A True crime Podcast

A decorated hero of the Great War. A career officer of the French Foreign Legion. A holder of the Légion d’Honneur. Then, in 1943, he put on the black uniform of the Waffen-SS. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast , Alexander Lawson examines the life and crimes of Paul-Marie Gamory-Dubourdeau — the professional soldier who rose to command the first French SS volunteer brigade and later served i...

In November 1998, two women were murdered within eight days in eastern France. One body was pulled from a canal, weighted with sewer grates. The other was found locked in the trunk of a burned-out car. The man responsible had already killed before—and the justice system had already released him more than once. This episode of A True Crime Podcast tells the full story of Jacques Maurice Fruminet, t...

A quiet road. A teenage girl walking home from school. A van pulls up… and she never makes it home. Between 1987 and 2003, Michel Paul Fourniret — known as the Ogre of the Ardennes — and his wife Monique Olivier preyed on young girls and women across France and Belgium. Driven by a chilling obsession with virginity, the couple left a trail of shattered families and unresolved cases. In this episod...

He was a celebrated historian, a professor at the Collège de France, and a close friend of Gertrude Stein. Then Bernard Faÿ turned France’s greatest library into a weapon. In 1940, under the Vichy regime, he built a secret card index of 60,000 Freemasons, seized their headquarters, and fed names to the Germans. Nearly a thousand men were deported. 549 never came home. This is the story of the eleg...

In the industrial shadow of the Peugeot factories, a quiet foundry worker lived a double life. By day, Mohamed Faleh was a reliable colleague. By night, debts from gambling drove him to hunt with an axe. Three victims died. One survived the soft “chut” that came just before the blade. This episode of A True Crime Podcast uncovers the brutal crimes of the man the French press called the Axe Killer...

November 1942. As Allied forces storm North Africa, a French admiral in Tunis holds the key to the fate of the campaign. German planes circle. Fuel stocks sit ready. One decision will either bar the door… or throw it wide open for the Axis. Admiral Jean-Pierre Esteva, a decorated hero of the First World War and trusted servant of Marshal Pétain, chooses collaboration. What follows is a story of lo...

Sixteen years old. An apprentice cook. Quiet. One afternoon the police take him in over the brutal murders of two eight-year-old boys. After 36 hours of interrogation he confesses. He describes the sound of their skulls being crushed “like a melon.” He recants almost immediately. It doesn’t matter. In 1989 a French court sentences him to life in prison — the first minor in modern French history to...

A devout Paris grocer. A trusted host. A man who knelt in prayer by day and measured poison by night. In 1770s France, Antoine François Desrues invited a noblewoman and her teenage son into his home. He slowly poisoned them both, buried their bodies in secret, forged documents, and tried to claim their country estate as his own. When the truth emerged, he was broken on the wheel and burned alive i...

In occupied France, one man never needed a gun. Henry Coston built lists, published pamphlets, and celebrated the camps. After the Liberation he was sentenced to hard labour for life—then walked free after five years and kept writing until he died. Host Alexander Lawson examines the true-crime story of France’s most relentless antisemitic propagandist.

He was called the Edison of France—the inventor of neon lighting, a scientific genius who helped build industrial empires. Then came the Nazi occupation. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast , host Alexander Lawson examines how Georges Claude turned his prestige into propaganda, publicly championed collaboration with the enemy, and faced a dramatic postwar reckoning that ended in a life sentenc...

In 1930 Paris, a single gunshot in Montmartre kills a pimp named Roland Legrand. The dying man names his killer: “Papillon.” Police arrest Henri Charrière, a young safecracker with a butterfly tattooed on his chest. He swears he’s innocent. The courts give him life at hard labor in the infamous French Guiana penal colony. What follows is one of true crime’s most legendary — and most disputed — sto...

On a sunny Sunday in 1974, a grenade exploded in a crowded Paris drugstore, killing two and wounding dozens. The man behind it—and a trail of bombings, shootings, and terror across France—was Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. In this episode, Alexander Lawson traces the Venezuelan revolutionary’s deadly campaign on French soil: the Drugstore Publicis attack, the Rue Toullie...

September 17, 1992. A quiet French town. A bank robbery. Children leaving school. And a municipal officer gunned down in cold blood. Host Alexander Lawson recounts the crimes of Arrigo Candela — the Italian security guard who styled himself after Rambo, left a trail of bodies across Piedmont, and fled to Brittany. There he robbed banks, murdered a police officer near an elementary school, and trig...

