He broke into homes while you slept. He bound couples. He killed 13 people. Then he vanished for 32 years — and mowed his lawn in a Sacramento suburb.

Joseph James DeAngelo was a police officer. He was also the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker, and the Golden State Killer. For more than a decade he moved across California. Then DNA from a discarded tissue and a family tree on a genealogy site finally put a name on the mask.

Alexander Lawson tells the full path: the badge, the nights, the cold case, and the 2018 arrest that ended one of America’s longest manhunts.

If this episode is hard to hear, RAINN is 800-656-HOPE.

3 a.m. Two brothers. One bed. One shotgun.

In 1943, Pere Areny Aleix killed his sleeping brother in a stone house in the Pyrenees — then became the last man a European principality ever executed. No lawyer. A public rosary. Six rifles, and only one loaded.

The court said he did it for the inheritance.

The file says his mind was already breaking.

Alexander Lawson on the fratricide Andorra tried to bury — and the firing squad it never used again.

New episode of A True Crime Podcast.

October 1505. Two Grimaldi brothers. One dagger. By morning, Jean II is dead and Lucien is Lord of Monaco. Eighteen years later his nephew walks into the palace, cuts his throat, and the body is dragged down the steps with forty-three wounds. Alexander Lawson tells the story of how a fortress on a cliff was kept — and lost — inside one family.

On 6 May 2014, billionaire heiress Hélène Pastor and her chauffeur, Mohamed Darwich, were gunned down outside a hospital in Nice. The shooting looked like a street robbery. It wasn’t.

Alexander Lawson traces the case from Monaco’s gilded drawing rooms to a Marseille contract killing — and to Wojciech Janowski, Poland’s honorary consul, charity figure, and the longtime partner of Pastor’s daughter. A monthly fortune. A crumbling business empire. A fitness coach as middleman. A confession that vanished, then returned through a lawyer’s mouth.

This episode of A True Crime Podcast is the story of proximity to money, a principality that sells safety, and a conviction that ended in life.

Before dawn in one of the most guarded penthouses on Earth, billionaire Edmond Safra locked himself in a bathroom with his nurse. They thought assassins were in the house. The only other man inside was Ted Maher — the nurse hired to keep Safra alive.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of the 1999 Monte Carlo fire that killed Safra and nurse Vivian Torrente: the staged home invasion, the wastebasket, the self-inflicted wounds, the confession, Monaco’s “trial of the century,” and the prison break that lasted only hours.

A small fire. A fortress that filled with smoke. And a man who wanted to be a hero.

August 1907. A trunk leaks on a Marseille platform. Inside is a woman’s torso. Head and legs in another bag. Jewels beside them.

The couple who checked the luggage called themselves Sir and Lady Goold. She was Marie — French dressmaker, self-styled lady, and the woman Monaco’s court sentenced to death.

Alexander Lawson tells the story of the Monte Carlo trunk murder: a faded Wimbledon finalist, a widow who came to collect a debt, a villa a short walk from the casino, and the last capital sentence ever handed down in the Principality.

This is A True Crime Podcast.

August 1907. A leaking steamer trunk at Marseille station. Inside: a woman’s dismembered body. The man who packed it had once reached the Wimbledon final.

Alexander Lawson tells the story of Vere St. Leger Goold — Irish tennis champion, gambler, and the only Wimbledon finalist ever convicted of murder — and the killing of Emma Levin in Monaco’s Villa Menesini.

Roulette, borrowed titles, a thousand-franc debt, and the crime the papers called the Monte Carlo Trunk Murder.

A True Crime Podcast.

June 26, 2003. A 13-year-old girl in Ciney, Belgium, is forced into a van — and escapes. That night ends the long hunt of Michel Fourniret, the so-called Ogre of the Ardennes.

Host Alexander Lawson traces the crimes Fourniret committed in and through Belgium: the abduction of 12-year-old Elisabeth Brichet from Saint-Servais; bodies left in the woods of Vresse-sur-Semois; the years he lived in Sart-Custinne and worked at a local school; the failed attacks in Namur and Gedinne; and the pact with Monique Olivier that let him cross the Franco-Belgian border for more than a decade.

Content warning: sexual violence and crimes against minors. This episode is based on court records and publicly reported facts. If you have information about unsolved disappearances from this period, contact the police — do not speculate online.

On 23 June 1979, five people were murdered in a house in Sint-Amandsberg, near Ghent. A father, a mother, two daughters, and a young man who had only come home to see the woman he loved. Months earlier, a Polish shopkeeper had been shot in the port of Ghent. The same weapon. The same names in the dock.

Freddy Horion — Sunglasses, the Monster — and Roland Feneulle were convicted of six murders and sentenced to death, immediately commuted to life. Feneulle died in prison. Horion did not. For nearly half a century he was one of Belgium’s longest-serving prisoners, while courts, relatives, and Europe argued over what life actually means.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the crimes, the trial, and the decades that followed — including the 2026 transfer from prison to a forensic care centre under an ankle tag. This episode is about the Steyaert family and Hélène Lichachevski first. Horion’s name is only the reason we still have to say theirs.

A True Crime Podcast.

In 1930s Liège, a widow poured the tea, borrowed the money, and measured the dose. Marie Alexandrine Becker — the Black Widow, the Belgian Borgia — was convicted of poisoning eleven people and attempting to kill five more.

Host Alexander Lawson follows her rise from a farm in Waasmont to a dressmaker’s parlour, the digitaline in the cup, the anonymous letters that finally stopped her, and the 1938 trial that ended in a death sentence Belgium would not carry out.

The most dangerous room in this story was not a dungeon. It was a sitting room with two cups.

A True Crime Podcast.