The Trash Bag (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

Tour France, and at some point she excused herself to go use the bathroom, and when she opened

“the lid of the toilet, she saw in the bowl were two small gold objects floating in the”

water.

It looked like beads at first, or maybe broken pieces of jewelry, and so she leaned down

clothes to get a better look. And then she realized what they actually were. But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious deliberate and story format, and you've come to the right place, because that's all we do, so if that's of interest to you, please ask the follow button to go get a matching

tattoo with you. But after they finish getting theirs done, leave without getting yours. Okay, let's get into today's story. On the night of December 11th, 1988, a 38-year-old woman named Francoise Jindrone touched up her lipstick in the bathroom mirror of a nightclub in the city of Tour France.

Her best friend, Sylvie Reverego, was washing her hands at the sink right next to her. Francoise and Sylvie were best friends, they had basically known each other forever, since they were just little kids.

“And these days, they went out together almost every single night.”

They were both divorced, and Francoise's 19-year-old son had recently moved out of the house, so she was making the most of her new freedom and staying out late all the time, often was Sylvie. Now, Francoise and Sylvie were not exactly the same in terms of their attitude towards life.

Francoise had always been much more sociable and had this huge circle of friends, and so

really she was the one who often had to push her much more introverted friend Sylvie to come out with her, but she usually did. However, tonight, it was Francoise who turned to Sylvie and said that she actually wanted to go home now. She told Sylvie that the men they were there were that the club, Michelle and Luke were

making her feel uncomfortable, and she wanted to leave. Now it was clear to Francoise pretty much immediately that Sylvie was pretty disappointed. You know, despite being introverted, now that they were out, Sylvie wanted to stay out. And also, I mean, they regularly went out with Michelle and Luke, and there was never any issues before, and so she said as much to Francoise, like, what do you mean, like, what's

what's the issue? But Francoise just said she was getting a weird vibe from both of them, and just would feel better if she went home. And so a few minutes later, Francoise and Sylvie walked back to the table where Michelle and Luke were still sitting, and there was a receipt on the table, and Michelle was putting

his wallet away, like he had just paid for it. Actually, Michelle, he turned to the women, and he said, "Hey, are you guys ready to leave and go to the next club?" But Francoise, she just kind of smiled and grabbed her coat and said that actually she was going to leave now.

She said she had to get home to her boyfriend, who was probably already at her apartment and waiting for her. The men were pretty surprised by this, and maybe even a little bit offended.

“And Michelle actually asked Francoise, like, "Hey, are you sure everything's okay here?”

Is that really the reason you're leaving?" And Francoise just said, "Yup, everything's fine. I just got to go." But she could definitely tell that the men did not believe her. But Francoise didn't really care, I mean, at this point, she really just wanted to leave.

And so she just turned and gave Sylvie a hug, and then just said, "By the group, we're just kind of sitting there, somewhat stunned. This is happening so quickly." And then Francoise turned, and she hustled right out of the club and flagged down a cab before any of them could follow her.

The next morning, Francoise woke up in her own bed to the sound of her boyfriend, Eve Marta, hustling around her bedroom and getting dressed. She rolled over to look at her alarm clock and saw that it was 8 a.m. Francoise sat up and Eve turned to her and said, "Good morning." But she immediately noticed that his voice was cold, and she knew why.

The night before when she had come home, they had gotten into a big argument, because, you know, he had been waiting for her for quite a while for hours, you know, by the time she finally got there. That was the reason she had to leave, and it really had upset him. And in many ways, this was not like a one-off issue in their relationship, it was a recurring

one.

Francoise was always staying out super late with her friends, and often with her male

friends, and Eve felt like she was basically prioritizing all of them over him. He worked during the day, so the evenings were really the only time that he and Francoise could reasonably get together, but Francoise never seemed to get home until super late, and at that point it was too late for Eve to come over, or vice versa, and so they just didn't get to see each other as much as they could be.

