Murder In Marseilles (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

MrBallen (0:00)

One morning in January of 1990, a man walked into a police station in Marseille, France, clutching a newspaper that was rolled up in his fist. He went right up to the desk, and he said that he'd seen a sketch of a murder suspect in the paper that morning, and he knew who it was. He then unrolled the newspaper, revealing the composite sketch that was in the paper, and he held it right up next to his own face. But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark & Mysterious, Delivered-In-Story Format, then you've come to the right place, because that's all we do, and we upload two, three, even four times every week. So if that's of interest to you, please sneak into the FollowButton's house and replace all their toilet paper with sandpaper. Okay, let's get into today's story.

At 5 p.m. on May 18th, 1988, a 71-year-old hospital director named Léon Smou carried his briefcase through the halls of the medical clinic that he owned in the city of Marseille, France. He was about to go home after a long, stressful day of business calls and paperwork. As he walked, he passed by various doctors and nurses who were all hard at work, and they all, you know, when they saw Léonce, they would nod at him, and Léonce, he would nod back, and at some point, Léonce turned a corner into the lobby, where he saw several security officers and guard dogs were stationed right by the entrance, and they were screening each person that came inside. Now, Léonce knew that, to some people, the security in this clinic might seem like overkill, but to him, it felt necessary to keep everybody here safe. So Léonce himself was not a doctor, he was not in healthcare really at all. He was a businessman, and he'd gone into private healthcare because it was very lucrative. But in recent years, it had also become very competitive and cutthroat. There was now a lot of governmental red tape that made it nearly impossible to open new clinics in Marseilles. So existing clinic owners actually had to buy other already operational clinics if they wanted to expand their businesses. And over the past few years, one of Léonce's primary competitors, a doctor named Jean Chiraki, who owned a lot of other private clinics in Marseilles, had become really, really aggressive about trying to buy Léonce's. Léonce, though, did not want to sell. He wasn't ready to retire yet. And when he did retire, he'd considered leaving his clinic to his daughter, Catherine. She was a doctor and she had a head for business, so Léonce thought she might be interested in taking things over versus, you know, a private sale. But despite expressing his intentions to Chiraki, Chiraki had continued to pressure Léonce and try to get him to sell, and Léonce was becoming afraid of just how far his fierce competitor would go to get what he wanted. After all, Léonce knew that Chiraki was really powerful and very well connected in town, and there were even rumors that he had ties to organized crime. And so, out of an abundance of caution that really came from this general tension slash fear with Chiraki, Léonce had installed all of these security measures, the cameras, the hired guards, the dogs. He'd even replaced the windows in his office with a one-way mirror so nobody could spy on him. And so, even though Léonce, to some degree, believed he was doing all this to protect the people that worked for him, it still caused a lot of tension between Léonce and his employees. It just seemed like he was becoming sort of crazy and paranoid. And because his staff clearly thought he was becoming paranoid and sort of wacky, it made him lash out at his staff and he distrusted everybody around him. He was sort of like this grumpy old man. And he knew that a lot of the doctors probably wished he would just retire already, that he was becoming sort of a nuisance, even though to him, he was just being a responsible business owner. And so with all this tension going on inside the clinic, Léonce was beginning to get into these sort of awful fights with some of the people he worked with, that just were at odds with what he was doing and how he was behaving. And in particular, Léonce had gotten into a few fairly high profile public fights, including one with one of his most high ranking administrators, a man named Mark Gagliazzi. And that fight had basically destroyed their relationship, even though Mark still worked at the clinic. They just now couldn't interact with each other. And so as Léonce is making his way out of the clinic this day, it's on his mind that a lot of people here, they're waving and being nice to him and he's waving back, but he knows that people don't really necessarily like him here. But you know what? He's had a stressful day. And at this point, he just wants to get through security, get out to his car and go home. So he walked out to his beautiful white Mercedes car, he unlocked the door and he got into the driver's seat. He set his briefcase down on the seat next to him and then he started the engine. But as he pulled out of the parking lot, out onto the road, another car suddenly appeared from a side street. And before Léonce could even react, it veered into Léonce's lane and stopped right in front of his car, blocking his path. Seconds later, a woman walking down the street outside of Léonce's clinic heard two loud bangs right behind her. She turned and she saw a white Mercedes stopped in the middle of the street, and there was a man standing by its front bumper, pointing a hunting rifle at the windshield of the car. The woman instinctively ducked for cover behind a telephone pole, but also sort of watched as the man with the rifle ran to another car that was stopped nearby, and he climbed into the passenger seat and they sped away. And then once they were gone, the woman slowly stood up from behind cover, and she walked a little bit closer to the Mercedes, and she saw there were two bullet holes in the windshield. And through the shattered glass, she saw there was a man in the driver's seat who was slumped over, and blood was clearly pouring out of his head. At this point, the woman turned and ran down the street, screaming for someone to call the police.