Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (9 page)

To Gilles de la Tourette, the absence of a body was conclusive: No cadaver, no truth to a preposterous hypothesis. Crime under hypnosis was a mere theory that would never burst out of the laboratory into the real world.

“And so,” Gilles de la Tourette boasted to the audience, “we hasten to declare our triumph.”

But Liégeois was not willing to go quietly. If Gilles de la Tourette
wanted to breathe fire, Liégeois was ready to match him.
“Would you want me to bring a somnambule on stage right now,” Liégeois challenged, “and have him submit to a strangling?”

The taunt brought the young doctors and students back onto their feet, heckling and pounding their chests, shouting:
“Me! Me! Take me!” It was a “deafening uproar,” Delbœuf recalled a year later. “My ears still ring at the memory.”

And so the theory of crime under hypnosis—unproved, unaccepted, little more than a hypothesis—left the scholars at a stalemate. With no real-life murder—no actual shooting, stabbing, or strangling, no blood, no body, no plea of hypnotic control—it was impossible to prove or disprove anything.

And yet, in an astonishing coincidence, the very next day, August 13, a ghoulish discovery nearly three hundred miles away set the stage for a final showdown, though none of the combatants at the time had any inkling. It would be months before an unidentified cadaver found on a riverbank outside Lyon inspired a real-world test for the theory of murder under hypnosis.

The odor arose in late July and thickened day by day until soon the village of Millery, some ten miles south of Lyon, was suffocating. The townsfolk wondered if Gypsies migrating along this desolate stretch of the Rhône River had dumped a dog carcass in the brambles. Or perhaps a massive fish kill spewed a stink up the embankment. By mid-August the air had turned so foul that a local dignitary, the Comtesse de Bec-de-Lièvre, fainted while riding in her carriage to church. Something had to be done. So the comtesse ordered her valet to get to the bottom of it, and he in turn hurried off to the local road mender Denis Coffy, who agreed to take on the task, promising:
“I’ll find what stupidity could smell this way.”

After delaying for two days, Coffy found the spot along the river where the stench was at its worst. Here the road climbed a knoll and the river dropped out of sight down a steep embankment. A guardrail protected carriages from tumbling over the precipice. The air, normally full of the scent of wildflowers, reeked of death.

Coffy made his way down the embankment, slashing through the brush with his billhook, until suddenly he was upon it: a lumpy sack lying at the base of an acacia bush in a frenzy of flies. Here was the source of Millery’s torment. Coffy took a tentative step forward, then froze—he needed help. He made an about-face, scrambled back up the embankment, and raced into town.

Later in the day, Coffy was again on his way down the embankment, this time accompanied by local policeman Jacques Mange. The surroundings were deathly quiet except for the brush crunching beneath their feet and the buzzing of the flies. With a swing of his billhook Coffy sliced opened the burlap sack, revealing what appeared to be a human head hidden under an oilskin hood. Poking gingerly
inside the sack, the men discovered a naked body tied up in a fetal position.

They dragged the sack up the embankment to the edge of the road. Then Coffy cautiously lifted the hood off the head, revealing a swollen, blackened face that was so decayed the eyes and nose were missing. Bloated lips bulged from a soiled beard and mustache. Having seen enough, the two men tossed handfuls of grass onto the corpse and hurried off to deliver the news.

At midnight Coffy was back at the scene again with the investigating magistrate Bastide and a young medical examiner from Lyon named Paul Bernard. Working under weak lantern light until 2:00 a.m., Bastide finally ordered Coffy to load the corpse onto a cart and take it to the morgue.

After a brief rest, Bernard began his autopsy at 8:00 a.m. A corpse in such an advanced state of decomposition presented a formidable challenge, particularly for an examiner of limited experience and skills. Alexandre Lacassagne, a professor of pathology at the University of Lyon and a giant in forensic medicine, would have applied his knowledgeable hand to the task, had he not been on vacation, and from the start the course of the investigation would have taken a radically different path. His former student Bernard did his best under the circumstances but his work was clumsy and imprecise. Making matters worse, the corpse by this time was barely intact. So fragile were the remains that hair and beard fell away at a touch. The internal organs—the spleen, kidneys, and bladder—had all been consumed by nature’s maw. Bernard jotted in his notes that the brain resembled semiliquid boiled meat.

