notice the recess beneath the bed. After sewing the legs in calico bags, he had indeed dropped them in the well on rue Princesse. To make sure the head would sink in the water, he had melted some lead and poured it into the mouth. Afterward, he had moved to the rue Lamartine and in January 1869 had married Adélia.

Ultimately, Voirbo cheated the guillotine: while he was in jail awaiting trial, he cut his throat with a razor that had been hidden in a loaf of bread. No one knew where he got it. Perhaps some of his friends in the secret police had given it to him as a hint.

It was the detective, not the criminal, who emerged as a celebrity from this case. Macé wrote an autobiography in which he told how he walked alone at night in the most dangerous parts of the city, satisfying his “desire to see all and know all.” ³¹ Macé even established his own musée criminal,or museum of criminality, where he displayed artifacts from actual crimes, including murder weapons.

He first reached fame with his brilliant solution to the Voirbo case and indeed devoted an entire book, Mon premier crime, to it, continuing in the tradition established by Vidocq. Macé’s writing shows the clear influence of Edgar Allan Poe, indicating that the Paris police were well aware of detective fiction. Macé makes Voirbo sound particularly like one of Poe’s characters in describing what happened after he hit Bodasse with a flatiron:

Not a sound escaped him. His head sank on to the table, his arms hung down inert. I was astonished, and satisfied with my strength and skill.

Then, blowing out the light, I opened the window and pulled the shutters to. In silence and darkness I listened to discover if he stirred. But I heard nothing, except his blood which fell on the floor, drop by drop! This monotonous drop, drop, drop, made my flesh creep. Still I kept on listening, listening. All of a sudden I heard a deep sigh, and something like a creaking of the chair. Désiré was moving, he was not dead! Suppose he were to cry out. This thought restored all my presence of mind to me. Lighting a small lamp, I saw the body had moved sideways, he was then still living. He was certainly no longer in a condition to make himself heard, to call for help, but his death-agony might be spun out and I did not want to see him suffer a long while. I therefore took a razor, approached him from behind and placed my hand under the chin of my ex-friend. Yielding to my pressure, the head rose up and then fell backwards. The lamp was shining full on his blood-smeared face. His round eyes were not yet lifeless — for a moment they fastened on the blade of the razor I was holding above him, and suddenly assumed such an expression of terror, that my heart beat violently. It was necessary to put an end to it. The same way a barber does when about to shave a customer, I pressed the blade just below the Adam’s apple, where the beard commences, and with a vigorous sweep I drew the blade from left to right. It entirely disappeared in the flesh, the head fell lifeless on the back of the chair. ³²

iv

L’Affaire Gouffé started as a missing persons case. On Saturday, July 27, 1889, a man reported that his brother-in-law, Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé, a Parisian court bailiff, had disappeared. Gouffé, a middle-aged widower with three daughters, had last been seen on the twenty-sixth. The inspector on duty did not think the matter was terribly serious. Gouffé was a known philanderer and might just have been on some amorous adventure. But when he was still missing on the thirtieth, the case was referred to Marie-François Goron, the chief of the Sûreté.

Goron was a small, fair, asthmatic Breton with a waxed mustache and pince-nez. He could be brusque in manner, but he was passionate about hunting criminals. Like Vidocq, he commanded a troop of “beaters” who posed as ex-convicts while roaming the dens of the Paris underworld. Goron had also developed new techniques for questioning criminals. He subjected suspects to alternating light and dark cells, and rotated bread and water with sumptuous meals. (His interrogation rooms were called “Monsieur Goron’s cookshop.” ³³ ) He went so far as to promise suspects women if they talked. These techniques proved successful, and Goron took full credit, for he was a genius at garnering publicity; newspapers frequently ran flattering stories about him.