In 1967, Claude Gabriel Buffet murdered a young woman in a stolen taxi and staged the scene as a sadistic crime. Sentenced to life, he told the court they hadn’t heard the last of him. Four years later, inside Clairvaux Prison, he took a nurse and a guard hostage—and cut their throats when police closed in. This is the story of the man who wanted to die by the blade… and got exactly what he asked...

Three little girls. One woman. Eight days. And a man the French justice system had already set free. In the summer of 2004, the quiet villages of Alsace were shattered by a series of brutal murders. Bodies turned up in the streams—mutilated, partially undressed, and marked by a signature of extreme violence. The suspect was Pierre Fernand Bodein, better known as Pierrot le Fou—“Crazy Pierre.” A li...

In the dead of night, a stranger enters a woman’s home, binds her hands, and forces her into his car. What follows is a calculated nightmare — and then, chillingly, he drives her home. Jean-Luc Blanche, known as “le routard du viol,” terrorized women and adolescents across France in the 1990s and early 2000s. Released from prison despite clear psychiatric warnings, he resumed his attacks, moving f...

June 6, 1867. In the heart of Paris, a 20-year-old Polish patriot steps from the crowd, raises a cheap double-barreled pistol, and fires at Tsar Alexander II riding beside Napoleon III. The gun explodes in his hand. The bullet hits a horse instead. What follows is a swift trial, a life sentence of hard labor in a remote Pacific penal colony, and nearly fifty years of exile that ends in obscurity....

In the spring of 1944, forty-four Jewish children were torn from a quiet home in the village of Izieu. Almost none survived. The man who ordered their deportation was Klaus Barbie—Gestapo chief of Lyon, known across France as the Butcher of Lyon. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, host Alexander Lawson recounts Barbie’s brutal campaign against the French Resistance and Jewish community: the...

On a cold November night in 1986, Renault CEO Georges Besse was gunned down outside his Paris home. One of the shooters who finished him off was Joëlle Aubron — a privileged young woman from Neuilly-sur-Seine who abandoned her comfortable life for the radical underground of Action Directe. In this episode, Alexander Lawson traces Aubron’s path from bourgeois upbringing to far-left terrorism, the a...

In December 1977, a young Argentine naval officer with an angelic face infiltrated a group of grieving mothers in Buenos Aires. He called himself Gustavo Niño. With a single kiss on the cheek, he condemned them—and two French Catholic nuns—to torture and a death flight over the Atlantic. Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet never returned. Their killer, Alfredo Ignacio Astiz, would later be sentenced to...

In the late 1950s, a French Army colonel ordered suspected rebels executed in public squares—and left their bodies on display as a deliberate tool of terror. His name was Antoine Argoud. A decorated officer turned OAS leader, Argoud admitted to torture, summary executions, and plotting against Charles de Gaulle. Then, in 1963, he was kidnapped from a Munich hotel and dumped, bound and beaten, in a...

Between 1989 and 1997, a charming nightclub doorman from Toulouse left a trail of raped and strangled women across southern France and Paris. Two of the deaths were written off as suicides. One body was buried in a garden. Another was left in a burning apartment. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, host Alexander Lawson recounts the crimes of Patrice Alègre—the man known as the Strangler of H...

On the night of November 13, 2015, coordinated terrorist attacks struck Paris, killing 130 people. Nine of the attackers died that night. One did not. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast , host Alexander Lawson examines the crimes of Salah Abdeslam — the logistics operative who helped prepare the attacks, the brother of a suicide bomber, and the man who became Europe’s most wanted for 125 days...

In 1982, two diplomats are gunned down on the streets of Paris. One American. One Israeli. A little-known Lebanese Marxist group claims the murders as retaliation for the war in Lebanon. Years later, a soft-spoken former schoolteacher walks into a police station in Lyon claiming he needs protection from Mossad. Instead, French authorities arrest Georges Ibrahim Abdallah — the man they say mastermi...

Independence Day 2012. Castle Rock, Colorado. Lonnie James Pebley turns a quiet neighborhood into a war zone, pinning down 27 officers with an AK-47 for 30 straight minutes. No one dies… but justice hits hard. Full story on the podcast. #TrueCrime #TrueCrimeTikTok #CrimeStory #CastleRock #July4th