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.

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 freely between departments while the justice system failed to stop him.

In this episode, Alexander Lawson examines the crimes of the man whose case helped create France’s national sex-offender registry — and the survivors left in his wake.

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.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the true story of Antoni Berezowski — the forgotten assassin whose single desperate shot revealed the deep wounds of a crushed uprising and the long reach of imperial justice.

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 torture and death of Jean Moulin, the Rue Sainte-Catherine roundup, the final convoy out of Lyon, and the sadistic methods that earned him his nickname.

We follow Barbie’s escape after the war, his years of protection and exile in Bolivia, and the long fight that finally brought him back to face justice in 1987. A story of cruelty, delayed accountability, and the enduring scars left on a city and a nation.

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 assassinations of General René Audran and Georges Besse, her dramatic arrest in 1987, life sentences, and her unrepentant final years.

A story of ideology, violence, and a woman who never said sorry.

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 life in a Paris courtroom… without ever setting foot in France.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, host Alexander Lawson uncovers the chilling story of the “Blond Angel of Death,” the secret crimes of Argentina’s Dirty War, and the landmark French trial that refused to let justice disappear.

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 van outside Paris police headquarters.

Host Alexander Lawson traces the rise, crimes, and extraordinary downfall of one of the most ruthless figures of the Algerian War and the secret war that followed.

A story of colonial violence, political terrorism, and a state that fought fire with fire.

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 Haute-Garonne—his arrest, his trial, and the questions that still linger about how many victims he truly left behind.

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. From his role driving attackers into position and renting the vehicles and rooms used in the plot, to his escape back to Brussels, the intense manhunt across Molenbeek, his dramatic capture, and the historic French trial that ended with a rare full-life sentence, this is the full story of the only surviving member of the Paris attack cell.

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 masterminded the killings.

Convicted of complicity in the assassinations and sentenced to life, Abdallah spends more than 41 years in a French prison, insisting he is a fighter, not a criminal. Supporters call him a political prisoner. Victims’ families call him a terrorist.

This is the story of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions, the cold-blooded murders that brought a distant war to the heart of Europe, and the longest-held terrorist prisoner in modern French history.

Hosted by Alexander Lawson.