Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [46]
He took on a partner, Pierre Victor Avril, a former carpenter. “I was the intelligence, Avril the arm,” Lacenaire wrote later. 6 He requested a bank to send a messenger to a certain address, giving a false name. When the messenger arrived, however, the porter of the building told him that no one of that name lived there. On Lacenaire’s second attempt, no messenger showed up.
Coming up with a new plan, Lacenaire remembered a former friend from prison, a man named Chardon, who now lived with his bedridden mother. Unwisely, he had once told Lacenaire that she had saved a hoard of money. One December morning, Lacenaire and Avril knocked at Chardon’s door. Chardon, too trusting, allowed his former prison mate inside. Without a word, Lacenaire stabbed him with a dagger and Avril used a hatchet to deliver a deathblow.
A low moaning in the next room attracted Lacenaire’s attention. It was the bedridden mother, and the two thieves showed her no more mercy than they had the son. Looking for hidden valuables, they overturned the mattress on which she was lying, suffocating her. They ransacked the house, taking everything that looked valuable. Despite what Chardon had said, the loot was worth no more than seven hundred francs — far less than they had expected. But the killers celebrated what they considered a “perfect crime” by washing off the evidence of their crime at a Turkish bath, followed by a dinner at a fancy café.
Emboldened by this success, Lacenaire struck again two weeks later, trying the messenger scam again. Posing as a M. Mahossier, he appeared at a bank and arranged to cash a forged check. The teller told an eighteen-year-old messenger named Genevay to take three thousand francs to the address Lacenaire had given. Because Avril was not available, Lacenaire’s accomplice this time was a man named François, also known as Red Whiskers. After the messenger put the bank notes on the table and turned to leave, François attacked him from behind with a file. He was as inept as his partner, failing to kill Genevay, whose screams brought neighbors to the scene. Both of the would-be robbers fled.
Genevay survived and gave the police a description of his attackers. He noted that Mahossier had a copy of Rousseau’s Social Contract hanging out of his pocket. Vidocq’s successor at the head of the Sûreté, M. Allard, assigned his chief inspector, Paul-Louis-Alphonse Canler, to the case. 7 Canler had won a reputation as the Sûreté’s best detective because of his uncanny ability to read the minds of criminals and because he was incredibly persistent. He was a shoe-leather detective at heart — which he had to be: a social scientist named Honoré-Antoine Frégier had published a lengthy work in 1840 in which he claimed some sixty-three thousand criminals were living in Paris — nearly 10 percent of the population. 8
Canler assumed that Mahossier was not the real name of the man he was after, but he also knew that criminals often used the same alias many times. So he began to visit lodging houses, looking through registers for the name. After a tedious search, he found a seedy place with the name Mahossier in the register. The concierge’s description of him sounded like the man who had stabbed the bank messenger — a distinguished-looking man with a high forehead, silky mustache, and smooth manner. She also remembered that he had stayed there once before under the name Bâton.
Canler interviewed five hundred people before he found a thief named Bâton and arrested him, even though he did not match the description of Mahossier. The inspector clung to his theory that following the trail of names would lead him to the culprit. Bâton, given plenty of brandy during questioning, revealed that he knew someone who fit the description of the man Canler was looking for — a nattily dressed man with a high forehead. Bâton knew him as Gaillard, Lacenaire’s real name.
Canler went back to checking the registers of flophouses. When he found a Gaillard, the innkeeper remembered that the man in question had left some papers behind.