Joseph Vacher
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Joseph Vacher (November 16, 1869, Beaufort, Isère - December 31, 1898, Bourg-en-Bresse, Ain) was a French serial killer, sometimes known as The French Ripper, or as L'éventreur du Sud-Est (The South-East Ripper) due to comparisons to the more famous Jack the Ripper murderer of London, England in 1888. His appearance became infamous for his scarred face, his accordion and his plain white rabbit-fur hat which he made himself.
Son of a illiterate farmer, young Joseph was sent in a very strict catholic school, where he was taught to obey and to fear God. In 1893, while in military conscription, he fell in love with a young maidservant, Louise, but she wasn't at all attracted to him. When army time was over, he tried to woo her and propose to her for the last time before coming back home, but she was bored by his quite ridiculous features and mocked him. In a rage, he shot her four times (she was badly injured, but survived) and then try to commit suicide. Shooting himself twice in the head accomplished nothing more than paralysing one side of his face (one of the bullet remained forever lodged into his skull) and putting him in a mental institution, in Dole, Jura. The medecine was absolutely worthless there, and the doctors set him free as "completely cured" one year later. Shortly after his release, at the age of 25, he began his murder spree.
During a three-year period beginning in 1894, Vacher murdered and mutilated at least 11 people (one woman, five teenage girls and five teenage boys), many of them were shepherds watching their flock on isolated fields. The victims were stabbed repeatedly, often disembowelled, raped and sodomized. Vacher was a drifter, simply moving from town to town, from Normandy to Provence, staying mainly in the South-East of France, surviving by begging or working on farms as a day laborer.
In 1897, Vacher tried to assault a woman in a field of Ardèche . She fought back and her screams soon alerted her husband and son who came rushing to her aid, overpowered Vacher and took him to the police. The authorities had little evidence that Vacher was responsible for the rash of murders, but their suspect soon confessed to everything.
Vacher claimed he was insane because a rabid dog bit him when he was a child (he wasn't bitten at all, just licked), then changed his mind and said that he was sent there by God, just like Joan of Ark, in order to make people think and understand the real virtues of faith. He was nonetheless judged sane by the Courts of Assize of Ain (department where he murdered two youngsters), sentenced to die on October 28th, 1898 and was executed by guillotine two months later, at the dawn of December 31st, 1898. He refused to walk towards the scaffold and was litteraly trailed by the executioners.
Though his suicide attempt worked as a catalyst for his murder spree, more recent studiesTemplate:Fact show two important things : first, he can legitimely be suspected of five murders committed between 1884 and 1890, three of them when he was only a teenager, years before he shot himselfTemplate:Fact. Second, his victim number is probably way more importantTemplate:Or than the eleven crimes he was judged for. He certainlyTemplate:Fct murdered 18 people, and can be without any doubtTemplate:Fact suspected of 31 murders, rapes and murder attempts.
In 1976, French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier made a film called Le juge et l'assassin (The Judge and the Murderer) inspired by Vacher's story (the name of the murderer, played by Michel Galabru, is slightly changed into "Joseph Bouvier". In French, "bouvier" and "vacher" are two words describing the same profession, a herdsman).
