Joseph Vacher confessed in October 1897 to eleven killings committed over a little more than three years across the countryside of southeastern and central France. Most of the dead were young shepherds and farm workers, boys and girls who were alone in the fields when he came upon them; many of the shepherds were 13 or 14, according to Lyon Capitale. He was a former army sergeant who had shot a young woman in 1893, been sent to two asylums, and been released as cured on April 1, 1894. The first killing he admitted came weeks later.
He was caught by chance in August 1897, after a man came to his wife's aid in a wood in the Ardèche, and he was identified only because an investigating magistrate in the Ain, Émile Fourquet, had already pieced together a description of the man he was looking for. Vacher was tried for one killing only, the murder of 16-year-old Victor Portalier at Bénonces. The real issue at his trial was whether he was insane. A panel of experts led by Alexandre Lacassagne, the professor of legal medicine at Lyon, found that he was responsible for his acts. The jury convicted him, and he was guillotined at Bourg-en-Bresse on December 31, 1898. The historian Marc Renneville has described the case as a turning point in the French history of criminal responsibility.
Vacher was born on November 16, 1869, at Beaufort, in the Isère, near Beaurepaire, according to the authority record of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The librarian and journalist Gérard Corneloup, writing in 2003 in Gryphe, the review of the municipal library of Lyon, says he was the 14th child of his father's second marriage in a family of 16 children. A twin brother died as a baby when bread was placed on the cradle the two boys shared; Corneloup writes that the brother was probably named Eugène. A study of a Breton ballad about the case, published by the song archive Kan.bzh, describes his mother as a mystic given to hallucinations.
He left primary school able to read, write and count, Corneloup says. His mother died when he was 13, and he went to join a half-sister at Saint-Genis-Laval, near Lyon. Fourquet's own account, published in 1931, records that as a teenager he also worked as a farm servant for a man named Déclérieux.
At Saint-Genis-Laval he spent time with the Marist Brothers, the teaching order. Corneloup says he left after a scandal over relations with other pupils; the Kan.bzh study says he entered at 16, in 1885, stayed two years and was expelled for sexual misconduct. Lyon Capitale, the Lyon news magazine, says only that he did odd jobs for the Brothers from the age of 14. In the letter in which he later confessed, Vacher himself referred to the brothers he had left.
As a young man he worked at a brewery in Grenoble, where he caught a genital infection that was later treated at the Antiquaille hospital in Lyon, Corneloup writes. He drifted along the roads between Geneva and Lyon, reportedly covering up to 60 kilometers in a day, took an interest in anarchist ideas, and lost a job at a paper maker after threatening a colleague. In his letter to Fourquet he said he had been working in Lyon in 1890 for a firm called Piquet frères.
He also told investigators a story that he would repeat for the rest of his life. When he was about seven or eight, he said, a rabid dog bit him, and the remedies he was given poisoned his blood. He blamed the bite, and those remedies, for what he called his rages. He would later add complaints about mistreatment by the religious brothers, in the army and in the asylum, according to a 2023 study of the case by the legal scholars Julie Allard, Vincent Lefebve and Julien Pieret of the Université libre de Bruxelles.
Vacher was called up to the 60th Infantry Regiment at Besançon. The Kan.bzh study dates his enlistment to 1890; Corneloup gives 1892. He rose to sergeant, Lyon Capitale says, despite reservations among his superiors; the Kan.bzh study says he was at one point refused promotion as unfit to command because of unexplained outbursts of violence.
At Besançon he became attached to a young woman, Louise Barrand (the name is also spelled Barrant and Barant). When she refused to marry him and turned to another soldier, he fired at her three times and then turned the gun on himself, according to the Kan.bzh study. Lyon Capitale says he shot himself twice in the head. Both of them survived. A bullet stayed lodged in the bone behind his ear for the rest of his life, causing a chronic infection that kept the ear discharging, and the right side of his face was left partly paralyzed in a fixed grimace, with a bloodshot eye. Those injuries would later help witnesses describe him.
