After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Body In The Trunk: France's Shocking 19th Century Murder Case

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

It was a murder mystery that gripped 19th century France and changed crime investigation forever.Who was the body in the trunk? What were the groundbreaking techniques used in the forensics investigation? And how did the murder case unfold from there?Taking Anthony and Maddy back to France in 1889 and through this story is historian and author Dr. Cat Byers.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hello everyone. It's us, your hosts Maddie Pelling and Anthony Delaney. But before we begin the show, we want to ask for a few seconds of your time. If you're enjoying After Dark, and we love you, if you are, we would love you just a little bit more. If you could vote for us in the listeners choice category at the British Podcast Awards. So go to the show notes now, click the link, and just then search for After Dark. Fill in your name and your email and don't forget to confirm. They will send you an email. You need to confirm. The whole process probably takes about 30. 30 seconds. If you've already voted, we are so, so grateful. If you haven't, stop what you are doing

right now. Vote for us before you enjoy this show. Hello, or actually, should I say bonjour and welcome to After Dark, because in today's episode, we are going to be talking about a murder case that captured the imagination of 19th century France and is said to have pioneered certain areas of the forensic sciences. But first, let's get into the heart and the heat of the action. It was the height of summer 1889 and the city of Lyon shimmered under the sun. Just beyond its edge, in a wooded ravine near the quiet village of Millarie, the air crackled under heat and the unsettling stench of decay. Two local men followed the scent and stumbled upon a large trunk, abandoned in the underbush,

With a mixture of curiosity, suspicion, and hesitancy, they pried it open. What they found inside was horrifying. The contorted, decomposing body of a man, crammed inside like cargo. His features were bloated and distorted. The scent of death came in a wave and clung to the air around them like a curse. The trunk itself bore no name, no clear origin. A mystery was born. The body inside was beyond recognition

and whispered no immediate clues as to who it was or how it had got to this remote location. Just the chilling certainty that this man had not put himself there. The corpse was taken to the Leon Morg, where pioneering work began the grim task of deciphering who the deceased had been, and what awful circumstances had led him to his death.

What involved would become one of the most sensational murder cases in 19th century France. It would span continents, involve an alluring young woman, a manipulative older man, claims of hypnosis, and some of the earliest applications of modern forensic science. It shocked a nation, blurred the line between victim and accomplice, and marked a turning point in the way we investigated. investigate crime forever. This is after dark, and this is the Goufay murder case. Now, my script says that I need to say our names, but I don't want to say our names today. We say our names all the time.

I'm bored of saying our names. So if you don't know who we are, just go and listen to another episode. It's absolutely fine. So this is After Dark, though. This is a podcast about the darker side of history. And we're today doing a crossover between After Dark and CSI 19th century, Paris. And I'm totally here for it. And of course, we couldn't do this on our own.

So we are joined to help us through this history by Morg Enthusiasmist. That's what it says here, that you're a morgue enthusiast, Cat. And previous guest in After Dark, one of our favorite guests in After Dark, but this time she happens to be Dr. Cat Buyers. Congratulations. Thank you. I can't decide if it's better or worse to be a morgue enthusiast or a morgue expert. I think morgue enthusiast is worse.

Yeah, it sounds like amateur. Yeah, and it just sounds a bit creepy, actually. Yeah. So in this episode, we are going to hear a story which centers around another morgue, because we've spoken about morgues with Kat before. And we are going to talk about a Morgan Leon this time. And it's the Goufé murder case. It's a story with a few twists and turns, as Maddie was saying there.

But the emergence of some of these details that we now take for granted as part of the whole forensic science suite. So let's set the crime scene, if you will. Kat, can you tell us what is happening in France, in Paris at this time? We're in 1889. That's right, isn't it? 1889. Paris is actually in the middle of a world fair.

God, people are mad for world fairs. I don't get the appeal. Sorry, this is a tangent. I'm just like, God, it's a lot of effort for that. I couldn't be bothered. Yeah, I mean, it's like millions and millions of people. And it doesn't massively impact the case in a kind of a devil and white city way. But it does mean that it adds another layer of like there's lots of strangers around at the time.

So we've got kind of that going on. We're also towards the end of the 19th century. So in terms of, I guess, like policing. in medicine. I've had all these massive developments in forensics and they're still happening, they're still testing out a lot of things but that is really changing the game in terms of how crimes

are being solved and how investigations are proceeding and also how much the public are kind of getting involved in crimes as well because we've obviously, you know, we've talked before about the morgue and how people would go and see the bodies and how it was a kind of like a real early

true crime element to that but then you add the kind of rise of sort of forensics and tabloids and newspapers writing about forensics and adding that part of the case to their reporting. And we've got detective novels going on. So you've also got this new thing where people are even more interested in how crimes are being solved from a kind of scientific and medical legal point of view, as well as the police are using these. So that all kind of comes together in this case as well, where people are not only interested in the kind of salacious marriage aside about, but also the actual techniques that the police are using and techniques

that the perpetrators might have used to try and hide their actions. It strikes me cat, Dr. Cat. We're going to have to call you Dr. Cat the entire way through now. Thank you. That's how we should all refer to each other at all times, yes. Yes. It does strike me that Paris in this moment is kind of a city of two halves and that true crime is something that kind of collapses that distinction, right? You've got, as you say, the welfare going on.

