Last Call (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

0:00In the fall of 2010, a detective was digging through a dresser drawer in a bedroom near Paris, France. He was looking for evidence, and when he pulled open the last drawer, he found five cell phones hidden inside of it. So he powered one of them on, and he first checked the call history, and then also the text messages, and then he opened up the Photos app, and he froze. There was this collection of photos on this phone. They were all very similar, and there were just dozens of them, And they all showed the same disturbing thing. But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious, delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do.

0:41So if that's of interest to you, please take the follow button out to your local park and hop on the seesaw. And for a little while, just ride it like you normally would. But at some point when the follow button is in the high position, go ahead and jump off so they smash to the ground. Okay, let's get into today's story.

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2:34And currently, she was counting that day's earnings from the register when a couple of regulars at a nearby table began shouting at each other. Natalie immediately yelled at them to keep things civil or she'd have the bartender cut them off. And the argument at that point did die immediately, and Natalie went back to counting the money. Natalie was used to drunks and to rough characters because her bar and the boarding house attached to it that she also owned were full of people like that. Like, just last week, Natalie had caught one of her tenants, a very heavy drinker named Bruno Martin, sneaking money out of this cash register.

3:14Now, she'd banned Bruno from the bar for obvious reasons, but she'd stopped short of kicking him out of the boarding house completely. She knew she'd have to watch him closely, but she just couldn't bring herself to throw him out on the street because he really had nothing else. You know, as difficult as her tenants and the patrons at her bar could be, Natalie did really care about them. She sort of felt like she was born to be a landlady, and she got real satisfaction out of putting a roof over the heads of people who really needed one, even if they were sort of rowdy and difficult. So even with all the headaches, Natalie wouldn't have traded the rose garden or, you know, the attached boarding house for anything.

3:51And so now she shut the cash register and she placed all the money that she had made into a zip-up pouch that she then put into her jacket pocket. Then she looked over at the clock and saw it was 8.30 p.m. So she reached for the phone behind the bar and dialed the number for her own apartment. After a few rings, Natalie's long-term boyfriend answered. He was a 47-year-old man named Marc de Trebek. So Natalie and Mark had been together for 25 years and, you know, never got around to having a wedding. But Mark had actually recently begun talking about doing a ceremony to make things official, which caught Natalie off guard because in these 25 years they had been together, Mark had really never shown any real interest in getting married.

4:35And so this change in Mark, for the most part, Natalie was actually happy about it. But every now and again, she sort of felt like, why is this happening now? What changed with Mark? But now, she told Mark on the phone that she was getting ready to leave work, and she was going to head home now. And he said that he'd already eaten and might be asleep when she got there. And Natalie said that was fine, and she would just heat up some leftovers and, you know, see him in the morning. As she hung up, her bartender, a 47-year-old man named Patrice Chevalier, came out of the storage room, and he was wheeling a keg on a hand truck.

5:09Patrice had turned up at the Rose Garden two years ago with practically nothing, and Natalie had given him a cheap room inside of the boarding house and a job behind the bar. And he'd turned out to be surprisingly reliable. And by now, she thought of him less as an employee and more as a friend. Natalie asked Patrice, as he was walking by with this keg, if he still wanted a ride to his girlfriend's place that night. Because if he did, she was getting ready to leave now. And Patrice said actually, yes, he did. and he would go grab his stuff right now, and then he put the keg away, and he ducked into the back again.

5:43A moment later, when he came back out with his coat on, you know, ready to leave, Natalie nodded to him, and then she also checked that the waitress had the keys and was good to close up when they were gone, and then Natalie grabbed her scarf off the hook by the door and headed out with Patrice right behind her. It was cold outside, so Natalie wrapped that scarf around her neck, and then she and Patrice headed across the parking lot toward her white van. The next morning, around 11.25 a.m. on October 15th, a man was out for a walk along this wooded road about a 30-minute drive from the Rose Garden.

6:16And as he was walking, he happened to glance down into the ditch that was running alongside the road, and he spotted a pair of women's boots sticking out of a pile of branches. The man thought the boots might be worth something, so he stepped down into the ditch to get a better look. But as he got closer, he froze. because through these branches, he could see there was more. There was patches of skin and clothing. And he realized that these boots were not just lying there on their own. They were on the feet of a woman. And so at this point, the man scrambled right back out of the ditch, pulled out his phone, and he called the police.

6:56About 30 minutes later, police colonel Joel Ferry of the local criminal investigations unit stepped down into that ditch to join a team of crime scene techs. He watched them clear away the last of the branches, and then he moved in closer for a better look at the body. The deceased was a middle-aged woman who was lying face down on the ground, and her hands were tied with a belt behind her back. The techs checked her pockets for ID and came up empty. Then they carefully rolled her over and very winced at the sight. The victim's face was severely disfigured, like it had been smashed in by something really heavy.

