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

  • Douglas Starr
Knopf/Simon & Schuster: 2010/2011. 320 pp. $26.95/£16.99 9780307266194 | ISBN: 978-0-3072-6619-4

Here are two books that span an era. Douglas Starr's The Killer of Little Shepherds describes the birth of modern forensic science in France in the late nineteenth century, revealing how it led to the capture of a serial killer. Michael Capuzzo's The Murder Room revisits cold cases from the past 50 years, just as the field of forensics is beginning to modernize and move in a new direction. Both accounts are riveting. But whereas Starr knows he is writing about a period of intellectual upheaval, Capuzzo seems impervious to the winds of change.

Starr's hero is the French physician and criminologist Alexandre Lacassagne, who established the ground rules for many forensic disciplines, from autopsy and blood-spatter analysis to toxicology and psychology. He worked in exciting times for the field. Between 1885 and the First World War, when Lacassagne's school of forensics in Lyons was influential, anthropologists Francis Galton in Britain and Juan Vucetich in Argentina were classifying fingerprint types for identification purposes, Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner discovered blood groups and, in 1897, a Parisian blaze provided the backdrop for the first identification of corpses by their teeth. The application of probability theory to the interpretation of forensic evidence in court was highlighted by the Dreyfus affair — the trial in France of artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason, which hinged on the analysis of handwriting in an incriminating document.

Lacassagne brought such forensic advances to bear on the case of Joseph Vacher, a serial murderer whose victims included young shepherd boys out watching their flocks in rural France. Through analyses of the crime scenes and victims' bodies, the criminologist showed that Vacher's crimes were premeditated and systematic, implying that the killer was not insane. Vacher was convicted in 1898, and executed by guillotine.

Similar forensic methods are still used more than a century later. Capuzzo's heroes in The Murder Room are William Fleisher, a former special agent with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, and forensic psychologist Richard Walter and forensic sculptor Frank Bender, who together founded the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1990. Taking its name from the nineteenth-century French crook-turned-crimefighter Eugène Vidocq, the non-profit, closed society brings together 150 volunteer experts to solve crimes that have gone cold. From forensic scientists to business leaders, the membership pools its knowledge once a month, over lunch, to home in on perpetrators and to avenge forgotten victims. They do so because they value justice, and because they enjoy the chase.

The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases

  • Michael Capuzzo
Gotham/Michael Joseph: 2010. 448 pp/384 pp. $26/£17.99 9781592401420 | ISBN: 978-1-5924-0142-0

Capuzzo describes the Vidocq Society's successes, including the identification of John List, who murdered five members of his family in 1971 and remained a fugitive for some 17 years. But what is striking about The Murder Room is that — with the notable exception of DNA profiling — the twentieth century added little to the nineteenth-century foundations of forensics. If Lacassagne attended a Vidocq Society lunch today, most of the techniques discussed would be familiar to him. Two modern techniques that he would not recognize — the lie detector and criminal profiling — are popular with law enforcers, although their efficacy has never been clearly demonstrated.

Together, these two books give the impression that the late nineteenth century was a golden era for forensic science and that the field has been treading water since then. Yet it is currently experiencing a crisis, which has been brewing since the advent of DNA profiling in the 1980s. Because DNA analysis had already been thoroughly validated in the academic context, its introduction raised the scientific bar for all forensic techniques — and many of them have been found wanting.

Credit: ILLUSTRATIONS BY G. POTENZA

In February 2009, the US National Research Council (NRC) published a highly critical report that challenged forensic science to demonstrate its scientific credentials. The report pointed out, for example, that fingerprint analysts' long-standing claims of zero error rates were not scientifically plausible. Almost all of the techniques in use in forensic labs today — from ballistics to analyses of handwriting, shoe prints and blood patterns — came in for criticism. The NRC's message to forensic science was clear: either drag yourself out of the nineteenth century, or the police and the courts will sideline you. Yet the problem is not only in the United States — modernization of the whole field, along with the laborious empirical testing which that will entail, seems inevitable worldwide.

Capuzzo's book may unwittingly describe the end of an era. Because members of the Vidocq Society rely on law enforcers to feed them cold cases, they too will have to respond to the challenge of modernization. As nineteenth-century French forensics pioneer Alphonse Bertillon discovered to his cost in seeking the truth — his reputation was destroyed after he failed to apply probability theory correctly and wrongly attributed that damning scrawl to Dreyfus — the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is better, in the end, to have good tools.