During a three-year period beginning in 1894, Vacher murdered and mutilated at least 11 people (one woman, five teenage girls, and five teenage boys). Many of them were shepherds watching their flocks in isolated fields. The victims were stabbed repeatedly, often disemboweled, raped, and sodomized. Vacher became a drifter, travelling from town to town, from Normandy to Provence, staying mainly in the southeast of France and surviving by begging or working on farms as a day laborer. By most accounts, he was unkempt and frightening, wandering from town to town as a vagrant in filthy clothes, begging in the streets and surviving on the scraps he received from anyone who spared him a kindness.