The shooting took place in 1893. Corneloup writes that he was acquitted of attempted murder and that the army discharged him on mental-health grounds, though with a certificate of good conduct; the Kan.bzh study dates the discharge to July 1893.
He was confined first at the asylum of Saint-Ylie at Dole, in the Jura, in 1893, according to the Kan.bzh study. Corneloup says he spent about six months there and tried several times to escape, and then about three months at the asylum of Saint-Robert near Grenoble. Lyon Capitale says he escaped from the first asylum soon after arriving. At Saint-Robert a doctor named Dufour declared him cured, and he walked out on April 1, 1894, Corneloup writes. A review of Douglas Starr's 2010 history of the case notes that one newspaper later called his release a dangerous mistake, and that the doctors had come to believe his violence had been a crime of passion, not a settled danger.
Vacher's own words tie his first killing closely to that release. Asked about the death at Beaurepaire, he told Fourquet that it had happened "a month after I left the asylum of Saint-Robert."
From the spring of 1894 Vacher lived as a chemineau, a tramp who walked from farm to farm and village to village, begging and taking day work. He did not stay anywhere long. A Hamburg newspaper that reported on his confession in October 1897 described him as thin, short and sickly-looking, with a sparse beard and hair. It said he chose young and weak victims, cleaned himself and his knife afterward, and hid bloodstained clothing in hedges and ditches.
The killings he later admitted ran from the Isère to the Var, Burgundy, Savoie, the Ain, the Ardèche, the Drôme, the Allier, the Haute-Loire and the Rhône. Each was investigated, if at all, by a different local magistrate, and nobody connected them. Little was reported about most of the people he killed beyond their names, ages, places and the fact that most of them were working alone, often watching flocks.
Eugénie Delhomme was 21 and was killed at Beaurepaire, in the Isère, close to where Vacher had been born. Her body was found on May 19, 1894, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, which said she had been strangled and stabbed. Corneloup gives the same date for her death. Lyon Capitale spells her name Delomme, and the Kan.bzh study, following the ballad, spells it Delorme and dates the crime to May 11. In an extract of Fourquet's 1931 book she appears as an unnamed young woman of about 19 at Beaurepaire in May 1894, and Vacher himself raised this killing with the magistrate when Fourquet put a different, older case to him.
Louise Marcel was 14, according to Fourquet's list of the confessed crimes, and was killed at Vidauban, in the Var, on November 20, 1894. The distance from Beaurepaire, hundreds of kilometers to the south, shows how widely Vacher traveled on foot in his first months out of the asylum.
Augustine Mortureux was 17. She was killed in the Bois du Chêne at Étaules, near Dijon, on May 12, 1895, Fourquet records. Her death would later prove to be the link that brought her case into Fourquet's file, through a circular sent out by the prosecutor at Dijon.
Before that, her death caused suffering for an innocent man. Public opinion settled on a prosperous local farmer named Grenier, whom Corneloup names as Eugène Grenier. According to a Hamburg newspaper of October 1897, he was arrested and then released for lack of evidence, but the girl's father threatened publicly to kill him, and he had to leave his farm and move to another department. Corneloup says Grenier was harassed by crowds and that local newspapers fed the campaign against him. The Kan.bzh study says he was held for a few days, partly to protect him from mob violence, before he was cleared. The Hamburg paper reported that Vacher's confession had at last freed him from suspicion.
On August 24, 1895, an elderly widow named Morand was killed at Saint-Ours, in Savoie, according to Fourquet's list. She was the only older adult among the victims Vacher confessed to; an account of the trial by Boston University, drawing on Starr's research, describes his admitted victims as four boys, six girls and one adult woman.
Victor Portalier was 16 and worked as a shepherd for his employers at the hamlet of Onglaz, in the commune of Bénonces, in the Ain. Fourquet records his death on August 31, 1895; Corneloup gives September 2, 1895.
