The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science
Search in google:
A riveting true crime story that vividly recounts the birth of modern forensics.At the end of the nineteenth century, serial murderer Joseph Vacher, known and feared as “The Killer of Little Shepherds,” terrorized the French countryside. He eluded authorities for years—until he ran up against prosecutor Emile Fourquet and Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, the era’s most renowned criminologist. The two men—intelligent and bold—typified the Belle Époque, a period of immense scientific achievement and fascination with science’s promise to reveal the secrets of the human condition. With high drama and stunning detail, Douglas Starr revisits Vacher’s infamous crime wave, interweaving the story of how Lacassagne and his colleagues were developing forensic science as we know it. We see one of the earliest uses of criminal profiling, as Fourquet painstakingly collects eyewitness accounts and constructs a map of Vacher’s crimes. We follow the tense and exciting events leading to the murderer’s arrest. And we witness the twists and turns of the trial, celebrated in its day. In an attempt to disprove Vacher’s defense by reason of insanity, Fourquet recruits Lacassagne, who in the previous decades had revolutionized criminal science by refining the use of blood-spatter evidence, systematizing the autopsy, and doing groundbreaking research in psychology. Lacassagne’s efforts lead to a gripping courtroom denouement. The Killer of Little Shepherds is an important contribution to the history of criminal justice, impressively researched and thrillingly told. The New York Times - Elyssa East …absorbing historical true-crime…Starr could easily have used Vacher's killings as a means of driving home a point about his hero, Lacas-sagne, and left it at that. He is good enough, though, to show the impact these murders had on the victims' families and on the villages where they took place, and to demonstrate how they prompted larger questions about the origins of criminality for La-cassagne and his colleagues…[Starr's] thought-provoking journey, through the strange underbelly of a vividly rendered France, lingers in the reader's memory.
Author's NotePART ONE CRIME1 The Beast 32 The Professor 153 First Kill 284 The Institute of Legal Medicine 365 The Vagabond 506 Identity 607 The Oak Woods 728 The Body Speaks 829 The Crime in Benonces 9010 Never Without a Trace 9811 In Plain Sight 11012 Born Criminal 11913 Lourdes 133PART TWO PUNISHMENT14 The Investigating Magistrate 14115 The Interview 15116 Professor Lacassagne 16717 "A Crime Without Motive?" 17018 Turning Point 18019 The Trial 19020 Judgment 20321 A Question of Sanity 214PART THREE AFTERMATH22 The Mystery of a Murderer's Brain 22723 Postscript 237Epilogue: The Violent Brain 242Acknowledgments 251Notes 255Bibliography 283Index 289
