THE GRIM REAPER OF PARIS

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case today we're going to be talking about the grim reaper of paris this is a serial killer that goes by a lot of different names they are known as the monster of montmartre the grim reaper of paris the beast of von mart and that is who we're going to be talking about today so you might have heard of this case before just under a different name and i'm sure you can tell by the name that this is a french case so i apologize in advance for my pronunciation of some names i've tried my best but i'm not french i'll tell you that quickly before we get into this video i just want to thank our sponsors for making this video possible magellan tv magellan tv is a documentary streaming service with over 3 000 titles on a range of different topics from earth nature space to history science and of course true crime the true crime selection is one of the most unique true crime selections i've ever seen on a streaming service they have so many different cases so many different titles that i've literally just never heard of i learned something new literally every time i go on magellan tv which is something i can't say about a lot of streaming services a very recent recommendation of mine this is a documentary that i watched the other day it's kind of a short one so if you're looking for a quick documentary i really recommend township terror it's all about this one master criminal this serial killer who i'm not gonna give too much of it away but let's just put it this way this guy was sentenced to 19 life sentences plus an additional 189 years on top of the life sentences if that doesn't tell you how horrific this guy's crimes were then i don't know what will so i really recommend that one that was a good documentary magellan tv update their selections every single week so there's always something new for you to discover on there it's completely ad free and you can watch it on pretty much any device that you have as well so what are you waiting for right now they're running a limited time offer where you can get 30 off of an annual subscription making it just 3.50 a month for a streaming service plus a two-week free trial to kick that off so if you want to make the most of that discount do it while you still can it is a limited time offer you can use the link down below in this description to go and claim that offer thanks again to magellantv for sponsoring this video before we get into this case i just want to give my usual disclaimer that i mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that i talk about in this video this video is for educational purposes and everything that i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video just a couple of content warnings before we get into this case we are going to be talking about themes of drug abuse and drug addiction there are themes of child neglect and also some themes of homophobia in this video so if any of that is you know if you don't want to see or hear about any of that please do click out of this video this probably isn't the one for you i'm sure i'll see you again another time with a different video that's a little bit more suitable but until then look after yourself now let's just get into the case so this case starts out in 1984 in paris france and this is where 83 year old anna barbier ponthis lived on the morning of october 6th anna's family went over to her house as they often did to go and check on her but when they arrived they stumbled upon a traumatizing scene anna had been murdered in her own home the night before and her body had been there the whole time for almost 12 hours now she had blood all over her head and it was very clear that things had been stolen from the apartment it had been ransacked anna's body was taken for an autopsy where it was found that not only was she beaten severely through this whole ordeal that was where all the blood had come from but her actual cause of death had been suffocation it's believed that she was actually suffocated with a pillar that was found next to her so detectives got to work on this case they had a look around her apartment that had very clearly been you know broken into this was a robbery whether that was the initial motive when breaking in police didn't know they didn't know that if this was a robbery gone wrong or a murder that just happened to have a robbery with it but as police were looking around they were trying to kind of take inventory of everything that was in the house see what was stolen and they came to the conclusion that about 300 francs was stolen that was the currency in paris at the time and that is the equivalent of about 30 great british pounds 50 us dollars so not a lot not a lot had been stolen from this house yet this woman had been murdered for it the initial theory was that this probably was a robbery gone wrong that someone had broken into the house tried to rob it and maybe anna had woken up during the process maybe disturbed them and they thought that the easiest thing would be to kill her so that she wouldn't be able to go to the police and give a description but as police began working on this case that same day they actually got a phone call from another elderly woman living in the area with a very similar story 91 year old jermaine petito had been in her own home which was actually just a few streets away from anna's from where this dead body had been found and she says that she too had her house broken into that same night and she was assaulted well actually it was very clear that this wasn't even just assault this was attempted murder jermaine was very very lucky to be alive so police tried to get as much information as they possibly could from jermaine because now it was looking like this was probably the same person that had committed both of these crimes so they're thinking if they talk to jermaine as much as possible if they get as much information about this attacker as they can then that will help them to solve ana's murder as well they'll be able to solve both these cases at the same time but jermaine petito was so deeply deeply traumatized by what had happened to her that she just could not talk to the police you know they wanted to question her they wanted to ask her as much as they could but she just she couldn't do it she couldn't relive it she couldn't you know tell her story she did cooperate as much as she could she you know she understood how serious this was and she really did want to help but this was so traumatic for her that in the end she actually had to just ignore the police she just stopped communicating with the police because this was making her ill so police really didn't have much to go off in this case at all because their survivor couldn't really talk to them couldn't really tell them anything and there was no evidence left at either of the scenes but just four days later they would have another development in this case in that same town where these two attacks had taken place an apartment building was set on fire luckily the fire was easily controlled no one actually lost their lives in this fire but there was a dead body found in the building let me