The Sunday Gentleman (53 page)

Not many years ago, he admits, he was involved in apprehending a New Caledonian multiple murderer with cannibalistic tendencies. While he prefers not to discuss this case, he concedes that he cooperated with German authorities in convicting Haarmann, who murdered from thirty to fifty German boys to sell their effects, and in catching Grossman, who slaughtered twenty-five young ladies and practiced cannibalism on their remains. In telling about Grossman, Dr. Locard likes to produce a photograph showing the murderer’s twenty-fifth victim, an attractive brunette, lying on a sofa quite extinct and very nude, but still in one complete piece when the authorities caught the criminal.

Two years ago, faked Picasso and Utrillo oils were floating about, and sold at enormous prices. The paintings were such excellent forgeries that Utrillo himself was not sure which of the street scenes bearing his name were actually his own and which were copies. Dr. Locard, retained to settle the matter, proved that when Picasso or Utrillo sign their works, they just sign in a natural manner. In the case of the forgeries, the swindlers, to be certain that the signatures were exact, first traced on the name of Picasso or Utrillo in pencil and then painted over it. Dr. Locard revealed the faint pencil markings, and helped smash a million-dollar racket.

He even had his finger in the prosecution of the Lindbergh kidnapping case in the thirties, a case that he regards as the most fascinating criminal investigation in American history. “It will become a classic, a legend,” he says. “There is so much to it. I examined the evidence and delivered an expertization on the wooden ladder to Colonel Lindbergh. I also checked and corroborated the findings of the American experts. Of course, they were right. Bruno Hauptmann was unquestionably guilty.”

When Paris police officials, or victims of crime, wish to consult Dr. Locard, and do not wish to trust their problems to correspondence, they usually board a train in Paris, and reach Lyons, which is about halfway to Marseille or the Riviera, seven hours later. For foreign visitors, Lyons, France’s third city, squatting between the Rhone and Seine rivers, more industrial and French than is Paris, holds few attractions beyond Dr. Locard. The foreigners hurry across a concrete-and-wooden bridge to the towering Palais de Justice. There they are directed to the rear of the courthouse, to a tiny crowded street called the Rue St.-Jean. Just beyond the entrance to the Sûreté Nationale is a grilled gateway bearing the sign
LABORATOIRE DE POLICE.
Going through this entrance, and then up four flights of cement stairs (there is no elevator), they reach Dr. Locard’s headquarters. His private office, files, and laboratories occupy the entire top floor.

He sits at the far end of a huge wooden table, his pretty, plump secretary across from him, a green-shaded lamp hanging down from the ceiling over him, a full wall of crime books and documents in seven languages behind him, and built-in metal files of his various investigations elsewhere surrounding him. Visitors, prepared to meet a man of seventy-two, usually expect a shrunken invalid in a wheelchair, and are dumbfounded when he rises briskly to greet them. Of medium height, slender, electric. Dr. Locard appears a young fifty-five. His white hair is short and rumpled, his eyes at once penetrating and amused, his nose hooked, his mustache full. He claims to know a dozen major languages. In our several talks, he would switch absently from his native French to German or Spanish or Russian. His English vocabulary, however, was limited, and somewhat exotic.

Visitors are often surprised to find that a man so scholarly can have a sense of humor. Dr. Locard, after finishing a long dissertation on some complex aspect of murder, usually likes to reward his guests or students with a light anecdote. His favorite, which he insists is true, involves the gentleman who developed a silent hatred of his old friend and roommate and finally decided to dispose of him. At the opportune moment, this gentleman massaged his roommate on the skull with a flatiron, and after making certain that rigor mortis had set in, he tried to think of a way of getting rid of the corpse. As a last resort, he dissected the body, neatly divided the pieces between a hand trunk and two small cartons, and then went outside with his load. As he staggered down the avenue, an inquisitive acquaintance watched him, then came alongside and inquired, “That’s quite a load. What are you up to?” The gentleman replied, “Oh, I am only helping move a friend.”

When foreign visitors, impressed by his versatility and acumen, inevitably compare him to Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Locard beams. He likes to think of himself as a Gallic edition of the fictional English detective. At the first mention of Sherlock Holmes, Locard dips into his desk and whips out a youthful, rather pensive, photographic portrait of himself trickily superimposed on a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes. Recently, when a woman was found murdered in a French hayloft, the leading suspect alibied that he had spent the night sleeping by a roadside. Dr. Locard vacuumed the suspect’s pockets, dug out the grit under his fingernails, and analyzed the minute particles. This revealed not the minerals in road dust, but organic hay dust. The suspect was convicted and guillotined. “Sherlock Holmes was the first to realize the importance of dust,” Dr. Locard explains. “I merely copied his methods.”