Goron would later write memoirs that he described as “social photographs that, without retouching, by their unadorned simplicity and horror, conveyed the truth.” ³⁴ Contrary to his assertion, his accounts came close to crossing the line of voyeurism, confusing the literary and popular with the real. Perhaps that was not too surprising, given his claim that his memoirs were an attempt to “raise the roofs of the houses of the capital” in order to see the “human perversity” found there. ³⁵

Taking over the case of the missing bailiff, Goron visited Gouffé’s office on the rue Montmartre. He discovered burned matches in front of the safe, which had not been broken into. A sum of fourteen thousand francs was found hidden behind some papers. The hall porter told Goron that a man had gone upstairs on the twenty-sixth, the night of Gouffé’s disappearance. Though the man opened the door with a key and stayed there for a while, he was a stranger whom the porter had never seen.

Looking into the missing man’s background, Goron found that he had a prodigious sex life — he visited many women regularly and was known to have a taste for kinky sex. Thus the suspect list included husbands who might have had a motive for murdering him. Paris newspapers regaled readers with stories of Gouffé’s escapades.

The bailiff’s finances were in order, so it seemed unlikely he had run away — particularly leaving fourteen thousand francs behind. Suicide also seemed unlikely in a person with such a lust for life. Goron sent descriptions of Gouffé to all the police stations in France in the hope that someone had seen him. He was a slim man, five feet nine inches tall, with chestnut hair and a carefully cropped beard. Goron also asked his assistants to look through out-of-town newspapers for stories about missing bodies. His curiosity was aroused when he read that on August 13, a road mender in Millery, a small town near Lyons, had followed a bad smell to a canvas sack hidden in some bushes. He almost fainted from the stench when he opened it and found the body of a dark-bearded man. Goron sent a query to Lyons but was told that the dead man’s physical characteristics were different from Gouffé’s. The Lyons police made it clear that they did not want any help from the capital.

On August 14, the Lyons coroner, Dr. Paul Bernard, conducted an autopsy. The advanced stage of decomposition of the body made it difficult to study, but Bernard came to the conclusion that the victim had died from strangulation. He estimated that the age of the man had been between thirty-five and forty and that his hair and beard were black.

A few days later, a traveler’s trunk was found on the banks of the river. The odor inside marked it as the container in which the body had been transported. Two labels indicated that the trunk had been shipped from Paris to Lyons-Perrache on July 27, with the year indistinct but thought to be 1888.

Goron, not trusting Dr. Bernard’s findings, sent Gouffé’s brother-in-law, named Landry, to Lyons with a Sûreté officer to take a look at the corpse. The Lyons morgue was on a barge anchored in the Rhône River, and a hideous stench arose from it. Landry, taken aboard, held a handkerchief to his nose and took only a quick glance. He said that the corpse was not Gouffé, for it had black hair, much darker than his brother-in-law’s had been.

Goron was not to be deterred. He continued his investigation in Paris. In September an informer told him that on July 25, Gouffé had been seen with a lowlife named Michel Eyraud and Eyraud’s mistress, Gabrielle Bompard. The couple had vanished from Paris on July 27, the same day the bailiff had disappeared. Goron assigned men to look for the pair, but without success.

He further investigated the labels that were on the trunk in Lyons, checking the baggage shipment registry for July 27 in both 1888 and 1889. In the latter year, a trunk weighing 105 kilograms had left Paris, bound for Lyons. Goron was certain that the Millery corpse had been transported from Paris in the trunk, but he still had to establish that it was Gouffé.

Goron himself arrived at Lyons and talked to Dr. Bernard, the local coroner, who showed him a strand of the dead man’s hair. It was indeed black, but after Goron dipped it in distilled water and washed away the blood and grime, it came out chestnut. Goron demanded that the corpse be exhumed from the cemetery and sent to Jean Alexandre Eugène Lacassagne, professor of forensic medicine at the University of Lyons.

When Lacassagne was called in on this case, he was forty-six years old and had already made several contributions to the field of forensic medicine. He was in fact to become known as the “father of forensic science.” As a young man he had served as an army physician in North Africa, which gave him a chance to study bullet wounds. He also noted the importance of tattoos in identifying bodies.

