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This is an excerpt from the new book The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science, by Douglas Starr.

When Alexandre Lacassagne arrived at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Lyon in 1881, he set about bringing the study of forensics into the modern era. It would be a new kind of practice, based on practical training, extensive research and translating that research into standardized procedures. It did not carry the glory of Pasteur’s discoveries or the history-changing paradigms of Darwin’s. Perhaps for those reasons his name is forgotten. But in terms of human benefits—villains brought to justice, innocent people freed, the overall civilizing affect on society—the impact of Lacassagne’s work was immense.

Lacassagne believed medical students' education was overly theoretical and lecture-based; he felt that what students really needed was practical experience. Under his tutelage, students assisted in eighty or more criminal autopsies every year. Each session followed a rigid protocol. Lacassagne or his lab chief would start by describing the known facts of the case—where and when the body was found, whether authorities suspected foul play and what they assumed to be the cause of death. Then he would distribute “observation pages”—charts that laid out the procedures they planned to employ. Designed as a kind of flow sheet, these pages would proscribe the steps that Lacassagne, his lab chief and students would follow in investigating each possible cause of death, with a series of observations to check off along the way. Each series of observations would lead to the next... and so on, until they arrived at a conclusion.


To do such exacting work required a well-equipped facility, and Lacassagne created one of the world’s most advanced criminal laboratories. The ground floor housed a modern amphitheater for dissections, with a rotating table in the center and semi-circular galleries that could hold up to 100 observers. An elevator brought corpses up from the basement and lowered the remains after the dissections. Adjacent to the operating theater was a laboratory containing microscopes and spectroscopic equipment.

To assist in an autopsy with Dr. Lacassagne was to participate in a memorable educational experience. Medical students would have seen hospital autopsies before, but forensic dissections were something quite different. Here they saw tableaus of violent death, displayed in a medium of shredded tissue and broken bone. Death leaves a signature, and they would learn to read the meaning: a peaceful death versus a violent one; a death by accident, suicide or crime. They would learn to determine whether the baby had been still-born or had lived long enough to take its first breath, by removing the lungs and seeing if they floated. They would learn that a frothy liquid in the airways indicated drowning; that a furrow around the neck pointed to a rope-hanging; that break-points in opposite sides of the larynx showed that the victim had been strangled with two hands. They would use the angle of a stab wound to determine the trajectory of the arm that held the knife, and the pathway of a bullet to deduce the location of the gun. They would employ chemical reagents to identify stains from blood, semen, fecal matter and rust (often mistaken for blood). “The students all flocked to him,” remembered Dr. Edmond Locard, a student who himself became a prominent criminologist. And so, several times a month for the thirty-three years that Dr. Lacassagne taught at the medical faculty of Lyon, students would cluster around their beloved professor who, with no mask on his face and no gloves on his hands, would slice into a cadaver to reveal the mysteries of the last moments of the deceased.

Upstairs from the laboratory was a large criminal museum that served as a reference base. There, students, colleagues and magistrates could wander among the exhibit cases and study the variety of natural, accidental and purposeful deaths, to inform their own investigations. One display case, for example, held everything related to fetuses and newborns: embryonic skeletons, bones with fractures typical of infanticide, instruments used for illegal abortions, and the heads of infants at several stages of development. Enormous glass cylinders held bodies of still-born infants, suspended in clear liquid as though in an eternal womb. Two glass cases were devoted to skulls and their fractures—broken from accidental deaths, suicides and crimes, including falls from high places, hammer blows and bullets. One cabinet contained projectiles and cartridges of every known firearm. One cabinet was stocked with vials of poisons, drawers filled with microscopic preparations of human and animal hair, and fabrics stained with blood, sperm and pus. There was a collection of various ropes and chords used in hangings and Lacassagne’s collection of 4,000 tattoos.

Next page: stabbing and shooting cadavers in the name of science