Free The Killer of Little Shepherds by Douglas Starr Page A

barn a few meters away. Just after that I met a man who was picking olives and I spoke to him, he can tell you.”
    Fourquet recognized the case of Louise Marcel. “That’s exact. And in Allier and Haute-Loire?”
    “In Allier, near Vichy, it was a young woman, about twenty years old; she was guarding her sheep in a field. I took her wedding ring, but I threw it away so as not to be taken for a thief. Regarding the affair in Haute-Loire, it was a girl, about fifteen years old or so. I cut her throat with a knife and then mutilated her. She also was guarding a flock in a field. That morning there was such a thick fog, I thought I would get lost in the woods if God had not been protecting me.”
    Two more cases had fallen into place: that of Marie Moussier, who had been wed shortly before her murder, and that of Rosine Rodier, whose brother Vacher had terrified during an encounter.
    “And in Saint-Étienne-de-Boulogne, in the Ardèche?” asked Fourquet, referring to the murder of Pierre Massot-Pellet.
    “If I’m not mistaken it was also a little shepherd; he could have been twelve or fourteen years old, guarding his flock like the others; it was in the mountains; I killed him next to a hut and I mutilated him.”
    “And now we arrive at the last one, near Lyon, in Courzieu,” said Fourquet. He was referring to Pierre Laurent, whose murder had first drawn Fourquet to the case.
    “That one … he was passing up the road with a pair of cows; it could not have been any later than midnight and I took him on the other side of the hedge. So … do you think I’ve been lying?”
    “No, Vacher, this time, I believe you.”
    Later, Fourquet tried to implicate Vacher in a crime that had taken place in 1890. Vacher denied it. The first time he ever killed, he insisted, was in May 1894, a month after his release from Saint-Robert. Vacher recalled that he was walking near the village of Beaurepaire when he came upon agirl of about nineteen or twenty years old. Overtaken by a sudden rage, he beat her in the head, strangled and stomped her, and then took a razor to her throat and chest.
    Fourquet had never heard of this murder. He sent a telegram to the authorities in Vienne, the administrative capital of the region that included Beaurepaire, asking if they had anything on file. Within hours, he received a telegram confirming that Eugénie Delhomme, a young woman who had worked in the silk mill, had been murdered in exactly the manner Vacher had described. A few days later, they went through the same process in uncovering the murder of Aline Alaise.
    The case exploded in the national press. 6 Under headlines such as THE SHEPHERD KILLER, VACHER THE RIPPER , and THE RIPPER OF THE SOUTHEAST , the story of the worst serial killer in centuries became a sensation, temporarily eclipsing the Dreyfus affair. Reporters flooded the small town of Belley, overwhelming the local telegraph office. People thronged around the courthouse, jostling to get a peek at the suspect and shouting abuse whenever they caught a glimpse of him. He would yell back, “Long live anarchy!” and “I am innocent before God!” 7 The situation became so volatile that Fourquet had a secret underground passage reopened so guards could bring Vacher to his office without setting off riots. Later, Fourquet took to interviewing Vacher in his cell, unarmed and unguarded in order to maintain the prisoner’s confidence.
    Reporters had a field day describing the protagonists, digging deep into their supply of sensational adjectives. “He is as repugnant physically as he is morally, this being whose face convulsively contorts and grimaces, this cripple whose defects repulse even the ugliest prostitutes,” wrote a reporter for
La Dépěche de Toulouse.
8 “His eyes shine with a savage flame,” wrote a reporter for
Le Petit Parisien.
9 Other correspondents described him as the “bloody wanderer,” “the ripper,” or simply “the monster.” The illustrated weeklies