Joseph Vacher
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Joseph Vacher (16 November 1869 - 31 December 1898) was a French serial killer nicknamed "The French Ripper" or "The South-East Ripper" after the more infamous Jack the Ripper. He raped and murdered 11 - 27 people, most of whom were teenage farm workers, between 1894 and 1897.
Biography edit
Vacher, the son of an illiterate farmer, was sent to a very strict Catholic school at an early age and taught to obey and fear God. He joined the army in 1892 and, frustrated by his lack of promotion and the belief that he was not receiving the attention he deserved, he unsuccessfully attempted suicide by slashing his throat. He survived but was deemed unfit for service and dismissed from the army. He then began courting a maidservant named Louise, who spurned him. Humiliated by her rejection, Vacher shot her and then himself. They both survived, but Vacher was left with severe brain damage and half his face paralyzed. He was institutionalized for one year before being pronounced sane and released.
During a three-year period beginning in 1894, Vacher murdered and mutilated at least 11 people - one woman, five teenage girls and five teenage boys. Most of his victims were shepherds watching their flocks in isolated fields. The victims were stabbed to death, raped, sodomised and often disembowelled. At this time he was a drifter, wandering from town to town begging and doing odd jobs for money and food scraps.
In 1897 Vacher attacked a woman gathering wood in Ardèche, but her screams alerted her husband and son, who ran over and overpowered Vacher. While in custody he swiftly confessed to the murders. His defence at trial was to plead insanity; he first claimed that a rabid dog had bitten him when he was a child and poisoned his blood, thus causing his madness, then that his blood had been poisoned by quack treatments after the bite, then that he was sent by God to kill people. Despite these claims he was declared sane after a lengthy medical investigation and sentenced to death. Vacher was executed by guillotine on 31 December 1898. At the moment of his execution, he refused to walk to the scaffold and had to be dragged by his executioners.