On the afternoon of May 19, 1894, the strangled and stabbed body of a woman was found in the town of Beaurepaire, France. The killer—though the police didn’t yet know it—was Joseph Vacher, a vagabond who over the next three years would kill at least 10 more people. Douglas Starr’s gripping nonfiction narrative, The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science (Knopf), juxtaposes Vacher’s crimes and punishment with an account of how science began to grapple with questions of morality, insanity, and culpability. The case helped bring to prominence a generation of pioneering criminologists, who “opened realms of discussion formerly reserved for priests and philosophers,” writes Starr, a professor of journalism at Boston University and author of Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce (Knopf, 1998). “What impulses for good and evil naturally existed within human beings? What modified those impulses along the way? What were the limits of free will and sanity? Could the impulse to do evil be understood, predicted, redirected, or cured?”
Foremost among the criminologists of the era was Alexandre Lacassagne, a scholar of forensic medicine at the University of Lyon, who had written numerous popular books on criminology and founded, in 1880, the Archives of Criminal Anthropology, which quickly established itself as the leading journal in the field of criminal science. Autopsies, procedures once primitive and haphazard, were paragons of precision and innovation under Lacassagne.
To better understand his work, Starr sat in on autopsies, an experience that gave him nightmares. One of the bodies was badly decomposed. “The stench is even worse than the appearance,” Starr writes. “It is a mixture of every repulsive odor in the world—excrement, rotted meat, swamp water, urine—and invades the sinuses by full frontal assault, as though penetrating through the bones of the face.” (Lacassagne and his colleagues, mind you, worked with no mask, no gloves, and often in hot, unventilated rooms.)
Vacher, who had spent time in a mental asylum before his killing spree, was the first serial killer to claim that mental illness made him not responsible for his crimes. His trial, in 1898, made headlines around the world. The French press deemed Vacher “a new Jack the Ripper”; The New York Times placed him among “the most extraordinary criminals that has ever lived.” Lacassagne was assigned to assess the defendant’s sanity. His work on the case marked a “golden age” of forensic discovery, Starr writes. “Science had become part of detective work, used not only to identify the ‘who,’ ‘when,’ and ‘how’ of a crime but also to deduce the criminal’s mental state based on crime-scene analysis—something unthinkable a generation earlier.”
Lacassagne interviewed Vacher for months, studied his crimes, and concluded that the defendant’s methodical approach to murder represented the actions of a sadistic but sane man. “He is responsible,” Lacassagne told the court. Vacher met his end at the guillotine.
Pieces of his brain were sent to half a dozen scientists eager for a look at the criminal mind. (The most sought-after brains for cerebral autopsies, Starr notes, were those of intellectuals. Lacassagne, for his part, donated his body to science and was dissected by his former students and colleagues after he died, in 1924.) Analyses of Vacher’s brain were contradictory and inconclusive. The mysteries of the mind, wrote one observer, were “inaccessible to our sharpest senses, our most perfect instruments, and our most subtle methods.”
Today our instruments are more sophisticated (though not nearly as sophisticated as they appear on television shows like CSI). But the big questions—Is there a part of the brain that regulates criminal behavior? Are murderers born, or are they created?—remain unanswered. “We will never understand why people like Vacher arise to bring chaos and violence into a world that we struggle to keep orderly and safe,” Starr writes. “We cannot account for the source of that impulse. We can only study it and try to keep it at bay.”
All About ‘OK’
From the birth of a science to the birth of a word. Allan Metcalf’s new book, OK: The Improbable History of America’s Greatest Word (Oxford University Press), has a lot to say about “OK.” As the subtitle suggests, Metcalf, a professor of English at MacMurray College, is a champion of the term. In an interview, he explains why: “There is no other word in the English language that is so successful, so peculiar, and so absolutely essential to our everyday conversations.”
According to Metcalf, “OK"—or “o.k.,” as it initially appeared—made its printed debut in a news item in the March 23, 1839, edition of the Boston Morning Post. It was defined for the reader as “all correct.” The 1840 presidential campaign helped secure its place in the American lexicon because Martin Van Buren’s nickname, Old Kinderhook—a reference to his hometown, in New York—was commonly shortened to “O.K.” “If he had been born in Schenectady, ‘OK’ may never have existed,” Metcalf says.
The term gained further prominence with the spread of the telegraph. As a 19th-century manual informed users, “An acknowledgment of the receipt of any kind of communication is made by returning O K.”
In 1858, “OK” went to college. That year some Harvard University students founded a literary society, The O.K. At meetings they debated rhetoric, drank beer, and ate little cakes cut into the shape of the letters “O” and “K.” (Theodore Roosevelt was a member.) Though it was a closely held secret, Metcalf believes the Harvard “OK” stood for “Orthoepy Klub,” “orthoepy” meaning proper pronunciation. By the mid-20th century, he reports, “OK” had become a mainstay in American fiction.
No one has done more to elevate the place of “OK” in the culture than Thomas A. Harris, whose 1969 book, I’m OK, You’re OK, transformed it from a word to a philosophy. The book—parodied by George Carlin as “I suck, you suck"—popularized transactional analysis, a theory of personality that emphasizes human interactions. Few people remember transactional analysis, Metcalf writes, but the book’s title made “OK” a “two-letter American philosophy of tolerance, even admiration, for difference.”
Then there is the celebrity-gossip magazine OK! Asked for his scholarly judgment, Metcalf thinks for a moment: “OK! is very OK.”