explain 89 year old suzanne foucault's body was found laying in her bed but like i said she hadn't died in the fire she'd actually been murdered her cause of death was suffocation and her body was actually found with a carrier bag a plastic bag still over her head so that was probably the method used to kill her again her apartment was ransacked money was stolen but still it wasn't a large amount of money it was probably about the same as the previous ones probably only about 50 pounds these elderly women were being murdered in their own homes what for the sake of 50 pounds a time this time the murderer had stolen one of suzanne's watches so they got like 30 pounds and a watch and then in the aftermath it seems that they had actually tried to destroy the crime scene they'd set her apartment alight which set the whole building alight and this was something we hadn't seen before in one of these cases we hadn't seen the murderer try to get rid of evidence like this you can probably tell from the way that i'm talking about this that police had at this point connected these three cases they believed that the same person had broken into each of these women's homes and tried to or successfully murdered all three of them so this was a very very serious repeat offender that maybe they believed that they were a serial killer at this point in time did they know that one of the women that they'd attacked had survived the ordeal so this was someone that had their victim not survived they would currently be a serial killer and there was no doubt in police's mind that they could try to act again police were scared that they would wake up the next morning and there would be another victim to go and find and then a few days later they'd wake up and there'd be another one and another one and another one and it seemed that this killer was particularly targeting the elderly in this very specific part of paris as well it was the 18th arrondissement of paris it was quite a low income area and so it was very heavily populated with the elderly because this was somewhere they would move during their retirement they weren't making a lot of money anymore so it was kind of easy cheap living so it seemed that this killer was targeting this particular area and these particular victims on purpose because they were vulnerable they couldn't fight back they couldn't defend themselves and all of these attacks were taking place literally just streets away from each other so this one particular area of paris was being terrorized and everyone was so scared and it wouldn't be long until this attacker actually officially became a serial killer when they claimed their third victim their fourth attack overall just a month after the last 71 year old retired teacher iona saikoreska was found murdered in her own home and again it seemed there'd been a robbery some money was stolen this time her body was found tied up with electrical wire and her cause of death was bludgeoning she'd been beaten to death and then just two days after that the killer struck again this time it was 84 year old alice benay her body was found the following morning by her own son who had come to her house to come and check on her again the same characteristics of all the other murders her home was robbed money was stolen it seemed that she'd been beaten but that wasn't all that had happened this time her autopsy actually showed that alice had been forced to drink drain cleaner now this absolutely terrified the police up until now they had regarded all of these attacks as just you know robberies where the victim had been murdered so that they wouldn't be able to tell police who would rob them you know but this revelation made it very clear that the murderer must enjoy the process of murdering these victims this was no longer just murder just so that the victim would no longer be alive to tell the police this was murder for the killer to enjoy it for the killer to put the victim through genuine terror torture them in their final moments force them to drink drain cleaner why else would the killer do that other than for some kind of sick enjoyment you know what what other purpose would there be and the very next morning another body was found another victim this is the fifth victim in turtle and this is what now like three in a week the murders were speeding up at an alarming rate a woman named mary choi was found the following morning by her carer and again an awful horrific looking scene this woman had been beaten tied up gagged with a towel she'd been tortured and eventually murdered i believe the way that mary had been tortured was that a few of the fingers on one of her hand were either fractured or broken it seemed her fingers had been twisted so again these murders are actually getting more and more brutal and just two days after that another victim was found this time it was 75 year old maria miko diaz and this time she'd actually been stabbed as part of this attack and this was the first time we'd seen this killer use a weapon like this it wasn't her cause of death her cause of death was still suffocation which if anything that's even more scary because now the killer is bringing extra weapons as part of the torture process they're thinking of new ways to hurt these victims while they're still alive again her home had been ransacked and robbed of what little money she actually had and her killer had gotten away left not a single piece of evidence and just three days after that two more bodies were found two bodies in one day two victims in one night when the bodies were actually collected and taken for an autopsy it was found that they'd actually been murdered a week before this so they weren't the most recent victims but their bodies had only just been found on this day and i just want to clarify that these were both individual murders as well they weren't both found in the same house they were found in separate houses it was just a coincidence that they were found on the same day these were two separate murders there were still two that happened on the same night separately the killer had been to two different places in one night there were 77 year old paul victor and 82 year old jean laurent again exact same situation they had been robbed of what little money they had and suffocated so this was eight murders in just over a month in this quite small section of paris as well this was horrifying that this person must just be walking these streets during the day and no one knows it's them that is murdering these elderly people in the middle of the night leaving no evidence and police were at a loss as to what to do in this case there was no evidence to really investigate i mean they did find i think one or two fingerprints at a couple of the scenes but this was the 1980s they really didn't have the technology to be identifying people from fingerprints i mean they did if they had the physical person's finger in front of them and then they could be able to compare the prints but without having a suspect i don't know it was kind of useless it's not like what we have now with the criminal database i mean we've got this big database where every single fingerprint or dna sample