And so now, Francoise knew she had to do something to try to smooth things over with her boyfriend, so she turned to Eve and said, "Hey, do you want to come over tonight after you get off work?" And she promised she would actually be home when he got there, so they could cook dinner together, and just spend some time together, it would be just a night for them.

And at that, Francoise saw Eve's shoulders immediately relaxed, and then he turned around

And so at this point, the mood in the room completely shifted, they were sort of back on

“good terms, and so as Eve finished getting dressed, he asked Francoise what else she had going”

on that day. And she told him that she had a handyman, she knew named Kristian Moro, who was coming by that morning to put up new wallpaper in the apartment, so she'd very likely be stuck at home for most of the day while he worked on it. The two chatted for a bit longer, and then once Eve was ready to leave, Francoise kissed

him goodbye, and then after he left, Francoise pulled herself out of bed and put on a soap, and then she went into the kitchen, and she opened up a can of food for her cat, and then she made herself some coffee. She was a bit hungover from the night before, and she thought maybe a warm bath would make her feel better, so after she drank her coffee, she ran a bath, she got into the

water, and she closed her eyes. At 11am the next morning, so December 13th, a janitor at the Trasso hospital in tour France was carrying a trash bag out to the dumpster when he noticed something odd. There were two blue trash bags just sitting out on a strip of grass in the middle of the hospital's parking lot.

“Now the trash bags they used at the hospital were gray, so the janitor knew these bags”

these blue bags had to have been left there by someone from outside of the hospital. So the janitor walked over to the bags and sort of inspected them from the outside, and they were sort of bulky, but you couldn't really tell what was inside of them, and then he just reached down and he opened one of them, and when he saw what was inside, he immediately stumbled back, turned, and ran inside, shouting for someone to call the police.

About an hour later, so just before noon on December 13th, 1988, Chief Inspector, Francois Barbeier of the tour police department, walked across the parking lot of the Trasso hospital. He'd been sent out here to investigate human remains that had been found outside

of the hospital, and he was the first officer to arrive on the scene, and so now a janitor

was walking with him to show him the way to where the remains had been found. They walked over to a grassy strip in the middle of the parking lot, and they stopped next to a pair of blue trash bags. Inspector Barbeier knelt down and he opened up one of the bags, and inside, he saw very clearly

“there were two severed arms and the lower part of two legs.”

He opened up the other blue bag, and he found it contained a woman's torso, but there was no pelvis, no thighs, and no head. Barbeier turned to the janitor, who he knew had found the remains, and he asked him, like, "When did you find this?" And the janitor said that he'd been out doing his rounds, throwing his own trash away around

11am, and that's when he had seen them. But they definitely had not been there when he had done his rounds at 9am that day. So clearly these had to have been dropped off sometime between 9 and 11. Barbeier stood up and looked around, and he noticed there actually was a medical school

right down the street, and for a second he wondered if maybe this was all just a tasteless

prank by some of the students who could have maybe stolen a cadaver from the hospital's morgue and dropped it here. But as he thought about it, he just couldn't imagine medical students desecrating a human body like that. I mean, even as a prank, it just seemed not possible.

And so to him, it just seemed like the more obvious answer here, albeit a gruesome one, because that this woman contained in these two bags had been murdered, and whoever killed her, chopped her body up and put them in these bags because it would be easier to dispose of her body that way. And so Barbeier hoped that when the forensics team showed up, they'd be able to find fingerprints

from the killer on the blue trash bags. Because at this point, I mean, they didn't have a head of this woman, the victim didn't have a head, and so it could be very challenging to identify who it was. And if you didn't know who the victim was, it would be even harder to narrow down who might have killed her.

Four days later, on the afternoon of December 17th, Barbeier was reading over an autopsy report at his desk. After the initial discovery of those blue trash bags at the hospital, more body parts from what appeared to be the same body had been found dumped behind a clothing store in a commercial part of town.

