A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

cellar. Pomeroy admitted that he derived pleasure from torturing children. His crimes aroused the
same kind of widespread horror as those of Jack the Ripper in London the following decade and -
like the Ripper murders - were the subject of much exaggeration. An account in Boston Murders,
edited by John Makris (New York, 1948) says he committed twenty-seven murders. Knife, Rope
and Chair by Guy Logan (London, 1930) mentions more than a dozen. There were acrimonious
discussions about whether Pomeroy was insane, or merely subject to ‘blood lust’. Yet at the time it
occurred to no one that the crimes were sexual.
In April 1880, a four-year-old girl named Louise Dreux disappeared in the Crenelle quarter of
Paris. The following day, neighbours complained to the police about an unpleasant black smoke
pouring from the chimney of a retarded twenty-year-old youth named Louis Menesclou, who lived
on the top floor of the same building as the Dreux family. They entered his room and looked in the
stove; a child’s head and entrails were burning there. In Menesclou’s pockets they found both the
child’s forearms. Menesclou admitted killing her, and sleeping with the body under his mattress
overnight. He indignantly denied raping the girl, but became embarrassed when asked why the
genitals were missing. A poem found in a notebook began ‘I saw her, I took her’, and talked about
‘the joy of an instant’. Menesclou was executed. The similarities to the Frederick Baker case are
striking.
It was the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 that made the world suddenly aware of the emergence
of a new type of crime. We have already noted that they were not generally recognised as sex
crimes - there was still a tendency to regard the killer simply as a homicidal maniac. (Zola based a
novel, The Human Beast, on the murders, and the title summarises the contemporary attitude to the
Ripper: he was a human being with the appetites of a tiger.) But from the fact that the victims were
prostitutes, and that the killer left them naked from the waist down, it was impossible not to realise
instinctively that some form of twisted sexuality was involved. The murders caused such a sense of
outrage because there was an obscure feeling that the killer had somehow ‘broken the rules’ - as we
might feel if terrorists started bombing schools.
For the Ripper himself, the sense of outrage he caused was an obvious motivation; in the two letters
that are generally accepted as genuine, he gloats over the murders, and heads one of the letters
‘From Hell’. The idea of this ‘human beast’ prowling the streets made everyone shudder; he wanted
to make everyone shudder. In fact, he was probably a shy, repressed, sensitive little man - like
Richard Speck, the killer of eight nurses in Chicago in 1966, or the Boston Strangler, or the
Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe - for whom this slashing and stabbing was an orgasmic release
from his usual sense of inferiority and ‘ambivalence’.
It is a reasonable assumption that Jack the Ripper would have lost his legendary status if he had
been caught and tried. The ‘French Ripper’, Joseph Vacher, was caught and executed; so that
although his crimes were very similar to those of Jack the Ripper, he never achieved anything like
the same notoriety. Vacher, born in 1869, was given to fits of sudden violence. But what emerged
at his trial in 1897 was that he was another self-pitying, oversensitive ‘outsider’, whose crimes
were partly motivated by resentment towards a world that he felt had treated him badly. He blamed
all his troubles on being bitten by a mad dog at the age of eight, but this seems to have been merely
an excuse. At one point he became devoutly religious and entered a monastery; but he was thrown
out for making sexual advances to other novices. In the army, during his national service, he was so
upset when his promotion to corporal failed to materialise that he tried to cut his throat. Discharged
on medical grounds, he proposed to a young girl, and when she refused him, tried to kill her and
himself. He only wounded her, and a bullet that entered his own right ear made him deaf and