Fourquet's account, drawn from the case file, sets out what happened that day. At about 3 p.m. another young shepherd found bloodstains in a meadow near the woods and called the other herders and the garde champêtre, the rural policeman. They followed a trail of blood to some juniper bushes, where Victor's body lay. Over the previous three days, August 29 to 31, a tramp had been going round the houses of the area; one household had given him soup that morning, and he had been seen on a path near the spot about two hours before the body was found. A search by some 150 armed men found nothing. With no suspect, the case was closed with a non-lieu, a formal finding that there was no case to pursue.
The witnesses' memory of the tramp at Bénonces would later decide the case. Portalier's killing became the only one for which Vacher was ever tried.
Pierre Massot-Pellet, a shepherd boy of 14, was killed at Saint-Étienne-de-Boulogne, in the Ardèche, on September 29, 1895, according to Fourquet's list. The Hamburg newspaper spelled his name Massat.
Here too a neighbor was blamed. The Hamburg paper reported that local people accused a farmer it named as Bonnier; the Kan.bzh study names him Bannier. The examining magistrate found him plainly innocent, but his neighbors went on persecuting him and his family, the paper said: they put up a stake by his door with a slaughtered sheep on it, cut open in the way the boy had been, and threatened to tear him apart and destroy his house. After Vacher confessed, those neighbors apologized and asked his forgiveness. In the foreword to his 1931 book, Fourquet named Bannier and Grenier, together with a man named Roux, as innocent people who had become victims of popular fury.
Fourquet's list of confessed crimes includes a killing at Truinas, in the Drôme, and Corneloup lists Truinas among the places where the killings occurred. The victim's name and the details of the killing were not reported.
In March 1896, at Noyen-sur-Sarthe, Vacher attacked a girl who survived. He later confessed to it as an attempted crime, and it appears in his confessions alongside the killings; the Kan.bzh study notes that it was not kept among the charges in the case file.
Marie Moussier, also recorded as Lorut, was 19 and was killed at Busset, in the Allier, on September 10, according to Fourquet's list. Rosine Rodier, a shepherd girl of 14, was killed at Varennes-Saint-Honorat, in the Haute-Loire, on October 1. Fourquet's book gives conflicting years for these two deaths in different passages; it places the Varennes killing in 1896.
The remains of Claudius Beaupied were found on October 25, 1897, at the bottom of a well at Tassin-la-Demi-Lune, near Lyon, where Vacher had told investigators to look, according to Corneloup and Lyon Capitale. The Kan.bzh study dates his death to May 1897 and gives his age as 17; other accounts give him as younger, and Lyon Capitale wrote in 2019 that the identity of the remains in the well was still not certain.
Pierre Laurent was killed at Courzieu, in the Rhône, on June 18, 1897. Fourquet gives his age as 13 and Corneloup as 14; the Kan.bzh study dates the death to June 19. Fourquet first read about it in the newspaper Lyon Républicain, and it was the crime that set his inquiry in motion. It was the last killing Vacher confessed to.
Émile Fourquet had taken up his post as juge d'instruction, the investigating magistrate, at Belley, in the Ain, in April 1897, according to the Kan.bzh study; Corneloup says the summer of 1897. The unsolved killing of Victor Portalier sat in his district's files.
When he read of the Courzieu killing, Fourquet saw the resemblance to Bénonces, and he went looking for others. A circular from the prosecutor at Dijon, named Fonfrède in Fourquet's account, led him to the death of Augustine Mortureux at Étaules. Writing to colleagues across several departments, he gathered eight cases into one file. Lyon Capitale says he became convinced that one man was responsible for all of them.
From the witness statements he drew up a single composite description. On July 10, 1897, he issued a commission rogatoire, a formal request to other magistrates, sent to about 250 juges d'instruction across France. It described a man of about 30, of medium height, with black hair and eyes and a brown moustache, whose lip was pulled to the right and the white of whose right eye was bloodshot. He wore wooden-soled shoes and carried a canvas bag and a stick. Douglas Starr, a Boston University professor who later wrote a history of the case, has described Fourquet's collection of eyewitness accounts and his map of the crimes as one of the earliest uses of what is now called criminal profiling.