is kept so then if we do have a crime scene where we find a random fingerprint we can compare it against the database and find a match back in the day they would have to have the physical person's finger to be able to test against the print so they needed a suspect and right now they had no suspects so they decided that the best plan of action here to be able to find an actual human suspect to like bring into the police station was to try to catch the serial killer in the act and this was quite a dangerous scary and unconventional tactic to use i mean they were literally waiting for him to try to strike again and they were gonna try and intercept that their plan was to send loads of police officers out into the street at night to just parole the area in the 18th round this month of paris they were just gonna have police officers on every street and they hoped that one of two things could come of this maybe this would just put the killer off completely maybe they would look outside see all these police officers and be like whoa it's not even worth trying and then they would give up murdering which i mean perfect or option number two maybe the killer would try and strike again maybe they thought they were smarter than the police that they could do it around the police and maybe one of the officers would be able to catch them in the act and then arrest detain them so the plan was to just walk around and stay on the lookout for anyone that looked suspicious or anyone that was you know obviously trying to break in somewhere but once this parole operation was put into action the murders very suddenly stopped there were no more murders past that point it would have taken a special kind of confident well cocky for this murderer to go out and try and kill again when it was when the risk was so high for them to be caught so the killing spree came to a very sudden halt and of course so did the investigation i mean they had nothing else to go off so like i don't know that kind of stopped as well and it was awful for the police to admit that they were just gonna have to move on that they they couldn't catch someone they wouldn't get these victims justice what more could they do there was no evidence there was no leads to go off of there was literally nothing else they could do this was a cold case i mean they did try a couple of little things like i said they had that fingerprint so they sent this fingerprint around every local prison in paris and they had all of the violent criminals fingerprints tested against it to see maybe like if the killer had been arrested and jailed because maybe that's why the murders came to a very sudden halt maybe it wasn't due to the police operation maybe it was because they'd been locked up but none of these prisoners had the matching finger to the fingerprint it seemed that the killer had just gotten away with everything that they did they'd murdered eight people and not seen a single day of prison for it and as the time went by paris gradually decreased the amount of patrol officers walking the streets this whole operation was just kind of over and paris was going back to normal people were confident going out on the streets again it seemed that this serial killer was gone but then a year later a year after the last murder now that the city's guard was down the serial killer came back it wasn't in the exact same area it was probably about 20 minutes away from where the last murders took place but it was very obvious that it was the same person and this is what is referred to as the second wave of murders it started a year after the last the first victim of the second wave was 91 year old estelle don jean she was suffocated in her own home and the whole place was ransacked it was robbed and as soon as police were called to this scene when estelle's body was found they knew that the killer was back it had all the same characteristics of the last eight murders almost copied and pasted just 20 minutes away two weeks after that another body was found this time it was 77 year old andrei ladam and just five days after that 83 year old yvonne coron's body was found in her apartment again the murders are speeding up there was a two week gap between the first and the second and then just a five day one between the second and the third the tension and the fear was just spilling back into paris almost quicker than it had done the first time three days after the last one the killer committed another double murder maram jer bloom and francois vendon were both murdered in the same night again these weren't linked just like the last double murder they were murdered in their own apartments separately so the killer had gone to one of them robbed and murdered them and then wanted to commit another one in that same night and found enough time to locate another victim and go and kill them too just three days after that a fourteenth victim we're on fourteen now was found again murdered in her own home her name was yvonne chablis the final victim of the second wave of murders actually happened quite a bit later it was about a month gap between the second to last and the last which was quite uncharacteristic of this killer they seem to just speed up and speed up and speed up until a sudden stop they wouldn't speed up and then slow down and speed up but anyway the last victim of the second wave of murders was 76 year old virginia labret maybe the reason that these killings slurred and then stopped again was because police were upping their efforts again they set up this whole patrol investigation this whole police officers on every single street once again and maybe this scared the killer again maybe that was the reason they stopped the first time and maybe that was again the reason that they were stopping this time it was like a cat and mouse game it was like the killer would go out kill loads of people police would go out with their investigation so the killer would pull back again and then as soon as the police started to pull back again the killer went back out and that is exactly what happened again the killings ended in february of 1986 and police were on full alert and then as the summer came police were kind of dropping and dropping and dropping their efforts and as it got to summer and police efforts were low again another murder happened on june 14th 1986 another victim ludmilla luberman was found again murdered her hum ransacked and robbed this murderer was back and claiming his 16th victim so this time police knew that they had to act fast or this would be another wave of killings so they wasted no time they got out in those streets in full force literally the next day there wasn't going to be any kind of build up or anything they were just back out on the streets hoping that this would scare off the killer and it did they successfully prevented a 17th murder for now but little did police know the only reason they'd actually prevented a 17th murder was because their killer this serial killer that had been terrorizing paris for so long now he was actually in prison for a complete other crime that they had no idea about they literally had this serial killer locked behind bars and they had no