I think the Eiffel Tower is completed this year as well. And, you know, Paris is very much like a symbol of modernity. There are these sort of grand boulevards. There's electric lighting in the streets. there's all this scientific innovation, as you say. But then also we have the morgue. We have people going and seeing the spectacle of death and sort of becoming interested slash obsessed with murder in particular. And do you think it's fair to say that there is an element of that interest in detection work, in kind of restoring order that makes the sort of ordinary

respectable citizens of Paris feel comforted in some way? Because they're able to glimpse this darker side. Do you think that people have faith in the police at this moment? I think maybe a little bit, yeah. I think it might increase the feeling that they might be able to solve crimes and that sort of thing. But I think there's also plenty of horrific crimes happening that aren't getting solved or that are kind of dragging out for a long time. So I think it's maybe just this idea that there's a new set of tools that are available for the police. And I think part of the publicity around them is to make people feel more secure and also make potential perpetrators feel more like, we'll get you, you know, you can't, you can't run but you can't hide because

we'll track you down with all our ingenious techniques. So there's definitely an element of that in the kind of publicising these new ways of solving crimes to try and be like a deterrent. And also that there's a reality of that as well is that, yeah, they use these new techniques to catch people that they would never have been able to otherwise. It's interesting as well because from some of the stuff that was happening, there's maybe a suggestion that people don't have huge faith in the police. And it's hard to tell if it's a lack of faith or just wanting to insert yourself because, for example, there was a period of time where there was a theory that if you took a photograph of a murder victim's retina, you would see an image of the

murderer in the retina. I've heard this before yet. Yes, it wasn't real, but obviously people had read about it and thought it might be true. And apparently loads of people kept writing to the morgue being like, guys, have you thought of doing this? Like, we've just come up with it. I think the police maybe know a little bit more about that than you do. In France, anyway, obviously, a lot of other countries, it was not that way. But so I don't know if that's more someone being like, I'm going to help solve the crime from home or if it was more than being like, I don't believe that the police would have thought of this.

Whereas me, Johnny and the suburbs, I've got it sorted. I'm going to contact them work about this. But yeah, but there is definitely a sense of like, they're trying to give out the impression of like, you can run, but you can't hide. Science will get you in the end. I love that there's a Johnny in the suburbs for every generation of. Also, I love that I said Johnny, the famous French name. Pierre in some of them.

Yeah, good. I like it. Before we get into the details of this crime, I want you in like in a minute to give us an overview of what we're going to be expecting. Who is the body? Who are the suspects and who is the person in the middle of this that's going to help us to get an outcome? Just so we have an overview before we get into the nitty gritty. Okay.

So what's happened, obviously, they found this body in Leon and they've got basically no clues apart from the fact that it was in this trunk. And the trunk has been sent out crushed off and left nearby. the trunk has a tag on it that obviously it was put on a train and sent from Paris to Lyon. But the date has been partially rubbed out. So they're like, we can't tell if this was this year or the year before. The body's partially decomposed. So that's a big part of this.

You know, the first sort of like few months is then just trying to get any clues whatsoever about who this guy is. And then the issue that's also happening is they take him to this Leon morgue, as we mentioned. And the guy who is the main forensics guy in Leon, who's really famous, is called Lacassagne. and he's, like, world famous for just criminology. He's really just a leading figure, and he runs the unit in Lyon. He's on holiday because it's France, it's August. He's, like, having my August holidays. So a junior, like, forensic doctor called Paul Bernard does it instead,

who is not particularly good. I mean, maybe he's, you know, maybe he's good, but just in comparison, La Casagna, he's, like, not the best. How's he thought of taking the photo of the retina, though? You know, that's the main problem he didn't think about doing this, but only Pierre from the suburbs got in touch about it. So he does the

autopsy and they're trying to connect it because there's a case going on in Paris where this bailiff, it's a wealthy bailiff called Toussaint-Augé has gone missing and they're like, okay, maybe there's a connection here, they seem to be a similar age, like perhaps, you know, we haven't got any leads en Gufé, this is a random

body down near Leone, but perhaps there's a connection. But then with the autopsy he notes down certain things like the height, the hair, color, various things that just don't match up with the body in Paris. And it was also happening in Paris in this investigation is people have been like, oh, I think I saw this guy with these two kind of like dodgy types

on the boulevard. I think he had these weird acquaintances, this man and his, quote, mistress, maybe they're involved. But they can't tie Gouffey to this body in Lyon. So the case kind of just goes cold for a while and we're just kind of stuck there being like, we've got this body in Lyon,

we can't connect it to this case, we've got a missing guy. and then in Leon they end up obviously, you know, putting the body in the ground. But very luckily, there is a guy who's an assistant at the more about the medical faculty and he has been reading about this case in Paris and he's like, I've just got a hunch. Like I really just feel like we're missing something here. And as the body is going into like a common grave pit as well because it's an unclean body, he marks the side of the coffin and he also takes off his hat and puts it inside the coffin