The search produced false leads first. Three tramps arrested at Lons-le-Saunier, Saint-Julien and Le Puy were brought to Belley and not recognized by the witnesses. A Basque man was also transferred and then freed when witnesses failed to identify him, Fourquet writes.
On August 4, 1897, at Champis, in the Ardèche, Vacher tried to attack a woman in a wood. He had been in the area for three days. According to Fourquet and Corneloup, her husband arrived and restrained him; Fourquet records that he was lying in the wood when she passed.
Asked what he was doing there, Vacher gave a reply Fourquet quoted: "I don't know, I come, I go." He was taken before the court at Tournon. The prosecutor there reduced the charge from attempted murder and rape to outrage public à la pudeur, a public indecency offense, and he was sentenced to three months and one day in prison, Fourquet writes. Lyon Capitale notes that nobody at that point suspected who they had in custody.
It was a magistrate at Tournon, named Garcin in Fourquet's account, who noticed that the prisoner fitted the description in Fourquet's commission rogatoire.
On September 9, 1897, two gendarmes, Brigadier Marquès and gendarme Euséby, escorted Vacher by train from Tournon to Belley. Their report described him as Joseph Vacher, 28, paper worker. When the train passed through Perrache station in Lyon he tried to jump from the moving carriage, and the gendarmes pulled him back, Fourquet writes.
Fourquet began questioning him the next day, and at first Vacher gave nothing away. Two witnesses from Bénonces were brought to confront him and identified him as the tramp they had seen. Twelve more witnesses from other cases were later confronted with him; all but two identified him, and those two did so privately afterward, according to Fourquet.
In one interview Fourquet put to him a list of crimes, including the 1890 death of a nine-year-old girl, Olympe Buisson, at Varacieux in the Isère. Vacher denied that one outright, Fourquet records, and instead spoke of a killing near Beaurepaire in May 1894 that the magistrate had not raised. Fourquet also told Vacher what he believed his plan to be: to confess to a large number of crimes so that he would be judged insane rather than sentenced to death. Vacher then confirmed the details of several of the killings.
On October 7, 1897, Vacher wrote a letter addressed "To France." "Yes, it is I who committed all the crimes you have accused me of," it said, in Fourquet's transcription. He went on to blame the rages that he said had come from the dog bite of his childhood, and wrote that he was not entirely sure of himself. Regional newspapers were to print the confession the next day, and the national papers took it up, Fourquet writes.
His count of crimes grew as the questioning went on. Corneloup says he first admitted to eight, then to eleven, and later to twelve, counting the attempt at Noyen. The Criminocorpus museum of the history of justice gives the accepted figure as eleven murders and one attempted rape. A Hamburg newspaper of late October 1897, reporting eight confessions at that stage, already expected the number to rise and noted suspicion that he was also responsible for an unsolved killing of 1890.
Vacher's explanations shifted. He told investigators a voice from God had driven him; at times, the Hamburg paper reported, he admitted he had wanted revenge on women. He called himself "the anarchist of God" and the "Son of God," and he took as his motto "God! Right! Duty!", Corneloup writes. Marc Renneville, the historian who in 2019 published the case archive, describes his position as a confession combined with a claim of innocence: he said he had killed to punish France, as the instrument of an avenging God.
The confession also brought relief to the families of men who had been suspected. The Hamburg paper, writing within days, described how the neighbors of the farmer accused over Pierre Massot-Pellet's death had come to beg his pardon.
The case now turned on his mind. A finding of insanity would have meant that he was not criminally responsible and would have led to compulsory confinement in an asylum, the Kan.bzh study explains, and it puts Fourquet's aim plainly: he wanted the enormity of the crimes recognized and insanity ruled out.