But the head was still missing. And with no clues as to who the victim was, the investigation really was just barely crawling along. The police had put out a press release about the body's discovery, but so far no one had come forward with information, and there had been no women who had been reported missing

in the area recently. Also, no usable fingerprints have been found on the trash bags. And so at this point, they really just didn't have forensic evidence, and so they were not able to even begin to track down who the killer was or what happened to them. And now, as Barbeier continued to read through this autopsy report, he saw that the medical

examiner had run the victim's fingerprints through the database, but there was no match. And so again, there's just like no leads in this case so far. However, as Barbeier continued reading through this report, he saw that the autopsy did reveal that the victim had died recently, probably only one day before her remains were discovered.

And there were also traces of an anti-anxiety medicine that was in her blood, which suggested

“she might have been drugged before she was killed.”

And Barbeier was sort of baffled by this, because the method of murder almost seemed gentle and controlled, compared to the extreme violence that was done to the body post-mortem. Like those two things were totally in contrast with each other. And so he wondered if this was all done this way out of necessity. And so maybe the killer was just too small or too weak, or maybe both, to kill the victim

without sedating her first.

And then also, along those same lines, maybe they couldn't move her body without chopping it up first. And so as Barbeier is just sort of thinking through what could have happened here, the phone on his desk rang. He put down the report and he picked up the phone and it was a woman who said that she had

just seen a newspaper article about the dead body, and she thought it could be a woman named friend Swal Shendron, who lived in an apartment complex called Lavalet, Violet. And so Barbeier immediately set up, he grabbed his pan and he wrote down the name and the address, but before he could ask who the collar was or why she thought the victim

“could be this woman friend Swal's, the collar hung up.”

Half an hour later, Barbeier walked through the hallway on the first floor of the Lavalet apartment complex, where his mystery collar had told him his victim lived.

This was the first lead he had gotten since the body was found.

So he was hopeful that something would come of it. Now the woman who called didn't actually give the apartment number for friend Swas, just that she lived in this complex. And so Barbeier just literally walked down the hallway and knocked on an apartment door at random. And the man who answered, Barbeier asked him if he knew a woman named friend Swal Shendron

and did she live here. And the man just nodded and said, yep, she lives here. And then he pointed to a door right down the same hallway. And then the man, unprompted, told Barbeier that he hadn't seen anybody go in or out of that apartment for at least a few days.

And he was starting to get worried about friend Swas's cat. Barbeier's heart began to race because if friend Swas really did live in that apartment

“and she really hadn't been around in days, well it seemed very possible that she was”

his victim. So he thanked the man and said he would handle it and then he walked down the hallway to the door and he knocked. And there was no answer. But he could here cat meowing inside.

And so at this point, Barbeier was feeling really confident about the anonymous tip. And so he just turned and hurried back out to his car and he radioed for a friend's team to come to the apartment complex. And then a few minutes later, they arrived carrying a battering ram to break down the door.

And so Barbeier and the team they go back down the hallway to friend Swas's door, Barbeier got out of the way and then the officers smashed it down with this ram and then once it was open, Barbeier stepped inside the apartment. As soon as Barbeier was in this apartment, he was standing in the living room and he looked around and nothing seemed disturbed.

However when he left the living room and went into the kitchen, it was a different story. Now the kitchen was not a total disaster, but there was a broken dish on the ground and some food items that must have been on the dish at some point that also were scattered across the floor.

And so just at first glance, it appeared like maybe some sort of struggle happened in here.

However, Barbeier looked around the kitchen and he didn't find any blood anywhere, so it was just this broken plate. And then when Barbeier checked the rest of the apartment, no drawers or closets looked like they'd been ransacked, so this didn't appear like an apartment that had been robbed at any point.

However, one thing Barbeier did notice was, in the bedroom, there were a few unopened rolls of wallpaper on a stool, like as if somebody had been about to do some work in the bedroom, but then just didn't. Barbeier told the forensics team to first make sure the cat got fed because there was a cat in here, and the cat was a little melnerished, but basically okay.

And then to sweep the apartment for fingerprints to see whether a friend swallows his prints matched the victim. And if she was the victim, he was hoping they might also find fingerprints or blood inside the apartment from whoever might have killed her. And so the forensics team, they got to work.

