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The newspaper editors couldn’t have asked for a greater gift than being able to add the feared word “ANARCHISTS!” to their headlines. Even better, when Carouy’s photograph was shown to the bank messenger in his hospital bed, Caby mistakenly declared that it was the man who had shot him. Carouy was immediately named by the Sûreté as the head of the “motor bandit” gang and the mastermind behind the rue Ordener outrage.

Carouy himself, seeing his mug shot on the front page of every newspaper in Paris, felt a little aggrieved, for he had earlier turned down Bonnot’s offer to join in the caper, feeling that it would be too dangerous. Now he needed money to leave the country, and he had no way of getting it from the three actual thieves.

Carouy may have declined to participate in the bank heist, but his reflex was that of a habitual criminal: if he needed money, he would steal it. Along with a friend named Marius Medge, who had carried out robberies with him before, Carouy plotted what appeared to be an easy job. In the southern suburb of Thiais, Medge knew an elderly man who lived off rents from properties and reputedly kept large amounts of cash at home. His only companion was a seventy-two-year-old housekeeper. On the night of January 2, 1912, Medge and Carouy broke into the house, but things did not go as easily as they had expected. The old man unwisely resisted, and the crooks beat him to death with a hammer. To eliminate any witnesses, the burglars strangled his housekeeper as well.

Bertillon’s lab later found fingerprints at the scene that identified Carouy as one of the perpetrators of the crime. That meant — to both editors and the Sûreté — that the anarchist gang were no longer merely thieves but brutal murderers engaged in a crime spree.

Nevertheless, Carouy continued to elude capture. According to Ashton-Wolfe, Carouy had gone to extreme lengths to change his appearance: his “eyes were peculiarly small and round, and every police officer had been informed of this. Carouy sent a friend to buy a lancet, some cocaine, and a hypodermic syringe. When his skin was sufficiently numbed by an injection of the drug, the outer and inner corners of the eyes were slit and held apart by sticking-plaster until the slit skin was healed. The effect was extraordinary. His round eyes now appeared to be long and narrow.” 10

Meanwhile, the newspapers called for action and got it: ten days after the Thiais murders, Hamard was given another post. Replacing him as head of the Sûreté was Xavier Guichard, widely known as a tough and uncompromising police officer. (Many also thought him crude, partly because he had never advanced beyond elementary school.) Guichard ordered a series of raids on locations where anarchists were known to congregate, including newspaper offices and social clubs. Little useful information was turned up, but Guichard could point to “successes” such as a raid on a dance in Belleville: of the fifty people in the hall, twenty-nine were arrested on charges of illegally carrying firearms. None, however, could be tied to the robberies and murders.

Guichard got a break when he forced the still-hospitalized messenger Caby to look at photographs of some of the many known anarchists in Bertillon’s files. When the investigator turned up a picture of Garnier, Caby nearly fainted. This, he cried, was him — the man who had shot him. Hadn’t he already identified Carouy as the man? Yes, said Caby, but he was mistaken.

Luckily for Guichard, Garnier’s girlfriend, Marie Vuillemin, had been arrested in a raid on the offices of the new anarchist magazine Lorulot had founded, L’Idée Libre. Her apartment was searched, turning up signs that Garnier had lived there, but Garnier himself was nowhere to be found. Along with Bonnot and Callemin, he had gone to Belgium, where they stole another car, driving it to Amsterdam and selling it for eight thousand francs. So far, car theft was bringing in more money than bank robberies. But they were not discouraged.

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