Three experts from Lyon were appointed to examine Vacher: Alexandre Lacassagne, professor of legal medicine at the Lyon faculty of medicine, and two other Lyon physicians, Auguste Pierret and Fleury Rebatel. Corneloup writes that all three found him lucid and responsible, but that Pierret and Rebatel added that his responsibility was reduced. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lacassagne interviewed him over several months and studied each crime, and concluded that he was a sadistic but sane man whose methodical approach to killing showed it.
One line from Lacassagne's findings, quoted by Allard, Lefebve and Pieret, summed up his reasoning: no madman, he wrote, had ever been seen asking so insistently to be sent to an asylum. Lacassagne published his findings that year as "Vacher l'éventreur" in the journal he edited, Archives de l'anthropologie criminelle (volume 13, 1898), and expanded them into a 314-page book, Vacher l'éventreur et les crimes sadiques, published in Lyon and Paris in 1899.
Vacher used his time in prison to write. A handwritten defense statement dated Belley, July 15, 1898, survives in the municipal library of Lyon (manuscript 7055), Corneloup records, along with an album of photographs, cartoons and drawings that was probably put together by Fourquet (manuscript 7056). His prison writings were published in 2006 as Écrits d'un tueur de bergers, edited by the historian Philippe Artières.
In a 2010 article in the journal Droit et Cultures, Renneville argued that the story of how Vacher was caught has overshadowed the story of how he was assessed, and that the expert examination explains why the case became a turning point in the history of criminal responsibility in France. The article's title asks whether the case marked the end of what critics of the time called a license for impunity for criminals who could claim madness.
The investigation itself was partly undone on a point of procedure. Allard, Lefebve and Pieret note that a law passed in 1897 requiring a lawyer's presence during questioning led to part of the investigation being annulled. They do not say which steps were affected.
The trial opened before the Cour d'assises de l'Ain at Bourg-en-Bresse on October 26, 1898, Corneloup writes. The presiding judge was Colson, the prosecutor was Ducher, and Vacher was defended by Maître Charbonnier. It lasted three days, with ten doctors and 54 witnesses. He was tried for a single crime committed in the Ain, the murder of Victor Portalier, according to the Criminocorpus notice on the case.
Boston University's account of Starr's research describes the scene. A crowd outside the courthouse shouted "Death to Vacher." Inside, reporters and spectators talked, laughed and pushed. Vacher appeared with a ragged beard and long nails, wearing a white rabbit-fur hat, and as the charges were read he drew a finger across his throat. He yelped during testimony. According to Lyon Capitale he displayed a sign about the bullets in his head and claimed he had acted on impulses he could not resist. Starr told Bostonia, the Boston University alumni magazine, that Vacher "pulled out all the stops to appear mentally ill" and wanted to turn the trial into a circus.
On the third day the medical experts testified. Lacassagne described how Vacher had chosen and killed his victims, using the evidence of blood patterns and wound sites, and concluded that the crimes were those of a "sadistic, antisocial" man who was responsible for his actions. "He is responsible," he told the court, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. The defense argued that Vacher was mentally unstable and that the death penalty should not be imposed, Corneloup says.
The jury found him guilty, and on October 28, 1898, he was sentenced to death, Lyon Capitale reports. The Kan.bzh study records that the plea of criminal irresponsibility was not accepted. The trial drew headlines around the world, The Chronicle of Higher Education notes, and the French press called him a new Jack the Ripper.
No appeal to the Cour de cassation, or its outcome, was reported. A request for a pardon was made and refused: at dawn on December 31, 1898, in the prison at Bourg-en-Bresse, Vacher was told that it had been rejected, according to the Kan.bzh study.
He was guillotined shortly afterward on the Champ de Mars at Bourg-en-Bresse, before a crowd. The BnF records the date of his death as December 31, 1898, at Bourg-en-Bresse, and Allard, Lefebve and Pieret give the same date. He was 29. The executioner was a member of the Deibler family; Corneloup names him as Anatole Deibler, and the Kan.bzh study gives only the surname. Lyon Capitale reports that on the scaffold he said he was glad to have had his hair cut. A review of Starr's book says a member of the crowd called him a coward who did not know how to die properly.
