The Vampire of Ropraz (3 page)

Over the next hour the grim ritual is rediscovered in all its horror. The open grave, the coffin lid
unscrewed and, once again, the corpse violated, with traces of sperm and saliva around the navel and on the thighs. And the rest of the body defiled and bloodied: this time the girl’s genital area has been removed, her head entirely severed from the trunk. Then the head was scalped, as can be seen from the cuts in the bone, the encrusted blood and the long tuft of black hair that lies gleaming on the sunlit path.

What had happened at Carrouge?

Three years earlier a village family had taken in an orphan who had survived tuberculosis of the bone. But one leg remained crippled, and Nadine Jordan had a limp. She was given light housework to do to earn her keep. She was pretty, conscientious and fresh-faced; the boys began to court her despite her stiff leg and her still childish figure. She was well proportioned, with an attractive bust and long shining black hair: the schoolmaster himself, M. Jeunet, was not indifferent to her charms… But a hard winter gives no quarter. The preceding December her tuberculosis became active again, a nasty fever
gained the upper hand, and death soon followed: Nadine Jordan died a few days before Easter, on Thursday the 9th of April. She would be buried on Saturday the 11th. As in Rosa Gilliéron’s case it was Pastor Bérenger – Carrouge is not far from Mézières – who officiated at the burial, speaking of Nadine’s brief existence as a courageous, spotless young girl, and reciting the prayer for the dead.

This time there was no snow to preserve the Vampire’s tracks. There was this severed skull covered in black blood, and a long handful of hair, still pearled with red, lying in the grass of the graveyard, behind the church and the school.

Spring seems to arouse the Vampire’s ardour. Scarcely have Nadine Jordan’s tortured body and scalp been discovered at Carrouge, when the Jorat is again stunned by a third macabre affair.

This time it happens at Ferlens, a village to the east of Carrouge, on the road to Lake Bret. A young woman of twenty-three has just died of tuberculosis, and her husband, Jacques Beaupierre, has granted her last wish to be buried with her head resting on the little rubber cushion that helped her endure her suffering. A strange wish, and a promise piously kept: Justine Beaupierre is buried on Tuesday the 21st of March, her head resting, inside her coffin, on the absurd but serviceable object.

Imagine Beaupierre’s horror, on his first visit to the graveyard, when he sees the aforesaid cushion, orange-coloured and very easy to spot in the nine o’clock light, on the path leading to his wife’s grave!

Once again, an open grave, a gaping coffin, a burial gown torn away, the young woman’s throat pierced and slashed, her breasts sliced off and partly eaten. Dried sperm and traces of saliva like animal slaver, as Jacques Beaupierre would later describe it, around the navel and in the creases of the groin. The belly is sliced open with a long, neat cut; the pubic area and genitalia have been excised and removed. Pieces of them, chewed and spat out, hair, tender flesh and cartilage, will be found in the boxwood coppice that runs along the graveyard fence. Just as scraps of the pubic area and hair were found in the dark Crochet hedge in Ropraz, after the February outrage.

“The colour of Justine Beaupierre’s eyes?”

“Brown, darkish in shade.”

“Colour of her hair?”

“Dark brown.”

“The complexion of the aforesaid?”

“Pale and clear.”

“The height of the aforesaid?”

“Medium, well formed. Well-developed breasts. Narrow hips.”

“Build of the aforesaid?”

“Slender and willowy. Ninety pounds at most.”

You would think that the Vampire of Ropraz keeps to one type of woman, always the same, and that he selects his sacrificial victim well in advance. Where does he get his information? How does he know that a dark, slim girl is dying, and in what precise location? Does he have a list of the young patients near death in all the clinics, sanatoria, isolation wards and nursing homes in the country? Has he an accomplice in the Moudon hospital? And the times of the funerals: how does he know the very day, the very hour, that such and such a young woman is to be laid to rest in such and such a village?

People begin to suspect churchwardens and undertakers, and the one in Ferlens, old Cordey,
is grilled by the investigators. Thanks be to God, he is saved by the bottle. At the time of the Beaupierre crime, Jérémie Cordey was still dead drunk, thanks to the tips he had been given the previous day.

