Joseph Vacher killed at least eleven people, most of them young shepherds and shepherdesses working alone in the fields, while walking across the south and centre of France as a vagrant between 1894 and 1897. He was convicted at Bourg-en-Bresse and guillotined on December 31, 1898. The French press called him the French Ripper and the South-East Ripper.
He was born at Beaufort in the Isere on November 16, 1869, the fifteenth child of a peasant family. He spent time in a monastery and was discharged from the army after erratic behaviour.
In 1893 he shot a young woman who had refused him and then turned the gun on himself. Both survived. He was left with a bullet lodged near his ear, a paralysed facial nerve, a suppurating ear and a permanently disfigured face. He was committed to the asylum at Saint-Robert and released in April 1894 as cured. Every one of the killings came after that discharge.
For the next three years he walked, playing an accordion and begging, and killed as he went. The victims were boys as well as girls, taken in fields and woods in the Ardeche, the Loire, the Isere and elsewhere; he stabbed, strangled and mutilated them.
The reason it ran for three years is structural rather than clever. Rural France in the 1890s was full of men on the road, and there was no national police force able to connect a body in one department to a body in another. Nobody was in a position to see a series.
He was caught in August 1897 after attacking a farm woman in a wood, whose husband and children came running when she shouted. He was held on that assault and recognised from a description.
The series was assembled by an investigating magistrate, Emile Fourquet, who had been circulating a questionnaire to magistrates in other departments asking about unsolved killings of young people working alone. That questionnaire is the mechanism by which the case exists at all, and it is an early instance of linking crimes across jurisdictions by paperwork.
His trial at Bourg-en-Bresse in October 1898 became a set piece in the argument then dividing French medicine and law over whether a man like him could be held responsible. Vacher wore a white fur hat, declared himself an anarchist of God, and blamed a rabid dog bite in childhood. The forensic physician Alexandre Lacassagne examined him at length and concluded that he was a sadist who understood what he was doing. The court agreed.
He was convicted and guillotined at Bourg-en-Bresse on December 31, 1898, aged twenty-nine. Eleven killings were established against him and he claimed considerably more, which has never been tested.