Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So we recently mentioned the surprisingly late date for the last public guillotineing in France on the show. That date was nine and the episode it came up on was the one about the punitive Benin expedition. Just to avoid any confusion, if you look up the last execution by guillotine in France, that was much later, nineteen seventy seven. The distinction here is that the one we are talking about was the last time it was public, and we'll talk about why it was the last time it was public. Uh, it just so happened that I actually had the case tied to all of this, this last public guillotineing on my list, and that kind of popped it up to the top. So we're going to talk today about the crime and the trial. We will get to the execution next time. Because this became an accidental two parter um in a way, because I feel like when you usually look at articles about this or mentions of it, they're very brief and they really don't capture all of the many things that were going on, um, in terms of how the police were handling things and what was going on with the family of one of the people involved, because we have a lot of coverage of one particular victim and how it all played out, and the kind of accidental way that the person slash persons involved in all of this were apprehended. Um, it's a difficult story. Aside from the fact that there's like a missing person and and we do have record of the pain of a family going through that, there's also some accusation of lackadaisical police attention to the case, and ultimately there is so much evidence that was discovered that it seemed almost like, uh, they didn't know what to do with it at all, because it was pretty significant and it is probably obvious by now, but just in case, this episode is going to involve discussion of violence, specifically murder, and quite a bit of it, uh. And then this is part one of two. Second one will also have violence as well as execution. In nineteen thirty seven, Jean Da Covin was twenty two. She was a dancer from Boston, Massachusetts, and had moved to New York when she was still young. She went to n y U and studied dance in both New York and Chicago. She had recently started teaching classical dancing and ballet to about twenty students in a studio on the bottom level of the apartment building where she lived with her mother. She went to Paris in July of that year for a vacation. She arrived on the ship the Normandy on July nineteenth and stayed with her aunt, Ida Sackheim, who she called Sucky. They stayed in a hotel on the Left Bank, and early on in their stay, a German Man a pro to Jean in the lobby of the hotel room and offered to help the two women as an interpreter. They had been struggling to find someone who was staying in the hotel. Ambassador and Ida Sackheim described him as having quote the most gracious smile she had ever seen. Jean, who was very outgoing, was charmed by the idea of having met an interesting stranger while she was traveling abroad. Later that night, Jeane to Covin wrote a letter to a friend about the encounter, writing quote, I have just met a charming German of Keen intelligence who calls himself Siegfried. Perhaps I'm going to another Wagnerian role. Who knows I Am going to visit him tomorrow at his villa in a beautiful place near a famous mansion that Napoleon gave Josephine. This is not really a villa, but an apartments, but that would be a minor detail in the story. Jean was just excited to spend time with a local, so in the afternoon in July she went out for her date. She was supposed to at and the Opera that evening to see a production of Ariadne and blue Beard. You talk about in the behind the scenes, but that's a particularly strange bit of coincidence. But she never showed up for that performance, nor did she return to the hotel that evening. Jean's aunt Ida was of course deeply worried, and the next morning Miss Sackheim received a telegram that everything was fine, which of course was incredibly suspicious. Later that day there was another missive, and this was even more troubling. This was a letter that said that Jean was safe, that she had been kidnapped, and that she would be returned after a five hundred dollar ransom was paid naturally. Ida Sackheim took this to the authorities, notifying both the American consulate and the Paris police, but their reaction was really not what she expected or hoped for. She was frantic, and the police seemed to think that in all likelihood, Jean just had a little fling and hadn't come home yet. Authorities assured her that this kind of thing happened all the time time when tourists from the United States went out partying and either slept somewhere else in the city or just couldn't find their way back to their hotel for a bit. This letter seemed like somebody was just playing with Sackheim, and this case, on the surface, did seem a little like Jean may have gone on a date that simply hadn't ended yet. Aunt Ida had mistakenly described the man involved as a handsome Swiss gentleman, and authorities took that as a further indicator that this was probably just a romantic escapade rather than anything sinister, and Jean was an adult who had gone out with this man of her own accord. But the kidnapper or the person who was saying they were a kidnapper continued to send letters, and