and then he's like, just in case and this will go in the ground. So you said something there that was very interesting, Kat, you said about these two strangers who may have been seen with the bailiff in Paris, the bailiff who is missing. So let's rewind a few months then to pre-July 1889 when this body is found. And can you introduce those two characters for us and what they are doing potentially in the city of Paris? Potentially, nefariously, we'll hold judgment for now. Who are they? I mean, I hesitate to call them a couple because they're not really a couple. This is a guy called Michel Erode, who is kind of just like a businessman slash petty crook slash maybe quite a big crook as well. One of the crazy things also about this case, as a lot of cases in this period, is the like the newspaper version, the police version and then also the reality are all really quite different stories. But anyway, this guy, Michelle, he's just a bad guy. In his sort of late 40s by this point. He grew up between France and Spain. He speaks multiple languages,

which also helps him, you know, being a crook. It's very helpful if you're trying to, like, run scams. He went away and joined the French army in South America. I think it was in the 1860s. He deserted or something. He got in trouble, but he ended up being able to return to France and amnesty. And he essentially spends his entire career just like running scams between France and South America. And he has this long-suffering wife who's in the French suburbs. And he just sort of comes back for a bit, steal some money, leaves, has all these mistresses all over the place and has this kind of like, yeah, sort of dark underworld life going on. And then in the late 1880s, he's back in Paris and he's working at this kind of like trading

firm. And then one day this young woman turns up looking for a job. Her name is Gabrielle Bonaparte. And so again, in the way that it's written about in the press and then also later, you know, even that contemporary retellings, they're sort of like, oh, she's his mistress and they're this kind of like a crime couple together. The reality is that she's, had like a really complicated, difficult upbringing. She was born in his middle class family in Leone and she kind of was just like sent off to convents and boarding schools from when she was really, really young. She was brought back to like watch her mother die and then sent away again. And so by the time she like finishes school, she's just like not on a great way. And,

you know, typical of the time they're sort of like, oh, she's a boy crazy flirt, she's this, she's that, she's saucy. And I think actually she's probably quite traumatized. And she has a horrible relationship with her father she runs away from home, goes to Paris gets to Paris and it's like I haven't got any money goes to this office to try and get a job, meets Michel and she starts

bursts into tears and it's like I haven't got any money I'm going to sleep under a bridge and he's like oh I can't give you a job because you'd have to give me this whole massive deposit to get a job but why don't I take you out for dinner and then... Nothing dodgy here. Nothing weird at all. He hasn't got any ulterior motives whatsoever and then

again the way that they sort of write about this is they say, oh, she becomes his mistress. I think it was maybe a bit more of a kind of pimp situation than that. So that's kind of where we end up with this couple, is that on the boulevards, they seem to be this sort of man and mistress. But the reality is that she's kind of very much under his power and he's very violent towards her. So we've got a sort of set up there where, you know, he sets her up in an apartment and

these kind of things, and she kind of just does whatever he tells her to do. I'm so fascinated by that relationship. And I think there's some suggestion at the time. We can talk about this later because this is something that appears. in the media coverage of this case as well. But there's a suggestion that he's hypnotised her. I mean, that's sort of so 19th century. You couldn't get more so.

But I think it does speak, whether or not you take that at face value, it does speak to that kind of coercion and control that he has over her, right? Massively. And I think that it's interesting because a lot of the stuff that hypnosis of him, and purea does sound like absolutely ridiculous in the way they're talking about it and is ridiculous. But then there's a layer of it that is absolutely the equivalent of coercive control and it's kind of a 19th century

of understanding coercive control. Unfortunately, a few people put that forward at the time. Obviously, we're getting ahead of ourselves here, but people do put that forward. But obviously the vast majority of people, including the police are like, no, she's just the saucy minks. It's not hypnotised at all.

She did this all of her own volition. But I think it's absolutely that. I think there's a massive sort of coercive control element going on. And of course, the thing is, it doesn't have to be hypnotism, as you're saying, to be coercive control. There are other ways in which people can have control over. I mean, we have maybe a broad,

of vocabulary for that now. But there is a third person in this set up that we need to address as well, and that is Toussaint-Agostain, Gouffe. And this is the person who, well, goes missing, but tell us a little bit about him before he ends up missing. So he's a character. So Gouff, he's a bailiff, very wealthy man, also in his late 40s. He's a widower. He's got three daughters who are kind of in their late teens, early 20s. Surface level. real respectable man, but because of his job being a kind of debt collector, he sort of veers between sort of bourgeois respectability and also, you know, kind of the underworld bit. And he is a massive womanizer. And it comes out later because, you know, when he goes missing and the

kind of sort of track his movements, that he'd slept with 20 women in July alone. Wow. Yeah. So he's, you know, he's enjoying the boulevards. He's having a good time. He's also, again, and there's some subtext in it, that at one point they talk about all of this and they say, say something about like, oh, you know, he's a debt collector and he was a really generous guy and if a woman couldn't pay, he found another way. I don't know if they would call that being a generous guy. Do you know what? At the start of this episode, I felt sorry for the person in the suitcase and now I'm not sure that he didn't deserve it. Hold on now. Hold on a second. Are we meeting out justice, Maddie, on the podcast? Yeah, retrospective justice. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's not, I don't want to say it's not the worst person who's to happen to because no one should get married, but as it goes on, you do feel a little bit less. Yeah. Sorry for him. There's also, there's a bit when the police, because obviously the police are just kind of like, what a guy. And there's a bit when they describe his sexual prowess as akin to the labors of Harcheulies. Oh, wow.

