A True crime Podcast

April 1892. A bomb rips through a Paris restaurant. The owner lies dead. A customer is killed. The city is left in shock. This was no random act of terror — it was calculated revenge. The man behind the blast was Théodule Meunier, a skilled cabinet-maker turned anarchist bomber who helped ignite France’s deadly “Era of Attacks.” From the failed explosion at the Lobau Barracks to the lethal attack...

On a quiet Paris street in 1986, two unmasked women gunned down the CEO of Renault in broad daylight. One of them was Nathalie Ménigon — a working-class bank employee turned co-founder of the far-left terrorist group Action Directe. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast , host Alexander Lawson traces her path from radical activism to targeted assassinations, a life sentence, and eventual release...

In a cold Lyon courtroom in January 1945, a nearly deaf 76-year-old man rises to face his sentence and shouts one final, venomous line: “This is the revenge of Dreyfus!” Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras never held a gun. He never planted a bomb. Yet for decades his newspaper columns called for deaths, named targets, demanded hostages be shot, and cheered the persecution of Jews, Resistance fighters,...

Summer 1976. A heatwave grips Grenoble. Two young people vanish. Then a third. Letters signed “Red Brigades – Group 666” demand a massive ransom… or the hostages die. Police launch a manhunt. A city lives in fear of a terrorist cell. But there was no cell. Only one man: Joël Isidore Matencio. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast , Alexander Lawson examines the calculated kidnappings and murders...

Seven young women with intellectual disabilities vanished from the French countryside between 1975 and 1979. No one searched for them. Officials called them runaways. For twenty-five years, their cases gathered dust—until a bus driver named Émile Louis sat down with police and confessed to raping and murdering them. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast , Alexander Lawson examines the Affaire de...

It’s just after midnight at a wedding in the French Alps. An eight-year-old girl is dancing. One moment she’s there. The next, she’s gone. The man who took her was an invited guest — a former army dog handler named Nordahl Guillaume Richard Lelandais. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, host Alexander Lawson unravels the chilling double life of Lelandais: the 2017 murder of young soldier Arth...

In the dark waters of the Avre marshes near Amiens, two young men were found dead months apart — one with a fractured skull, the other shot and tangled in a boat chain. Both had last been seen alive with the same quiet, helpful friend. Host Alexander Lawson recounts the crimes of David Patrick Roger Lefèvre, the French serial killer known as Le Tueur des Marais — the Swamp Killer. From a violent c...

Between August 1993 and January 1994, a 22-year-old man quietly terrorized the suburbs south of Paris. Five elderly women were strangled in their own homes. One survived. The killer later admitted the blood excited him. Host Alexander Lawson recounts the crimes of Claude Lastennet — the man French media called the “tueur de vieilles dames” — from his fractured childhood and psychiatric struggles t...

High above the French Riviera, Michel Lambin lived as a quiet goat farmer and cheesemaker. Neighbors saw a polite, ordinary man. The woman who lived with him saw something else entirely—a killer who allegedly hung victims from meat hooks, dismembered them while they were still alive, and treated human remains with the same cold practicality he used on livestock. In this episode of A True Crime Pod...

In 1946, a French court sentenced a 72-year-old former revolutionary to life at hard labour. Not for murder — for helping send hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen into forced labour for Nazi Germany. Hubert Lagardelle began as a firebrand of French syndicalism. He ended as Vichy Minister of Labour, one of the men who made the Service du Travail Obligatoire a reality. In this episode of A T...

In 1840, a carefully baked cake arrived in Paris. One bite set off a chain of vomiting, convulsions, and death that would captivate an entire nation. Marie-Fortunée Lafarge, a refined young Parisian trapped in a loveless marriage, stood accused of slowly poisoning her husband with arsenic. Her trial became one of the first to hinge on forensic toxicology—and left France bitterly divided over wheth...

In 1993, in a Liberian village square, a man’s chest was split open with an axe. His heart was cut out, cooked, and eaten in front of the community. One of the men who took a piece was a young rebel commander named Kunti Kamara. Thirty years later, that same man sat in a glass box in a Paris courtroom — the first Liberian war criminal tried in France under universal jurisdiction. In this episode o...

Rennes, 1932. A bomb explodes under a statue. One of the young extremists rounded up afterward is twenty-two-year-old Théophile Jeusset. Investigators find he has been in contact with German agents. Over the next decade he will move from antisemitic pamphlets and secret Breton nationalist cells to active service in the Bezen Perrot—a collaborationist militia affiliated with the Waffen-SS. When the...

