They had purchased wine before returning to kill. The order, placed a few days earlier, furnished them with a pretext for being expected at Jean Dorier’s homestead; there was no need to force a door when one had contrived to have it unlatched from within. In this affair, violence did not always emerge beneath the guise of an unknown intruder. It could wear the face of a customer returning to collect what he had asked for.
The men who would come to be known as the Chauffeurs de la Drôme had grasped this economy of crime. A piece of intelligence gathered at the market, a boastful remark regarding a sum of money, an isolated dwelling, an old man reputed to hoard his savings: it sufficed thereafter to turn such knowledge into a snare. The term chauffeurs derived from the torture inflicted upon their victims to force them to reveal a hiding place. Terror broke those who had withstood mere interrogation. After their departure, there remained in the houses ransacked furniture, grievous wounds, and sometimes a corpse that no one would discover for several days.
The House with Two Exits
In Romans, on the Rue Pêcherie, Berruyer’s house served as a meeting place. It possessed two separate outlets, a convenient advantage for men who preferred not to account for their presence. Urbain Liottard, Octave David, Louis Berruyer, and Jean Lamarque came from disparate backgrounds, with trades plied fitfully, terms of imprisonment for some, and ties that tightened as opportunities arose.
Lamarque and David had become acquainted at Clairvaux. Liottard was familiar with the countryside and its petty traffic. Berruyer provided a rallying point. This association did not require that each man share the same history; it merely demanded that they agree upon what they hoped to extract from the lives of others. Around them circled receivers of stolen goods, informants, and associates whose respective roles must not be confounded.
The victims were chosen for what their assailants believed they knew of their wealth. Such beliefs could prove entirely mistaken. Yet this did not render the aggressors any less dangerous: when the coveted booty was wanting, their violence did not necessarily abate. They had nurtured an expectation; they made the person they plundered pay the price of its disappointment.
The Miller and the Hoarded Coin
Eugène Girard, a miller, routinely carried substantial sums. He was slain upon the road in 1907. Other persons were assailed in their own homes; some survived, while others did not. The judicial record would later connect these outrages, which their differing locations had at first dispersed among disparate inquiries.
At the Dorier homestead, in April 1908, the visit ostensibly concerning the wine ended in the slaughter of the father and his daughter, Élisabeth. The assailants departed with a paltry sum, without ever uncovering the hoard they had hoped to seize. The disproportion between their calculations and the outcome offers no consolation; it reveals only that the existence of two human beings could be sacrificed to an ill-verified rumor.
An accomplice, Auguste Finet, known as Romarin, was likewise murdered. The men feared he might speak. His body was concealed within a well, and effects belonging to him were employed to deflect suspicion elsewhere. The gang was thus no longer merely defending itself against its victims and the police; it had begun to protect itself from its own members. This was a pivotal juncture: complicity, which had once seemed to guarantee silence, was henceforth breeding quite as much peril as it averted.
Arrested for Less than Their Crimes
The investigation took a decisive turn through petty thefts and the resale of stolen goods. Liottard and Berruyer were apprehended; they implicated David in offenses they perhaps deemed less perilous than murder. Lamarque, having been forewarned, managed to flee. The men who had planned their expeditions in concert found themselves separated, each ignorant of what the others had already declared.
Local police officers, magistrates, and the mobile brigade from Lyon were compelled to bring the files together. What was novel was not that an investigator suddenly possessed infallible intuition; rather, it lay in the circulation of intelligence, the cross-referencing of locations, and the capacity to examine the same set of facts from multiple vantage points. Administrative boundaries, once so convenient for men on the move, were growing less protective.
David finally broke his silence in the autumn of 1908. The motives behind his decision remained a subject of dispute, yet the effect of his declarations was immediate: the inquiry altered in scope, and cases hitherto kept apart began to outline a single history. It was then necessary to verify, to confront, to rediscover the scenes and the bodies. Confessions did not dispense with the labor of proof; they merely made it possible upon an entirely different scale.
Return to the Houses
The judicial reconstructions brought the accused back to the very places where they had believed they left nothing behind. This time, they entered neither as customers nor as wayfarers. Men took notes, demanding that a position, a trajectory, a presence be precisely established. The familiar landscape became the theater of a confrontation between divergent accounts.
Romarin’s body was recovered in February 1909. The dead man whom his companions had sought to employ as a false scent rejoined the dossier in an entirely different capacity. His disappearance had aided their defense; his discovery contributed to its undoing. Objects, utterances, and locations no longer formed isolated fragments, but a coherent fabric that a simple denial could no longer unravel.
The trial of July 1909 resulted in four death sentences, including one in absentia against Lamarque. The charges were grave, the proceedings followed with avid fascination. It was nevertheless essential to distinguish the perpetrators of the crimes from those who had merely drifted into their orbit. A collective enterprise does not license the meting out of an identical guilt to every associate.
Three Deaths, a Fourth Destiny
Berruyer, David, and Liottard were executed at Valence in September 1909. The crowd, the illicit photographs taken despite restrictions, and the accounts of their final words prolonged the public curiosity. The utterances attributed to the condemned men varied according to the newspapers; their proliferation tells us as much about the appetite for spectacle as it does about what was truly spoken.
Lamarque was arrested the following year, retried, and sentenced to death in his turn. His punishment was commuted to hard labor for life. Time had sundered men whom the first verdict had appeared destined to unite in the selfsame end. This divergence did not diminish the crimes; it was a reminder of the decisive weight of legal appeals, executive clemency, and the political climate of the hour.
The house on the Rue Pêcherie remained standing. One might be tempted to seek an explanation within its walls, as though two exits were enough to engender a criminal gang. They had offered nothing more than a convenience. What had truly made the undertaking possible lay elsewhere: lives appraised solely by their savings, isolated neighbors, intelligence transformed into a weapon. The Doriers’ door had been opened for a delivery of wine. It was that ordinary trust, even before the stolen money, that the murderers had carried away.