But he's pootling around the boulevards and his diary is full for July. But come July, the end of July, that's kind of the last time we see him, right? Yeah, that is the last time we see him. He disappears one night. He's meant to join some friends at the World's Fair, and he never arrives because he has a prior appointment to go and see a woman, and then he disappears. And do we know who that woman is?

Well, so what had happened is he had met Michelle and Gabriel. They're all kind of boulevard acquaintance people, and they'd ended up having dinner with him one night. And Michelle, who at this point is fully won out of money, is already on the make for like, I need a target, I need somebody to rob, like, this is what I need to keep me going financially. And Goofy shows an interest, surprise, surprise, in Gabrielle. And so Michel kind of comes up with his plan to bump into him a few days later on the street

because he kind of knows his routine, he knows where his offices, bumps into him and says, oh, yeah, me and Gabriel have broken up, yeah, yeah, it's not for me anymore. But you should totally go for it. Like, she was definitely really interested in you. Again, this is how they report it. It may have been a much more direct sort of business dealing. but essentially he's like you should go for it

and also Gabrielle is at this address go see her tonight and then they set up so he walks rather than the street and then he bumps into Gabrielle he said this is my lucky day and she's like oh I don't know if you've heard

I broke up with Michelle you should totally come and see me tonight I'll be at this apartment and so he's like great I'll definitely go and do that oh Gouffay I mean come on man can't you see what's happening here

you're getting manipulated it's also interesting cat that you said about the relationship between Gabrielle and Michelle that actually there may be a way, a world in which he is actually pimping her out and let you say that's a more direct kind of business dealing. Do you read this situation as that? Yeah, I do. And I think that the thing that's really complicated about this case and especially

about her is I think that she's very much like a sort of quote imperfect victim. And that is like evident throughout the whole case and especially later on in the trial and all those kind of stealth. But I don't think that she had much power. And so I think there's also a massive part of that that, you know, like you're saying, that coercive stuff is really complicated. Just because she was walking freely in the streets doesn't mean she wasn't under the control of this. So I think it was, she was definitely involved in the planning and in the execution of what would happen. But I think there's an element of which she was kind of just caught up. But she was also very young.

I think she was about 19 at this point, 19 or 20. And these guys are also way older than her. So there's an element of that. But, yeah, so they invite her over to this apartment that they've rented. And he turns up and says, hello little demon. I know. Yeah, the little demon stuff is so weird. They always call her that. Wow. Okay, so also, again, they both have different versions of this. But what happened is they had, so we'd gone to London and bought this trunk. It's been really

well planned. And then they sewed this kind of special dressing gown cord. And they'd also rented this apartment and nailed like a pulley with a rope to the ceiling and then hidden it behind a curtain. And they had this whole like sort of lounge chair set up. And so Goofie turns up and she's there like in a little robe here have some cognac, have a biscuit and she sits on the chair and there's a curtain behind the chair and behind the curtain Michelle is waiting. Obviously Gufay

doesn't know he's there and then things start happening and while he's like opening up her dressing gown she takes the loop off and like playfully puts it over his neck while looping it through this rope above her ties it and then while Gufay is distracted

Michelle yanks the rope from behind the curtain with the idea of being that it's supposed to strangle him. Then the pulley breaks, Gufrivols the floor, Michel jumps out behind the curtain and strangled him. And then this becomes a massive point of contention

because obviously when it comes down to it later, Michelle is like, you did it, you shranked, you like did it with the rope. And then Gabrielle is like, no, you strangled him. So that becomes this massive point of like who specifically did it. But the otto see sure that he was strangled, so it's more likely to be Michelle there.

So they do that and then they put his body in the trunk. the one that they bought in London the one that they bought in London the special trunk and then the next day they take it to Lille Isn't it to Lille? Isn't it really interesting the level of kind of stagecraft that went into that.

And it speaks to something that you're saying. I mean, jury's out for me on Gabrielle. I absolutely will fully get behind the theory that there is coercive control considering the situation she's in when she comes here and she falls under this influence one way or the other. But the level of stagecraft that's gone into what they concoct there is so interesting.

But it also speaks to the fact that Gabrielle is a very useful tool actually in terms of how he would execute a lot of crimes. Think of how useful a 19 or 20-year-old woman is to help commit these crimes. So very likely he is using her as a tool with which to just gain more badly sought or ill-gotten games. So we have a body in a trunk now, a London trunk. I don't know why I'm fixating on that detail, but for some reason it feels odd. I feel like there's going to be trunks in Paris. Just go there. It's fine.

