Joseph Vacher
Joseph Vacher was a French serial killer, rapist, and necrophile who killed between 11 and 50 people, many of them adolescent farm workers, between 1894 and 1897. He was contemporarily called "le tueur de bergers", but upon his capture became more commonly known as "The French Ripper" or "L'éventreur du Sud-Est", owing to comparisons to the more famous Jack the Ripper murderer of London, England, in 1888. Vacher's scarred face and plain, white, handmade rabbit-fur hat composed his trademark appearance.
Early life
Family
Vacher was born as the second youngest of 16 children to illiterate farmer Pierre Vacher, in Pierre's hometown of Beaufort, a commune 5 kilometers from Beaurepaire and 60 kilometers from Grenoble. Joseph's mother, Marie Rose "Rosalie" Ravit from Lentiol, was Pierre's second wife after his first wife Virginie Didier, mother of four of Joseph's siblings, died in 1849, aged 30. Pierre and Rose became Joseph's parents at a relatively old age, being 59 and 44 years old respectively. Vacher had a twin brother, Eugène, who died in infancy on 15 July 1870, after choking to death on a loaf of bread that had been placed in the shared cradle by one of Vacher's older brothers.Childhood and adolescence
As a child, Vacher was already noted for his temper, having once shot at a group of other boys with his father's rifle for heckling him. Another incident occurred while working on the family farm, when he attempted to strangle his younger brother Louis because Vacher thought he was slacking off while helping him push a wheelbarrow.In the summer of 1884, a ten-year-old boy named Joseph Amieux was raped and murdered inside a barn in a neighboring town. Although the crime is blamed on vagabonds, then-14-year-old Vacher would later be suspected as having been the true perpetrator. At age fifteen, Vacher was sent to his widowed half-sister in Saint-Genis-Laval, who, overwhelmed by the task of caring for the temperamental youth, sent him to a very strict Marist Brothers school, 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 18, he was reported for the attempted rape of a 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 and possibly referenced other violent crimes he committed. After he was rejected by his brother, he lived in Lyon. In 1891, Vacher was briefly confined to an asylum for voicing persecutory delusions.
Military service
Seeking escape from the intense poverty of his peasant background, he joined the army in 1890, serving in the 60th infantry regiment. Early into his enlistment, Vacher was transferred from his initial living quarters because he kept stealing and hiding the clothes of fellow soldiers. Vacher was noted for his ill temper and aggressive behaviour towards his fellow soldiers. In his first year of service, Vacher made at least two murder attempts on superior officers. In the first instance, frustrated at slow promotion, infused with the grandiose belief that he was not receiving the attention he deserved, Vacher made threats against Barbier, a recently promoted corporal from his unit. When Barbier arrived in Vacher's barracks to calm him down, Vacher attacked him with a straight razor. After failing to injure Barbier, Vacher instead tried to kill himself by slicing his throat, in his first known suicide attempt. In another incident, Vacher tried to stab a sergeant fourrier with a pair of tailor's scissors. He was brought to the infirmary for overnights stays after both incidents, and following the second attack, he was heard screaming "Blood! I'll kill him! They don't know what I'm capable of!" In another incident, Vacher lunged at the adjutant sergeant Tissot with a razor when the latter confiscated a bottle of brandy from him. Despite these incidents, Vacher was promoted to corporal the same year.After reaching the rank of sergeant on 28 December 1892, Vacher was known to punish soldiers for infractions by physically beating them, once nearly strangling a man to death. One soldier, a private named Mathieu, attested that Vacher kicked him in the abdomen for failing to keep a steady marching pace and threatened to court-martial Mathieu. On the way to the barracks, however, Vacher took Mathieu aside and admitted that he would not have a proper case against Mathieu, asking him to forget about the threat. Reportedly, Vacher was also known to steal from civilians, for which he was never charged since the items were of low value.
Although he served for under three years, Vacher would later claim to have been 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 1897 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.
Attempted murder-suicide
In the spring of 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 if she betrayed " in the same breath. Vacher nevertheless attempted to move in with Barant and her parents, and failing that, he stalked her while she was at work. Privately, Vacher grew paranoid that Barant had become involved with his best friend Louis Loyonnet, a fellow soldier who was a childhood friend from the Marist school. 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. On 24 June 1893, Vacher got into an argument with Barant as she refused to acknowledge his letters and gifts. When she told Vacher that she rejected the marriage offer, Vacher grabbed Barant from behind and took out a kitchen knife, shouting "As good as today as tomorrow!", but fled without harming Barant when he heard someone approaching. The following day, on 25 June, Vacher purchased a swordstick, a revolver and ammunition, and entered Barant's residence in Besançon. Vacher told Barant to either accept his proposal or return the letters and gifts, but before she could answer, Vacher shot her three times in the head with the revolver. Barant was badly injured from a shot through the mouth, which broke off two front teeth, and grazes by both temples, but survived the shooting. Vacher then attempted suicide by shooting himself twice in the head. Vacher survived these injuries, instead 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. Barant received dentistry treatment and returned to work within two weeks of the shooting the following July.
On 7 July 1893, Vacher was confined to Saint-Ylle Psychiatric Hospital in Dole, Jura, where he often attacked staff, destroyed furniture, and wrote letters to officials, claiming he suffered abuse there. On 2 August, Vacher was discharged from the army in relation to the attempted killing, but still received a certificate of good conduct. He briefly escaped the facility on 25 August, but was caught a few weeks later, though 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 Barant by reason of insanity and 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. That same day, during a meeting with his former subordinate, Private Mathieu, Vacher stated that he had "tricked" staff into the release by claiming he had suffered only "temporary insanity".
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. Many of them were shepherds watching their flocks in isolated fields. The victims were stabbed repeatedly, often disemboweled, raped, and sodomized, the last 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 what is now the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. By most accounts, Vacher 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 would show 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 undertake pilgrimages to Lourdes to pray to the statue of the Virgin Mary.Authorities did not make a connection between any of the killings until the summer of 1897, when newly installed judge, who had investigated the murder of Augustine Mortureux in 1895, had judicial offices in départements across Southern France collect records of unsolved murders, having concluded that a single individual was behind some of the gruesome murders reported to him due to their shared mutilation and/or victim group.