Justine Beaupierre is reburied. Once again a new gown for the massacred corpse, and once again Pastor Béranger, not fearing to compare these dreadful events with the Ten Plagues of Egypt, with the merited punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah. “What crime are we paying for, miserable creatures that we are? Thou knowest, O Lord, and we know too, if only we look deep into our hearts. None is innocent before the Lord. It is only after we have examined all our sins, and decided to repent, to change the direction of our lives, that Thou, O Lord, wilt restore peace to our towns and villages. As Thou hast, in Thy goodness, bestowed peace upon our hearts benighted by so much error.”

There, it has been said: God will destroy the Vampire once we have surrendered to Him. A biblical vow, commensurate with the obsession
with sin engrafted in the bodies of Calvinists in their wasteland. Their souls in despair at the steep ascent to a heaven that is out of reach. Béranger knows his people well. However, especially after night has fallen, everyone thinks of the three lovely bodies, bloody and cut to pieces deep in their fresh beds of soil in the three lonely little graveyards, and they know that the monster will have the last word in this vale of bitter tears and richly deserved darkness that God has granted us.

The Beaupierre crime in the Ferlens graveyard, in its rehearsal of the ritual, had surpassed the worst imaginings. Would there ever be an end to this butchery?

A new incident at Ferlens, the “Café du Nord affair”, as it was instantly baptized, might have given the impression that the guilty party had been caught.

The owner of the Café du Nord, M. Georges Pasche, had been complaining since winter that in the cowshed adjoining his farm and café – which together formed a single, sizeable building – his cows and heifers were being subjected to unnatural practices. Indeed, that winter, and
all through the spring, the vulvas, anuses and recta of several animals had been injured by the introduction of a penis of large proportions, a stick or pick handle, or some other pointed instrument, for the membranes and recta of the young females were found to be punctured or torn, very often bleeding, at morning milking time, and the orifices of several animals were still smeared with sperm.

At first Georges Pasche kept watch, not daring to reveal what was happening for fear people would accuse him of dealings with the Vampire of Ropraz. But as it continued, and even grew worse, Pasche finally offered two five-franc pieces – heavy silver coins of the Federation and a substantial sum in this countryside at the time – to whoever would denounce the guilty party or help to surprise him. It is Monday the 11th of May, 1903.

Nothing more was needed, just two days after the reward was announced, for the little serving girl from the café to catch Favez, the farmhand, in the cowshed in the middle of the night, standing on a stool with his trousers around his ankles,
busily having his way with a hobbled heifer. The little serving girl held up the lantern: “This time I’ve got you, my lad!” Pasche comes running when he hears the fray, and old Madame Pasche, and of course the Pasche children, all in their nightshirts in the cowshed, which reeks and fumes with heavy smells, steam and brandished oil lamps. The labourer is forcibly dressed, tied up and shut in the cellar, to wait for the police from Mézières to lift him into their van at dawn, and lock him up in the prison in Oron, the chief town of the district.

The full name of the unfortunate fellow is Charles-Augustin Favez. He is twenty-one years old, but looks twice that: strangely deformed, receding brow, alcoholic, perverted, taciturn. And he pleasures himself on our animals! Maybe he haunts graveyards too? What if Favez were the guilty one, Favez at Rosa’s grave, Favez at Carrouge, Favez at Ferlens too! Of course it is Favez, sadist that he is. Favez is the monster. He is the Vampire of Ropraz. With no human victim, he perforates cows and heifers as he waits for other dead young women to come his way.
Or maybe living ones, who knows? Warm little quails in their innocent slumbers, schoolgirls, girls in catechism class or young mothers for him to lie on top of and rub his foul snout against.

On that Thursday, the 14th of May, a single cry goes up from the Jorat and from farther abroad across the whole countryside: “They’ve caught the Vampire! He’s the Vampire!” Yes, that’s him all right, worse than the legendary wolf or bear, the one who desecrated the bodies of three young dead women in Ropraz, Carrouge and Ferlens, the one who spread terror among us, and who now will be judged, the one for whom the ultimate punishment must be brought back. That morning, in the countryside and villages, everyone is talking about the death penalty, even though it was abolished thirty-six years ago.
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Only the death penalty is appropriate, in the firmly held opinion of the entire population, for such abominable offences.

