The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science

"It tells two intertwined narratives: one is this really horrific serial killing in 19th-century France; it also tells you about the origins of forensic science and policing. If you go back to the early 1800s, that was the time when police forces around the world were being organised. Up until then it was private—just people who were hired as security, with no formal legal basis. So The Killer of Little Shepherds is set around the time that the Sûreté was formed… …and a man called Vidocq became a very famous detective. He’s kind of a French equivalent to Sherlock Holmes , although Sherlock Holmes is fictional while Vidocq was a real person. It’s a horrific story, even by my standards: a man killed 11 people—mainly children or teenagers, boys and girls—and disembowelled them and raped some of them. He moved around southern France, and sometimes outside of the south of France. This is one of the big lessons which resonates with my career. Even in modern times police forces are not that good at cooperating. I’m not saying they don’t cooperate, but personalities often get in the way; everybody wants to solve the case. There are tensions and rivalries as you see in any other organisation. So one of the reasons this man could act under the radar was because he moved around. When it was happening in a different place or legal area, it became somebody else’s problem. Eventually he was caught more or less red-handed. “A great deal of what we call ‘forensic science’ is only vaguely science” In the French case, a man called Lacassagne, who was a professor of forensic medicine at Lyon University, played an important role. He was the tutor of an Edmond Locard, considered by many—not quite accurately—to be the founding father of modern forensic science. But he was one of Lacassagne’s pupils. Lacassagne was saying things like: ‘pay attention to details’, ‘observe carefully’, ‘try to be objective, theorise, then test the theory’, while the cops of the time, would just be running in and splashing about, knocking things over. The things that really struck me about this book were that it’s really well written, incredibly well researched, and it’s a fantastic story. Douglas Starr is an American who started as a journalist. How he researched it in France… he must be a fluent French speaker, or reader, anyway. Many of the problems that arise in this case I highlight in cases in my book, which will be published in October, of recent cold cases. For example, Robert Black killed four children in the UK between 1981 and 1986 before he was arrested and convicted. One of the reasons he was able to do this was because he moved around the country operating in different police force areas. People are still making mistakes or forgetting things, not cooperating, misunderstanding or not paying attention to the evidence, and so on and so forth. He contributed to the development of blood pattern analysis. But these things weren’t happening around the time of the book. People were only just beginning to see that blood spatter might tell us how a person died, whether the body was moved, what weapon was used, stuff like that. Lacassagne was a medic, a professor of what he called criminology. He was more focused on bodies, but he was also interested in things way beyond that."