The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science by Douglas Starr

Author:Douglas Starr
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Non-Fiction, Criminal Procedure, Murder, Trials (Murder), Forensic sciences, Serial Murders, True Crime, Science, Europe, France, Law, General, Fiction, Legal History, 19th Century, Serial Killers, Serial murderers, Forensic Science, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780307266194
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2010-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

The Interview

It was a wild train ride from Tournon to Belley via Lyon.1 Two guards hustled Vacher into a second-class car that had been cleared of all passengers, locked the doors, and handcuffed him. During the two-hour journey from Tournon to Lyon, he jabbered about how he admired the police and how his sentence in Tournon had been overly harsh. Then, just as the train was passing over a bridge, Vacher bolted for an open window. He had almost cleared it when one of the guards latched onto his shins. For seconds, Vacher dangled over the void, the guard inside acting as a counterweight, until some passengers in a neighboring car came to help. Later, while waiting in the station in Lyon for the connecting train to Belley, he screamed anarchist slogans and cursed the vileness of the French bourgeoisie.

Now in Belley, he faced his inquisitor. For a long while, Fourquet peered at the suspect, comparing the features he saw with those on Vacher’s Bertillon card. Affecting a tone of friendly interest, he looked through Vacher’s bag and asked where he had acquired each of his possessions.

Hans Gross, the great Viennese criminologist, had written about the art of interrogation in Criminal Investigation. Gross dismissed the conventional practice of using pressure, or even torture, to force confessions. Instead, he favored employing the newly developing science of psychology—understanding and exploiting the suspect’s temperament and luring him into revealing information. To do that required a new kind of interrogator—not the shrieking intimidator, but one who displayed a certain “absence of passion,” wrote Gross.2 “The officer who becomes excited or loses his temper delivers himself into the hands of the accused.”

In relating the characteristics of a skilled interviewer, Gross could well have been describing Fourquet. The ideal person would be one “who knows men, who is gifted with a good memory and presence of mind, who takes pleasure in his work and zealously abandons himself to it.” Such a man “will not allow himself to be carried away” by anger. No matter how monstrous the crime, he must maintain his sangfroid; if necessary by “constantly repeating to himself these words, ‘It is my duty.’ ”

Gross saw the interview as a complex discussion, or series of discussions, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Before the session, he said, the interviewer should prepare by researching the suspect and the crimes in order to have the information readily at hand. The investigator should begin the discussion not with the crime, but with events early in the suspect’s chronology. Gradually, he should lead the suspect to the crime, “in the hope that he will begin to speak about it himself.” During the discussions, the interviewer should not seem threatening, but maintain a neutral, almost beneficial stance. The suspect should not get the impression of being forced to confess, but given the opportunity to unburden himself. The interviews should be long and repetitive. That way, the magistrate could use multiple versions of the same events to tease out the truth.

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