Besides copying the master’s methods, and besides forcing his disciples to read all the Sherlock Holmes short stories and novels. Dr. Locard carries his Baker Street fetish even further. In one classic story, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes remark that he had written a monograph “Upon the Distinction Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos, An Enumeration of 140 Forms of Cigar, Cigarette and Pipe Tobacco.” While the treatise may have been fictional when Sherlock Holmes spoke of it, Dr. Locard has since made it a fact by writing a learned paper on the identification of tobaccos through a study of ashes left at the scene of a crime.

Dr. Locard likes to say that he personally caught the killer who, in real life, almost extinguished Sherlock Holmes before his time. This killer was a thirty-five-year-old Frenchman named Jules Bonnot, whom Dr. Locard regards as the most daring and resourceful murderer he ever squared off against. Bonnot, a mustached man with a pleasant concave face, ran wild in France just before the First World War. Working out of an innocent-looking motorcycle repair shop, which he used as a cover and a storehouse for his artillery, Bonnot committed almost every crime in the book. He forged documents, counterfeited money, kidnapped, robbed, committed arson, and performed twelve brutal murders. His most spectacular murder was that of a Société Générale bank messenger, whom he waylaid, killed, and robbed of half a million francs. Bonnot was well-traveled, and had adopted criminal techniques from every European nation. The Sûreté suspected any number of gangsters, but narrowed their hunt down to Bonnot and one other person on information provided by an informer. But, until the police obtained real evidence, Bonnot was safe. Then, in Lyons, a risky safecracking job was attempted. The Sûreté, acting on another tip, broke in on the thief. In the dark, unseen, Bonnot slipped out of the net and escaped. He even managed to take his torch and tools away with him. Dr. Locard, examining the damaged safe, discovered telltale traces of marks left by the tools. With photographs of this evidence. Dr. Locard secretly made his way into Bonnet’s repair shop, and compared the marks to the tools lying about. In ten minutes, Dr. Locard had found the instruments that fitted the marks. Bonnot was apprehended, almost fought his way free from his captors, but was finally jailed. Under muscular questioning, he confessed to all of his previous sins. The French police bypassed the aristocratic guillotine to execute Bonnot by a firing squad composed of giant African Zouaves.

One day, a short time thereafter. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stopped off in Lyons to chat with Dr. Locard. Eager to play proper host to the creator of his beloved Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Locard escorted his visitor to the three private rooms in his laboratory which only his friends and celebrated guests are ever permitted to see. In these three rooms, his crime museum. Dr. Locard keeps mementos of crimes solved: weapons, tangible clues, and a pictorial gallery of rogues he has brought to justice. As he guided Sir Arthur through the rooms, explaining the offenses committed by the owners of the various profiles in the photographs, he suddenly heard his guest gasp. Dr. Locard turned. Doyle was staring ahead at a large photograph of Bonnot. “Why, I know that fellow!” blurted Doyle. “He was my chauffeur for two months in London. What in the devil’s he doing here?” When Dr. Locard told him what Bonnot was doing here, the creator of Sherlock Holmes shivered, “Actually shivered,” says Dr. Locard. “It was quite a coincidence. That is why I always say that I caught the man who might have abruptly ended Sherlock Holmes’s career. Bonnot chauffeuring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The flesh creeps. Think how close we came to not having all we do have of Sherlock Holmes!”

Dr. Locard possesses a large rectangular ledger in which he records every criminal assignment that crosses his desk. In forty years, he has scrawled 9,253 entries in this ledger. He has not solved them all, but his successes are fantastic. He enjoys a clever crime, and he likes to solve it in a subtle way. “The great difference between crime in the United States and in France,” he says, “is that American murders are usually merely physical and violent. Here in France our killers tend toward finesse. They always prefer to mix their murder with a bit of forgery or with a swindle or with melodramatic trickery.”

Dr. Locard is never aroused by a straight unimaginative homicide. When Vacher, a runty Frenchman who looked exactly like a sweet little Arab, but had slaughtered twenty-nine farmers and shepherds, was caught while opening the stomach of his thirtieth victim. Dr. Locard considered the catch routine. “Vacher was merely mad,” he says, in a masterpiece of understatement, “and therefore thoroughly uninteresting.”

