Alexandre Lacassagne (public domain photo, Wikipedia)
The town of Cahors is located in the western region of southern France. Surrounded by steep limestone hills, the town rests near the foot of the Pyrenees Mountains and dates back to Roman times. Cahors includes a variety of important and historic monuments, including Roman walls, a historic city center, the famous Saint Etienne Cathedral and the Valentre bridge (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). It is here in this picturesque and historic place that, on August 17th 1843, Alexandre Lacassagne, one of the most important names in the world of forensics, was born.
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| Valentra Bridge (picture courtesty of Leon Petrosyan and Wikipedia) |
Lacassagne was the principle founder of the field of criminal anthropology and as such was keenly interested in the many ways in which science could be used to study criminals and their behaviors. He was also interested in discovering ways to use science to help solve, as well as prevent, crime.
After attending military school in Strasbourg, Lacassagne enlisted in the military and served in North Africa, as a military physician and surgeon in both Tunis and Algiers. It is while serving in these theaters that he first became interested in forensic science.
In 1878 Lacassagne was discharged from military service. In that same year, he wrote the textbook, Precis de Medicine Legal (Summary of Forensic Medicine), which both solidified his reputation in the field and caused him to be invited by the University of Lyon to become professor of forensic medicine.
During the 1880's Lacassagne spent many hours in the town mortuary, studying and recording descriptions of the specific changes the human body goes through after death. For example, he described the phenomenon known as livor mortis, also known as lividity, which is the fourth stage of death. This phenomenon helps coroners and investigators to learn exactly when death of the human body has occurred.
Later in that same decade, Lacassagne achieved new levels of recognition as he helped to solve two cases of murder in the year 1888 and 1889, using techniques which he himself had helped to discover and develop.
The first case involved matching a bullet to a gun that was suspected of being the murder weapon used to kill Claude Moiroud, a seventy-eight year old man. When Lacassagne inspected the bullets which came from the victim's body, he noted there were seven distinct, spiral grooves carved into them. In the course of the murder investigation, a suspect, a young man named Echallier had been located and a search of this man's residence turned up a gun which had been hidden beneath some floorboards. To confirm his suspicions that this was in fact the murder weapon, Lacassagne had the gun test fired with a brand new bullet. When he compared the bullet from the test firing and the bullet from the dead man, he noted that the grooves made by the gun were identical on both bullets. This caused Lacassagne to conclude that the gun which had been found under the floorboards was in fact the murder weapon and that the owner of the gun, the man who was the prime suspect, was in fact the murderer. It is believed that this is the very first instance of this particular technique being used to help catch a murderer and it has become a standard practice, whenever possible, in the course of a murder investigation that involves the use of a firearm.
The second case involved attempting to identify the badly decomposed corpse of a man which had been discovered rotting in a canvas sack, located in some bushes along a country road approximately 10 miles outside of the town of Lyon, France. The body had been found in the month of August of 1889 near an old, empty cargo trunk. The trunk itself was bloody and smelled of rotting flesh which caused investigators to conclude that the body of the man had initially been inside the trunk for some time. This same trunk also had shipping labels pasted on it, indicating it had been on a train which had originated in Paris, with a destination of Lyon, arriving near the end of July of the same year.
The opportunity to examine the corpse was given to Paul Bernard, a former student of Lacassagne. After examining the corpse, Monsieur Bernard concluded that the man had been strangled to death. As this was all that Bernard was able to discover about the dead man, the body was then buried.
While this was occurring, a search was being conducted in Paris by assistant Police Superintendent Marie-Francoise Goron for a man named Toussaint-Augssent Gouffe, a bailiff who had gone missing at approximately the same time that police in Lyon had discovered the corpse in the trunk. When Goron learned of the case in Lyon, he requested that the body be exhumed from its' grave and sent immediately to Lacassagne for additional examination; as it was believed the body was that of Gouffe.