they started coming with requests like that Ida should place notices in the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune that was popular with tourists asking Jeane to reach out. This was really like them setting up a code. The wording indicated to the kidnapper that Sackheim had received the missives and was cooperating, and sometimes she would place them when they had not had a response that she expected. So those placements were listed in what's called an agony column, sort of like miss connections, but usually for scenarios where somebody in Ida's exact position would try to urge a missing person to get in touch. That term, sometimes also called agony ants, is also used for advice columns sometimes, but in those cases was trying to find missing people. The brief ads that Sackheim had the paper run were short and simple. They said things like Gene, please come back, or Gene, do not understand your way of acting, want proposition immediately. And although they had been sort of dismissive of the situation, the police were following the ads to see if there was any response in the paper, and they also sort of worked quietly on the investigation without really disclosing that was what they were doing. They also kept an eye on the proposed meet up spots that the kidnappers notes had indicated when they sent things to Ida suggesting she give them some money, But the police were not super widely about this, and eventually Ida got a postcard that read, quote, remind the least sign we have of the police, and we don't send nobody to get the money. But then Jeans travelers checks started to be cashed around Paris. If you've never encountered travelers checks, they are an alternative to currency, but they offer a little bit of protection over carrying cash, so think of it as kind of like a gift certificate, but not a specific retailer. The traveler could and still can, although this isn't that common anymore, purchase traveler's checks through the bank and then no they would be able to use them in other countries without having to go through a currency exchange. Was if you lost your travelers checks, the bank usually had coverage for them, so it wasn't like if somebody just stole your money out of your wallet. These have mostly fallen out of favor in the digital age, but they were really common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They're guaranteed traceable and replaceable. So when some of the checks that Jean had purchased before going to Paris were used with obviously forged signatures, the police started to get a lot more serious about the case. Yeah, Normally, when you purchased travelers checks, which I have done I think exactly once in my life, you had to sign it there at the bank in front of a bank official, and then that signature is kind of what establishes it as your traveler's check. So any subsequent sign over has to also include a second signature that should match the first. So these checks were worth ten dollars US each and over the course of a few days, twenty four of them were used in Paris in banks, high end shops, and the Paris Exposition. When investigators started tracing the transactions and interviewing clerks and shopkeepers, it became apparent that there were multiple people involved, and that a lot of people had been pretty lax in taking those checks. There were descriptions of four different people, two men and two women, who had forged Gene's signature, and all of them had been using Gene to Covin's passport as the I D and as these forgeries piled up, the police decided to announce their investigation publicly, which they did on August seven. The forged travelers Check stopped once the story hit the papers, and at that point jean had been missing for more than two weeks. Ida could not bring herself to believe that Jeane might be dead, but she felt certain that the man they had met in the hotel lobby was involved in Jean's disappearance. Jeane's photo was published as part of the coverage of the kidnapping. This led to a seemingly endless string of tips coming in from people who thought they had seen her. This also meant that the public was formulating their own ideas about who Jeane was and what really happened. Plenty of people and some police, suspected that because Jeanne was an entertainer, this whole thing was a publicity stunt. Others thought she had just run away from her aunt, either to lead a thrilling or has some people believed, a debased life. Some people called her aunt's hotel trying to get money in exchange for information that they claimed to have. Yeah Ida had said like, I will give rewards for information, and so all kinds of fake info started to flit in. The search for Jean was also covered in the U S, Canadian and English press at length. Initially, these were brief mentions, and they often cited the de Covin's family dismay and feeling pretty hopeless and kind of dismissed by French authorities. But as details emerged about the case, there was a web of connections that involved those countries we just mentioned as well as Germany, and press coverage kind of shot up. Nine days after the story broke in the press, Jeane to Covin's brother Henry got to Paris, he announced that their father, Abraham to Covin, was offering a reward of ten thousand francs. Henry stayed in Paris for a month in part to try to convince