On the Guillotière bridge in Lyon on May 28, 1861, a man with a misshapen lip offered Marie Pichon a place as a maid at Dagneux, in the Côtière east of the city, at 250 francs a year. She packed her few things in a trunk and went with him by train to Montluel, arriving late in the evening, and then on foot into the woods above Dagneux. There he attacked her and tried to strangle her with a cord. She broke away and ran to the Joly farm at Balan, and Joly called the rural policeman at Dagneux. Her description made the authorities think at once of a local man the villagers called Raymond. On the examining magistrate's order he was arrested on June 2, and the next day Pichon picked him out immediately. Some accounts date the attack May 26.
His name was Martin Dumollard. Born on June 22, 1810, at Tramoyes in the Ain, he was the son of Marie-Josephte Rey and Pierre Dumollard, a Hungarian who had fled a criminal past. At his trial Dumollard said that when his father was recognized by Austrian troops at Padua in 1814 he was executed by dismemberment, and that he, four years old, and his mother had watched. He herded sheep from the age of eight, went into service, and in 1840 married Marie-Anne Martinet, whom he had met as a fellow servant. They settled at Dagneux. He had a record of thefts.
The examining magistrate, Genod of Trévoux, had been chasing the man with the swollen lip for six years without a name. In late February 1855 hunters found the body of a young woman in the forest of Montaverne at Tramoyes. It took months, photographs by the Lyon photographer Camille Bernabé and the persistence of her family to identify her as Marie Baday, who had left her lodgings after an argument over rent saying she had a better offer. An innocent man, Jacques Verger, spent three months in prison for her murder. The same spring Olympe Alubert took refuge at a farm at Mionnay and told how a man had offered her a well-paid place between Neuville-sur-Saône and Miribel and then turned on her on the road. Other women told the same story: Josephte Charletty, who grew wary of his questions about her savings and slipped away; Jeanne-Marie Bourgeois, twenty-two, who ran for the nearest farm; Victorine Perrin, twenty-two, who handed him a trunk of her best things to carry and watched him flee with it; Julie Fargeat, pregnant and just turned out of her lodgings, whose screams brought two farmers running and who was then charged with vagrancy because the thief had taken her papers; and Louise Michel, who escaped near Civrieux in April 1860.
After the arrest the rest came out. Marie-Anne Martinet told the magistrate that her husband had killed a girl in the Montmain woods near Dagneux years earlier and come home with her gold earrings, and on July 31 she led investigators to the body. Three sisters came forward about Marie-Eulalie Bussod, forty-two, of Loisia, who had followed a man offering a place as a maid in February 1861; one of them, who had glimpsed him, recognized Dumollard at once, and among the clothing seized from his house they found their sister's. On August 1 Dumollard himself said, "I know where the body is and I am ready to take you there," and led them to a grave in the woods near Pizay. The examiners concluded she had been struck on the head, raped and buried alive. At the house investigators found some 1,250 items of women's clothing: stockings, petticoats, shawls, hats, dresses. Martinet had washed, altered and sold what she could.
The trial opened at the assize court of the Ain at Bourg-en-Bresse on January 29, 1862, before a crowd of four to five thousand, and lasted four days, with seventy-one witnesses for the prosecution and hundreds of exhibits. Dumollard arrived in his blue smock, waving his hat to the crowd. The magistrates had examined 648 cases and could establish his guilt in twelve attacks. The jury found him guilty of the murders of Marie Baday, the unknown woman of Montmain and Marie-Eulalie Bussod, of the attempted murder of Marie Pichon and of a string of thefts; it did not find the rapes of Baday and Bussod proved. On February 1 he was sentenced to death and his wife to twenty years of hard labor. She died in the prison at Auberive in 1875.
His appeal to the Court of Cassation was rejected on February 27. Told he would be guillotined, he said he preferred it to dying like his father. The guillotine was brought from Bourg to Montluel, and on the morning of March 8, 1862, after coffee and a glass of Madeira, he refused a horse and walked the hundred and fifty meters to the scaffold in the Place Bourgeat, now the Place Carnot, before a crowd of about five thousand. He was executed at about seven. His head was sent to the medical school in Lyon, where casts of the skull were made; a study in the 1960s concluded that the misshapen lip was an angioma. Victor Hugo cited him in Les Misérables as an orphan who at five years old, according to the official documents, worked to live and stole. The stories of cannibalism and blood-drinking attached to him in later popular writing have no basis in the trial record.