Paris, March 1944. For days, black smoke has been pouring from the chimney of a locked townhouse on the rue Le Sueur, and the whole street can smell it.

When firemen force the shutters on the second floor, one of them comes back out and is sick in the doorway. A little later the doctor who owns the house rides up on a bicycle. Before he says anything else, he asks each policeman whether he is French. Then he pedals away into the dark.

The doctor was Marcel Petiot, and for more than two years in occupied Paris he had been selling a secret that couldn't be checked. For 25,000 francs he promised Jewish families in hiding, Resistance targets, and Paris gangsters a way out of France, through Spain and Portugal, and on to a new life in Argentina. His clients were told to turn their money into gold and jewels and sew their valuables into the linings of their clothes.

Joachim Guschinow was a furrier from the rue de Caumartin who left with five sable coats and diamonds sewn into his jacket. Kurt and Greta Kneller were German Jews in hiding with their young son René. Yvan Dreyfus was sent in by the Gestapo and vanished like the rest.

The rue Le Sueur today is a quiet street in the sixteenth arrondissement, off the Avenue Foch, not far from the Arc de Triomphe. Stand on the pavement at number 21 and you can see the join: the townhouse Petiot knew came down in 1954, and the building that replaced it is clearly of a different age. The basement below is said to survive. Nothing on the street marks what happened there.

Content warning: murder, antisemitism, the Nazi occupation of France, and the exploitation of refugees. Listener discretion advised.

Amsterdam, 9 November 1983. At four minutes to seven in the evening, Freddy Heineken walked out of his office towards his car, and his driver, Ab Doderer, was waiting beside it. For twenty-one days, the police of an entire country couldn't find them.

The men who took them were five friends from the city who'd read the financial pages with a pen in their hands. They'd drawn up a set of rules for who they'd choose: very rich, not a royal, not a politician, and someone they believed could survive weeks in a cell. They called it the grand slam, and they marked the choice at a New Year's Eve party with Dom Pérignon.

The ransom was 35 million guilders: about 200,000 banknotes in four currencies, weighing roughly 400 kilos. Later writers have called it the largest ransom paid for a kidnap victim in Europe up to that point.

This episode is about the money, of course, but it's also about a wall in the wrong place, a meal for two, and a man chained by one wrist who kept a slice of bread back for the morning.

The True Crime Tour of Europe goes where the case went: the pavement outside the office on the Tweede Weteringplantsoen, the old brewery on the Stadhouderskade, the industrial estate at De Heining out in the western harbour, and the woods near Zeist where plastic barrels were buried in the ground.

Sources include Peter R. de Vries's 1987 book and Gert van Beek's police account from 2013, along with contemporary press reports from November 1983. Where those accounts disagree, the episode says so.

Corrections, case suggestions and ideas for new podcasts are welcome: spokennetwork@mailbox.org

Content warning: this episode discusses kidnapping and prolonged captivity in cold and damp conditions, and the later killings of some of the people involved. Listener discretion advised.

In 1990 Austria released Jack Unterweger from a life sentence for murder. He had gone into prison barely able to read and come out a published writer, and the campaign for his freedom ran through the country's literary establishment, its newspapers and eventually its politics. His release was treated as evidence that prison could reform a man.
Within a year women were disappearing from Graz, Vienna and Prague. He was a journalist by then, and an Austrian magazine sent him to Los Angeles to write about the city's murders.

From a market town in the hills of Styria to a lake near Salzburg, the Vienna Gürtel, a motel in California and a cell in Graz. Nine women, and a country that had staked a great deal on his being a success story.

Corrections, case suggestions and ideas for new podcasts are welcome: spokennetwork@mailbox.org

Content warning: this episode describes violence against women, including sexual violence, and a death by suicide. Listener discretion advised.