idea he was a serial killer it's just unlucky that they weren't still testing this fingerprint against new prisoners it had been tested against all the old prisoners but he wasn't in prison at the time obviously if they'd kept testing it against every single new prisoner that came in they would have caught him here and now but they didn't he was right under police's nerves but they had no idea and so a year and a half later he served his year and a half sentence and then he was back out on the streets ready to commit a third wave of murders the 17th and 18th murders the first ones of the third wave came on the same night november 25th 1987. the murderer was just going straight in again with a double kill two in one night or at least he tried to 79 year old rachel cohen and 87 year old bertha final terry were both attacked separately on the same night and the next morning rachel's body was found but little did the grim reaper of paris know his second victim bertha was actually going to survive the attack so this was his second survivor at this point did he know he had any survivors luckily on the night of the attack bertha had been screaming for help and she lived in an apartment building not just her own place like her own house where she wouldn't be heard she was in a building with so many other people her neighbors heard the commotion and rushed to her apartment where the attacker had already fled and left bertha for death she was in a really really bad way her neighbors thought that she was going to die when they got there but she was transported to hospital and miraculously she survived so the next morning police rushed straight to the hospital where bertha was being kept because this was huge for the investigation she could help find this man once and for all so they asked her if she'd seen her attacker's face and she had clear as dare and she gave them this exact description i'm gonna read it word for word he was a mixed race man in his twenties with hair like carl lewis and an earring in his left ear i don't know who carl lewis was i think that was like an olympian at the time so this was the absolute biggest and probably like only lead that they'd had in this whole investigation this was the biggest thing they had to go off and they were so hopeful from this as well because this was a very unique description hair like carl lewis i think he had like dark hair that went into like bleach blonde which is very unique and an earring in just his left ear like these were all quite specific things it wasn't like it was just a white man with short brown hair which is like every single white man ever so they felt like they were finally gonna be able to save paris from this monster they asked bertha if she would be willing to meet up with a sketch artist to create like a composite sketch of the man that attacked her she was willing and they made this thing within like 24 hours and got it out to every single news station newspaper that they could the hall of paris was completely bombarded with this composite sketch because they thought if as many people could see this as possible then if they were kind of walking the streets and they saw this man in real life they would recognize him from the sketch but in the time it took to actually create this sketch the killer had already struck again claiming his 18th victim now 73 year old genevieve garmont was again attacked and murdered in her own home the whole place ransacked she was robbed but luckily she would be the grim reaper of paris's last victim four days after that final murder a police officer was walking down the street he wasn't really doing anything i think he was kind of between tasks at this point in time he was just walking down the street as normal when he looked up and he saw a man walking towards him and he did a double take at this man because he felt like he knew him he felt like he recognized him he felt like he'd seen this man before and that was when it clicked this was the man from that sketch that he'd been seeing everywhere the hair the earring everything everything was exactly as bertha had described and so that police officer wasted no time he whipped out those handcuffs and arrested that man then and there and took him to the police station so when he was back at the station police found that this man was 24 year old thierry pollon and he completely denied having anything to do with any of these murders robberies break-ins absolutely any of it but police were just convinced it had to be him he was such a unique looking person especially for that area in paris it's a very white area very non-expressive area so to see someone a man with one earring and bleach blonde hair you know this wasn't very typical i mean right now it doesn't sound like that unique of a description because it is a little bit more common for people to express themselves that way these days but back then this was it would have been very unlikely to get two people that looked like that in one area of paris so police did some digging and they found that this man thierry pollard actually had a criminal history and quite a lengthy one as well he'd done prison time for armed robbery assault and he'd actually been in prison quite a lot in his life and coincidentally the times when this man was in prison seemed to line up perfectly between the killing waves when the grim reaper of paris stopped killing this guy was locked away in a cell so i mean is that because he was the grim reaper of paris and he was simply unable to kill because he was locked away maybe that explained the gaps maybe it had nothing to do with the police patrol program thing that they set up and maybe it was just because he was just imprisoned so police held this man in custody for a good few days and they were interrogating him they just knew that this was the killer they just knew it they were so confident and they were saying to him you know just confess just do it we know you did it and he wouldn't he maintained his innocence through this whole thing day after day until eventually one day he just broke and he turned to police and said fine i killed 21 people and this shocked police because 21 they only knew about 18 victims so who were the other three was he telling the truth was there more to discover about his murders and he also dropped another bombshell that day in the police station and he said that he actually hadn't acted alone so they probably shouldn't stop looking for suspects we'll get back to that in just a second right now i want to tell you a little bit more about 24 year old thierry pollon he was born on november 28 1963 in martinique which is one of the caribbean islands i believe it's owned by france his parents were still teenagers when they had thierry and admittedly they were not ready for a child they said that themselves and when he was born they kind of freaked out they realized how much of a responsibility this is how much hard work it is to raise a child and they didn't want to do it anymore they ended up splitting up literally just days after thierry was born and they ended up sending him to live with his father's mother so his paternal grandmother this whole thing having