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, young Joseph 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 Grenoble. While living with them, Vacher contracted syphilis and had to have his left testicle surgically removed six months following the diagnosis. He was evicted not long after by his brother-in-law due to his aggressive behaviour. At age 19, he was reported for the attempted rape of a 12-year-old boy in June 1888.

Army and attempted murder-suicide

Seeking escape from the intense poverty of his peasant background, he joined the army in 1892. 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. Vacher would later claim to have served as a non-commissioned officer with the Zouaves, which, while unsubstantiated, 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 Beaune, he fell in love with a young maidservant, Louise Barant, who was not attracted to him and spurned his advances. After his attempted suicide led to his dismissal from the military, he again tried to court her, even going so far as to propose marriage. Bored with him and uninterested in his offer, she mocked him and his proposal. This second slight also motivated violence: in a rage, Vacher shot Barant four times and then tried to commit suicide. Both attempts were unsuccessful—Louise was badly injured 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 (other sources name either the hospital or the town it is situated in as "Saint-Robert" or that he was transferred there later). Despite a one-year stay and a pronouncement from his doctors that he was "completely cured," Vacher began murdering his victims shortly after his release at the age of 25.

Murders

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. 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. 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 4 August 1897 Vacher tried to assault a woman gathering wood in a field in Ardèche. She fought back and her screams soon alerted her husband and son, both of whom came rushing to her aid. The men overpowered Vacher and took him to the 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 county 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 a sex worker)
• 20 November 1894 in Vidauban: Louise Marcel (13), shepherd
• 12 May 1895 in Étaules: Augustine Mortueux (17), shepherd
• 24 August 1895 in Savoie Departement: Mme Moraud (65), farmer
• 31 August 1895 in Bénonces: Victor Portalier (16), shepherd
• 1895 in unknown location: Two teenage boys (15 & 17)
• 21 September 1895 in Saint-Étienne-de-Boulogne: Pierre Massot Pellet (14), shepherd
• October 1896 in Allier Departement: Marie Messier (née Lorut) (19), shepherd
• Unknown date in 1896 in Varenne-Saint-Honorat: Rosina Rodier (14), shepherd
• 19 June 1897 in Brussieu: Pierre Laurent (14), shepherd

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 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