Or Leon, even, for that matter. but the body is in the trunk but they decide okay we need to rid ourselves of this evidence yes exactly and also just to what you were saying it is kind of like almost like a honey trap

set up is kind of the way they use her and the police at one point describe her as an instrument of perfect pleasure which is also just an incredibly fucked up thing to say so it is kind of the idea of being like I can just this woman is a great like yeah like a little appealing target for everything

anyway so I think also they go to London to get the trunk because they think it won't be traced. Little do they know it will be. And yeah, then they go down to Leon. He knows Leon well. He sort of lived near there at one point. Kat, just for our internationalists, just give us a sense of where Leon is in relation to Paris. Because it's, I mean, they're traveling quite far here, aren't they? Yeah. I mean, it's a couple of hours on the train. So it's like a big enough trip. It's like not so long that they're going to have to spend days doing it. Yes. But I think also more than anything, it was about the fact that he kind of knew the surrounding

area of Lyon. And he was like, we'll go to Leon, we'll take the body in the trunk. Then we'll hire a horse and car and we'll drive out to this random kind of bit of countryside, and then we'll throw it off the side of a ravine. And I guess if you're planning ahead, you're like, I want to know where the ravines are in order to do this. I'll go to a ravine I am familiar with. And I think also they were like, it's far enough away that people are not going to hopefully connect this to Paris. Yeah, because I think that's the thing, like, in today's world, going two hours on the train to ditch some evidence for crime is probably quite a minimal effort, really. But, you know, you know, this is 1889 and as modern as Paris is, like, this is still a world where there's

no CCTV, like you're not easily traced. You can move about the country with relative anonymity, I suppose, at this moment. Okay, so they ditch the trunk. And presumably they go back to Paris, do they at this point? Well, they go back to Paris very briefly to pick up a hat and some other stuff, which is a whole side thing. There's a lot of hats in the story. It's a whole kind of thing. There's a lot of weird decisions made. I guess maybe your head's not straight. You've just killed somebody. But anyway, they make a lot of weird decisions. Obviously, they robbed Dufet for his money.

He only had 150 francs on him in the end. And Michel went to the office to try and get some money and didn't actually get any. So they didn't even actually get any money out of it. So it really wasn't worth it. And they go back to Paris briefly. And then they go to Marseille. And then they just kind of go on the run. They go over to London.

They go to Liverpool. And then they get a boat to the US. So they just get straight out of dodge. And she, like, cuts her hair and they dress her as a boy. She's also really tiny. She's like four for eight, I think. so they dress her as like father and son that's like the Crippen case

we spoke to Hallie Rubenhold recently about her book A Story of a Murder which is about that case and it's exactly the same thing I suppose that's two decades later something like that but yeah that's so interesting yeah weirdly common I think that if the woman is small enough they're like let's be father and son

yeah which is always creepy because like the Cripping case that relationship between those two people is actually really troubled and deeply sexual and then there's something quite sort of weird and problematic about them being like, yeah, a father and son is the obvious and easy option for us. It's quite strange. There's also, I mean, there's a weird layer to that with this whole case in general because she is so tiny, like she's really young and really small,

and in between calling her like this incredible seduptress, they also keep talking about her child like she is. I don't know if you want to be writing that in your police memoirs, but okay. And yet, and yet they did. And yet they proudly did. Yeah. So they've gone to wherever they've. have gone now. They're off, yeah. And then Maddie was saying in the very, very beginning,

we get to August. So where are we now? We're like, what, a couple of weeks later on the 13th of August 1889, this trunk is found. And we have a decomposing body inside. The body is taken to the morgue at Leon. And it's really difficult, as Maddie was describing, to identify because it's been a while and there's decomposition and all that kind of thing. Enter Mr. Lazzania. In fact, sorry, Dr. Lazzania, if we're giving everybody their proper titles. enter Dr. Him and he is a forensic pathologist, give us his proper name, and then let us know how he becomes involved in this.

So basically the evidence going to start stacking up that maybe this is goofy. Various things come together and they start to be like, you know, we should reopen this case. And one of the things that happens is that they, even before La Casagna, Lazzania gets involved, is that they'd kept like a little snippet of his hair

and they'd been like, oh, well, this hair is black and his hair was like sort of reddish brand. it can't be him. And then the police cube puts it in some water and it's like, oh, wait. We just needed to wash it. Come down. Look at that. So basically the few things happen where people are like, maybe we should look into this again. And they also might have traced like the ticket from the trunk, the Paris Leon, realize the dates all line up. And they're like, okay, let's get him back out of the ground.

At this point, he's been in the ground for four months. He'd already been in like the hot Lyon summer for a couple weeks the first time around. So like he's not in a good way. original autopsy, they said that his brain resembled boiled meat. So this is like the kind of situation we've got. But fortunately, Dr. Lacazania has an incredibly strong stomach and is somehow really good at his job for lots of reasons. But I think part of it is also that he's able to deal with these kind of situations. So this guy pipes up and says, oh, actually, I know where the coffin is because I put a marker on it and I put my hat inside. So they dig it up and they start a new autopsy.

It's now November. Died in July, it's now November. And they start a brand new autopsy, and they do, because they've been sort of inventing all these new techniques and Lackazania is at the forefront of developing a lot of his own techniques, they re-measure the body and decide that it's a slightly different height than they'd originally thought. And so then they also contact the office that holds Guffe's military records.