And Barbeier, he just continued sort of walking around the apartment, looking at photos that were out on display to maybe get a sense of friend swallows his body size to sort of mentally compare it to the victim's body. And as he was doing this, he happened to glance out the window, and he saw a young man standing on the sidewalk outside who clearly was watching the police through the glass.

And when Barbeier locked eyes with the sky, the guy suddenly looked terrified and he just turned and began speed walking away, at which point Barbeier opened up the window and shouted at the sky to stay right where he was. And our later, Inspector Barbeier walked into an interview room at the tour police station and sat down across from the young man who had been watching a friend swallows his apartment.

By now, he knew this man's name was Eve Marton, and he claimed to have been friend

And so Barbeier sits down and he asks, "Eve, you know, what were you doing outside

of friend swallows his apartment when I saw you?" And Eve said that he had just come by the apartment to see a friend swallows his home, but like he got there and saw a police inside and he knew something was wrong. But he specified that he hadn't seen or heard from her in about five days and didn't know she was missing, like the last time he spoke to her was the morning of December 12th.

Now the instant Eve said December 12th, Barbeier thought of two things. One is that was actually the day before the body was found in the parking lot, and two, based on the autopsy report, it was presumed that the victim was killed the day before her body was found, so December 12th. And so it's pretty suspicious that this guy is mentioning December 12th as the last time

he saw friend swallows. And so Barbeier leaned in and he asked Eve to elaborate about the last time he saw friend swallows on the 12th.

And Eve said he had seen friend swallows at her own apartment when he left the apartment

around 8am on the 12th, and the two of them had made plans to meet up again at her place that evening. That he said when he got there that night, she wasn't home. But this was not unusual for her, so Eve explained that he just let himself inside her

“apartment with the spare key she had given him, and he just made himself dinner and he”

watched TV while he waited for her to eventually show up. And then he said it around 8pm, her landline, her home landline phone began to ring. Eve said that he answered the phone, which was not totally unusual, and he said the person who was calling claimed to be one of friend swallows's friends. Eve said he didn't recognize the voice, but he said friend swallows had a big circle

of friends, and he for sure did not know all of them. But Eve told Barbeier that this caller was not calling the apartment to try to reach friend swallows. They were calling the apartment to reach him, Eve. To tell him that apparently friend swallows had decided to go out a town this weekend with

some other friends, and that she would not be home tonight.

And Eve said this was not the first time that friend swallows had ditched him.

And so in his frustration after being told this by this friend, he said he grabbed his dinner plate and just chucked it on the floor and shattered it, and then he left. Barbeier was surprised to hear this, and he was thinking if Eve was the type of person who would immediately start breaking things over something that, you know, didn't seem like

“that big of a deal, well what else was he capable of?”

However, as potentially suspicious as Eve was, Barbeier had not actually confirmed whether friend swallows was even his victim. This could just be a coincidence here that she left town right before this body was found, like she could be just fine. And so before Barbeier let Eve go, because he couldn't really hold him at this point.

He asked Eve to just give him a detailed account of what else he had done on December 12th. He wanted to get the full timeline of what he did on that day. And Eve just said, after he had left friend swallows's apartment that morning, when he in friend swallows had made plans to meet up that night, he said he had spent most of the day at work, and then he had gone back to friend swallows's apartment after work, and

then after he had waited around for a while and got that phone call and broke the plate, he said he had just left and gone straight to his own apartment, which he shared with his mother, and he was there all night. And so Barbeier wrote down what he said, and made a note to follow up on his alibi, and then before he let Eve go, he just asked him if if friend swallows was planning to go anywhere

or meet anybody on the day he'd last saw her. And Eve he thought about it for a moment, and then he said, yeah, actually there was one thing friend swallows had mentioned to him. She had told him that an acquaintance named Kristian Morrow was supposed to come over her apartment later that morning to put up some new wallpaper in her apartment.

The next morning, December 18th, Inspector Barbeier knocked on the door of Kristian's apartment, a guy who was going to put up the wallpaper. Now at this point, Forensic still had not confirmed whether or not friend swallows was the victim, but for the time being, Barbeier was working under the assumption that she was.

