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In August 1897, Vacher assaulted a young woman in a field in Tournon. Her screams brought her brother and father rushing to her aid. They subdued Vacher and brought him to the local police. Called before a judge, Vacher made the shocking admission that he had slaughtered numerous people. In October, Vacher wrote a full confession for the judge, Émile Forquet, describing himself as suffering from urges he could not control. Vacher claimed that these urges came from a childhood bite by a rabid dog, which he said had poisoned his blood. A quack doctor’s treatment had made the condition worse. Vacher admitted that as his victims were dying, he drank blood from their necks. 44 Vacher argued that he was not culpable because his motive was neither theft nor vengeance.

The case became a national obsession. The scarred face of Vacher, wearing the white rabbit-fur hat he had made himself, holding the accordion he carried with him in his murderous travels, appeared in every newspaper in France for a year. The French people were already fearful of the many homeless, out-of-work vagabonds who roamed the land; Vacher gave that fear a terrifying face. Nursery rhymes were written about him to frighten children.

Excited by his growing fame, Vacher began to think of himself as a great man. He boasted that he was a scourge sent by God to punish humanity. “I am an anarchist, and am opposed to society, no matter what the form of government may be,” he declared. 45

His sense of publicity caused him to ask to be tried separately for each murder in the territory where it was committed. He would agree to discuss his crimes only if the interviewer published his words in one of the leading French newspapers.

The full story of his crime spree will never be known. He began to boast of more murders as he recalled them. When investigators checked his new stories, they found corroboration — and bodies. Corpses were discovered in the midst of thickets and in abandoned wells. Vacher was quoted as saying, “My victims never suffered for, while I throttled them with one hand, I simply took their lives with a sharp instrument in the other.” 46 In fact, it appeared that after Vacher attacked and stunned his victims, he often experienced a frenzy in which he brutally slashed and mutilated them.

These seemingly insane rages were followed by cunning attempts to elude capture. In one case, he killed a shepherd boy and walked away. Soon he was overtaken by a gendarme on a bicycle, who asked him for identification papers. Vacher showed his discharge papers as a noncommissioned officer of a regiment of the Zouaves. “Why, that is my old regiment,” exclaimed the gendarme. “I am hunting for a man who has just cut a boy’s throat. Have you seen any suspicious characters?”

“Oh, yes,” answered Vacher. “I saw a man running across the fields to the north about a mile back from here.” 47

In January 1898, Vacher showed he was still capable of murderous rages. The warden of his prison unwisely allowed himself to be alone with Vacher, who nearly beat him to death with a chair. The warden’s screams brought other guards to his rescue.

Judge Forquet retained jurisdiction in the case and assigned a team of doctors, led by Alexandre Lacassagne, to examine the defendant. The panel was asked to decide whether Vacher was sane enough to stand trial. A strong case could be made against that, because of his earlier stay in an insane asylum. Lacassagne had been interested in the Jack the Ripper murders of the 1880s in England and had written a monograph on what the photographs of those crime scenes revealed. Now, studying Vacher allowed him to apply modern theories of the human psyche to a serial killer.

Lacassagne and his panel spent five months examining the defendant’s behavior, interviewing him and those who had known him. Vacher had a history of “confused talk,” spells of delirium, and persecution mania. He was openly delusional at times and even went into mad rages when seen by the panel. Neighbors recalled him torturing and mutilating animals as a child. During his military