Joseph Vacher

Joseph Vacher
Joseph Vacher wearing his trademark rabbit-fur hat
Born	(1869-11-16)16 November 1869 Beaufort, Isère, France
Died	31 December 1898(1898-12-31) (aged 29) Bourg-en-Bresse, Ain, France
Cause of death	Execution by beheading
Other names	The French Ripper The South-East Ripper
Details
Victims	11–27
Span of crimes	1894–1897
Country	France
Date apprehended	4 August 1897

Joseph Vacher (16 November 1869 – 31 December 1898) was a French serial killer and necrophile, sometimes known as "The French Ripper" or "L'éventreur du Sud-Est" ("The South-East Ripper") owing to comparisons to the more famous Jack the Ripper murderer of London, England, in 1888. His scarred face and plain, white, handmade rabbit-fur hat composed his trademark appearance. He killed 11 to 27 people, many of whom were adolescent farm workers, between 1894 and 1897.

Life

Early life and teenage years

Vacher was born as the second youngest of 16 children to an illiterate farmer. At age fifteen, Vacher was sent to a very strict Marist Brothers school in Saint-Genis-Laval where he was taught to obey and to fear God. He was meant to be educated there until he was 18, but expelled after only two years, as monks at the school noted Vacher for torturing animals and masturbation. He found work as a restaurant worker and moved in with his sister and her husband in Marcollin. While living with them, Vacher contracted syphilis and had to have his left testicle surgically removed at Antiquaille Hospital six months following the diagnosis.

At age 19, he was reported for the attempted rape of 12-year-old boy on a farm in Beaufort on 29 June 1888. The victim, Marcelin Bourdon, was pushed down while baling hay in a barn, but managed to punch Vacher and alert fellow workers to the scene. Vacher avoided a charge of pederasty as he fled town and his employers were unaware of his residence. He was evicted in 1889 by his brother-in-law due to his aggressive behaviour and went to Geneva to ask to live with his brother Auguste, to whom he admitted to the attempted rape in Beaufort In 1891, Vacher was briefly confined to an asylum for voicing persecutory delusions.

Army and attempted murder-suicide

Seeking escape from the intense poverty of his peasant background, he joined the army in 1890 and served in the 60th regiment. Frustrated by slow promotion and no recognition, and infused with the grandiose belief that he was not receiving the attention he deserved, Vacher attempted to kill himself by slicing his throat. This was the first of two suicide attempts. Although he served for under three years, Vacher would later claim to have served as a non-commissioned officer with the Zouaves, which, while unsubstantiated and unlikely, was widely repeated in contemporary English-language media. Related to this, Vacher stated he had evaded arrest in 1895 by repeating this claim to a gendarme who was about to book him for running from law enforcement; said gendarme was looking for the perpetrator in a nearby murder committed by Vacher.

In 1893, while Vacher was stationed in Besançon, he fell in love with a young maidservant, Louise Barant. After his attempted suicide led to a four-month dismissal from the military, he invited her to a meal and proposed to Barant during this first rendezvous. She declined because Vacher said he would "kill [her] if she betrayed [him]" in the same breath, after which he stalked her for several weeks, often begging Barant to give their relationship another chance. Barant eventually accepted an invitation to go to a dance with him, but ran off when Vacher attacked a man who spoke to Barant during the date. Barant moved back to her mother in Baume-les-Dames, so Vacher instead began sending her love letters, again trying to court her, and repeating his marriage proposal. After leaving the letters unanswered for weeks, fed up with his advances and uninterested in his offer, she mocked him and his proposal. This second slight also motivated violence: on 25 June, Vacher entered Barant's home and in a rage, shot her four times and then tried to commit suicide. Both attempts were unsuccessful— Barant was badly injured from a shot through the mouth and grazes by both temples, but survived the shooting, and Vacher severely maimed himself. Shooting himself twice in the head, Vacher succeeded in paralyzing one side of his face, deforming him severely. One of the bullets remained lodged in his ear for the remainder of his life, and the damage to his brain likely exacerbated his existing mental illness. He felt that the shooting damaged him more than physically: he later claimed, after his arrest, that the reactions of strangers to this self-inflicted deformity drove him to hatred of society at large.

This second suicide attempt led to his confinement to a mental institution, Saint-Ylle Psychiatric Hospital in Dole, Jura, where he often attacked staff, destroyed furniture, and wrote letters to officials, claiming he was suffered abuse there. He briefly escaped the facility on 25 August 1893, but was caught a few weeks later, once more fleeing by jumping out of a train window while he was being transported back to Dole. When he was found and brought back two days later, he tried to commit suicide by repeatedly bashing his head against a wall. On 21 December of the same year, a court found him not guilty of the attempted murder of Louise Brabant by reason of insanity, after which he was transferred to the state-run Saint-Robert Psychiatric Hospital outside of Grenoble. He stayed there for three months until his doctors pronounced him "completely cured," and released on 1 April, 1894. In total, Vacher spent less than ten months in treatment.

