The Walder affair: from the murder of Joseph Lagrange (1847-1879), pharmacist based Place Beauvau in Paris, to the modernization of the police identification methods
Résumé
On October 5, 1879, Joseph Lagrange (1847-1879), a pharmacist practicing Place Beauvau in Paris, and his maid, Zélie Galliot (1861-1879), were murdered. The killer was quickly unmasked: Arnold Walder (1857-?), a pharmacy student employed by Joseph Lagrange. But despite the evidence and the means deployed by the police, Arnold Walder was never found nor arrested. This article studied this case in detail, thanks to the judicial archives, the police archives and old press articles. The violence of the crime, its location at the doorstep of the French Ministry of the Interior, and the disappearance of the murderer made it an important crime case of the 20th century that was regularly reported in the newspapers for almost forty years. In a second step, we highlighted the link between this affair and Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914), father of the forensic anthropometry.