this child actually freaked out to yerry's father so much that he moved to france like he moved out of the caribbean islands all the way to france to like start a new life after this so he left his kid in martinique just with his mum and never saw the kid he did pay money towards him of course and thierry's mum kind of felt the same she didn't run off to france but she didn't really want anything to do with her child either so immediately literally just days after his birth he's abandoned by the two people that are supposed to stick by you for the rest of your life his two primary caregivers have just been like nope too much effort and the one carer that he did have his grandmother was said to be just really she emotionally neglected him she saw him as a burden like i mean her son just had a child and then was like i don't want this anymore you can have this and now she was kind of stuck with him for like 18 years until he moved out she didn't like him she didn't treat him very well she didn't abuse him as far as i'm aware but she did emotionally neglect him didn't meet his needs she wasn't you know very hands-on or active with his upbringing and he felt that you know he knew that his grandmother really didn't care about him all that much and that must have been awful to know that both of your parents didn't want you and now your grandmother doesn't want you as well just a side note here that it's been theorized that maybe that is why thierry paul on eventually targeted elderly women yes because they were vulnerable and they couldn't fight back they'd be easy to overpower but also maybe there was this factor of his grandmother in there as well yes i do think that money was a motive in these crimes but maybe it was a secondary motive and maybe a primary motive was to take out this pent-up aggression and hatred that he had towards his grandmother maybe these elderly women that he was killing maybe he saw them as his grandmother and maybe money was just a secondary motive he needed money so he was going to kill someone and he decided that that someone was an elderly woman because it reminded him of his grandmother because let's face it if money was the main motive in these crimes why was he still targeting these old women that only literally had like 30 pounds in their whole home they didn't have much to steal he wasn't getting much out of these attacks and it was a very high risk for a very low reward he was getting very little money and literally committing murder he could get sent to prison for a very long time for each of these things for what 30 pounds so it does make a little bit of sense to me that that is why he particularly targeted elderly women anyway back to the timeline thierry's grandmother was awful and so when he was a little bit older thierry decided that he was gonna try and reconnect with his mother because he felt like she did care about him she did love him but she was just so young that she just couldn't look after him you know she didn't give him up because she didn't like him whereas his grandmother didn't like him he wanted to go and live with his mother by now i think he was like 10 years old his mother was now in her 20s and you know maybe she was a little bit more capable of caring for her child he felt like now if he went back to her she would be able to look after him like a mother but thierry's mother had moved on with her life you know she'd got a new man she'd literally had kids with this new man so she had a whole new family so thierry had stepbrothers and stepsisters that he had no idea about and luckily his mother did allow him to come and stay with her but it didn't go very well he felt like he never really fit in he felt like he was the outcast he felt like he was kind of intruding on his mother's new life on his mother's new family like he didn't belong there as he got older thierry began misbehaving and this was it started out with kind of just usual naughty kid behavior you know just little things when they're in school and it just snowballed and snowballed until it was serious stuff it got so bad that there were even reports of thierry threatening one of his school teachers with a knife the school did try to write letters home to thierry's mother and just say like look this is what's going on can you do something about it can you like discipline your child please but thierry would i mean the school i don't know what they expected they would send these letters home with thierry and so he would just never give his mother them i mean it does make sense not that i condone that but like if you're gonna get a letter sent home that's gonna get you in trouble why would you give it to him you know what i mean he would intercept them he would just take the letter open it sign it like forge his mother's signature and sign it as his mother and then just take it back to school and be like yeah my mom saw it so i don't actually know how much of thierry's bad behavior his mother actually knew about like i don't know if she knew that he threatened his teacher with a knife and stuff like that but it was when thierry started getting violent with his stepbrothers and sisters that his mother was like right not having this anymore cannot be having this i don't want this child living with us anymore so she called thierry's father and bear in mind she hadn't spoken to his father in like 10 years they split up right after having this newborn baby and he just left her and went to france and he was like i don't know you sought it out and so she had to give the baby to his mother so i imagine this was kind of a mad phone call to have but she phoned his father like 10 years on and she said look i know you're in france i know you've got a new life but we do still have that kid and he is a nightmare and i can't have him anymore so will you have him so they came to an agreement thierry's father agreed that he would have him if she just put him on a plane over to france he would care for him he would shelter him you know he would be a father to him but that meant that he would stop paying child payments and his mother was more than willing she was like fine just take the kid and sir he did tierri was shipped over to france to go and live with his father but he was not very accepted over in france this was the 1970s and thierry pollon was mixed race and imagine paris france is a very very white area and in the 1970s racism would have been a huge huge problem that he faced and that meant that he only had about two friends in the whole school that he went to and because of this his mental health took a huge hit he was anxious he was depressed he never really went to school so like his grades were getting affected he ended up failing all of his exams at the end of school i mean he never went and he never learned anything so it's not that big of a surprise he ended up failing all of his exams and his future wasn't looking very bright and so thierry did the only thing that he could think to do to make his life kind of a success and that was to join the army when he was 17 he joined the army he was like a parachute guy and one thing that he didn't expect was for the bullying to be even worse in the army