A few seconds later, a young man answered the door and confirmed he was Kristian Morrow. And so Barbeier asked him if he remembered going to friend swallows' own apartment on December 12th.

“And Kristian said, yes, he did remember, but he seemed confused about why he was being”

asked about it by a police officer. Barbeier explained that friend swallows was presumed to be missing and had even been possibly killed on the same day that Kristian was at her apartment. And Kristian looked very surprised to hear this. And he just said, you know, I was there on the 12th, I got there around 10 a.m.

that morning, friend swallows seemed perfectly fine. She appeared to have just gotten out of the bath and it just didn't seem like anything was wrong. However, Kristian said he was only in the apartment around friend swallows for like a minute because he just dropped off the new wallpaper and was going to install it on another

day. It was a very brief interaction, but again, she seemed fine during this very brief interaction. Barbeier obviously had seemed those roles of new wallpaper just sitting in friend swallows's apartment, so he figured this part of Kristian's story had to be true that he must have dropped them off.

another time to actually perform the work.

“Like you could easily just do those two things at the same time.”

So he wondered whether this had actually been the plan all along, or if something unexpected had happened inside of the apartment with friend swallows that had somehow stopped

Kristian from installing the wallpaper on that first visit.

So Barbeier asked Kristian for his alibi for the rest of the day that friend swallows had last been seen, which was the 12th, and Kristian went over his entire day, he provided all the information, and then afterwards Barbeier after taking down some notes, he said he would be in touch. Now at this moment, Barbeier didn't have enough evidence to hold Kristian for more questioning.

But as he walked back to his car, Barbeier hoped that forensics might find some fingerprints or blood in friend swallows's apartment that could implicate Kristian. A day later, Barbeier sat down at his desk and read over a forensics report on friend swallows's apartment. Now there hadn't been any blood traces found, but a set of fingerprints had been pulled

“from the phone, and they matched the hands that had been found inside the blue trash bag.”

So this confirmed that friend swallows was indeed the victim, but so far there was no evidence

pointing to who killed her. Eve, friend swallows's boyfriend, his alibi checked out, and that handyman, Kristian Moro, he also had a solid alibi, and then asked for friend swallows's 19-year-old son who was serving in the military, while he was confirmed to have been at his barracks over 200 miles away at the time of the murder, and so he was ruled out as a suspect, and then

also he would say that he had not heard from his mother since several days before she was actually killed. Barbeier was still trying to figure out who was that person who called friend swallows's apartment when Eve was there, to tell Eve that hey, your girlfriend's going to be out of town this weekend, because it just seemed like that was pretty suspicious, and this

person who was calling must know something about friend swallows's death. But this was the 1980s, so it was harder to get a hold of phone logs than it is today.

“Now Barbeier had submitted an order for those phone logs, but the order had to be signed”

by a judge still, and then it could also take several more days beyond that, to actually get the records, and so there was a bit of a wait. However, just then, another officer knocked on Barbeier's door and said that a phone college just came in from someone claiming to have information about friend swallows' vision drawn, and so Barbeier picks up the phone and he hears a woman's voice, and this woman

tells him that she has information on friend swallows. And Barbeier immediately wondered, like, is this the same anonymous woman who called in before, with that tip that friend swallows was the victim, but Barbeier just couldn't quite tell if it was the same voice? And so this woman told Barbeier that she had been a very close friend of friend swallows,

and she knew about two men named Michel and Luke, who might have been involved in friend swallows' death. She said right before she died, friend swallows had found out that these two men were secretly involved in drug trafficking, and apparently they had talked about killing friend swallows if she reported them to the police.

Specifically, the caller said these two men had threatened friend swallows that they would drug her, bleed her out, chop her into pieces, and then cut off her head so she could never be identified. Early the next morning, so on December 20th, 1988, seven days after friend swallows' body was found, chief inspector Barbeier pulled up outside of a discount store in a shopping

area in tour. In front of the store, there were two men unloading boxes from a semi-truck. Barbeier, he got out of his car, and he began walking towards them. And when these two men saw the detective approaching, they immediately seemed sort of panicked. And when Barbeier got close enough, he asked them if they were the store's owners, Michel

and Luke. And one of the men nodded, at which point Barbeier said, "You two are coming with me." About an hour later, Barbeier walked down the hallway at the police station, past the doors of the interrogation rooms where Michel and Luke were currently being held.