Lacassagne combined the scientific skills of a physician with the curiosity of a policeman. He was to use both throughout his career. In 1880 he founded the Department of Forensic Science at Lyons University, where he liked to remind his students, “One must know how to doubt.” ³⁶

Doubt was distinct from ignorance. Lacassagne had started his career when morgues and sometimes even cemeteries had bell-pulls for supposedly dead people to yank in case they were still alive and had only been in a coma when death was pronounced. The normal test for life was to place a mirror or feather in front of the mouth of the body, to see if the mirror would steam or the feather move, but these methods were by no means infallible.

Lacassagne studied the significance of blotches on the body that appeared after death, deducing that blood collects at the lowest points of the body after circulation stops. If the body was moved within a certain time after death, the blood was still motile and the blotches could move, but after about twenty hours, the discoloration was permanent. He also noted that the body did not always cool at a given rate; earlier observers had generalized that the body temperature dropped one degree centigrade per hour during the first hours after death, but Lacassagne found that there were variations depending on the temperature of the environment. He also studied the onset and duration of rigor mortis, the stiffening and then relaxation of the body after life ceased. Such information was helpful in ascertaining the time of death.

Lacassagne was also the first forensic scientist to show that a bullet could be matched to a particular gun. A few months before being called in on the Gouffé case, he had studied under a microscope a bullet that had been removed from the body of a murder victim named Echallier. Lacassagne noticed that the bullet had seven longitudinal lines, or striae, and theorized that they were the result of rifling — the grooves that were made inside gun barrels to cause the bullet to spin and thus move in a more accurate path. In the Echallier case, when the suspect’s gun was fired, it produced the same seven lines as were found on the test bullet. On that basis the suspect was convicted of murder. The science of ballistics was born.

Nevertheless, when the exhumed body found at Millery was delivered to Lacassagne’s laboratory at Lyons University, he could not have been optimistic. Not only was it in a state of advanced decay, but as he told his students, “A bungled autopsy cannot be revised.” ³⁷ Though Dr. Bernard had been a student of Lacassagne’s, he certainly had botched his attempt. Lacassagne decided to concentrate his examination on the bones and the hair. The work was gruesome, for the pathologist did not have the advantages of refrigeration or latex gloves. He plunged his hands into the putrid, maggoty flesh, cutting and scraping it away until the bones were exposed. The skeleton told him a lot. He found a deformation on the right knee that would have caused the man to walk with a limp. He discovered that the victim’s right ankle had been injured as well. Family members confirmed that Gouffé had walked with a limp owing to a childhood accident.

Lacassagne agreed with the earlier pathologist’s conclusion that the cause of death had been strangulation, because there was clear damage to the thyroid cartilage. He thought, however, that it might have been manual strangulation, rather than strangulation by ligature or rope. He also disagreed with Dr. Bernard’s estimate of the victim’s age. Bernard had believed that the man was no older than forty, but Lacassagne put his age closer to fifty, which matched the forty-nine-year-old Gouffé. Lacassagne had based his estimate on the corpse’s teeth. Dental forensics were in as primitive a state as dentistry, and Lacassagne’s achievement here was another breakthrough: he judged the wear of the dentin in the teeth, the amount of tartar at the roots, and the thinness of the roots themselves to produce his estimate.

Lacassagne clinched the identification with a hair from one of Gouffé’s hairbrushes. He compared it under the microscope with a hair from the corpse, checking for hair-dye residue, which came up negative. Then he measured the thickness of the hairs and found them identical. Certain in his conclusion, Lacassagne dramatically addressed Inspector Goron: “I present you with Monsieur Gouffé!” ³⁸

“The Corpse Has Been Identified,” trumpeted the Paris newspaper L’Intransigeant on its front page the following day, November 22. The newspaper ran two illustrations side by side — one showing the decomposed head of the corpse and the other the face of Gouffé in life. “It Is He,” the headline crowed. Other newspapers treated their readers to the gory details and stressed the glory of French forensic medicine. Le Petit Journal paid tribute to Dr. Lacassagne’s skills, concluding, “The solving of the mystery of Millery demonstrates that French medicine can show criminology the way to great progress in the future. Identification of the Millery corpse is a milestone in history.” ³⁹

Goron was content for now to let the spotlight shine on someone else and to take up the next stage in the case: finding who killed Gouffé. The brother-in-law was now shown police photos of several known criminals. Goron was pleased when he identified pictures of Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard as the pair previously seen with Gouffé. On his return to Paris, Goron had found yet another witness who linked the lovers to the murdered man. But Eyraud and Bompard seemed to have dropped out of sight.

