The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection Read Online Free PDF

butcher’s cleaver. There was also an old iron spoon that had been used for melting lead. Finally, Macé found some cord very much like that which had been used to tie the bundles found in Lampon’s well.
    Voirbo’s cellar yielded more. The detective noticed that the bung on one of the two casks of wine was higher than on the other. He removed it and discovered a string attached. He drew up from the barrel a tin cylinder. When he broke it open, he found the Italian securities for which Bodasse had been killed. There was only one missing — the one Voirbo had used to make his final rent payment on his former room.
    Macé had a fair idea of where and how Bodasse had been murdered; now he set out to re-create the scene of the crime to prove his hunch. Scouring the crime scene as a source of clues was one of Vidocq’s ideas. Later, Bertillon would take extensive photographs of crime scenes and measure them as carefully as he measured suspects’ faces. But Macé’s experiment produced its own spectacular result, one that made such examinations a regular part of the investigation of violent crimes. Collecting Voirbo and several officers from the station, he took them to Voirbo’s former room in the rue Mazarine. With the help of the concierge, Macé arranged it exactly as it had been when Voirbo lived there. Given the small space, he realized that Voirbo would have had to dismember the body on the table in the middle of the room. He noticed that the tiled floor had a sharp slope that ended under the bed.
    With a theatrical flourish, Macé picked up a carafe of water. “I notice a slope in the floor. Now, if a body had been cut up on a table here in the center of the room, the effusion of blood would have been great, and the fluid must have followed this slope. Any other fluid thrown down here must follow the same direction. I will empty this jug on the floor and see what happens!” 30 With that, he poured out the water on the tiles. Everyone present watched it gather in a pool beneath the bed. Voirbo remained tight-lipped as Macé ordered that the tiles there be removed. As each tile came up, dried bloodstains could clearly be seen on the sides and underneath.
    Realizing that the game was up, Voirbo broke down and confessed. He had needed money to show his fiancée in order to prove that he would be an equal partner in the marriage. Bodasse was a miser who hoarded his money, and he refused to lend it to Voirbo. On December 13, 1868, Voirbo had lured Bodasse to his apartment, battered him unconscious with a flatiron, and then slit his throat. Afterward, dressed only in his underwear, Voirbo had chopped up the body. Later he wrapped it and threw pieces into the Seine from the Pont de la Concorde. Though he thought that he had cleaned up the mess thoroughly, he had failed to notice the recess beneath the bed. After sewing the legs in calico bags, he had indeed dropped them in the well on rue Princesse. To make sure the head would sink in the water, he had melted some lead and poured it into the mouth. Afterward, he had moved to the rue Lamartine and in January 1869 had married Adélia.
    Ultimately, Voirbo cheated the guillotine: while he was in jail awaiting trial, he cut his throat with a razor that had been hidden in a loaf of bread. No one knew where he got it. Perhaps some of his friends in the secret police had given it to him as a hint.
    It was the detective, not the criminal, who emerged as a celebrity from this case. Macé wrote an autobiography in which he told how he walked alone at night in the most dangerous parts of the city, satisfying his “desire to see all and know all.” 31 Macé even established his own musée criminal, or museum of criminality, where he displayed artifacts from actual crimes, including murder weapons.
    He first reached fame with his brilliant solution to the Voirbo case and indeed devoted an entire book, Mon premier crime, to it, continuing in the tradition established by Vidocq.