On August 31, 1895, the body of Victor Portalier, a young shepherd, was found in a field near Bénonces, a village in the hills of the Ain. His throat had been cut, he had been disemboweled, his genitals had been mutilated, and he had been raped. Witnesses described a vagrant with a scar or redness over his right eye, a small canvas bag and a walking stick. The man could not be found and the case was left open. Two years later a new investigating magistrate at Belley, Émile Fourquet, took it up again. The case he built became the prosecution of Joseph Vacher, and Portalier's was the only killing Vacher was ever tried for, although by then he had confessed to eleven.
The dead were people who worked or walked alone in rural France, most of them adolescents. Eugénie Delhomme, twenty-one, a factory worker, was raped and strangled two hundred yards from her mill at Beaurepaire in the Isère in May 1894, on the 19th or the 20th depending on the source. Louise Marcel, thirteen, a farmer's daughter, was killed at Vidauban in the Var on November 20, 1894. Augustine Mortureux, seventeen, was killed in the Bois de Chêne at Étaules, near Dijon, on May 12, 1895. On August 24, 1895, a widow named Morand was killed and raped in her isolated cottage at Saint-Ours in Savoie; her age is given as fifty-eight in some accounts and sixty-five in others. A week later came Victor Portalier, whose age is recorded as fifteen or sixteen. Aline Alaise, thirteen, was killed at Truinas in the Drôme on September 22, 1895, and Pierre Massot-Pelé, fourteen, a shepherd, at Saint-Étienne-de-Boulogne in the Ardèche a week after that. In 1896 there were Marie Moussier-Lorut, nineteen, at Busset in the Allier on September 10, and Rosine Rodier, fourteen, a shepherd girl, at Varennes-Saint-Honorat in the Haute-Loire on October 1. Claudius Beaupied, fourteen, a boy on the roads himself, was killed at Tassin-la-Demi-Lune near Lyon around the end of May 1897 and thrown down a well. On June 18, 1897, Jean-Pierre Laurent, fourteen, a farmhand, was found at Courzieu in the Rhône with his throat cut and his body mutilated in the same way.
The method rarely changed. A physician who studied the case described him watching for boys and girls alone in the fields, seizing them by the throat, cutting it with the knife or razor he always carried, mutilating the body and raping it, usually after death. He confessed to one attempt that failed: on March 1, 1896, at Noyen-sur-Sarthe, he tried to rape an eleven-year-old girl, Marie Derouet, and was nearly caught. A week later, on March 9, he was arrested at Baugé for vagrancy and assault and served a month; nobody connected him to the attack.
The killer covered enormous distances on foot, up to sixty kilometers, about thirty-seven miles, in a day, from Normandy to the Tarn by way of Burgundy and the Rhône valley, begging, doing odd jobs on farms and sometimes playing an accordion. He never stayed anywhere long enough to become a local suspect. Rural France in the 1890s was full of men on the road, and there was no police force that could connect a body in the Var with one in the Côte-d'Or. Suspicion fell instead on whoever was nearest: in several cases local men who had found a body or known the victim were arrested or driven out of their towns, and some of their families lived for years under that accusation.
Vacher was born on November 16, 1869, at Beaufort in the Isère, near Beaurepaire, next to last of at least fifteen children in a respected farming family. His mother, Marie-Rose Ravit, called Rosalie, was fifteen years younger than his father, Pierre, intensely devout and subject to hallucinations, and she filled the house with mysticism and superstition. He had a twin, Eugène, who died at eight months, smothered under a loaf of hot bread that one of their brothers had carelessly set down on him. As a boy Joseph was said to be sly and cruel, to torture animals, to fly into rages in which he broke whatever was within reach, and to beat his brothers and sisters, even the older ones. He went to work at fourteen, when his mother died. Ten years later he would be suspected, though never charged, in the rape and murder of a ten-year-old boy, Joseph Amieux, in a barn at Eclose in the Isère on June 18, 1884, and in three or four other unsolved killings that followed it.
At sixteen he entered the Marist Brothers at Saint-Genis-Laval as a postulant. He stayed two years, finished his education there and seems to have taught classes to children, and was dismissed at eighteen for indiscipline and immorality, including fondling other students. He went back to Beaufort, where he was said to have tried to abuse a twelve-year-old farm boy, and then to Grenoble, where one of his sisters kept a brothel. In 1888 he worked in a Grenoble brewery and caught a venereal disease; on February 11, 1889, at the Antiquaille hospital in Lyon, surgeons removed part of a testicle. On November 15, 1890, he was called up to the 60th Infantry Regiment at Besançon. Older soldiers hazed him, and his comrades and officers described him as disturbed, gloomy and convinced he was persecuted. He finished fourth in his class at the school for corporals and was still refused the rank as unfit to command, and in protest he tried to cut his own throat. The colonel visited him in the infirmary, judged him fit after all and gave him his stripe. He proved an overbearing but capable leader and was soon made sergeant.
At Besançon he met a young canteen worker named Louise Barrant. On June 25, 1893, he followed her to Baume-les-Dames to ask her to marry him. She had fallen for another soldier and refused. He fired three shots at her from a revolver and then turned it on himself. Both survived. One of his bullets entered his right ear and lodged in the bone, leaving him deaf on that side; another went into his neck. Neither could be removed. The right side of his face was paralyzed, his right eye was left larger than the other and permanently bloodshot, and the ear discharged pus for the rest of his life, so that he almost always kept his head covered.