they bullied him not only for his race but also for his sexuality because thierry pollon was gay but i don't think he was out at this moment i think he was still closeted but there were certain kind of traits of his that the men would call gay and this got so bad that in 1982 when thierry pollone was like 19 20 years old he went on leave from the army and when he did he committed his first major crime he walked into his local grocery store with a massive knife and threatened everyone in there saying give me all of your money everything that i ask for or i'm gonna stab someone especially the woman behind the counter she was the main one that was being threatened and she was like a little elderly old woman of course she complied and she gave him whatever he wanted in the moment in order to make sure that everyone was safe but as soon as he left she called the police and because this was his local grocery store of course she recognized him he'd been in there before and for some reason he thought he could rob the place without a disguise and get away with it absolutely not it really wasn't a well thought out plan by any means so she told the police exactly who would rob this star and the next day they went and arrested thierry pollon for this armed robbery he was given two and a half years in prison however this sentence was later suspended not entirely sure why but that meant he got zero prison time like he had no repercussions for this armed robbery and it was around this time that he actually got back in contact with his biological mother who had actually now moved over to france she actually lived in paris right now he was living in a place called toulouse and he got back in touch with his mother who lived in paris and asked if he could move back with her he was like now i'm older promise i'll be well behaved and she let him she let him move to paris this was their first time properly meeting now that thierry was an adult you know they could kind of connect on a on a better level than when he was like a naughty little kid and they did not gel well like their personalities were not very they were very clashy they just didn't get on they had very conflicting personalities and i mean they knew that from the start they knew they didn't get on but they tried because they were family at the age of 21 thierry got a job at a local drag club and he loved it he found his passion in life up until this point i think he'd very much been trying to hide his interest and all that kind of stuff you know joined the army and stuff like he was trying to take a complete opposite route and it just wasn't working for him but he got a job at this drag nightclub as a waiter and he just flourished like he found this real love for drag he slowly started to dabble in it himself i mean he started as just a waiter but then he started like putting a little bit of makeup on trying on the wigs and before he knew it he was one of the performers there he was one of the drag queens and he did really well people really liked him he was specifically known for his renditions of earthquake songs and when he took this kind of promotion in his job he went to his mother all excited and he was like mum you've got to come and watch me perform he was so happy he was so passionate about this new life path that he'd found and he wanted to share this with his mother and so his mother agreed to come and watch one of his shows i mean she was very reluctant to she wasn't supportive she wasn't you know she didn't like the fact that he was gay she didn't like the fact that he was into drag but she went anywhere so she sat down in the crowd thierry got up on the stage and a couple of seconds into this show his mother gets up and leaves the club and thierry just has to watch her from the stage this was the first time in his life that he had felt truly himself that he had felt truly passionate and excited about anything he felt excited for his future now that he had this new job he wasn't very good in school he didn't fit very well in the army and all his life he'd just kind of seen himself as a failure for all these reasons but he wasn't a failure he was just trying to get into the wrong things but now he'd finally found this thing that he was good at and he was excited about and he tried to share that with his mother and she didn't want to hear it which was a bit of a knockback for thierry but it didn't stop him he continued to work there he continued to keep his passion alive and eventually there at the club he found a man that he really liked and eventually the two of them started seeing each other and this man was 19 year old jean-thierry matheran but this guy matharan brought with him a lot of turmoil into thierry's life he was a very very serious drug addict he was very very dependent on numerous different drugs mainly cocaine sometimes heroin and he introduced thierry into this life thierry started dabbling in drugs here and there with his boyfriend but eventually he became addicted just like his boyfriend was i mean mataram was always way more addicted than thierry was but still he had an addiction he now had this addiction and it was a huge issue for both of them it really affected their lives but they didn't really see it all that much the only way that they saw it affecting their lives was through their money they started spending every penny that they had on cocaine primarily and they were very very caught up in the very glamorous on not so glamorous life of like drugs sex rock and roll i mean it's not really rock and roll you know what i mean parties all the time they've lived these very like socialite-esque lives very luxury lives they threw really expensive extravagant parties did a lot of drugs do a lot of drinking invited a lot of friends they actually ended up moving out of thierry's mother's home and moving into a luxury hotel this hotel and their whole lifestyle in general was depleting their money so fast that they knew they had to do something more to make money and that was when they started selling drugs i say there but it was more thierry that was selling drugs i think matheran was a very like submissive role in this relationship thierry was always the dominant one the one who like he made the commands he made the orders whatever he said goes everything they did in this relationship was pretty much thierry's idea and matheran was just kind of a complicit sidekick that was just so desperate for money for drugs that like if thierry was like oh yeah let's start selling drugs mataram was like cool as long as it gets me the money so they were selling drugs for a while and this was just not earning them enough money to keep up with this lifestyle so they began pickpocketing people in paris they stole anything they could cash credit cards even just people's items that they were holding because they could then sell them and get money for them and it was at this point that they were so desperate for money that thierry suggested to matheran that they get a little bit more hands-on a little bit more aggressive with their approach to um to these cd money-making scheme and he suggested that they start doing break-ins home invasions like burgling