A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

paralysed the facial muscles on that side. He was committed to an asylum, and discharged as cured
in April 1894. It was at this point that he became a tramp, and began to commit sex murders. On 20
May 1894, he encountered a twenty-year-old girl, Eugenie Delhomme, near Besancon, and
throttled her unconscious. He then cut her throat, severed the right breast, and trampled on her
belly; after this, he had intercourse with the body. , She was the first of eleven victims, five of them
boys. Most of these were disembowelled, and, in many cases, he removed the genitals. On 4
August 1897, he attacked a woman gathering pinecones in the Bois des Pelleries; she proved to be
stronger than he expected, and her shouts brought her husband and children, who overpowered
Vacher. He was taken to a local inn, where he played his accordion until the police arrived, and
realised that he was the black-bearded tramp who was suspected of being the ‘Ripper of the southeast’.
But witnesses failed to identify him, and he was only sentenced to three months for indecent
assault. In prison, he wrote to his judges, confessing to the series of mutilation murders of the past
three years. In spite of his insistence that he was insane, a panel of doctors judged him to be of
sound mind, and he was executed in December 1898. Vacher’s trial might have excited more
attention had not the Dreyfus trial been taking place at the same time.
While Vacher was still being tried, two schoolgirls disappeared on their way home from school in
the village of Lechtingen, near Osnabriick. The bodies were later found in nearby woods. The limbs
had been amputated and the intestines scattered over a wide area. A travelling carpenter named
Ludwig Tessnow came under suspicion, and was taken in for questioning. He insisted that various
stains on his clothes were brown wood-stain, and was released. Three years later, on the Baltic
island of Riigen, two young brothers vanished. Their remains were also found in nearby woods, the
limbs hacked off and the intestines scattered. The next day, a woman reported to the police that she
had seen the children talking to the carpenter Tessnow, who lived in the village of Baabe and who
had only just returned from his wanderings around Germany. Tessnow was arrested, and spots
resembling dried blood were found on his clothes - there had been some attempt to wash them off.
Tessnow again insisted that they were wood-stain. This reminded the examining magistrate of the
Lechtingen murder of September 1898, and he sent to Osnabriick to enquire the name of the
suspect who had been held; when he found that it was Tessnow, he had no doubt that he had caught
the killer of the two boys. He also recalled that, shortly after Tessnow had returned in June 1901,
half a dozen sheep had been killed and mutilated in a field on Riigen.
But there was no concrete evidence against Tessnow. At this point, the prosecutor heard that a
young doctor named Paul Uhlenhuth, of the University of Griefswald, had discovered a test that
would not only distinguish blood from other substances, but could actually distinguish the type of
blood; the test depended on the defensive properties that are developed by blood when it is injected
with foreign protein. Tessnow’s clothes were sent to Uhlenhuth, who cut out various stains and
dissolved them in salt water. His test showed conclusively that the stains on the clothes were not
wood-stain; they were of blood - both human and sheep’s. This evidence was conclusive. Tessnow
was executed.
The most striking thing about the cases mentioned above is their sadistic violence. It seems odd that
so many of the major sex crimes in the latter half of the nineteenth century should involve this
frenzy. The answer undoubtedly lies in the social attitudes of the period. At most levels of society,
relations between men and women were stiff and formal. So when sheer sexual lust overcame these
inhibitions, the result was a violent explosion that went beyond mere rape.