Vidocq Society

A number of former and present law enforcement professionals founded the Vidocq Society in 1990 to solve cold cases. The society was aptly named after Eugène-François Vidocq (1775–1857), a master criminal who was active in France in the early 19th century. Vidocq was so clever at his trade that the city of Paris made him its Chief of Detectives (1809–27, 1832). He became legendary in the annals of crime and punishment, and a number of novelists modeled characters after him, including Emile Gaboriau's police officer M. Lecoq. Most famously, Honoré de Balzac supposedly based his master criminal, Vautrin, who appears throughout Le Comédie Humaine, on Vidocq's life. Vidocq was not only a successful thief and detective, but also an author of books on crime and criminals, such as his work on criminals’ customs and slang, Les Voleurs, Physiologie de Leure Moeurs et Leur Langage … (1837), and his popular autobiography, Mémoires de Vidocq, chef de la police de SÛreté jusqu'en 1827 (1828).

Vidocq was creative in solving mysterious crimes, and in 1811, he founded the elite undercover unit of the Paris police, the SÛreté. Vidocq used ingenious disguises and a variety of unconventional and innovative methods to solve crime. He is credited with such crime-fighting techniques as indexed recordkeeping, criminalistics and ballistics studies, and plaster casts of foot and shoe impressions. After his tenure as chief of police, he founded his own very successful private detective agency. He also held patents on indelible ink and unalterable bond paper. Therefore, when William Fleisher, a former FBI agent; Frank Bender, a forensic psychologist; and William Richard Walter, another forensic [Page 490]psychologist and profiler, founded their society to help with unsolved crimes, they considered it appropriate to name the society after Vidocq because of his reputation for investigating crimes.

The club is limited to 82 members, one for each year of Vidocq's life. The Society also has approximately 150 associate members from around the world. The membership includes attorneys, judges, profilers, coroners, psychologists, police detectives, forensic scientists, and others. Only regular members can vote on taking a case. They devote each monthly meeting in Philadelphia to an unsolved homicide or death. The members examine whatever evidence exists and attempt to revive the investigation among offices. Originally, the group met at lunch to talk about old cases. The discussion became so lively that the members began an organization to see if they could actually solve old crimes. The members, many former law enforcement officers, decided early on that they would not interfere with official agencies, and that the latter would have to approve of the Society's involvement.

The Society has solved a number of homicides. Most prominent from the Philadelphia area were the murders of Terry Brooks and Deborah Lynn Wilson. Brooks, an assistant manager at a Roy Rogers restaurant, was murdered during a hold-up in 1986. The members recommended a new investigation and an examination of the DNA evidence, which was not checked at the time of the murder. They found a former boyfriend of the victim and matched his DNA with that found at the crime scene. He eventually confessed to the crime in 1999.

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