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why police overlooked him while repeatedly jailing the wrong people as suspects. In addition to understaffing and jurisdictional limitations, they were hampered by their own
methods
of investigation. Despite the modern emphasis that Lacassagne and others placed on evidence, many police departments remained wedded to their old ways. Ever since Eugène-François Vidocq established the Paris Sûreté, the world’s first detective bureau, in 1812, the French police had relied on coercive methods to solve cases: cultivating informers, pressuring suspects (including the use of thumb screws), placing stool pigeons in jail cells, and using undercover police as agents provocateurs. 16 But those methods, questionable even on the mean streets of Paris, often proved useless among rural villagers.
    Vidocq, the world’s first celebrity detective, was worthy of a book—and indeed, Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo based characters on him. A thief, forger, and legendary escape artist, Vidocq began to cooperate with authorities as a jailhouse informer, thus shortening his sentences. Upon his release, he realized he could capitalize on his street knowledge and his friendships among criminals and became an
agent particulier
(special agent) for the Paris Préfecture of Police. He eventually formed his own bureau, called the Bureau de Sûreté (Security Bureau). Working in disguise, he and his squad of ex-cons would infiltrate taverns that criminals liked to frequent, gain their confidence, trick them into revealing information, and hustle them or their friends. Sometimes they wouldemploy an
indicateur—
an ex-con who would walk ahead of the police and tip his hat when he passed a suspect he recognized. They frequently hired
mouchards
(snitches) and
moutons
(sheep), who would inform from within prisons. When Vidocq published his memoirs in 1829, he became the forerunner of all celebrity detectives.
    Vidocq’s methods became standard throughout the countryside, and in many other countries, as well. Alan Pinkerton, the detective who formed the first U.S. detective agency, referred to himself as the “Vidocq of the West.” 17 But as effective as Vidocq’s methods seemed at the time, their inherent problems eventually became apparent. He ran up huge numbers of arrests, but many were false arrests or entrapments. Suspects who were pressured to confess sometimes told police what they wanted to hear, rather than the truth.
    If those methods were questionable in Paris, they proved virtually useless among the rural French. Law enforcement was relatively new in many parts of the countryside, and its representatives were seen as outsiders. Certain ordnances, such as those against illegal harvesting or poaching, did not earn respect. Peasants had their own ways of dealing with offenders, whether by individual or collective violence, or the kind of ongoing harassment targeted against Grenier, Bannier, and others. To them, the law was something to avoid, or perhaps to manipulate as a way to settle grudges.
    Vacher profited from it all. It was the rare magistrate who would detect a pattern, or could imagine that one man would commit so many crimes.
    Sexual murderers, of course, were not completely unheard-of. In the decade prior to Vacher’s rampage, Jack the Ripper had murdered and mangled five prostitutes in London. The crimes were horrific, but people could console themselves with the fact that the victims belonged to a disgraceful profession and all lived in a single small neighborhood. There had also been monsters in France, such as Louis Menesclou, who in 1880 lured a four-year-old girl into his apartment in Paris and then raped and strangled her. Part of his notoriety was due to the fact that the police broke in just as he was in the act of burning the little girl’s body; one of her severed arms was protruding from his pocket. But that was a single incident. There was also Pierre Rivière, who in 1835, in his cottage in Normandy, took a pruning