Paris, 1946. The war is over, but a French courtroom delivers a different kind of justice. Claude Jeantet—journalist, propagandist, and high-ranking collaborator—is sentenced to hard labor for life. He never fired a gun. Instead, he used newspapers, influence, and carefully chosen words to support the Nazi occupation and help normalize one of history’s darkest chapters in France. From the far-righ...

In 1927 Abel Hermant became one of the forty “immortals” of the Académie française — a celebrated novelist, language purist, and Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor. Eighteen years later the same man, now eighty-two, stood in a courtroom and received a life sentence for treason. This episode examines how a pillar of French letters lent his pen, prestige, and name to the Nazi occupation, the post-...

He was one of France’s literary Immortals — elected to the Académie française, celebrated for his sharp novels of high society and his defense of the pure French language. Then came the Occupation. At nearly eighty years old, Abel Hermant aligned himself with the enemy: writing for a pro-Nazi newspaper, supporting Vichy, and joining the Groupe Collaboration. In December 1945 the same man was sente...

On January 30, 1976, seven-year-old Philippe Bertrand vanished after school near Troyes, France. Within the hour, his parents received a ransom demand. Eighteen days later, police found his body wrapped under a hotel bed. The man who rented that room had already appeared on national television, declaring that anyone who harms a child deserves to die. His name was Patrick Daniel Henry. In this epis...

Between 1984 and 1992, a quiet, drifting man with no car and no fixed address left a trail of brutal, impulsive murders across France. Hitchhiking, jumping trains, sleeping in shelters and psychiatric wards, Francis Heaulme — later dubbed “le routard du crime” — killed without pattern or warning. Children, elderly women, a nurse on a crowded beach… no one was safe when he “saw red.” In this episod...

Three victims. No clear pattern. No elaborate plan. Just opportunity, impulse, and sudden brutality. In 1992, a French teacher is poisoned and asphyxiated in his Beauvais apartment. A decade later, an elderly woman is found with her throat slit in a hostel room. Weeks after that, a young cameraman is drugged and stabbed to death in Saint-Étienne. All three murders lead back to one man: Jacquy Hadd...

In August 1907, a leaking trunk at a Marseille train station revealed a horrific discovery: a woman’s dismembered body. The couple who left it claimed it was just poultry. One of them had once stood as a Wimbledon finalist. Host Alexander Lawson uncovers the shocking fall of Vere Thomas “St. Leger” Goold—from Irish tennis champion to convicted murderer in the Monte Carlo Trunk Murder. A story of g...

Paris, 1991. A 19-year-old student returns home. By morning she is dead — the first of seven women raped, tortured, and murdered by a predator who stalked the streets of eastern Paris for six years. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast , host Alexander Lawson unravels the crimes of Guy Georges — the man the press called the Beast of the Bastille. From his early violence and repeated releases fr...

He was a devout Catholic, an elite civil servant, and a trusted insider at the heart of NATO. For nearly 20 years, Georges Pâques handed the West’s most sensitive military secrets to the Soviet Union—not for money, not for ideology, but in the name of “peace.” In this episode of A True Crime Podcast , Alexander Lawson uncovers the remarkable story of one of the Cold War’s most productive and puzzl...

In a quiet Provençal villa, firefighters force open a door and find a mother and daughter bound, gagged, and slaughtered. The house is locked from the inside. Twenty-nine stab wounds. Two throats cut. And no DNA that matches the man everyone suspects. Alexander Lawson investigates the crimes of Poncé Gaudissard — the bus driver, serial rapist, and suspected double murderer known as the Barbarian o...

On May 16, 1967, inside the sewing workshop of Nîmes Central Prison, a man known as “King Kong” sharpened a pair of scissors… then used them to kill a guard in front of nearly a hundred inmates. Maurice Gateaux’s path of violence began years earlier in Algeria, continued with a fatal robbery in 1965, and ended with a life sentence that became the longest continuous detention in modern French histo...

July 15, 1983. A suitcase explodes at the Turkish Airlines check-in desk in Paris’s Orly Airport. Eight people are killed. More than fifty are injured. The bomb was never meant to detonate on the ground. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson examines the case of Varoujan Garabedian, the Syrian-born Armenian nationalist and ASALA operative who confessed to planting the device, r...