-- Lacassagne studied tattoos as clues to the milieu of criminals. "Tattoos had the added advantage of revealing something about the victim's character -- occupation, politics, sexual proclivities." Lacassagne referred to them as "speaking scars." (Ch. 6)

 -- Identifying deceased humans through their teeth has a long history. It works because dentists keep records and enamel is hard. "One of the early cases of forensic dentistry occurred when Paul Revere, who worked as a dentist as well as a silversmith, identified his friend Dr. John Warren, killed and buried during the Revolution, by an artiificial tooth Revere had implanted" (Ch. 6).

--people regularly lied,

-- but on-the-spot evidence never lied. Even tattoos were seen by Lacassagne as "speaking scars."

"On February 14, 1924, at the age of eighty-one, he left for his usual morning walk. He was approaching one of the bridges over the river when a car careened around the corner and struck him. ... (Lacassagne finally succumbed) on September 24" (Postscript). May Alexandre Lacassagne rest in peace and undying honor!

-- (1) This book is the serious, scholarly case study of Joseph Vacher (1869 - 1898). At age 29 Vacher was found guilty and guillotined for one murder committed late in the stream of eleven that he had confessed to. Styled by the press of France as "The Killer of Little Shepherds," Vacher probably also  committed another 14 unadmitted murders of young boys, girls and women between 1894 and 1897.

The study presents a detailed biography of France's greatest murderer since Joan of Arc's comrade in arms, Baron Gilles de Rais (1404–1440). Joseph Vacher, the youngest of 15 children, was both a devout religious fanatic and a compulsive sexual predator and sadist. In one ten month period he was committed to two separate French insane asylums, declared cured and released. A contemporary forensic medicine specialist argued that if Vacher had been captured and tried for the very first murder committed after his second release from an asylum, he would certainly have been found insane for a third time and then returned for further medical treatment. This outcome is what Vacher strove for at his trial. But he failed to persuade a jury that he was insane.
 
-- (2) THE KILLER OF LITTLE SHEPHERDS begins as a fast-paced case study of a serial killer. But its author, Boston University Professor of the history of science, Douglas Starr, did not think that the case of Joseph Vacher could stand alone on its own literary merits. Readers, especially non-French readers, needed to know much more about France between 1870 and 1900 than the bare facts of Vacher's short life.

France was a country ravaged by unemployment and terrorized by wandering "vagabonds," such as former army sergeant Vacher, moving from place to place with the seasons in search of work. 

It was also "la belle époque," in France. In Italy, England, the United States and elsewhere this was a time of intellectual fervor, especially in regard to understanding the mentality and behavior of criminals. The Medical School of the University of Lyon (then still France's second largest city, since surpassed by Marseille) was dominated by one genius. The glory of both medical school and Lyon was Doctor Alexandre Lacassagne (1843 - 1924).

If Vacher is the villain of THE KILLER OF LITTLE SHEPHERDS, then Lacassagne is its towering hero. He shares the book's limelight with Etienne Fourquet, the young prosecutor who drew heavily on contemporary forensic science to build a psychological profile of Joseph Vacher and to bring Vacher to trial. 


Lacassagne and his great Italian rival Professor Cesare Lombroso contended for their ideas for decades. Lombroso was a determinist: criminals were born not made. Lacassagne believed in freedom of the will and argued that understanding criminal behavior was a complex undertaking. A criminal was not genetically pre-determined. He or she did what they did in part influenced by the seasons of the year when  crimes were commited,  through childhood traumas, through associates and even tattoos! Lacassagne's testimony at Vacher's trial was decisive in convincing the jury that, though severely troubled, Vacher was responsible. He had a conscience and Joseph Vacher was not predetermined to assault his innocent victims.

(1) the sober case study of a serial killer

(2) brilliantly embedded in the leading crime theories and personalities of the age, with interdisciplinary leadership provided by seminal thinkers in Lyon, France. 

(By the way, this is a good place to make it clear that beyond 50% of the book's text is detail, vast detail, about minutiae in the evolution of hard and soft sciences bearing on crime and criminal behavior. We see Lacassagne and other researchers finding clues in tattoos, bones, footprints, putrefaction, poisons, brain indentations, dust and mud found on clothing and on and on and on.)

-- This allowed me to advance along the trail of the first American consul in Lyon, James Fenimore Cooper
 
-- and to deepen my knowledge of two local heroes: Professor Alexandre Lacassagne and early French explorer of Guinea in Africa, Olivier de Sandeval (I will shortly review a novel about Sandeval, THE KING OF KAHEL.)

-- I saw the elegant building that once housed the now closed American cosulate.

-- I also saw the medical school dominated by Lacassagne for decades.
 
-- I crossed the Avenue Lacassagne. I strolled along a favorite walk where he was struck by a car in 1924.
 
-- I did not see the Saint-Paul Prison where serial killer Vacher was brought for interrogation.

-- But I did come to see how fitting it is that the permanent world headquarters of "The International Criminal Police Organization - INTERPOL" was transferred in 1989  from Saint-Cloud outside Paris to Lyon. For INTERPOL epitomizes Lacassgne's and his "Lyon School" of forensic science's conviction that crime solving is by teams, not bylone wolves.