Crimes in Lyon. Serial murders: the savagery of Lyon’s “Jack the Ripper” with its 30 victims

Joseph Vacher, nicknamed “the Jack the Ripper of the southeast”, is considered the first publicized serial killer in France.

The man who sowed terror in the greater Lyon region between 1894 and 1897, born in Isère near Lyon and also called “The Shepherd Killer”, is the author of around thirty to around fifty murders in the region. . He showed a savagery and a chilling composure.

A true “crime backpacker”

Long before news channels, social networks and streaming platforms, France was already hanging on the atrocities of a serial killer. Joseph Vacher, born in Beaufort, was released from a psychiatric asylum in Jura in 1894 before beginning his crazy criminal series.

This French Jack the Ripper operated mainly in the Lyon region, but wandered in search of prey in several neighboring departments. This 19th century “backpacker of crime” also left traces in Isère, Var and Allier, Côte-d’Or, Savoie, Ain, Drôme, Ardèche, Haute-Loire and Rhône.

Isolated victims targeted

Reformed, this former army sergeant turned vagabond targeted isolated people, mainly women and children, but also often men. aged around fifteen years.

Nicknamed the “shepherd killer”, he also attacked staff working in small villages or on farms. A “psychophysiological, medico-legal and anatomical study” carried out at the time on the repeat offender explains in detail his modus operandi.

“He searches for and watches for isolated young girls or boys; like shepherds and shepherdesses […] He throws himself at his throat, which he first squeezes by strangulation, and which he then quickly cuts with the knife or rather the razor that he always carries with him; once and instantly defeated, he makes her undergo various mutilations: disembowelment, cutting of the breasts (if it is a woman), cutting of the testicles (if it is a man), then, at the height of excitement and paroxysm, he strikes again and at random the already mutilated corpse… and consummates the crime with rape,” writes the expert commissioned to work on the profile of the killer.

30 to 50 potential murders

The one who grew up with no less than fifteen brothers and sisters continues to travel the roads of a quarter of France, from Burgundy to the south of France and the Rhône valley. In total, between 30 to 50 murders were attributed to him over four years.

Among the fifty crimes of which he would end up being suspected, notably by the investigating judge Émile Fourquet, Vacher confessed to a total of eleven murders and an attempted rape, including the murder of a 14-year-old in Tassin-la- Demi-Lune and a farm servant of the same age in Courzieu-la-Giraudière, near Lyon.

During his trial at the Assize Court of Bourg-en-Bresse (Ain), he appeared “crazy” with eccentric behavior. He wears signs around his neck reading: “I have a bullet in my head” and shouting “Long live Jesus!” Long live Joan of Arc.”

Convicted of a single crime and sentenced to death

At the end of his three-day trial, he was found guilty of a single murder. The only assassination of Victor Portalier. The request for pardon from President Félix Faure is rejected.

The Jack the Ripper of the Lyon region is finally sentenced to death by the courts and guillotined in 1898 on the Champ-de-Mars in Bourg-en-Bresse.

His last words spoken in front of 2,000 onlookers were: “It’s fortunate that I got my hair cut,” according to the newspaper The Little Parisian.

Start of “profiling” of suspects and media coverage

This Vacher affair is above all an opportunity to implement the first “profiling” technique for a serial murder suspect.

In 1897, the vagabond was caught in the act of indecent assault and attempted to attack a farmer’s wife in Ardèche. After his conviction for this case, the investigating judge Émile Fourquet, who took office in Belley in Ain in April 1897, made the link with an individual who could correspond to the description of the “shepherd killer”.

The judge, who draws large pictures of several similar crimes, then appears to be one of the first French “profilers”.

The media coverage of the case and then the trial was also new at the time, which made Joseph Vacher the first French media serial killer. His judgment fascinates the local, national and even foreign press. The very serious New York Times devotes an article on the sentence of the trial in its columns on January 1, 1889.

Follow all the news from your favorite cities and media by subscribing to Mon -.