people's houses now it's unclear at this point in the case whether thierry intended on killing the people in those houses i don't know if that was part of his plan from the very beginning or if that came in a little bit later i don't know if mataram knew that that was part of the plan either but either way matheman agreed that this was a good idea and the two of them started robbing houses every single house that they robbed they killed the person in so there were no robberies before the murders that were just robberies you know what i mean the first robbery was also a murder there was no progression there it went from pickpocketing people on the street to literally breaking in people's houses and killing them and they didn't just choose their victims randomly they didn't just like pick a house and were like okay let's go break into that one they actually had a method for choosing their victims thierry said that he would walk up to these elderly women in the street and strike up some kind of conversation with them talk to them in some kind of way and based on their response to him how they acted towards him would determine whether they would live or die if the old lady was nice to him he would let her live but if the old lady was rude or ignored him or something he knew that that was his victim if she was rude he would follow her home and make a mental note of where she lived what apartment it was what house it was and then later that night they would go back to her house and get some kind of revenge thierry and mataran would go to these houses together they would knock on the door and then when the woman answered thierry would lunge forward put his hand over her mouth so that she couldn't scream and push her inside the house mataram would then run in behind and close the door behind them so that no one could hear what was about to happen thierry said that his job was to stay with the victim sometimes he would just stand there with them and make sure they didn't move sometimes he would tie them up gag them sometimes he would talk to them he would beat them he would burn their feet he would smash wine bottles over their head like glass bottles there was that woman where he twisted all of her fingers and like started breaking her fingers there was a woman that he made drink drain cleaner meanwhile mataran would run around the house and just rummage through everything looking for any cash anything that they could steal and sell credit cards literally anything that was mataran's job and then when they were sure that they could get nothing else out of this house they would murder the woman and this is where it gets a little bit confusing because both of the men thierry and matheran both said that the other one was the one that did the killings so thierry says i never killed anyone i was just part of it it was all mataran that killed them and mataran says the exact same thing he was like i never killed anyone it was all thierry he did it all the most believed theory is that either both of them had a hand in every single murder maybe they did them all together or maybe they alternated or maybe it was literally just whoever could find a weapon first or whoever got to the woman first it's believed that they both murdered them and at the very least they were complicit in it they stood there and watched as the other person murdered them which i suppose is probably almost as bad after the first wave of murders and police started this whole patrol program on the streets they had police on every single street thierry and mataran decided that it was way too risky for them to stay in that area of paris and they decided that they were gonna they were gonna boost and so thierry got in contact with his biological father that he'd actually left a couple of years before to go in the army and he said do you mind if we come and stay with you for a few months and his father was down for it like i said he lived in this place called toulouse and so thierry and mataram went there and i don't think thierry's father knew that he was gay or at least he definitely didn't know that he had a boyfriend and he was bringing said boyfriend because it kicked off his father was very very homophobic and he could not stand the fact that his son had a boyfriend and that he'd brought this boyfriend to his house literal fights happened every single day like arguments and physical fights and this of course ended up causing arguments between thierry and mataram mataram was like why do we have to stay here your father hates me we're getting into fights every single day like let's just go somewhere else but thierry didn't want to and this ended up causing a rift between thierry and mataran until eventually they split up and mataram moved away and now it was just thierry so from this point in the story it's all just thierry so thierry now single he stayed living with his father in toulouse for a little bit and he decided that it was now time to kind of work on himself he decided to put his past behind him stop taking drugs stop robbing people stop killing people and he decided that he was gonna make an honest living you know he was gonna get his life back on track so he decided he was gonna set up an agency for trans artists and it was kind of gonna be like a replica of the drag nightclub that he worked at but the only issue was this wasn't paris this was toulouse and toulouse was a lot more of a conservative city and the allure of drugs sex drag disco it just wasn't there in toulouse like it was in paris it wasn't you know they didn't have the same nightlife and so this club this trans uh talent agency it died it just it just crumbled within a year so thierry now was like what the hell do i do i mean he tried to make it work with an honest living and it didn't work so he just snapped back into his old ways he moved back to paris and began the second wave of murders this time he acted alone and this was i hate to say it this was the most successful way thierry had found to make money it was rather quick he would be in and out of this woman's house within like 10 minutes murder her rob her house and then he's got what like 30 40 pounds for it now if you remember with the second wave of murders this was kind of an odd one because there were about six people killed within a few weeks of each other and then the killings stopped for a few months and then there was another one like three or four months later which is officially counted in the second wave of murders but it looks kind of odd it was like there was first wave second wave one random murder and then third wave so you might be wondering why that final murder of the second wave had like there was like a three or four month gap between the second to last and the last in the second wave and that was because thierry pollon actually got himself an honest job once again he no longer felt the need to rob and murder because he found another method of income he was a talent scout for a media agency and it was going well he was earning i mean it wasn't big money but it was money and it was enough which i think is one of the most terrifying things about this case for me personally is that he saw this as a day