After laboring for several hours, he guessed that the victim had been dead for three to five weeks, which placed the murder between July 9 and July 23. That put the death just beyond Gouffé’s disappearance on July 26.

Bernard estimated the dead man’s age at between thirty-five and forty-five; his weight, at about a hundred and sixty-five pounds. His height, according to Bernard’s best measurements, was five feet seven inches. The color of the victim’s hair was black, the medical examiner concluded, ruling out a possible match with the missing Gouffé, whose hair was chestnut brown.

Despite the body’s state of decay, Bernard surmised that the victim
was most likely a man of means, for the nails on both the hands and feet had evidence of a manicure. In the dead man’s stomach he found remnants of a final meal: partially digested pasta, carrots, and green beans. In a crucial dental clue, he determined that the first right molar in the upper jaw was missing. For the cause of death, Bernard concluded from two breaks in the larynx:
“I think that the victim was strangled by hand.” While the autopsy brought to light several important facts, the medical examiner was unable to attach a name to the body. The Millery corpse remained a mystery.

The next day, August 15, investigators received some new evidence. Alphonse Richard, a farmer, was hunting for escargot along the banks of the Rhône with his nine-year-old son when he stumbled upon a pile of wood scraps in a watery ravine. As he collected the pieces—about twenty in all—he realized they were the shattered remnants of a large trunk. At first he considered keeping them for firewood but was put off by their ghastly odor. He was aware of the corpse’s discovery, news of which had traveled quickly through town, and now wondered if this trunk could have played a role in the death. Soon the scraps of sycamore and fir were in the hands of the police.

Two days later, on the morning of August 17, Coffy was back at the site, resting against the guardrail, when he spotted a metal object on the ground. Stooping down, he picked up a key and took it to investigators who tried it in the trunk’s lock: a perfect fit. The key, the reasoning went, had been tossed away carelessly after the trunk was unlocked to dump the body; then the trunk had been hauled farther down the road where it was shattered, and the pieces were tossed over the embankment into the ravine where Richard found them.

But could that trunk, large as it was, carry a full-grown man? To find out, investigators ordered two craftsmen to rebuild it—no easy task given the scraps’ poor condition and the stench of death that still clung to them. The craftsmen, François Duveau and Jean Cormod, went to work under such suffocating conditions that at one point Duveau became ill. Yet the men soldiered on and had soon pieced together their puzzle: The scraps formed a trunk that was about three feet long, a little less than two feet wide, and just over two feet high. Large—but large enough for a man? To test it, Cormod climbed inside and pulled his legs up into a fetal position like the victim. Duveau then lowered the lid, closing Cormod inside and proving that
the corpse of a man not quite six feet tall with his legs drawn up could have been crammed into this undersized coffin.

One point was clear: The Millery corpse had once lain in the sycamore and fir trunk. But the Lyon investigators knew little else. The dead man had no name and his killer was on the loose.

Police departments in nineteenth-century France were notorious for their failure to communicate with each other. Often it was provincial pride: Local cops wanted nothing to do with Paris; they were reluctant to assist the capital and abhorred interference in their own cases for fear of being ridiculed for their bumbling ways.

Chief Goron, for his part, tried to plug the gaps. He was assiduous in informing the provinces of criminals on the run from Paris and of other police matters in which he had an interest. But that didn’t mean the provinces rushed to reciprocate. So Goron resorted to other means of information, and newspapers were his best source. To keep abreast of crimes in the hinterlands that could have a bearing on his own cases, Goron read every paper he could get his hands on from every corner of the country and around the world. He also kept a close eye on what came in from correspondents working for the Paris newspapers in other cities.

By mid-August, the Gouffé case had ground to a halt, and Paul Dopffer, the investigating judge, even admitted to
L’Écho de Paris
that he was discouraged. Goron was in desperate need of a break when two newspapers landed on his desk, each with a brief story about an unidentified body that had turned up in Lyon. The remains had been discovered on a bank of the Rhône River and delivered to the Lyon morgue. There was nothing in the reports to suggest that this corpse so many miles from Paris had anything to do with the Gouffé case. But Goron had a hunch.