But who is he, this lover of dead girls, this abuser of cattle and author of so many terrible crimes?

Charles-Augustin Favez was born in Syens, a tiny village between Moudon and Mézières, on the 2nd of November 1882, in a deprived environment in which drink, incest and illiteracy were family scourges. At the age of three Charles-Augustin was taken from his wretched family and given to a couple who abused him, before being finally placed by the welfare services in a family of shopkeepers in Mézières, who tried to give him a decent upbringing by having him do odd jobs around the shop, while at the same time he was attending school.

Charles-Augustin was a very sturdy lad, physically developed beyond his age and subject to dreadful fits of anger. He spent little time with his schoolmates, avoided girls and spoke so little that you might have thought he was dumb. Making his annual health examination in the Mézières schools in June 1892, when Charles-Augustin was ten, Dr Delay noted in his report that the Favez boy was over-developed for his age, extremely
pale, with raw, red-rimmed eyes seeming “as if the daylight causes him pain”. This remark would be cited in court.

Charles-Augustin Favez is subject to “absences” that obliterate from his memory certain facts or actions to which he has been subjected or that he may have committed. He seems to have cultivated these absences as a defence against serious hurt done to him in childhood, such as the hunger and ill treatment to which he was subjected before being placed with the Chappuis. In the matters of interest to us, he says he had no recollection of any of the recent perverse acts he has committed, or may have committed, in any of the graveyards mentioned.

It is discovered that ever since he was fifteen he has had a liking for drink that makes him imbibe whatever strong stuff he can get his hands on, especially on Saturdays, when he was seen in cafés and at dances, even when he was still under age, or at travelling fairs and other festivities, where he got drunk. On many occasions he has been picked up after closing time and dumped at the
door of the Chappuis’ shop on the Grand Rue, where people find such a spectacle alarming.

At sixteen he was expelled from catechism class for stealing fifty centimes from a fellow pupil’s smock in the presbytery vestry. An interesting coincidence: at school and in catechism class one of his fellow pupils was Rosa Gilliéron, from whom, intimidated, he kept his distance, though the master’s report says that “he watched her continuously and followed her in the street, even when her father was present”.

There was just one year’s difference between Charles-Augustin Favez and Rosa Gilliéron, born in 1882 and 1883 respectively. They had the “same” schooling in a district where public education was obligatory for all. It is strange to imagine the pure young girl innocently following the teacher’s lesson from the front row, while from the back of the class Favez the Vampire is watching her and already imagining he is drawing her blood and feeding on her.

So Favez is locked up in Oron prison. He is not held for long: only fifty-seven days. How is it possible for the most notorious criminal in all Switzerland to escape punishment in this way?

In Oron, contrary to every expectation, Charles-Augustin Favez will benefit from the interventions of two individuals. The first is inevitable: it is by a psychiatrist already famous at the time. Dr Albert Mahaim, a student of the theories of Charcot, who had attended his lectures at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, has himself carried out a considerable amount of research on hysteria, sadism and neurasthenia, and senses in Favez an excellent subject for observation, and possibly
for corroboration, useful to the development of his own theories. A professor in the Lausanne Medical Faculty, Albert Mahaim is also one of the founders of the Cery psychiatric institution, to the west of the town, on the wooded fringe of the community of Prilly-Chasseur. The ambition of the Cery institution is to grow into one of the most important European centres for the study of mental illness. For instance, shortly after it opened in 1873, thirty years before the events related here, the institution established several geriatric wings and a model farm, where the less dangerous patients, or those who, in the terminology of the time, were in a “latent” phase, were allowed to work, to the extent that they demonstrated their ability to do so. There were orchards, a market garden, forestry, poultry, tillage and livestock too – the Cery herd, with several prize-winning bulls each year at the canton’s agricultural fairs, was soon considered one of the best cared for in the region. Already in 1903, the farm employed forty or so residential patients under the supervision of several doctors and overseers.