The flock had strayed into the clover. It began merely with that: livestock to be rounded up, a comrade who failed to answer, a shepherd’s chore that the shepherd had abandoned. Twelve-year-old Jean-Marie Robin called out for Victor Portalier. Then he caught sight of blood upon the earth. The other herdsmen directed him to the rural constable, who followed the crimson traces into the juniper bushes. On August 31, 1895, at Bénonces, in the department of the Ain, sixteen-year-old Victor had ceased tending his beasts. His body bore the marks of a murder of extreme violence.
He was in the service of the farmer Berger, at the hamlet of Anglas. His mother had entrusted him to a child welfare society, which had placed him there three years prior. This boy, whom the case file depicts as well liked by all, was destined to become the focal point of a resounding trial. Yet two years would elapse before those capable of identifying him as a victim finally encountered the man they could recognize as his murderer.
The Wayfarer Lost to Sight
Several witnesses had noticed a stranger in the village. They recalled his garments, his satchel, his walking stick, but above all his face: a deformed mouth, a mark near the eye, a scar. His departure could be traced for a short distance. Then all scent went cold. The fields, roads, and woods that afforded him passage kept no register of travelers.
The examining magistrate of Belley, Émile Fourquet, refused to allow the dossier to wither away with this disappearance. Other crimes, in other departments, exhibited unsettling similarities. He applied himself to refining the physical description and dispatched rogatory letters to numerous public prosecutors' offices. The investigation had to travel as far afield as the murderer himself.
The man’s name was Joseph Vacher. The stages of his journey were pieced together only long after. He walked ceaselessly, laboured for a spell upon a farm, and took to the road once more; after committing a crime, he might already be far away while suspicion settled upon the stricken village. The judicial record exposes this dreadful asymmetry: the murderer possessed mobility, whereas rumour knew only the folk of the immediate vicinity.
At Beaurepaire, Eugénie Delhomme had been slaughtered in 1894. At Vidauban, Louise Marcel had perished that very same year. In 1895, the death of Augustine Mortureux, near Dijon, had brought accusations down upon individuals entirely innocent of the crime. One of them had even been committed to the indictment chamber before securing a dismissal of charges. Vacher would confess to these killings. His admissions did not merely attach a name to the prosecution; they lifted from innocent souls the label of murderer that their neighbours had already fastened upon them.
A Woman Able to Cry Out
The road came to an end in the Ardèche. On August 4, 1897, at Champis, Vacher attacked Madame Plantier. Her husband arrived on the scene accompanied by two other men. This time, the assailant had no leisure to complete his design. He was overpowered despite his furious resistance.
The arrest did not immediately reveal to the authorities the full measure of what they had just brought to a halt. A man had assaulted a woman; he was tried at Tournon and duly convicted. Yet his description answered to the one sought for the murder at Bénonces. Following the September verdict, he was transferred to Belley. The inquiries, scattered until then across the provinces, could at last converge upon a single prisoner.
Vacher began by denying everything. The witnesses from Bénonces identified him; he subsequently admitted to having killed Portalier, and thereafter other victims. The bill of indictment retained eleven confessed and verified homicides. That tally does not dispense with the need for precision: not all the crimes linked to his name were substantiated, and the trial before the Assize Court of the Ain concerned solely the murder of Victor Portalier.
One confession furnished proof of a peculiar nature. Vacher stated that he had murdered Claudius Beaupied, an adolescent whose death had gone entirely undetected. The body had been cast down the well of an abandoned farm near Tassin-la-Demi-Lune. The ensuing search resulted in the recovery of human remains. The magistrates were no longer merely facing a man recounting published atrocities; he was leading investigators to a victim they had never even known to seek.
The Crime Acknowledged, Responsibility Disputed
Vacher, however, intended to draw from his confessions a conclusion quite different from that of the prosecution. He claimed to be a diseased man, subject to fits for which he could not be held accountable. The matter had a genuine history. In 1893, after shooting at a young woman who had refused his hand in marriage and subsequently turning the weapon upon himself, he had been committed to an asylum. That assault had ended in a dismissal of charges on grounds of his mental state. He had then been discharged from the Saint-Robert asylum in April 1894, certified as cured.
The prosecution perceived in this sequence of events proof that a passing disorder had run its course. The defence, on the contrary, found therein every reason to scrutinize the prisoner’s condition with the utmost gravity. A bullet lodged in his skull, the lingering effects of his wound, and his confinement in the asylum were among the elements cited. Vacher added to these the tale of a rabid dog and a folk remedy administered to him in childhood; the medical experts dismissed this explanation.
Doctor Lacassagne and his colleagues concluded that he was fully responsible. Their reasoning emphasized the calculated preparation of the attacks, the deliberate selection of isolated victims, and the precautions taken in his flight. This expert consensus provided the prosecution with a formidable rebuttal to the prisoner’s protestations; it also rendered his passage through the asylums a cornerstone of the judicial debate. The issue before the jury was immediate and stark: whether this man could be held criminally answerable for the slaughter he had confessed to.
The trial opened on October 26, 1898. Over the course of three days, more than fifty witnesses were examined; ten medical men were called. Vacher appeared with his papers, his pencil, and written briefs intended to plead his cause. He brandished placards and repeatedly interrupted the proceedings. Étienne Martin, who chronicled the sessions for Lacassagne’s published volume, interpreted these displays as a calculated performance. That judgment belongs to the observer; the conduct he records demonstrates, at the very least, an accused man resolved to play an active part in his own trial.
Maître Charbonnier moved for a second psychiatric evaluation. The court initially reserved its decision until the conclusion of the pleadings, then rejected the motion, judging the examinations already performed and the guarantees afforded the defence to be entirely sufficient. The verdict resulted in a sentence of death.
On December 31, 1898, his appeal in cassation and his petition for clemency having been denied, Vacher was executed at Bourg. The account preserved by Lacassagne shows him still railing against the asylums and refusing to walk when the time came to lead him toward the prison yard. The man who had tramped along so many highways had to be carried to the scaffold.
At Bénonces, however, the story had never begun with him. It had begun with beasts straying through a patch of clover, and with a child calling out to another child. The trial had at last answered that summons. It could not bring back the boy who had watched over the flock.