He pressured Dopffer to telegraph his counterpart in Lyon for details but the judge demurred; he didn’t want to chase after another dead end—the investigation had already suffered enough embarrassment. But Goron persisted—his relentlessness was breathtaking—
and finally Dopffer caved. But the Lyon investigating judge Bastide gave Paris the quick brush-off: The Millery corpse, he said, could not have been more different from Gouffé and, furthermore, Lyon had its investigation well in hand and required no assistance from Paris.

Not one to be denied, Goron telegraphed a reporter who had written about the cadaver and soon had a full account of the case. He learned about the stench that overtook Millery in July, the body’s discovery in August, the inconclusive autopsy, and the recovery of the trunk. The victim, Goron read, was five feet seven inches tall, between thirty-five and forty-five years old, and had black hair; his larynx was broken in two places, suggesting death by strangulation.

One other piece of evidence intrigued Goron. A railway baggage label had been found on a scrap of the shattered trunk. It indicated that the trunk rode aboard an express train from Paris to the Lyon-Perrache railroad station. But the label was frustratingly incomplete. It was missing the last numeral on the date of the journey: 7/27/188—

Goron, however, had no trouble completing the label: To him, the conclusion was indisputable. Gouffé had disappeared on July 27; a few weeks later a rotting corpse and a smashed trunk showed up on a Lyon riverbank. In what year could that have occurred except 1889?

But Bastide and his cohorts in Lyon, including a special police commissioner named Ramonencq, were of another mind: They had decided, for reasons that baffled Goron, that the missing numeral was an eight, not a nine, and therefore, that the trunk had come to Lyon a full year earlier, in 1888, and had only now been used in the commission of a local crime.

Goron was stuck. The reasoning of the Lyon investigators was absurd but he had little chance of persuading them to see things his way. Besides, Bastide and the Lyon contingent had one piece of evidence that was impossible to contest. Everyone who saw the rotting corpse had the same opinion of the hair: it was black. Protest all he might, Goron could not change Gouffé’s hair color from its now well-publicized chestnut brown.

Of all the people who had seen the corpse—villagers, investigators, police, the medical examiner—no one had known Gouffé. What, Goron wondered, might have been missed by this parade of strangers? If Goron could send a relative of Gouffé’s to Lyon for a private viewing, perhaps something would leap out, some jarring feature
of the corpse, maybe a trait that only an intimate would recognize. Despite its terrible decomposition, the cadaver had to have its chance to talk.

Goron now had the difficult task of convincing both investigating judges, Dopffer in Paris and Bastide in Lyon, that a family viewing was essential. At the very least, a proper investigation demanded such thoroughness. Not only that, officials owed this courtesy to the anguished Gouffé family. Goron kept pestering until he wore down his opposition and, grudgingly, both judges granted his request. Dopffer gave in only to placate Goron, while Bastide believed he had nothing to lose and saw an opportunity to humiliate Goron and the Paris Sûreté.

Goron assigned Brigadier Léon Soudais to accompany Gouffé’s brother-in-law Louis-Marie Landry to Lyon. Both men, expecting a chilly reception, a gruesome corpse, and probable failure, were less than enthusiastic. Before departing, Brigadier Soudais, a man who usually kept his complaints to himself, told Goron he was ready to carry out the mission as ordered but doubted its chance of success. His gloom irritated Goron, who demanded blind obedience from his troops. To him, any pessimism from an agent impaired the fortunes of the Sûreté.
“Faith is indispensable in police work, as much as it is in art or in literature,” he wrote in his memoir. “Sadly, it frequently is lacking in agents, especially when it’s the boss who asks it of them … So Soudais left in a bad humor and his skepticism was only made worse in Lyon.”

Goron’s prognosis was quickly borne out. Arriving at the Lyon police headquarters, the two Parisians were subjected to hours of bureaucratic formalities. Worse, Soudais had to fend off mocking questions from local officers: Had he come to Lyon to learn how to solve crimes? Did Paris police know so little they needed lessons from the provinces? The sting of ridicule only sharpened Soudais’s criticism of Goron. “Naturally,” the chief wrote, “this attitude of Lyon encouraged my brigadier to think that I was completely misled.”