7:33Now, there was a ton of blood on her face and her head, but very little around the rest of her body, or really anywhere else in the ditch. And since head wounds do tend to bleed a lot, that told Ferry that this woman had very likely been killed somewhere else before being dumped here. Ferry also noticed when he was looking at this woman's hands that there were signs of scratches on them, as if she had been in a struggle. And also he saw that her pants, her shirt, and bra were all ripped open. So there had very likely been a sexual assault component to this attack. As Ferry was taking all this in, another officer called him over to a spot that was further down the ditch, about 50 yards away.

8:16And so Ferry walked over, and he looked down at what they had found. And it was this thick, heavy branch that was kind of like a big club with blood smeared along one end of it. It looked like it very likely was the murder weapon. And looking down at this huge piece of wood, you know, this big club, if you will, I mean, it really drove home just how brutal this murder really had been. I mean, smashing someone's face in with a branch, that's something that would take a lot of strength and probably a lot of rage. And so whoever killed this woman had wanted to destroy her. Early the next morning, on October 16, 2010, Colonel Joel Ferry walked into the interview room of a small-town police station near Paris.

9:02A lot had happened since yesterday, but the biggest development was that the body from the woods now had a name. The victim had been identified as Natalie Vierme, a 46-year-old bar owner whose boyfriend had reported her missing yesterday morning. An autopsy had been completed overnight, and it confirmed that Natalie was savagely beaten to death, that very likely the killer had used that bloody branch that was found 50 yards away from the body and had ultimately broken her skull, literally caved her head in. However, the killer had not left any physical evidence on the body or in the body, which actually suggested that very likely sexual assault did not occur, which meant that Ferry's best shot at IDing the killer came down to that bloody branch that was believed to be the murder weapon and also the belt that was used to bind Natalie's hands.

9:54And both of those items were currently on their way to the crime lab, but, you know, despite that, analyzing them would take a few weeks. So in the meantime, Ferry was just plowing ahead with the investigation in other ways. One of his main priorities right now was finding Natalie's vehicle, which according to her boyfriend, who had filed the missing person report was a white van. And so that van had still not turned up yet. And so Ferry's team was currently out searching the roads for the vehicle, while Ferry was more focused on just speaking to the people that were closest to Natalie. And so now Ferry took a seat across from his first interview subject, Natalie's boyfriend, Marc de Trebek.

10:33And so as the victim's partner and the one who actually called the police about her absence, Mark was an obvious suspect. But right now, Ferry felt like he at least looked the part of a grieving boyfriend. He was pale, he was shaky, and he kept breaking into tears and saying he just couldn't believe Natalie was dead. And when he finally got himself together, Mark explained that he had last heard from Natalie two nights ago when she'd called around 8.30 p.m. to just say she was leaving work. He had gone to bed thinking, you know, he'd be asleep, she'd get home any minute and then he'd wake up and he would see her.

11:08But when he woke up, the house was empty and her van was not there. Mark instinctively immediately reported her missing. And then he'd driven over to the Rose Garden, but Natalie hadn't been there either. So Mark and a friend from the bar had gone out looking for her. And they'd still been driving around scanning the roads for Natalie or her white van when Mark had gotten the call that her body had been found. Colonel Ferry took detailed notes the whole time Mark was speaking. It seemed kind of strange that Mark wouldn't notice that his girlfriend, who he lived with, was missing until the next day.

11:40Like, even if you went to bed, it just sort of seems like if you expected her any minute, I mean, wouldn't you have sort of noticed if she just didn't show up? Wouldn't you have not been able to drift off to sleep? And also, Mark's story in general about just having been asleep at the time that his partner was killed is like the worst kind of alibi, really because nobody is going to be able to confirm or disprove it. It's sort of like his word against everybody else's. And so now, Ferry began asking some sort of uncomfortable follow-up questions about Mark and Natalie's relationship. Like, was there any infidelity?

12:16Did they have any money problems? Had they been fighting? You know, that kind of thing. He was looking to see how Mark handled these questions as much as he was listening to his answers. Because in Ferry's experience, guilty boyfriends or guilty partners tended to get really defensive when you started poking at their relationship. But Mark, he just looked sort of confused. He said, no, they were really happy and they'd actually been talking about getting legally married soon, finally, you know, after 25 years. And so Ferry wrote that down and then he asked about the friend who had helped Mark look for Natalie on the morning that he discovered she was missing.