Goron was creative in his search. He hired a carpenter to make an exact copy of the rotten trunk that had been used to take the body to Lyons. Put on display at the Paris morgue, the trunk attracted some thirty-five thousand curious viewers in the first three days. Photographs of it were sent around the world. The Gouffé family offered a reward for information, and letters poured in from all over France. Soon Goron heard from a man in London who claimed that a Frenchman and his daughter, later identified as Eyraud and Bompard, had lived in his lodgings and before departing had bought a trunk like the one shown in the newspapers.

A police spy in Paris gave Goron more important details. Michel Eyraud was an army deserter and a small-time crook and, though married, had taken up with a prostitute, Gabrielle Bompard. The two of them operated the traditional badger scheme: Bompard would take a client to her apartment, and after a suitable amount of time, Eyraud would burst in, pretending to be her husband. He would threaten the john, who was usually ready to pay to get out of the situation.

The con worked well, but Eyraud was a greedy man. One of Bompard’s clients was Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé, who had foolishly let her know that he kept large sums of money in his office. Eyraud, Goron’s spy reported, had decided to kill Gouffé and take the money.

Despite massive newspaper coverage and the fact that photos of the pair were sent to police throughout Europe and North America, they managed to keep one step ahead of the law. They reached San Francisco, where Bompard met another man who fell for her charms. She ran off with the American after telling him that Eyraud planned to kill her. Jealous, Eyraud pursued the pair, tracking them from city to city.

It was not until January 1890 that Goron firmly connected with the culprits — not through detective skills, but by sheer luck. A resentful Eyraud sent him a letter, protesting his innocence and putting all the blame on “that serpent Gabrielle,” whom he accused of the murder. “The great trouble with her,” he wrote, “is that she is such a liar and also has a dozen lovers after her.” ⁴⁰

Even more astonishingly, a few days later, Gabrielle Bompard herself appeared in Goron’s office. Small, delicate, and well-dressed, she was accompanied by her new lover, who believed that she had been victimized by Eyraud. She told a racy story of greed, sex, and murder. Gouffé had been killed during an assignation at a room on the rue Tronson du Coudray south of the boulevard Haussmann. Bompard admitted that she had lured him there, but claimed that she had not been directly involved in the murder and did not know that Eyraud planned to kill the bailiff. Nevertheless, she was placed under arrest.

After Bertillon took her facial and body measurements for identification purposes, Bompard was subjected to “Monsieur Goron’s cookshop” treatment — being kept hungry and questioned day and night. Female police spies were placed in her cell to win her confidence. Eventually, she was taken to the crime scene, where the concierge immediately recognized her, causing Bompard to confess.

Bompard explained that she had brought Gouffé to her room on July 26, 1889. While she was getting him ready for a lovemaking session, she playfully tied the cord of her dressing gown around his neck. Eyraud, hiding behind a curtain, sprang into action. Using a series of pulleys he had set up earlier, he yanked the hapless victim into the air, but when the cord broke, Eyraud finished him off, strangling Gouffé with his hands.