Vacher's body did not settle the argument. Parts of his brain were sent to about six scientists, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, and their analyses were contradictory and inconclusive. Casts of the brain circulated in Europe, and the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, studying one, judged him insane and dangerous, a "born criminal" in Lombroso's own terms, Allard, Lefebve and Pieret write. Lacassagne, as a review of Starr's book points out, rejected Lombroso's idea of the born criminal and stressed the influence of a person's surroundings.
Fourquet returned to the case for the rest of his life. He wrote on criminal vagrants, a book that Allard, Lefebve and Pieret date to 1908, and in 1931 published Vacher, le plus grand criminel des temps modernes ("Vacher, the greatest criminal of modern times"), signed as the man's examining magistrate. In its foreword he attacked alienists who, in his view, were too quick to declare violent criminals irresponsible, and he made a short argument against relying on the asylum: "but people get out of an asylum." Another book by Fourquet on Vacher appeared in 1934, according to the BnF.
The killings passed quickly into popular song. Criminocorpus holds a printed complainte, a street ballad, on Vacher's execution, sold in 1899 by L. Simonet at Saint-Amand-Montrond and set to the tune of "Le juif errant"; its compilers note that it misplaced the execution at Bourges. The Kan.bzh study examines a Breton-language ballad on the case, which used the story of the innocent farmer Grenier to defend the Church. Renneville collected these songs in Le chant des crimes in 2021.
In 1976 the director Bertrand Tavernier made the case into a film, Le Juge et l'Assassin (The Judge and the Assassin). Renneville notes that the affair inspired the film, and Allard, Lefebve and Pieret examined it in 2023 as a study of justice and social control.
The full case archive became available to readers in 2019, when Renneville published Vacher l'éventreur. Archives d'un tueur en série. According to his own description, it combines a narrative of the case with more than 150 original documents, including all of Vacher's interrogations, his prison writings and the correspondence of the magistrates and doctors, together with a reprint of Lacassagne's book. It won the Prix Sade for an essay in 2020. Corneloup published a full-length book on Vacher in 2007.
In the United States the case was retold in 2010 by Douglas Starr in The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science (Knopf). Starr read Lacassagne's case files, photographed the court records in France, collected Vacher's letters, and visited his birthplace and the villages where the killings took place, Boston University reported. The book won the Gold Dagger award and was nominated for an Edgar award. Science News described it as an account that alternates between Vacher's crimes and Lacassagne's development of forensic methods.
Proven by final judgment: the murder of Victor Portalier at Bénonces in 1895, the only charge tried. The jury rejected the claim that Vacher was not responsible, and the sentence was carried out.
Confessed but never tried: ten further killings (Eugénie Delhomme, Louise Marcel, Augustine Mortureux, the widow Morand, Pierre Massot-Pellet, the victim at Truinas, Marie Moussier, Rosine Rodier, Claudius Beaupied and Pierre Laurent) and the attack at Noyen in 1896. These are attributed to him on the strength of his own statements, the witness identifications and, at Tassin-la-Demi-Lune, the remains found where he said they would be.
Suspected and never proved: Fourquet believed the true number was above fifty, Corneloup writes, and later writers have attributed some fifty similar crimes to him; the Criminocorpus notice speaks of about thirty murders. The 1890 death of Olympe Buisson at Varacieux, which Fourquet put to him, was denied by Vacher. Lyon Capitale notes that mutilated bodies were found along his early routes in Savoie and the Isère before 1894, but that there is no proof they were his.
Cleared: the farmers Grenier (Étaules) and Bannier or Bonnier (Saint-Étienne-de-Boulogne), and a man named Roux, whom Fourquet listed as innocent victims of popular anger; and the tramps and the Basque man brought to Belley in 1897 and not identified by witnesses.