job like murder was his job it was like he did a shift every few weeks he would just go out and kill someone and then that put food on his table for the next week which is such a terrifying concept and such a unique one i don't think i've ever really seen anything like that before but yeah thierry stopped killing for a couple of months until eventually this company where he was a talent scout it went bankrupt and he was left without a job again and so then three or four months later he committed the final murder of the second wave and then there was a year and a half break between the second wave and the third wave and that was because thierry pollon actually landed himself quite a serious prison sentence he actually attacked his drug dealer with a baseball bat and this drug dealer he attacked him so bad like so viciously i think he was like trying to kill him and this drug dealer was actually the one to call the police on thierry paul on this guy was a drug dealer and he was willing to go to the police and say look i'm a drug dealer yeah i know arrest me too but this guy let arrest this guy so thierry paul on for this attack was sentenced to 16 months in prison and police literally had the grim reaper of paris behind bars and they had no idea thierry served his sentence no one suspected a thing all the murders were still unsolved no one was even sniffing around him and then when he was released from prison about a year and a half later he actually received some devastating news thierry pollan had tested hiv positive and this completely flipped his world upside down there's no cure for hiv it's literally only gonna get worse and worse until it eventually kills him and so he knew that he was in effect like under a death sentence in a way from hiv like it was gonna kill him in the next few years and this completely altered his mindset if he wasn't destructive and reckless enough as it was he was now looking at his life thinking i've gotta amp everything up because i'm gonna die in a few years i might as well have the best next few years of my life make the most of it party as much as i can drink as much as i can do as many drugs as i can and murder as many people as i can and this influx of more parties more drugs more drinks meant that he needed more money as well so the third wave of murders began and this brings us back to the timeline where thierry paul on unintentionally left a survivor in that third wave and she was the one that told the police exactly what he looked like and that was how he was brought to the police station now in the police station in all of his interviews thierry pollan was so unbothered like he literally did not care about anything probably because he knew he was gonna die soon he knew he probably only had like a few months to a year left none of it really mattered it wasn't like he was gonna get sent to prison for a long time i mean he probably would get an official sentence but he was gonna die in the next year so it's not like he was gonna be in there long anyway but there was one thing that he actually cared about cared about quite a lot and that was the publicity that this case these murders got him because this was huge news in france like the whole time it was happening for years this serial killer was completely terrorizing the city and putting all these old women in danger and it was so highly covered this whole time everyone wanted to know who this was everyone wanted this serial killer capturing and finally he was so thierry pollone was front page news on every single newspaper and he would ask his friends and family on the outside to send him in every single newspaper that they could find spoke about him and spoke about his crimes he wanted to read it he wanted to read what the newspapers were saying about him he would cut out the clippings keep them put the rest of the newspaper in the bin because he only really cared about what they were saying about him he was in a holding cell for about a year awaiting trial but this trial would never come because in early 1988 thierry pollan's physical health was deteriorating very rapidly and he had to be sent to hospital he was in a state of near paralysis like this was so bad he was suffering from meningitis and tuberculosis at the same time it was looking life-threatening for him eventually on april 16th 1989 thierry pollan passed away from all of these different diseases and illnesses attacking his body so that meant that he was never gonna get really any prison time he was never going to get a trial he was never going to get found guilty for any of these murders but luckily police did have his accomplice jean-thierry matheran had been arrested and he was also in police custody awaiting his trial because after all he did take part in the first eight murders so that's eight murder charges that's a lot it doesn't sound as much because we're comparing it to thierry right now but eight murder charges that's that's a mad serial killer in a normal video you know and while it is believed that mataran kind of had a little bit more of a backseat approach in the murders he is believed to be the less violent one it's believed that thierry was a lot more hands-on aggressive violent torturous whereas mataran just kind of desperately needed this money for drugs so he was willing to kill people for it but he still had a huge part in all eight of these people's murders i mean we don't know exactly what happened but at the very least he was complicit and encouraging and wanted to do it over and over again for the money so he was eventually given a life sentence with a minimum of 18 years for those eight murders that he helped to commit because he was a serial killer himself they were both serial killers together and that is all i have for this video thank you so so much for watching thanks again to magellan tv for sponsoring this video remember if you want to get 30 off of an annual subscription making it just 3.50 a month plus a two-week free trial make sure you're going through the link down below in the description of this video that is a limited time offer so i mean go do it go do it huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier 2 members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video but yeah thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed please leave a thumbs up down below because that really helps me out if you want to subscribe there'll be a link to do so right here if you want to subscribe to my second channel there'll be a link to do so right here and if you want to watch another true crime video there'll be a playlist on screen right now bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,233,921

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, eleanor neale makeup, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, bbc, itv, netflix, storytime, forensic files, 2020, crime watch daily, dateline, interview, news, creepypasta, horror, grim reaper of paris, monster of montmartre, montmartre, paris, france, thierry, jean thierry, mathurin, thierry paulin, beast of, monster of, montmarte

Id: KCCMx8m4aa4

Length: 55min 46sec (3346 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021