Aunt Sachie to come back to the US with him. Henry believed that Jean was dead, and the authorities did as well. By the time idasak Iim and Henry to Covin set sail for home on September. When Henry to Covin got to New York on September, he told the U. S Press that he felt the Parisian police were not taking the case seriously. At that point, there was this sort of pervading feeling that Jeane to Covin was doomed to become an unsolved missing person's case forever what happened to her was discovered, although it did not happen for several months. We mentioned that Idasak I'm thought that Jean's friend Siegfried was involved. We will talk about who exactly he was in a moment, but first we will pause for a sponsor break. The man at the center of this whole thing was not named Siegfried. He also wasn't named Bobby, which was what he had told Ida Sacheim she could call him. His name was Oygan Weidmann, and when he met up with the two tourist women from the US, offering to be their interpreter, he already had a lengthy criminal history. Oigan was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on February eight and he was a really smart kid and from a very young age he was in trouble with the authorities. At the age of fourteen, police identified him as the ringleader of a group of schoolboys who had committed several robberies. For the next several years, he got into one scrape after another. As he was discovered to have committed a variety of petty crimes, his parents decided that the best thing for eighteen year old Oygan was to remove him from the environment and the friend group that he had been running with, and they sent him to a school in Canada in ninety six. It was not long before he was arrested and jailed in Canada, first serving three months in for forgery, and then once again in nineteen twenty nine, this time serving a one year sentence for theft. He and a group of accomplices had held up the paymaster of a wheat company in Saskatchewan, which is where he was working as a farm hand. After he served his sentence, he was deported back home to Germany. In Germany, he was in hot water again pretty soon. In nineteen thirty one, he was found guilty of assault and robbery and was sentenced to five years in prison. While he was incarcerated, he was by all accounts, well liked by prison officials because he was smart and polite and didn't cause trouble. During his time in prison, he worked in the prison library, and he spent that time well. This was part of why he seemed so erudite to Jean. He read a great deal. He studied all manner of topics. He loved Wagner and could speak about opera at length, and that was something he had also studied in prison. Wigan was incredibly smart. He had a gift languages. He spoke English and French fluently and could also manage in Portuguese. When he was released from prison, he lived with his parents for about six months, and then he left for France sometime in the spring or early summer of ninety seven let's see differing dates issued there. This was, to his parents another chance at a fresh start. Oigan would later say he left Germany to avoid having to enlist, and this was of course a time when Germany was in turmoil and events were already in motion that would lead to World War Two. But unbeknownst to Oigan's parents, their son actually had plans. He was going to meet up with some of his friends from prison in Paris. That of course put Oigan widman in Paris at the time that Jean Dacovin vanished, and then there were several other crimes in the area that seem on the surface completely unrelated. Jean had disappeared on July, although the case was kept private until the first week of August, a month after the pres US ran the gene to COVID kidnapping story, a man named Joseph Coufey was found dead, shot in the back of the neck in a wooded area. This happened not in Paris, but near Tours, which is a little less than two hundred forty KOs or a hundred and fifty miles southeast of Paris. This man was a chauffeur. He ran his own small luxury limousine service, and he had picked a client up in Paris where he lived, then was not seen alive again. It was reported that he had been robbed of francs. Yeah, we'll talk about those money numbers a bit, because they're really inconsistent in the reporting. Another seemingly unrelated murder happened on October three. A woman named Jasmine Killer traveled to Paris to respond to a job posting for a travel companion who could also cook and manage the health needs of the client. Sometimes this is listed as like a nurse companion job. It doesn't matter because that job was not real. She was shot in the same manner as Koufy, and the money she is carrying, reported as fourteen hundred francs, was stolen along with a ring. A third murder took place on October sixteenth. This time the body of Roger LeBlanc was found in a parked car, shot and robbed. In this case, the body was wrapped in a curtain that had the initials m B written on a tag. That curtain and information from Leblong's girlfriend that he was meeting somebody named Prandier on business led police down a rabbit hole. They were looking for anybody with the name Prodier or the initials m B. Both of those efforts, which totaled up some more than a thousand people who were questioned by the police, those were fruitless. Then a young Jewish man from Germany