12:53And Mark explained that the man was actually Natalie's bartender, a guy named Patrice Chevalier. Patrice didn't drive, so Natalie would sometimes drop him off at his girlfriend's place on her way home from work. And from speaking to Patrice yesterday, Mark understood that she had given him a ride on the night she was ultimately killed. Ferry's pen immediately stopped when he heard that, because this was the first time he was hearing that Natalie hadn't been alone when she left the bar that night. and it meant that he needed to speak to Patrice as soon as possible.

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15:16Visit beautyrest.com to find a retailer near you. Later that afternoon, Colonel Ferry sat in a corner of Natalie's bar, the Rose Garden. It was closed because of the murder, and so Ferry was now using the space for interviews, starting with the bartender, Patrice. And Patrice confirmed what Mark had said, that Natalie did sometimes give him a ride after work to his girlfriend's place. And on the night that she was killed, she had done just that. Patrice said, you know, on the night that she was killed, you know, after he got dropped off, he said she just drove off and that was the last he saw of her.

15:52He didn't think anything of it. It was sort of like business as usual. At this point, Ferry told Patrice that while he understood that from, you know, his POV, this seemed like, you know, hey, this is what happened. I don't remember anything else, fine. But at this point, you are officially the last known person to see Natalie alive, and right before she likely was killed. And so because of that, the police needed to take his DNA, and also they needed the contact information for his girlfriend so they could verify the time that Patrice had gotten home. And Patrice immediately nodded and said he understood and was genuinely happy to cooperate, you know, whatever they needed.

16:29He said he owed Natalie a lot for giving him a job and a place to live when he was really down on his luck. Now, he sounded very genuine as he said that, but Ferry couldn't help but feel really skeptical, and he wanted to see what Patrice would do if he gave him the chance to point the finger at somebody else. So before ending the interview, Ferry asked Patrice if he was aware of anyone that Natalie was having trouble with, like in particular of late. Has she had any recent issues with anybody? and Patrice did not hesitate. He said there was one tenant in particular, a very mean drunk named Bruno Martin, who'd been giving Natalie problems really for months.

17:10Ferry made a note of the name and would follow up with him, but he also made a note that Patrice had taken the bait a bit too easily. But either way, this Bruno was definitely somebody Ferry did need to speak with. An hour later, Ferry was still sitting in that same corner of the bar, only now he was sitting across from this very scruffy-looking man in a stained jacket. This was Bruno Marton, the tenant that Patrice had mentioned that apparently had been giving Natalie issue. And by now, a bunch of other tenants and employees had confirmed that Bruno was sort of like a violent alcoholic who really had clashed with Natalie on a pretty regular basis.

17:50And in fact, just a week before the murder, Natalie had apparently caught Bruno breaking into the bar's cash register, and she'd slapped him across the face before throwing him out of the bar, apparently for good this time. Like, he was banned from the bar because of this. So it really did sound like Bruno might be a pretty suspicious guy here. He could have harbored a grudge. But there was something else Ferry had learned that made Bruno's history actually even more interesting, and that was that on the night of the murder, Right before Natalie left the Rose Garden for the last time, she had emptied the cash register and taken the money with her.

18:28But no money had been found on or anywhere near her body, which meant that one possible motive for this crime was simply robbery. And the fact that Bruno had recently been caught stealing literally from the same register by the same woman who was murdered was starting to make him look really suspicious. And so when Ferry pretty aggressively pressed Bruno on all of this, Bruno got really flustered. He snapped that, you know, he wasn't a thief and that Natalie had been wrong to blame him in the first place. You know, he thought it was just a cash register discrepancy, he called it. He admitted that he and Natalie had never really gotten along.

19:10That was true. But he still said that he hadn't killed her and that he'd spent the night of the murder alone in his room. Like, he wasn't out there doing anything. And so Bruno, you know, he diligently took these notes, and he's just letting Bruno talk. And then at some point when there was a break, Ferry said, OK, well, will you give a DNA sample so you can be ruled out? He said that he was taking samples from everybody at the Rose Garden, tenants and staff included. But right away, Ferry could see that Bruno did not like this idea. Bruno glared at Ferry with his teeth visibly clenched. And so Ferry is getting ready for this guy to refuse the DNA sample.

19:49But then, much to Ferry's surprise, Bruno, you know, with gritted teeth and with this angry look on his face, he nodded and said, fine. If that's what it took to get the police office back, you'd do it. So Ferry started getting out the DNA kit to swab Bruno while also processing everything he'd just learned. The interviews so far had turned up three strong suspects. There was Bruno, the alcoholic with an apparent grudge. There was Patrice, the bartender, who had left the bar with Natalie on the night she was killed. And there was Mark, the boyfriend with, you know, the sleeping alibi. At this point, any one of them could be the killer.