Murders

Vacher began murdering his victims shortly after his release at the age of 25. During a three-year period beginning in 1894, Vacher murdered and mutilated at least 11 people (one woman, five teenage girls, and five teenage boys). Many of them were shepherds watching their flocks in isolated fields. The victims were stabbed repeatedly, often disemboweled, raped, and sodomized, the latter two occasionally post-mortem. Vacher became a drifter, travelling from town to town, from Normandy to Provence, staying mainly in the southeast of France and surviving by begging or working on farms as a day labourer. Most murders occurred in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. By most accounts, he was unkempt and frightening, wandering from town to town as a vagrant in filthy clothes, begging in the streets and surviving on the scraps he received from anyone who spared him kindness. The few times he took temporary work such as shepherding from farmers, Vacher would often quit midway and still demand full payment. During this time, he was twice arrested for vagrancy, but never suspected of the killings. He reportedly attributed being undetected by police to God's grace and would regularly pilgrimage to Lourdes to pray to the statue of the Virgin Mary.

On 17 October 1886, Vacher passed through the commune of Job, where he knocked on the house of a woman surnamed Gouttebel and asked her for cheese. Gouttebel turned to the kitchen to bring him some food when Vacher threw himself on her when she returned. Gouttebel tore away from his grip and ran outside to alert her neighbours

According to a family who let Vacher lodge with them for a few days in July 1887, they took him in after seeing him beg outside of a pub, playing the accordion while tending to a small dog he bought a few days earlier, named Loulette, and a magpie, and he was kind to the couple's four daughters, for whom he performed music and made funny faces. He had reportedly asked their neighbors about if there were any open shepherd jobs. On 2 August, Vacher was ousted from the area by locals following an incident at the farm of Régis Blanc. Blanc had given Vacher some stew, which Vacher then tried to share with his dog Loulette. When the animal did not eat, Vacher said "If you don't want to eat this, I will kill you" before grabbing Loulette and throwing her to the ground until the dog's head caved in, doing the same to his pet bird. Blanc gave Vacher a shovel to bury the animals before telling him to leave.

On 4 August 1897 Vacher tried to assault Marie-Eugénie Héraud gathering wood and pinecones in a field in Ardèche. She fought back and her screams soon alerted her husband Séraphin Plantier who came rushing to her aid. Although Plantier was of slight build and shorter than Vacher, he fought off the attacker and left with his wife to get police from the station. When Plantier returned with two officers, Vacher was sitting near a tree, playing his accordion. He was first charged with public indecency, for which he received a three month prison sentence. Vacher wrote extensively about his murders during his stay, attracting the attention of police. Despite their belief that they had apprehended the man responsible, the authorities had little evidence that Vacher was responsible for the series of murders. However, and with little apparent prompting, Vacher confessed to committing all eleven murders, saying, "I committed them all in moments of frenzy." On 26 January 1898, Vacher broke out of his cell and seriously injured the on-duty guard by battering him with a chair before he was subdued by other staff.

Insanity plea

After his arrest, Vacher claimed he was insane and attempted to prove it in a variety of ways. He claimed that a rabid dog's bite had poisoned his blood, causing madness, but later blamed the quack cure he received for the bite. He also claimed he was sent by God, comparing himself to Joan of Arc. Despite his protestations, he was pronounced sane after lengthy investigations by a team of doctors that included the eminent professor Alexandre Lacassagne. He was tried and convicted by the Cour d'Assises of Ain, the departement where he had murdered two of his victims, and was sentenced to death on 28 October 1898. Vacher was executed by guillotine at dawn two months later, on 31 December 1898. He refused to walk to the scaffold under his own power and was dragged to the guillotine by the executioners.

Victims

A list of Vacher's known victims.

• 19 May, 1894 in Beaurepaire: Eugénie Delhomme (21), silk factory worker (some sources describe her as also moonlighting as a sex worker)
• 20 November 1894 in Vidauban: Louise Marcel (13), shepherd
• 12 May 1895 in Étaules: Augustine Mortureux (17), shepherd
• May 1895 in Tassin-la-Demi-Lune: Claudius Beaupied (14), shepherd
• 24 August 1895 in Saint-Ours: Mme Morand (68), farmer
• 31 August 1895 in Bénonces: Victor Portalier (16), shepherd
• 10 Sepember 1896 in Busset: Marie Moussier (née Lorut, 19), shepherd
• 21 September 1895 in Saint-Étienne-de-Boulogne: Pierre Massot-Pellet (14), shepherd
• 23 September 1895 in Truinas: Aline Alaise (16), shepherd
• 1 October 1896 in Varenne-Saint-Honorat: Rosine Rodier (14), shepherd (some sources mistakenly identify the victim as her 13-year-old brother Alphonse, whom Vacher had planned to attack, but relented due to the arrival of other workers)
• 19 June 1897 in Courzieu-la-Giraudière: Pierre Laurent (14), shepherd