Details that vary between sources: the date of Victor Portalier's death (August 31, 1895, in Fourquet; September 2, 1895, in Corneloup); the spelling of Eugénie Delhomme's name (Delhomme, Delomme, Delorme) and the date of her death (May 19, 1894, or May 11 in the ballad); the ages of Louise Marcel and Pierre Laurent (Fourquet gives 14 and 13); the age and date of death of Claudius Beaupied and whether the remains were securely identified; the years of the Busset and Varennes killings; the year Vacher entered the army (1890 or 1892) and how many times he shot himself; the date Fourquet took up his post (April or summer 1897); and the number of his confessions (eight, eleven or twelve, depending on the stage and on whether the attempt at Noyen is counted). The trial opened on October 26, 1898 (Corneloup); Lyon Capitale's statement that it began on June 14, 1898, is not supported by any other report.
November 16, 1869: Joseph Vacher is born at Beaufort (Isère); his twin dies in infancy.
About age 13: his mother dies; he joins a half-sister at Saint-Genis-Laval and spends time with the Marist Brothers.
1890 or 1892: called up to the 60th Infantry Regiment at Besançon; rises to sergeant.
1893: shoots Louise Barrand, who survives, and then shoots himself; discharged from the army; confined at Saint-Ylie asylum, Dole.
After Dole: transferred to Saint-Robert asylum near Grenoble.
April 1, 1894: released from Saint-Robert as cured.
May 1894: Eugénie Delhomme, 21, is killed at Beaurepaire (Isère).
November 20, 1894: Louise Marcel is killed at Vidauban (Var).
May 12, 1895: Augustine Mortureux, 17, is killed at Étaules (Côte-d'Or); the farmer Grenier is wrongly suspected.
August 24, 1895: the widow Morand is killed at Saint-Ours (Savoie).
August 31, 1895 (or September 2): Victor Portalier, 16, is killed at Bénonces (Ain).
September 29, 1895: Pierre Massot-Pellet, 14, is killed at Saint-Étienne-de-Boulogne (Ardèche); a neighbor is wrongly accused.
Date not reported: a killing at Truinas (Drôme).
March 1896: attack on a girl at Noyen-sur-Sarthe; she survives.
September 10 and October 1 (years given inconsistently): Marie Moussier at Busset (Allier) and Rosine Rodier at Varennes-Saint-Honorat (Haute-Loire) are killed.
1897 (date uncertain): Claudius Beaupied is killed at Tassin-la-Demi-Lune (Rhône).
April or summer 1897: Émile Fourquet takes up his post at Belley.
June 18, 1897: Pierre Laurent is killed at Courzieu (Rhône).
July 10, 1897: Fourquet's commission rogatoire with a description of the suspect goes to about 250 magistrates.
August 4, 1897: Vacher is arrested at Champis (Ardèche); later given three months and a day at Tournon.
September 9, 1897: transferred by train to Belley; tries to jump from the train at Lyon.
October 7, 1897: writes his confession "To France."
October 25, 1897: remains found in a well at Tassin-la-Demi-Lune where he said they would be.
1898: Lacassagne, Pierret and Rebatel examine him; Lacassagne publishes "Vacher l'éventreur."
July 15, 1898: Vacher dates his handwritten defense at Belley.
October 26, 1898: trial opens before the Cour d'assises de l'Ain, Bourg-en-Bresse.
October 28, 1898: found guilty of the murder of Victor Portalier and sentenced to death.
December 31, 1898: told at dawn that his pardon is refused; guillotined on the Champ de Mars at Bourg-en-Bresse.
1899: Lacassagne's book Vacher l'éventreur et les crimes sadiques is published.
1931: Fourquet publishes Vacher, le plus grand criminel des temps modernes.
1976: Bertrand Tavernier's film Le Juge et l'Assassin.
2006: Vacher's prison writings are published, edited by Philippe Artières.
2010: Douglas Starr's The Killer of Little Shepherds; Renneville's article in Droit et Cultures.
2019: Renneville publishes the case archive.