20:28And Ferry knew he wasn't going to be able to rule any of them out by interviews alone. What he needed now was some real hard evidence. About a week later, on the morning of October 24th, Ferry was standing in the police station's garage in front of what looked to be like an evidence gold mine. His team had finally found Natalie's missing white van. It had been abandoned on the side of a road about five miles or so from where her body had been dumped. And this van was covered in blood. On the hood and on the grill and inside on the floor. And so now, a blood spatter analyst took Ferry and was walking him around the vehicle, explaining what they could learn from all the blood.

21:12The analyst explained that based on the shape of the droplets and the distance between them all, their team could tell that the blood on the van's front had sprayed onto the hood, which meant that Natalie's heart had been beating when this blood left her body that wound up right here. Meanwhile, the blood that was inside the van, in the back of the van on the floor, had clearly leaked there rather than sprayed, implying that she was dead before she was loaded into the van because her heart was not beating. So for Ferry, you know, putting those details together, it actually told him quite a bit.

21:47It looked like someone had killed Natalie in front of her van, and then after she was dead, they put her body in the back of the van and then drove her van with her in it to the ditch, dumped her, and then drove the vehicle away and dumped it nearby. And so at this point, it was like Ferry had what he believed was like the clearest picture of the crime yet. But, you know, despite having this clarity, he still didn't know who killed Natalie. And so for that, Ferry had spent the last few days looking into his suspect's alibis. And two of them turned out to be pretty solid. Bruno's alibi checked out.

22:24because several phone calls had been made from his room in the middle of the night, and so unless someone else had gone into his room and placed those calls, it looked very much like Bruno really had spent the night at home. Patrice's alibi had also held up. His girlfriend had confirmed that Patrice really had been dropped off at her apartment soon after leaving the Rose Garden, which left him virtually no time at all to kill Natalie, dump the body, dump the car, and get back, like it seemed virtually impossible. Now, Ferry knew that the girlfriend could definitely be covering for Patrice. But still, this was a stronger alibi than Mark's, the long-term boyfriend, who had said he'd been home asleep all night, with absolutely nobody there to confirm or deny it.

23:09And so Mark, by process of elimination, was really starting to look like the guy. Like he is the killer. But still, all three suspects are still in play, despite the two strong alibis. And so now, Ferry really just needed the crime lab to get back to him with the results from the DNA testing. A few weeks later, in November of 2010, Colonel Ferry was in his office when he got the call he'd been waiting for. The crime lab had found DNA on the belt that was used to bind Natalie's hands. And the DNA belonged to one of Ferry's three suspects. So, Ferry immediately made some phone calls, and later that same afternoon, he walked back into the police station's interview room and sat down across from the bartender, Patrice Chevalier.

23:56When Ferry told Patrice that his DNA was found on Natalie's belt, Patrice turned pale and put his face in his hands. And for a second, Ferry thought he was about to confess. And when Patrice looked up again, he even did say that there was something he needed to tell Ferry that he had left out in the first interview, but it was not a confession. Patrice, who looked visibly pretty shaken up here, like he was sort of panicking, he said that he actually wasn't that surprised that his DNA was found on that belt because he said they'd been sleeping together for weeks before she was killed. This was shocking for Ferry.

24:33I mean, he did not expect there to be like a secret affair going on, but instead of interrupting or asking questions, he just let Patrice keep going. And Patrice would go on to explain that Natalie had apparently been very frustrated with her long-term boyfriend, Mark. She thought that he was cheating on her, and that his recent talk about them getting married was just a way to cover up his bad behavior. And he said that her suspicion around Mark had been the main driver that had prompted her to make a move on him, on Patrice. Patrice said, you know, he was attracted to her, and when she came on to him, he just couldn't say no.

25:12Colonel Ferry just stared at Patrice as he finished the story he was telling. To Ferry, this had to be a lie. It just felt way too convenient. Like, Patrice was literally just spinning a story to explain away the DNA found on the dead body. I mean, this is quite the convenient story here. But if there was any chance that this was true, obviously Ferry had to know. Because if Natalie had been cheating, it gave Mark a very powerful motive, like if he knew about it. Which meant the DNA on the belt had not closed the case at all. It had actually just shifted it in a new direction. And so Ferry would spend another hour questioning Patrice all about this affair and getting all the details he could before ultimately releasing him.

26:00And then he made a call to a local judge. There was one way to know for sure if Mark was hiding something. Ferry was going to tap Mark's phone and spy on him.