The height aligns, great. They measure the head. They contact his hat maker. That aligns, great. They do things like check the level of tartar in his mouth. and align that with his age. Again, exactly perfect. They find an injury on his ankle bone, and they contact his family and find out he broke his ankle as a child. All these different things as a missing molar in the right place. They contact his dentist. They contact his daughters and

get his hair brush and match the hair to his head. So they do all these incredibly elaborate techniques. And then they have it. So they've got like, this is 100% the match. It's him. Wow. I love that they contacted his hat maker. Why a hat's such a big theme in this. I was so amazing. You're saying all this cat in a big long list and it kind of makes sense to me hearing that. I'm thinking, yeah, of course they would do that stuff now that would be routine

to do all of that. But how groundbreaking is this at the time? I mean, this is a case that absolutely makes Lackazanyu's name as like a forensic doctor. I mean, he was obviously very well known already kind of in his field and in the work that he was developing

and he'd started off kind of as a military doctor and he had this obsession with tattoos and he kept like taking the tattoos off people and stuff. It's a whole weird side thing he had going on. Do you mean like taking their skin off? Yeah, like so he was like a military doctor like off like in the sort of North Africa when like France had colonised part of North Africa

and he got really obsessed with like prisoners and prison tattoos and so in his archive collection there's all these tattoos. He also had weird stuff like he had a paperweight in his office that was taken of the model of like a female criminal's hand and he also had it as like a door knocker at his house. So he had like a lot going on and he was already known but this case kind of really elevated his position. And also, I think, the level of technique

and the level of certainty that they were able to get from a man who was totally unrecognizable was absolutely groundbreaking. So, you know, they'd been used, like I said, they've been developing medical legal staff and using lots of different techniques in cases, but this was a scenario when it was like, you should not have been able to identify that body.

Even a few years before, I think they would have totally gotten away with it. But because of like, yeah, just and also the fact that because Gouffet was like a middle class man, like a bourgeois man, they had various records on him, which was quite helpful too. And they were able to determine the fact that he had been strangled. They were able to determine all of those things during this process, which of course then is so valuable as the case goes on. What I want to do then is once we have Goufay, we're still quite a bit off finding out why this has happened to him who did a. except that there is a pretty important clue that we've been hinting at throughout. And that clue is the trunk.

So am I right in guessing that the trunk is what starts to lead them towards the suspects at this point? Yes. So we have this broken trunk and we have this amazing institution. I don't know if you've heard of it called the Paris Morg. That is really good if you want to get a whole bunch of people to come and look at something. And so obviously, again, this is like the late 1880s. everyone knows about the morgue. It's super, super famous. And so the police are like, we think it was probably Michelle and Gabrielle,

but we haven't got enough to tie them to it. We need to tie them to the trunk. Like, that's what's going to get this all together. Let's get somebody to rebuild this exact trunk because the original one is like mashed up. We'll rebuild the exact specifications, but the same star-lined paper inside, all of that. Put it on display in the morgue next to the broken one and kind of explain. Oh, wow. trying to figure out where this trunk came from. Because obviously they're like, if we can figure out where they bought it,

we can go to the shop and they can be like, we recognize these people. And obviously at this point, they've gone around all the trunk makers in Paris, I can only assume. But they're like, maybe somebody will recognize it. And also, I think at this period, trunks are kind of like specially made or it's a specially made trunk for us weird dimensions. So they're like, it's not your bog standard trunk. Let's see what happens.

So they put on display at the morgue, everyone goes mental as they always do at the morgue, at massive Jews to just see your trunk. Everyone goes to do that and at some point someone turns up and is like, oh yeah, that's made by a guy who makes trunks in Gara Street in London. Wow. I'm just imagining Michelle and Gabrielle walking into the shop in Gower Street in London and being like, we need very specific dimensions for this trunk.

The dimensions are a human man. If you can fit a human in, we will take it. We want you to picture a bailiff. He's about this high. Squish him down. He will be squished, yeah. But apart from that, we're definitely using it for women's clothes. That's what it's for. But if hypothetically, we wanted to put a bailiff in it.

Totally fine. Okay, so we have the names or the identities of Michelle and Gabrielle. It's kind of hinted out when people are, I suppose, witnesses are originally saying we've seen the bailiff on the street with these people. And then I guess there's the train ticket as well, right? And then there's now the trunk. So this is pretty compelling evidence. But of course, our suspects have gone to the US.

So is there now a race to catch them? What happens next? Yeah. So now everyone's a bit like, oh shit, they've definitely left the country. Like, how are we going to get hold of them? And so there's sort of a bit of an international manhunt that kicks off. And so they're sort of contacting authorities in New York, contacting authorities in Montreal. And Michelle and Gabrielle are now just like they're moving cities all the time.

And they're trying to just like sort of move around the US. They end up in Vancouver. And then obviously, Michelle being the way is, he's like running little scams the whole time. because they've got any money because they didn't get any money off Gouface he's like running these little scams and like scamming people and he's also like kind of flamboyant

so they're not like the most subtle people in the world because he's also just like seducing people there for it and centre and like stealing their money and their coats it's a bit when he steals someone's fur coat and anyway all this is happening

and then they meet a French guy called Gérangerie who they sort of fall in with and Nichelle starts setting up like a fake scam distillery business and he manages to get garangier to kind of invest in it and this is weird thing going on but then garaget sort of has a thing

for gabriel and there's like this weird sort of it's hard to tell if the set up between gabriel and garangier is like a love match or if it's kind of just like a convenience thing or who's getting whatever on who anyway basically they're sort of having a bit of a situation michel recognizes this and michel and gaber at this point are pretending to be uncle and niece it just gets weirder and weirder it's the whole thing it's really fucked up and then And Michel basically decides that he's going to rob and murder Garangier, who's quite wealthy. For some reason, he sets this up by first saying to Galangely, like, oh, can you take Gabrielle back to France? Her aunt has died, and then some of that money I owe you will be in France so you can go and get it.