During his trial, Vacher was also accused of the following murders:

• 26 June 1888 in Joux: Unidentified woman (35)
• 1 July 1888 in Chambérat: Clémence Grangeon (14)
• Unknown date between 11 April and November 1889 in Moirans: Augustine-Mélanie Perrin (23)
• 29 September 1890 in Varacieux: Olympe Buisson (9)
• 6-7 December 1894 in Châteaudouble: Jean Honorat (75) and Marianne Perrimond (71), husband and wife (possibly committed with an accomplice)
• 22-23 July, 1895 in Chamblet: Mme Renaud (64)
• 22 September 1895 in Four: Madeleine Martelât
• 24 September 1895 in Arrondissement of Die: Unidentified woman (18-20) (admitted by Vacher in court)
• May-June 1896 in Tain: Unidentified man, vagrant
• 18 March 1897 in Belfort: Adrienne Reuillard (6-12)
• 5 April 1897 between Vienne-le-Château and Binarville: Thérèse Ply (19), woodworker
• 11 April 1897 in Les Haïes: Geneviève Heymein-Benoît (née Cadet, 68)
• 1 May 1897 in Chaumont-la-Ville: Jeanne-Elise-Clémentine Henrion (14), seamstress

In addition to Louise Barant, Vacher was alleged to have made the following murder attempts:

• 1 July 1888 in Joux: Unidentified female sherpherd (occurred after the Grangeon murder)
• 17 May 1894 in Roches: Victorine Gay (née Gueyfier, 55), gardener
• 18 May 1894 in Roches: Mme Eydan, gardener
• 19 May 1894 in Roches: Mélanie Pallas (née Jay), gardener
• 31 March 1895 in Saint-Fons: Antoinette-Augustine Marchand (28), saleswoman
• 26 April 1897 in Graffigny: Léonie Soyer (18), glovemaker
• 21 July 1897 in Darbres: Marie Vantalon (28), Henri Marnas (8) and Louis Delhomme (14), shepherds

American newspapers would somewhat exaggerate Vacher's killings, claiming the number of victims to be as high as 38. They also attributed the murder of a French nobleman, named only as the "Marquis de Villeplaine", who had fallen victim to a fatal robbery during a park walk near the French-Spanish border, to Vacher. After his execution, it was widely reported by the same sources that Vacher was a self-admitted anarchist and his murders related to his "oppos[ition] to society, no matter what form of government may be [sic]".

Legacy

Vacher's place in French social history is similar to Jack the Ripper's place in British social history.

In popular culture

• In 1976 French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier made a film called Le juge et l'assassin (The Judge and the Murderer) that was inspired by Vacher's story. The name of the murderer, played by Michel Galabru, is slightly changed into "Joseph Bouvier" (in French, the words bouvier and vacher describe the same profession, herdsman).
• In the 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, in a private dialogue with her husband Port, the character Kit Morseby says of the Eric Lyle character: "He looks like a young Vacher".
• In the episode "Probable Cause" of the TV series Castle, serial killer 3XK uses Vacher's name as an alias.
• In the film Psychopathia Sexualis Vacher is the first case study of a sexual mental illness presented.
• In the video game Genshin Impact, the character "Vacher" (Marcel) during the Fontaine Archon Quest is inspired by the real-life Vacher.

See also

• List of French serial killers

General bibliography

• Lacassagne, Alexandre, Vacher l'éventreur et les crimes sadiques, 1899 On-line (French)
• Bouchardon, Pierre, Vacher l'éventreur, Albin Michel, 1939, 252 p.
• Deloux, Jean-Pierre, Vacher l'éventreur, E/dite Histoire, 2000 (1995), 191 p. (Main source used to improve this article)
• Garet, Henri and Tavernier, René, Le juge et l'assassin, Presses de la cité, 1976, 315 p.
• Kershaw, Alister. Murder in France, Constable, London, 1955, 188 p.
• Lane, Brian. "Encyclopedia of Serial Killers", Diamond Books, 1994.
• Koq. La peau de Vacher, Edilivre, 2013, 404p.
• Starr, Douglas: The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2010. ISBN 978-0-307-26619-4 [hard cover, 300 p], ISBN 978-0-307-59458-7 [eBook]

External links

• Media related to Joseph Vacher at Wikimedia Commons