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 loyalty, power, and the thin line between duty and treason that would later see him condemned by a liberated France.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, host Alexander Lawson examines the rise, choices, and downfall of the man who handed Tunisia to the enemy—and paid the price for obedience

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 receive that sentence for murder. He will spend the next fifteen years behind bars for a crime he did not commit.

This is the story of Patrick Dils, one of France’s most devastating miscarriages of justice, and the long fight to prove his innocence.

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 in the Place de Grève—still protesting his innocence.

Host Alexander Lawson unravels the calculated crimes of one of the Ancien Régime’s most hypocritical killers: the pious poisoner who turned hospitality into murder.

Listen now to this episode of A True Crime Podcast.

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 sentence. A story of brilliance, bitterness, and betrayal under the shadow of Vichy France.

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 — stories: daring escapes, years in solitary, a coconut raft through shark waters, and a bestselling memoir that may have stolen other men’s lives.

Host Alexander Lawson examines the crime, the conviction, the bagne, and the enduring mystery of how much of Papillon’s tale is truth… and how much is legend.

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 Toullier murders of two police officers, the train bombings of the 1980s, and the decades-long pursuit that finally brought him to justice. Multiple life sentences later, the Jackal remains behind bars in France.

A True Crime Podcast.

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 triggered a massive three-day manhunt involving hundreds of officers and helicopters.

From the woods of northern Italy to a life sentence in a French prison, this is the story of the self-styled survivalist who treated ordinary people as targets in his private war.

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 for.

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 lifelong criminal who had spent decades bouncing between prisons and psychiatric hospitals, he had been released on parole just months earlier despite repeated warnings about his danger.

Host Alexander Lawson traces Bodein’s long, disturbing history, the eight-day killing spree that claimed the lives of 10-year-old Jeanne-Marie Kegelin, 14-year-old Julie Scharsch, and 38-year-old Hedwige Vallée, and the investigation that finally stopped him. This is the story of a man who gamed the system for years—and the devastating cost when that system failed.

A true crime podcast.