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hook to his mother, sister, and brother. But nothing came close to what was now taking place. To imagine crimes on the scale of Vacher’s, one had to cast back to 1440, when the nobleman Gilles de Rais, one ofJoan of Arc’s brothers in arms, was hanged and excommunicated for the rape and murder of literally hundreds of children.
    The very scale and nature of Vacher’s crimes worked to his advantage. At the time of his arrest in Baugé, he had killed at least seven people and assaulted many more, in towns more than
six hundred miles
apart. One magistrate, Louis-Albert Fonfrède of Dijon, who started keeping a dossier on the killings, thought there might be a contagion of crime, what police would later call “copycat killings.” People saw implications of Pasteur’s germ theory everywhere, including the idea that criminality might be contagious. But the other magistrates would focus only on a murder in their particular jurisdictions.
    Vacher saw his time in prison as yet another sign of benevolence from above. After his release on April 6, 1896, he wrote a letter to a friend, alluding to his feeling that somewhere, somehow, he was fulfilling a destiny. “My program never varies. 18 Ever since my family cast me out I have continued to serve my unique master and let myself be blown by the winds of chance.”
    As he thought about his blessings, he decided to make a pilgrimage to a place where he could thank the Holy Mother for her protection along his strange and dangerous path. It would be a long journey, a walk of hundreds of miles, to the southern border of France. More people would die along the way, but Vacher knew that blessings would await him. He was going to Lourdes.

Part Two
Punishment
    If we now ask, “How should an Investigating Officer set about his work?” we can come to but one conclusion: “His whole heart must be set upon success.
”
    —Hans Gross,
Criminal Investigation
, 1906

Fourteen

The Investigating Magistrate
    On April 17, 1897, the town of Belley in the foothills of the Alps hired a new investigating magistrate named Émile Fourquet. Belley, home to about four thousand people, was a market town and the capital of the region of Bugey, in the
département
of Ain. It was a scenic but undistinguished location, a jumping-off place for an ambitious young magistrate who was trying to launch his career. Fourquet, thirty-five, had earned a law degree and had served in several minor judicial roles. He was a tall and lean man, with a bald head, a flowing mustache, and spectacles. A cleft chin suggested a stubborn strength; his eyes, magnified by the spectacles, conveyed a mixture of youthful curiosity and professorial detachment. On receiving the appointment, he “burst with joy,” he wrote in his memoir. “Examining magistrate! Manhunts! It was a dream of a lifetime; an opportunity to fulfill a burning passion.” 1
    Two months later, Fourquet was having morning coffee with some colleagues when prosecutor Jean Reverdet walked in with the day’s newspaper. “Look at what an extraordinary crime was committed the day before yesterday near Lyon,” he said. 2
    In an article entitled “Murder of a Shepherd,”
Le Lyon Républicain
reported that a thirteen-year-old shepherd had been “shamefully murdered, then defiled” in the hills several miles west of Lyon. 3 Pierre Laurent had been returning to his village from the fruit market on the night of June 18 when a killer attacked him. The murder was described as one of “unimaginable cruelty.”
    He first slit the boy’s throat with a knife, then he threw himself upon him … [and] sawed open the throat.… The miserable cur had no fear in satisfying his bestial passion, defiling the body and then mutilating it.…
    The little victim fell under the blows of an odious brute, who unfortunately has disappeared without leaving a trace of his passage.…
    Fourquet and the others knew that the killing had taken place in another jurisdiction, so it would