Another crime which Dr. Locard regarded as routine, but which had Paris in an uproar, began when one Charles Weber accused his sister-in-law, Jeanne Weber, of strangling his year-old son while babysitting, as well as of murdering her own children and her two nephews. The bodies of the youngsters were promptly exhumed, but autopsies revealed neither strangulation nor poison. Several months later, a hysterical neighbor reported to the police that her only child had died in the night while Jeanne Weber was baby-sitting. Again, autopsy revealed neither strangulation nor poison. In subsequent months, more youngsters died in the night, and though people referred to Miss Weber as “the Ogre of Goutte-d’Or,” there was not a shred of evidence against her. At last, deciding to employ a dangerous strategy, the police found a friend of Miss Weber’s who felt that she was absolutely innocent and who was willing to risk his two offspring with her for a night. As the friend left the house, Miss Weber was placidly baby-sitting with his two-year-old boy and ten-year-old girl. But when the police broke in shortly after midnight, they found the little boy almost dead of suffocation. His sister quickly came out of hiding to describe how Miss Weber, in an uncontrollable fit, had climbed atop the child, and pressed both hands down on his chest until he could not breathe. At her trial, Jeanne Weber provided a field day for Freudians when she stated that since childhood she could not stand the sight of a youngster. “When I am near one, I hear a voice telling me to kill. Before I know what I am doing, I have killed.” After she had served a few weeks of her twenty-year term, Miss Weber completely lost her sanity. “It was a
crime sans cause
,” says Dr. Locard. “Terrible, but it involved cleverness on neither her part nor ours.”

Dr. Locard prefers his crimes to be unusual and challenging. He likes to remember the murder near Tours which he solved by observing the pattern of a corduroy jacket smeared on a dust-covered marble slab; or the criminal that he caught through tooth prints because the famished culprit had bitten into a pastry from which a plaster cast could be taken; or the fugitive who was found because he fell on a sandy beach while fleeing the police—the clear impression of his copper-buttoned vest, which was left, brought him to justice in three days.

One of Dr. Locard’s favorites Involves the robber who, leaping from the first-floor window of a villa, fell to his knees, rose and escaped. “I examined the spot where he fell,” recalls Dr. Locard, “and found two clearly visible knee marks. They showed he wore striped velvet trousers. One set of stripes seemed broader, proving to me that one of his knees had a patch of slightly different material. This gave us a perfect picture of the man. We had him in twenty minutes.”

Another time an engineer was found murdered in a mead-o,w outside of Lyons. There were no clues. Dr. Locard studied the immediate, surrounding terrain with the greatest of care. The day following, when suspects were paraded in and out, Dr. Locard was about to dismiss a burly man when he noticed a tiny seed clinging to the suspect’s sleeve. “I identified the seed. It was
scorzonera lumilis
,” says Dr. Locard. “That was one of the plants beside the corpse in the meadow. Of course, our man confessed. He was guillotined.”

One of Dr. Locard’s most highly prized crimes occurred thirty-seven years ago. A sixty-five-year-old prostitute named Coco-la-Cherie was found in her tiny room, her throat cut, her body a sieve of stab wounds. She had had countless clients, so the suspects were many. “When we examined her corpse, we found hordes of rare parasites attached to her,” says Dr. Locard. “I thought I’d take a few of these insects. Perhaps the criminal would have had enough contact with Coco to have caught them. The second day after the murder, a drunkard was brought in. He was one of those who’d slept with Coco on the fatal night. He thought he might have killed her, but he wasn’t sure. He’d been too drunk. I examined him, found parasites, but of an entirely different kind. We released him. The third day another suspect, a boy of twenty named Mayor, was brought in. In his hair, I found the same rare parasite Coco had on her person. Mayor denied the crime. But when his fingerprints corresponded with those in her room, he confessed. He had killed her, and then stabbed her thirty times in a fit of fury, because she wanted fifty centimes for sleeping with him instead of the thirty-five centimes he offered. Incidentally, the fingerprint that convicted him was the prettiest I have ever found. In France, we require that twelve points on a suspect’s fingerprint correspond with prints found at the scene of the crime, in order to convict. Well, this fellow Mayor’s print had one hundred corresponding points. It was delightful.”