After Lacassagne received the corpse, he performed an exhaustive examination, similar to what would be done by a modern-day forensic anthropologist. He first had all the flesh removed from the skeleton so he could examine it more closely. As he gazed over the bones he made a number of crucial observations. First, he noticed a defect in the right knee, a deformation that made him believe the man must have walked with a pronounced limp. Next, he estimated the man's age at time of death - fifty years by Lacassagne's calculations. Finally, he examined a hair sample extracted from the dead man's scalp. He then compared his findings with what was known of Toussaint-Augssent Gouffe. Gouffe, it turned out, was 49 years of age when he went missing. It was also determined that Gouffe did, in fact, walk with a noticeable limp on the right side. Finally, upon examining hair samples from Gouffe's hairbrush, they were found under a microscope to be an exact match to the dead man's hair. Upon these findings, Lacassagne confirmed that the dead man, whose badly decomposed corpse had been found along the side of the road, ten miles outside of Lyon, stuffed in a canvas sack like so much trash, was the body of the bailiff from Paris, Toussaint-Augssent Gouffe. Upon the arrival of Superintendent Goron and a group of his officers at Lacassagne's laboratory, the criminologist pointed at the skeleton, and announced, "Messieurs, I present you with Monsieur Gouffe."
During the 1890's, Lacassagne began delving into other areas of forensic science. One of his interests involved the action of blood droplets as they were deposited at the scene of a crime and he is thought to be the first forensic scientist to formally study blood spatter patterns and their relation to the commission of crime.
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| Photo of Joseph Vacher (public domain via Wikimedia) |
Joseph Vacher (The French Ripper) or "L'éventreur du Sud-Est" ("The South-East Ripper")
In 1897, a man by the name of Joseph Vacher was brought into the local police station. He had been apprehended after attacking a woman who was out collecting wood in a field in the town of Ardeche. She had fought back and her screams for help had alerted her husband and son who came rushing to her aid.
Investigators discovered that Vacher had been spending his time wandering from town to town, living as an itinerant laborer and beggar. He had also, it turns out, been subject to violent fits of murderous rage. Under questioning, Vacher admitted that, from 1894 until 1897, he had brutally murdered and mutilated 11 people, many of whom were young shepherd out tending to their flocks in isolated areas of the country. He told investigators, "I committed them all in moments of frenzy." His murders did indeed look to be the work of someone who was possesed of something evil. His victims were stabbed repeatedly and often disemboweled, raped and sodomized.
In an attempt to cheat the guillotine, Vacher claimed that he was not sane at the time of the attacks and then attempted to provide proof of his insanity. He claimed he had been bitten by a dog who was infected with rabies, which gave him the deadly disease which in turn had driven him mad. Later he claimed it wasn't the rabies which caused his murderous rage, but the cure he had acquired from a doctor, who turned out to be a snake oil salesman. He also told his jailers that he had been sent by God, going so far as to compare himself to Joan of Arc, the nineteen year old French peasant girl who claimed she had visions and helped the French in their effort to be free of English rule.
In an attempt to determine if he was in fact not in his right mind at the time he committed his foul deeds, a call was put out to assemble a team of imminent doctors who could examine Joseph Vacher and his claims of insanity. Alexandre Lacassagne was asked to be a part of this group and he, together with the other doctors, set out to perform a set of in-depth interviews of the man who claimed to be the murderer of eleven innocent people.
For five long months, the team interviewed Vacher, attempting to gain insight into his true psychological reality at the time of the killings. At the end of that time, they came to the conclusion that Joseph Vacher was sane at the time of his killings and further, that he was simply putting on an act in an attempt to save his own life. Lacassangne went on to point out that Vacher was not insane while he was comitting his murders but was manifesting the signs of antisocial sadism.
The act was, ultimately, unsuccessful. On October 28th, 1898, Vacher was sentenced to death. Two months later, on December 31st, he was dragged to the guillotine and his head was cut off, ending the life of The French Ripper.
These interviews of Vacher, which Lacassagne and his colleagues performed, are believed to be the very first attempts at psychological profiling of a serial killer.
Alexandre Lacassagne, who pushed the boundaries of forensic science and helped usher in new areas of the same, died on September 24, 1924.
REFERENCES
BOOKS
Yount, Lisa - Forensic Science : from fibers to fingerprints - Chelsea House (New York)
ONLINE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livor_mortis
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stages_of_death
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahors
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Lacassagne
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Vacher
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc
- https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/lacassagne-alexandre
- https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/csi-1881-the-birth-of-forensics
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