Martin Dumollard

Martin Dumollard (June 22, 1810 − March 8, 1862) was a French serial killer condemned to the guillotine after having been arrested and charged with the deaths of maids from 1855 to 1861. His victims were approached in Lyon by Dumollard, who offered them a nice house in Côtière. Convinced, they would eventually follow him and, during their wanderings on foot, he attacked them. All twelve assaults or attempted assaults occurred in the late 1850s and early 1860s until that of Marie Pichon on May 28, 1861. He was quickly arrested, along with his wife and accomplice, Marie-Anne Martinet, who stole the personal belongings and used them for resale. Their trial took place from January 29 to February 1, 1862: Dumollard was sentenced to death and his wife, twenty years of penal labour. This affair, which preceded that of Joseph Vacher by about thirty years, had a great repercussion in France; it is often considered one of the first cases of a serial killer in France. Dumollard is notably mentioned in Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.

Biography Youth

Martin Dumollard was the son of Marie-Josephte Rey and Pierre Dumollard. The latter, a native of Pest, Hungary, arrived in France in Salins-les-Thermes where he met Marie-Josephte, who came from the region. The couple moved between Dagneux and Tramoyes, where Martin Dumollard was born in 1810. He was baptized in Mionnay because Tramoyes was not a parish at the time. In 1813, the Dumollards had a second child named Raymond, who died at a young age. Martin was subsequently nicknamed "Raymond" by the villagers of Dagneux.

According to some authors, the surname "Dumollard" is a French version of the Hungarian name of Martin's father: "Demola". In this regard, some sources incorrectly connect the name "Dumollard" to the locality of Dagneux named "Le Molard".

At the time of his trial, Dumollard recalled that his father had fled Hungary because of a criminal past there. When the Austro-Hungarian forces armies arrived in Ain in 1814, Pierre Dumollard feared that he would be recognized and fled to Padua. However, troops were also present there, and after he was recognized by the Hungarian forces as a wanted criminal, he was then arrested and executed by dismemberment. Martin Dumollard, aged four, and his mother attended the event.

His mother died impoverished on April 15, 1842, in Dagneux, while her son fled to Lyon due to thefts.

Dumollard began working as a shepherd at the age of eight. He was a servant under Guichard, owner of Sure castle in Saint-André-de-Corcy, where he met Marie-Anne Martinet, Eusebius Pieydagnelle (killer of six girls in 1871) and Joseph Vacher who also murdered in Ain in the mid-1890s. Dumollard is regularly presented as the first serial killer identified, in chronological terms, in Western Europe.

Posterity Dumollard's head The former hospital Desgenettes, where Dumollard's skull was studied in the 1960s. Dumollard's face reconstructed from his skin and scalp highlightning his labial angioma (preserved at the Testut-Latarjet Museum). Result of the DMP method applied to Dumollard and kept at the Testut-Latarjet Museum. Following his execution, Dumollard's body was buried in an indeterminate place, even if a strong presumption indicates that his resting place might be at the edge of the adjoining St. Bartholomew's Chapel of Montluel. The man's head was sent (in a special box) to the Lyon Medical School at the beginning of March 1862. Upon receipt, studies were launched to analyze Dumollard's skull: thus several cast plasters are kept in the Testus-Latarjet Museum.

The skull was gradually abandoned and forgotten before being analyzed again in the 1960s. These works on the skull at the Hôpital d'instruction des armées Desgenettes concluded that Dumollard had an angioma on his lip.

In the mid-1980s, three researchers from Lyon, Claire Desbois, Claude Mallet and Raoul Perrot, developed a method of reconstructing the face from data derived from the single bone structure. They call it "DMP", of their initials, using this method to make a three dimensional representation of Dumollard's face. Comparison with photographs from the period were used to validate the new method. The result of this experimentation, the bust made from Dumollard's head after execution and the reconstituted face from the real skin of Dumollard are all preserved at the Testut-Latarjet Museum.

Artistic references Victor Hugo makes an explicit reference to Martin Dumollard in Volume I of his novel Les Misérables:

In his work Bouvard, Flaubert and Pécuchet, dealing with Bouvard et Pécuchet, Roger Kempf explains that Gustave Flaubert, very much influenced by the Dumollard affair, first named one of his characters "Dumolard", who later became "Dubolard", and finally "Bouvard."

On television, in 1967, an episode of the television series En votre âme et conscience called The Dumollard Affair was devoted to the serial killer. It was directed by Jean Bertho and the actor Étienne Bierry played the role of Dumollard.