But first, he wanted to speak to the third person the police had brought in for questioning

that morning, Sylvie Reverego, who happened to be, friend swallows' best friend, and friends with Michel and Luke. And he sat down across from her, and he basically said, "Look, like we know you're connected to the two men, Michel and Luke, and also two friends swallows, and we want to know if you know anything about these two guys, because apparently they could have been threatening

friends swallows, we think they could be involved, tell me everything you know." And Sylvie would tell Barbeier that she was actually scared of Michel and Luke, and that was why she had not come to police yet. Because she was worried if she told them what she knew, they would hurt her. She told Barbeier that those two, those two men, had told her, or Sylvie, that they intended

to kill friend swallows because they were worried that friend swallows was going to report them to police for drug trafficking and selling stolen cars. And Sylvie said she didn't know if they were actually capable of that, but she just

she would become a target as well.

“And so he and Sylvie chatted for a bit longer and he got some additional information”

about when exactly they spoke to her and said this and some other details about their demeanor and the people they hung out with. And then after that, Barbeier got up, he left the interrogation room and in the hallway, he caught up with the detective who would actually already begun interrogating Luke. And the detective said that so far, Luke had totally refused to cooperate and he'd outright

denied even knowing who Sylvie was. Barbeier sighed when he heard this and he had a feeling right away that Michel was not going to be any more cooperative. But he was going to try his best to crack him. So Barbeier went into the room where Michel was being held and after he sat down, he just asked

Michel if he had seen the news about that woman who was found chopped up in trash bags in a hospital parking lot. And Michel said yes, he had heard about that. And then he made a joke that maybe a surgeon at the hospital had made a pretty bad mistake or something.

“Barbeier didn't react to the joke and instead he just pulled out a folder and slid it across”

the table. And then Michel, he opened it up and what he saw were photos of those blue trash bags and also photos of the severed body parts that had been found inside of them. And when Michel saw these pictures, he went completely pale. Barbeier then asked Michel, "Do you know who that body belonged to?"

And Michel, he just looked up and shook his head and said, "No." Barbeier just stared at Michel for a moment, sort of just gaging his reaction. And then eventually he said, "Well, the body belonged to Francois Jendron. When Michel heard this, he really looked like he was in complete shock." But Barbeier immediately followed up and said, "Michele, did you kill Francois?"

And Michel, his reaction was to immediately shout, "No!"

That Francois was a great friend of his and he would never hurt her.

Barbeier was crazy for thinking he would do that. And then again and again he just insisted that he was completely innocent here.

“Now immediately, Barbeier thought Michel's reaction here was pretty genuine.”

But just then, there was a knock on the door and so Barbeier got up and he stepped out into the hallway and another officer told him that the forensics team had just found a piece of evidence that almost certainly would crack this case wide open. Based on forensic evidence and an eventual confession, this is what police believe happened to Francois Jendron on the morning of December 12, 1988.

Around 10 AM, the killer knocked on the door of Francois's apartment. Francois answered the door wrapped in a towel and told the killer to come on inside. The killer stepped in and they acted very friendly and casual as if this visit was nothing out of the ordinary. But after the two had shattered for a while, the killer decided it was time to put their

plan into action. After all, Francois was a problem for them and they had to deal with her once and for all. So, at some point, the killer told Francois that they had something they wanted to show her. And asked if she would come over to the killer's home just for a minute to show them. Francois eventually agreed and once she got dressed, the two of them had it out together.

And so the two of them, they walked their way to the killer's home, they go inside, and then before the killer is going to show Francois, you know, what they brought them over here to show them,

they first made them both a pot of tea.