Eyraud searched the victim’s pockets for the key to his office and stuffed the dead body into the trunk. He then coolly returned home to his wife, leaving Bompard to spend the night with the corpse. Goron, curious, asked her what the experience had been like. Her response was chilling. “You’d never guess what a funny idea came into my head! You see it was not very pleasant for me being thus tête-à-tête with a corpse, I couldn’t sleep. So I thought what fun it would be to go into the street and pick up some respectable gentleman from the provinces. I’d bring him up to the room, and just as he was beginning to enjoy himself say, ‘Would you like to see a bailiff?’ open the trunk suddenly and, before he could recover from his horror, run out into the street and fetch the police. Just think what a fool the respectable gentleman would have looked when the officers came!” ⁴¹

The next morning, Eyraud had gone off to the bailiff’s office, which he searched frantically. Even though the police had no trouble finding the money later, Eyraud was unsuccessful. When he heard the footsteps of a guard in the hall, he fled through a window. He returned to Bompard’s room, where the two made passionate love on the floor next to the trunk that held the corpse. In confessing to this, Bompard insisted that Eyraud had forced her to do it.

The next day the pair rented a carriage and set off for Millery, where they dumped the body in the woods and left the trunk on the banks of the Rhône River. From there they fled to Marseilles and then to England, where they took a ship to New York.

Bompard’s spectacular confession set off a feeding frenzy in the Paris press. Parisians rushed to the rue Tronson du Coudray, where the landlady charged admission to view the murder scene. When Bompard was taken back to Lyons to reenact the dumping of the body, the crowds trying to watch were so large that cavalry troops had to be called to keep order. Some people even threw flowers at the murderer, whose celebrity overcame her deeds.

Goron still had to find her accomplice. Two French detectives were sent to North America, where they followed Eyraud’s trail from New York to San Francisco and into Canada. But Eyraud managed to elude them. Meanwhile, he sent a letter to the newspaper L’Intransigeant, placing all the blame for the murder on Gabrielle and an unknown man.

Eyraud’s flight from justice could not last forever: his photograph was in every police station in North America, and on May 20, 1890, Cuban police arrested him while he was leaving a brothel. French detectives arrived to take him back to Paris. When their ship landed at Saint-Nazaire on June 30, a huge mob was waiting. Someone in the crowd had a parrot that had been trained to call the name Eyraud over and over. Enterprising reporters clung to the sides of the train taking the killer to Paris.

The trial opened in the Paris Cour d’Assises on December 16, 1890, and it was everything the journalists could have hoped for. Each of the accused pointed a finger at the other. Few codefendants had shown such hatred and acrimony against each other, and the demand for seats in the courtroom was so great that the chief judge personally distributed the tickets of admission to friends and influential people.

Gabrielle Bompard portrayed herself as a victim, claiming that Eyraud threatened her life if she did not cooperate with him. She had a brilliant defense lawyer, Henri Robert, who caused a stir when he claimed that his client had been raped as a child while under hypnosis and as a result was very sensitive to hypnotic suggestion. Eyraud, he claimed, had made her his slave by hypnotizing her. The burgeoning science of neurology grappled with the question of whether hypnosis was powerful enough to compel someone to commit a crime, but Robert made this a main point of Bompard’s defense.

The prosecution countered with a Dr. Brouardel, a respected medical jurist, who said that there were no known cases of crimes committed by a perpetrator under the influence of hypnosis. Three doctors appointed by the examining magistrate came to the conclusion that though Bompard might be susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, her main problem was that she was morally deficient. Robert asked that his client be put under hypnosis on the witness stand to give the truest possible account of the crime. It would have been a dramatic scene, but the judges turned down the request, since there was no precedent for it.

The outcome of the trial was never in doubt, for the evidence against the defendants was overwhelming: only the severity of the sentence was open to question. At the end of five days, the jury found both Bompard and Eyraud guilty. French courts had traditionally been lenient toward female criminals, especially attractive ones. As a result, Bompard received a twenty-year sentence at hard labor. Released early after having served only thirteen years, she published her memoirs, which sold quite well. Despite her criminal past, she retained her celebrity status and was often seen at fashionable restaurants. Alberto Santos-Dumont, the pioneer Brazilian aviator, escorted her regularly.

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?” ⁴² 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.” ⁴³

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.” ⁴⁸

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!” ⁴⁹ 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. ⁵¹

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.

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.” ⁵²

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. ⁵⁴

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. ⁵⁶

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. ⁵⁷

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.