The Laetitia Toureaux Affair | The Dark Histories Podcast 

I thought this was one of Ben's best. He explains the historical context extremely well , and in this case the meleau is everything. Well done. Thank you.

One of best "locked room" mysteries ever.

New subscriber! Great podcast

Just woke up to my cat meowing outside my window...found this! Glad he woke me up now!

Interesting case, and a very good podcast. 😳🇦🇫 I, like many others, like to listen these while relaxing, so your voice is just perfect for creating that atmosphere! 👍

This story was so good,never heard of it 😊

I'm glad I saved this for today it needed all my attention its really sparked my interest thanks Ben

I find it interesting that some of the Cagoule group ended up in senior positions in the Vichy regime. The link to the French Embassy in Madrid during the inter-war Franco period is, I believe, a key to a lot of things! Who was one of the senior persons in the embassy then? Well....none other than Marshal Petain! His ADC in Madrid was a leader of the right leaning and other Cagoulard groups. :/ Hard to dodge claims that Petain was involved in all this when his 2IC was a major figure in the group. The Cagoule had a lot of links to the military - explaining how La Cagoule obtained all their guns and heavy weapons! lol You're right. This whole Cagoule thing is much deeper than you can squeeze into a tale of a single murder. Part of me suspects that, had Laetitia's murder not attracted the attention it did and exposed La Cagoule to more inspection; La Cagoule may well have succeeded in staging the coup they so carefully planned. If so - how would the direction of Europe's history gone then? A group in power allied in ideological compatibility with Germany at the time? There may well have been no WW2 as we know it! Britain wouldn't have been able to ally with France over the issues of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Germany's axis would have had a more powerful ally in Europe than the mercurial Italy under Mussolini. La Cagoule may well have purged France of anti-Fascist groups, Jews and left-leaning persons with a vigour well ahead of anything Hitler could have imagined at the time. Hitler had to take a bit of a run-up to begin his purges. France was well primed with a robust anti-Semitism equal to anything you would see in Poland, Germany or Russia at the time. The Stavisky Affair of 1934 did nothing to neutralize such ideas. Not least as we see the police possibly killed Stavisky and called it suicide! The strength of the Left-Right split in France in the 1930's had already kept France from doing anything to interfere in Spain's own civil war with the threat of yet another civil war in France. A situation the Left, no doubt, didn't want in France. Not after the collapse of the Paris Commune and the tensions that left behind. What is interesting is that Laetitia's murder was only one of several that the police at the time struggled to solve but later pieced together as being part of La Cagoule trying to silence spies and informers. You're right to say that it was the Press identified the links the police didn't (or woudn't!) draw. Given how a lot of the police tended to feel at the time, perhaps they merely 'turned a blind eye' to to help ease La Cagoule's project along. It's possible. For example... www.france24.com/en/20180919-depth-french-police-collaboration-with-nazis-revealed

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I lean towards the same idea that you do in that the one guy probably just didn't tell them he saw someone leaving. It makes the most sense and fits that man's character. I do think it's possible the 2 men from another car could have been the killers. The only witnesses to her scream were also the first to find hwe body and establish the supposed time of death. Without them, there is no locked room and she could have easily been murdered before or during the trip. Besides, she had a knife in her throat, so how did she scream loud enough to be heard in another car over the sound of the train and passengers yet couldn't tell the cop anything.

Love this show. Definitely my favorite podcast

Occam's Razor lends to lead one to the Italian secret service theory. The political climate of the times and the looming turmoil that everyone knew was coming. It fits the facts best outside the actually logistics of the murder itself. There are facts we'll never know with the ravages of WWII taking pertinent aspects away from scrutiny. Imagine all the intrigues that we no nothing about that were lost due to the war. My thoughts and great episode. Well done.

I lean towards the Italian Secret Service being involved, because the Italians did have a fairly sophisticated espionage setup with a lot of tentacles in social institutions - this is often downplayed in histories of the period (often times the Italians are the ones doing the downplaying), but this is the same network that waltzed into the American embassy in Rome and stole the code books around the same time. That said, the French government would seeming have MORE impetus to charge the other group if they wanted to avoid complications with the Italians, in fact they could kill two birds with one stone in that regard. The French organization may not have ‘claimed’ the hit because it wasn’t solely for political reasons, perhaps personal entanglements were involved and a high-ranking member of the organization wanted her gone for selfish reasons, pulling favors in order to do so - perhaps to save their own neck as it became evident others were after her. Killing dissidents of an opposed faction or explosive acts or sabotage is one thing to publicize, much less to gain from shining a spotlight on your own group’s internal divisions and infighting.

As an Italian this particularly interests me

Sounds like the different sides were probably fighting for the chance to eliminate this gal. She was a loose cannon for everyone.

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