So he sets up this whole thing with the plan that Gabrielle will actually take him to New York instead of to France, and then Michelle will come and murder him. It's kind of an elaborate plot. I really know how it was going to work. Anyway, as soon as Gabriel and Garanget leave, she tells him everything, and it's like, this is the situation, my real name's Gabrielle, this is the whole situation, and all those newspapers you may have seen, because also there's newspapers around the world and they're reporting the case, she's like, you may have seen this case, that's me, and then they decide to go back to France, and she decides to hand herself into the police, because she's like, I'm fully innocent, this wasn't my fault, I'm just going to go and tell them what happened, and it'll be fine. They leave, and she, like, runs off, and obviously Michelle realizes this when he gets to New York and she's not there. So she goes to France. She tries to hand herself in. The first day she goes to the police, she's like,

and Gabriel Bonapar, and they're like, okay, do you have a letter? Like, we don't know who you are. That come back tomorrow. And she leaves, and she does come back again. Again, I feel like she should get some kudos for her. Anyway, Michelle at this point is just like running around America still doing more scams. And he ends up in Havana, and they catch him like six months later. So that also becomes this massive, like, international police.

collaboration, but they managed to finally track him down and get him. It's interesting because in terms of Gabrielle, I think she, I think actually Gabrielle for me is the most fascinating person within this setup because what we're seeing is somebody who has become caught up in this web of Michel's lies and deceit and she's just a tool and his thing. Or we're seeing somebody who were underestimating

and who they knew would have been underestimated at the time too, who actually, despite the fact if this is the case, despite the fact that she's involved in these terrible things, is smart and is quite savvy. And maybe even recognises when the jig is up and goes, actually, you know what? The smart thing for me to do right now would not be to go down to Havana, but would be to go and start my narrative now.

There is a savviness in that, which is very easy to overlook by just saying, oh, maybe she was totally innocent of all of this, blah, blah, blah. But there's a smartness to her at the same time. That woman knows how to survive. And we have to give her that as well as part of this story, which is why it's so compelling because it's so difficult. But by the time we get them both back, right? They're both back in France now.

Is there a trial? What happens to these two people? There is a trial. And also, to your last point, I totally agree. And I think that she is really, really smart, that incredible survival instinct, and also can kind of tell the way the wind's blowing. Yeah.

And knows what to do. And this is, I think, why people got so fascinated with the case, partly because of all the forensics and, like, kind of the craziness of the narrative, but also because she just couldn't pin her, down. And she's not one specific thing. And this is why I say very much that she's like this imperfect victim, because she also, like, she knows her to play things as well as being a victim of them. And so there's this whole thing about her being this, like, wily seductress,

which I don't think is fully true at all, but I can see also why you would, why people were interpreting her that way. But then on the other hand, yeah, she's this like, obviously a victim of all this control. So she's like, there's really, really interesting character that just no one can pin down at all. But yeah. So, yeah, so. she comes back to France, she gives herself in, and then she sort of goes through all these interrogations, but they can't really finish up the case until they get him. And then they finally catch him, they bring him back. And also at this point, Paris is like absolutely crazy for the case. They write about it nonstop. She's become a celebrity, which she does really enjoy.

And she's like out there being like, look at me, this is great, which, you know, fair play, why not? And they also, they even like the famous wax museum even sets up like a tableau of the murder scene so that everyone can go. go and be like, imagine this is what it looked like. And then once he gets back, so she's absolutely terrified of him, doesn't want to have to see him. But obviously, she, like, kind of got away from him. And she's sort of saying, I don't want to see him.

I don't want anything to do with him. I'm scared of him. What they do is they make both of them go to the original crime scene and then be like, all right, tell us what happened now that you're here. And so they have them. And obviously, he says, it wasn't my, you know, I didn't do it. She was the one that, like, strangled him with the cord. she says how dare you you're a liar you're the one that strangled him so they just start screaming at each other

that works out really really well for the police and at least at that point the newspapers are like that was a terrible idea why would you have done that anyway and then it goes to trial and they have this kind of long complicated trial there's lots of accusations of hypnosis the lawyer says that she was hypnotized by him his lawyer says he was hypnotized by her and he was just as a pro-inicent man that was seduced by this Femps etal. Like none of us are even considering that that's a possibility like, all right, yeah, okay. He's like, you know what's a great defense?

Let's say. What she's doing. Lemon and wilds, they get yeah. They're going to get you. I think also there's an interesting thing with this case that people start to get really freaked out about like her as this like threat to bourgeois men. And there's a big thing about that as well

of being like, that's what scares people about her is that, you know, she was a seductress and she did a lot of air quotes here and murdered this guy. And so there is this thing of being like, you're just a wealthy man, living your life, sleeping with all these women, and you could just get murdered. Like, that could happen to you too.