Found not responsible because of his mental state, he was committed on July 7, 1893, to the asylum at Dole in the Jura, and on August 2 the army discharged him for good. On September 12 the asylum doctor, Guillemin, reported that he was insane, with delusions of persecution. He escaped, was caught at Besançon, and was committed again, this time to the Saint-Robert asylum near Grenoble. There he seemed to improve so much that the director, Dufour, discharged him as cured on April 1, 1894. Every one of the eleven killings he confessed to came after that date. The first, Eugénie Delhomme, was seven weeks later.
Fourquet took up his post at Belley in April 1897, and when the Laurent killing was reported that June he asked for the autopsy report. Working through the files of similar unsolved killings in other departments and drawing them up on large charts, he assembled a description of a man several witnesses had seen: a vagrant with a scarred, twisted face and a damaged ear. On July 10, 1897, that description was circulated across France. On August 4, in a wood at Champis in the Ardèche, Vacher attacked a farm woman, Marie Plantier, aged twenty-seven. Her husband and two other men came at her screams, pelted him with stones and held him until the police arrived. On September 7 the court at Tournon gave him three months for indecent assault. Only then was he matched to the man seen at Bénonces. On the way from Tournon to Belley he tried to escape by jumping from the moving train.
Fourquet first questioned him on September 10, 1897, and Vacher said nothing useful. The magistrate then told him, truthfully, that he was writing a book about vagrants, though its subject was criminal vagrants, and invited him to talk about his travels. Vacher did, at length, and the route he described ran through the southeast, the Rhône and the Ain, past the places where the killings had happened. On October 10, 1897, he confessed, first to eight murders, and eventually to eleven and the attempt at Noyen. He blamed a madness that he traced to the bite of a rabid dog when he was seven or eight, or to the remedies he was given for it, and to his treatment in the asylums. He bargained for the publication of a letter in Le Petit Journal, which printed it on October 16. Some suspected him of claiming crimes he had only read about, but on October 25, following his directions, investigators found human bones at the bottom of a well at Tassin-la-Demi-Lune; the parents of Claudius Beaupied identified the boy from his clothes and teeth. The prosecution nevertheless chose to try him on a single count, the murder of Victor Portalier.
The real question at the trial was not whether he had done it but whether he could be held responsible. Article 64 of the Penal Code provided that there was no crime if the accused had been insane at the time of the act. The prison doctor at Belley, Bozonnet, had reported on September 19, 1897, that Vacher was mentally deficient, fixed on ideas close to persecution, and of greatly diminished responsibility. On June 14, 1898, Fourquet appointed three experts: Alexandre Lacassagne, professor of forensic medicine at Lyon, and the asylum physicians Antoine-Auguste Pierret and Fleury Rebatel; two others X-rayed his head and examined the ear. Their report concluded that Vacher was not insane, that he was completely cured and fully responsible for the crimes he had committed and confessed, and that his behavior was a strategy to win what the period called a license for impunity. The case became a set piece in the argument then running through French medicine and law between those who located crime in disease and those who insisted on responsibility. In prison he wrote constantly, to his family, his doctors and his judges, and a letter he addressed to the French was printed in Le Petit Parisien: if they believed him responsible, he wrote, so much the worse for them.
The trial opened before the assize court of the Ain at Bourg-en-Bresse on October 26, 1898, and lasted three full days, followed by the national and foreign press. Vacher performed for the room. He wore a sign around his neck reading "I have a bullet in my head" and shouted "Long live Jesus! Long live Joan of Arc!", and nobody could say whether it was real delusion or an attempt to persuade the jury he was mad. On October 28, after about a quarter of an hour of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of the murder of Victor Portalier and rejected the plea of insanity. He was sentenced to death. His petition for clemency to President Félix Faure was refused.
He was guillotined on the Champ-de-Mars at Bourg-en-Bresse at three minutes past seven on the morning of December 31, 1898, at twenty-nine, before more than two thousand people standing in the cold rain. He had asked to have his head and beard shaved beforehand. According to Le Petit Parisien he said it was lucky he had had his hair cut, and then, "Here is the victim of the asylums' mistakes," and that France was guilty. The executioner, Louis Deibler, retired two days later, and it was his last execution. The autopsy found nothing abnormal beyond the bullet wounds, apart from unusually developed calves and flat feet. His brain was removed and studied by a team under Édouard Toulouse, all of them expecting to find the physical trace of insanity; they found nothing conclusive.
Eleven killings are generally accepted, the ones he confessed to and that matched the investigators' files. Fourquet and others came to suspect him of some fifty crimes, including at least twenty throat-cuttings of women and adolescents, but none of the others was ever proved. Among those he confessed to, only Victor Portalier's was tested before a jury. In 1976 Bertrand Tavernier made the case into a film, The Judge and the Assassin, with Michel Galabru as a killer named Joseph Bouvier. For the families of the dead, and for the local men who had been accused of their deaths, the confession was the only answer the law ever gave.