And critically, the killer crushed up a few anti-anxiety pills and put those in the bottom of Francois's cup of tea. Then the killer brought the tea over to the kitchen table where Francois was sitting and the killer sat down with her and they both drank their tea. The killer made sure Francois drank her entire cup, but by the time Francois had finished

her tea, she was so sedated from the drugs that she could barely sit up. At this point, the killer knew they could move on to the next phase of their plan. And so the killer, at this point, lifted Francois up out of the seat, she didn't put up a fight, and they carried her over to the bathroom, and they put her into the tub and they turned on the water.

And then eventually when the water filled up high enough, the killer just pushed Francois's head under the water, and again, Francois, because of the drugs, couldn't do anything to stop it. And she remained under the water until she fell unconscious. Then the killer grabbed a nearby scalpel, reached into the tub, and cut each of Francois's

wrists, and then Francois just laid in the tub, and bled out. After Francois was dead, the killer simply drained the tub, and then cut Francois's body into pieces to make it easier to dispose of. They took the pieces of her limbs and torso, and shoved them into blue trash bags, and then dumped them in the parking lot of a nearby hospital ten minutes away.

But the bigger problem for the killer was Francois's head. The killer wanted to completely erase Francois's identity. So, for that reason, they kept her head at their home, and they put it in the oven and they cooked it overnight. So the skull would then become soft enough that they could crush it with a hammer.

toilet, and they would take the other pieces of her head, and they would throw them into

a nearby river. However, despite all this effort, the killer forgot one thing, which was they put Francois's hands in those blue trash bags, and so her body was identified by her fingerprints just a few days later. And then not long after that, a tip soon led the police right to the killer's door, and

“when they investigated the killer's home, they found crucial pieces of evidence in her”

bathroom. The killer was Francois's own best friend, Sylvie Reverego.

Sylvie had always been sort of jealous of Francois, primarily because she seemed happy all

the time. And on top of that, Francois got a lot of attention from men, which just, again, made Sylvie jealous. And since the two women, post-divores, were spending so much time together even more than in their childhood, their friendship had gotten suffocatingly close, and over this recent

period of time where they were sort of on top of each other, Sylvie's jealousy and sort of resentment towards Francois turned into full-blown hatred.

“Initially, Sylvie had tried to pin the murder on Michele and Luke, by telling another friend”

of Francois's, a woman named Yvette, that those two men had threatened to kill Francois.

And just as Sylvie had hoped, Yvette had called the police and passed along what she had said. But unbeknownst to Sylvie, Yvette also shared another tip with the investigators, which was that a few days after the murder, Yvette's own daughter had happened to go to Sylvie's house and her daughter had found two gold dental crowns in the toilet, and the daughter

and Yvette both knew that Francois had gold dental crowns. So by the time Sylvie was brought in for questioning, Inspector Barbier was already pretty sure she must have had something to do with Francois's death. And so police would search Sylvie's home, and they would find traces of blood, and they would also find some of Francois's jewelry hidden inside of a box.

And then when Sylvie was confronted with all this evidence and testimony during her interrogation, Sylvie broke down and confessed. Sylvie Reverego was charged with Francois's murder on December 21st, 1988. Three years later, she was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Quick note about our stories, they are all based on true events.

But we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes. The Mr. Ballem Podcast, strange dark and mysterious stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballem. Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bone and Cole Caccio.

This episode was written by Kate Gallagher. Search and fact checking by Shelley Xu, Samantha Van Hoos, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Alex Paul, Ben Fassiano. Research and fact checking supervision by Steven Eher, audio editing and post-produced by Whitley Caccio and Jordan Stitham, production support by Antonio Minata and Delana Corley,

artwork by Jessica Klogston-Kiner, theme song, "Something Wicked" by Ross plugged in. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballem Podcast, and just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr. Ballem Podcast, you can also now watch on the Mr. Ballem YouTube channel that very same day, and trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe.

Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballem.

“If you want to listen to episodes one week early and add free, you can subscribe to”

SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit SiriusXM.com/podcast+ to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. So, that's going to do it, I really appreciate your support, until next time, see ya!