By a tiny girl, no less. By a tiny girl with her feminine wiles. So that's a big part of this too. And then at the end of the trial, he is sentenced to death, guilty, and she gets 20 years in prison. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, and one also with detail.

So they do this around. outside the execution, but they also do this outside the morgue as they make little replicas of the trunk. By they, I mean, like, local artisans make replicas of the trunk with a tiny body inside that you can buy as a souvenir. Oh, I didn't realize it was like you could buy as a souvenir. Yeah. That's funny. Remember the trial, all your memories. I think there's so much in the end of this case and about kind of replication, right, about obviously we have early on the trunk and the replica of the trunk being taken to the morgue for people to see, and then we've got them returning to the crime scene later on, and now we've

got these kind of tourist trinkets. It's so interesting that, on the one hand, it's a case that's seen as abhorrent and a threat to middle-class respectability, but also it's one that people want to revel in, right, that they want to kind of relive again and again and have a piece of. Obviously, in terms of, I mean, we find this so much at the end decades of the 19th century, and certainly when we've looked at Jack the Ripper and cases around the 1880s in London, we find that the media can distort so much of the narrative that's taking place and you said yourself at the beginning

that there's huge disparities between the police records and what you can read in print. I think it's fair to say that that takes an enormous toll, I suppose, on maybe even the outcome of the trial itself, right, that Gabrielle is not let off. I mean, she's got 20 years in prison, but it's possibly better than being guillotined. But in terms of the importance of this case scientifically, can you tell us something about

that? Because I think it's obvious that there is this kind of media storm, but what does this mean long term? I mean, I think it's kind of like I said before, a bit of a landmark case in terms of not only the possibilities of forensics of medical legal development in the legal system. And like I said, before they were, they'd been developing medical legal stuff for a long time, but this was just one of those real breakthrough moments where the extent to which you could identify someone that shouldn't have been identifiable at that point. But then I think also, again, like we talked about at the beginning, the idea of sending that message to would-be criminals and having that idea of being like, this is the level

that policing technology has gotten to. This is how much we're now able to sort of track people down, detect crimes, even the fact that you can run away to Havana and still be caught. And I know you were talking before about Hallie Rubinhold's new book about the Kripper murder, and that obviously being this case where they caught him and there was the wireless and all that stuff. And this is like, was this 15 years before that, maybe more? So that again is like this really early example of international police collaboration as well because that's something you're starting to see a bit more and more in this period. It's still really quite casual and it's quite based on individuals and there's plenty of bits in this case

where people are just like absolutely bungling it, but that there is an ability to sort of contact police departments around the world and kind of arrange a sting basically together. Because when they catch him in Havana, it's all these different people. are involved and trying to get him and trying to figure out where he is and corner him essentially because he was so good at getting away. So that's a massive part of it as well. And I think also it's another one of those cases where public interest lingers for so long. And they do continue to repeat it in the press, like fairly often, even after the whole thing's over. And also, you know, even in like the 20s, 30s, now and again, there'll be a press roundup of like crazy French murder

cases and they'll put that one in there. Every time it gets farther and farther away from what actually happened. But that becomes it just becomes like a definitive tale and they sort of reduce everyone down to these like monster criminals. And she obviously becomes, yeah, this kind of like

she devil sort of idea in the press. And actually the, so she's released from prison after 12 years for good conduct. And obviously there's a bit of a flurry about that in the press. And then there's a bit of a moment where she kind of

takes up with this guy who defended her with the hypnosis thing in the case and they're like, oh, we're going to perform hypnosis in front of people. So there's this all weird thing and they try and go to the US and she gets deported because she's sort of criminal records. And then she sort of disappears from the record at that point. But then

in 1920 there's suddenly this like resurgence again of all these reports that she's died. And so there's this whole thing that comes out and they say, oh, she died in this tiny French town and again, they talk about the crime again and they'd give a little summary of it. And then they don't really give any details apart from she was living there.

And they say, well, she was living in misery and, you know, kind of a bit of a good ridden's sort of vibe to all the articles. And then that's supposedly the end of it. But then there's one journalist, a tiny little paper who's like, oh, let me just go up there and see what the dealer is. Like surely there's a death record. Surely there's something. And then he goes up and finds no evidence of her whatsoever. As I'm listening to Talk, Kat, and as we look back over the details of this, case, one of the things that's really popping into my mind is that we always say, on this

podcast, we want to make true crime work really hard in order to get as much from it as we can. And this is why we are fans of historic true crime on here, because they are minefields, I think, in order to tell us something about the past. Because what we have here is we have insights into women's life in 19th century Paris. We have insights into scientific advancement. We have insights into the changing landscape of the legal outlook in the 19th century. We have international travel. We have forensics. We have so much going on. And this is exactly what we mean by making true crime work hard. Look at the amount of historic detail that this one story, this one history, can tell us. And it's why I think we really need to unpack these stories in the way that you

just have for us, because it can tell us so much about the time. It's about so much more than the story, which in itself, of course, is so compelling, like obviously enough. But in terms of that scene setting, setting the time period, it's just really, really is invaluable. And I think that's where historic true crime really comes into itself. So thank you, Dr. Kat, once more, for your guide through 19th century. Well, not just France, also America, Montreal, all over the world. Thank you so much for listening.

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