named Fritz Fromer vanished on November. Like the other murders we have just mentioned, he was shot and robbed. And then there was one more shooting and robbery victim who was killed on November. This time the deceased was a real turn named Raymond Lesbra who was showing a small house to his perspective Renter when he was killed, and it was Lasber's murder that finally offered a clue that tied all of these seemingly unrelated crimes together. Lesobra was found at the rental property, and one of the pieces of evidence retrieved at the scene, which was in the Paris suburb of Saint clu, was a business card with the name Arthur Shot on it. According to this card, Shot was a traveling salesman and was based in Nice. The detective on the Losober murder case, who was Commissar prim Borne, tracked down Arthur Shot, who at the time was in Strausbourg. Shot was told he needed to come to Versailles for questioning, which he did. He explained that he had distributed thousands of those cards. One of them had been given he said to his nephew Fritz Fromer, that was indeed the same from Her who was killed on November twenty. There's already a connection between from Her and Oigen Vitemin. They had been prisoned together in Germany, and as you recall, Widmann was incarcerated for robbery. Farmer was incarcerated as a political prisoner. He was there because he had criticized the Nazi Party. At this point, no one knew that Fritz Farmer was dead, and no one had connected him to Vitamin. When prim Borne followed up on the Fromer lead, he discovered that the young man had left his hotel on November two and never returned. They learned this from the hotel clerk, and the hotel had just chalked it up to him skipping out on his bill. Since this was suspicious, and it kind of seems in some readings of reports here that Fromer may have been a suspect at this point, the detective next track down a contact that had been on Fromer's hotel paperwork that led him to another uncle, and this uncle mentioned that his nephew had not been showing up for family dinners, which he normally did, and that he knew that his nephew had been in contact with the man named Kare, who he had known in prison. The uncle believed he lived somewhere near or in Saint Clue, in a villa called love Z. As an aside here we mentioned before, but I really want to reiterate when we say villa, because it comes up a lot. You might be conjuring up a luxury vacation home, and that is absolutely not the case. Uh in some usages it actually refers to a fairly modest space that's often shared with roommates, a pretty common usage in France in the nineteen thirties. And that is what we're talking about here, a pretty simple cottage that would have been like multiple renters under one name. Yeah, I'm imagining like it's got little trellis is with climbing vines growing up overlooking a vineyard. And that's not that you would be very disappointed. The next bed of detective work was to start asking after Career among various rental agents of sant Clu in search of this villa, and prim Borne discovered that Marie Brow, a landlady, did have a renter named Career, and on December eight the detective assigned two of his men, Inspector's Emile Bourges and Poignan, to watch the front of this little cottage where Career was living. When it came out there was a skirmish. So this person that they were looking for was in fact Oigan Viidmund and he had first asked the men who they were when he saw them outside his house, and they identified themselves as tax officers, and the three men began walking into the house to talk uh. There is some speculation and some indications in some of the testimony that when they had flashed their ideas tax inspectors, he had actually seen that one of them was a policeman. So they walked into the house, and once they were inside, the suspect turned and fired a gun three times. Both of these policemen were wounded. One bullet had passed through Bourgan's hat, grazing his head, the other had hit Poignan in the shoulder. But the officers, who were unarmed, put up a fight. In a hand to hand struggle, Borgun knocked Vidman out with a hammer that he had found in the home, and Vidman, unconscious, was taken into custody. Some of the most common photos that turn up in a search for Videman online show him with a bandage around his head, and that is because it is right after he was arrested, and it is from the injuries that he sustained during that fight. Right away, there were two very large, damning and obvious clues at Videbun's home. Two cars, one belonging to the chauffeur Koufi and the other to real estate agent Raymond Lusob were found behind the house. We'll talk about Oigan Vidman's statement to the police and just a moment, but first we'll take a break here from the sponsors that keep Stuffy miss in history class going. Once he was taken in by police, Oigan is of course questioned. After a few hours in custody, he became completely cooperative and he was a study in seemingly disparate temperaments. He gave his confession directly and calmly. He told the police that he never lied, and that actually did seem to be the case. The details that he gave about how any of the murders had happened was supported by the evidence, and he gave them a lot of details. And that's the thing. This all was a lot of discussion of very brutal murders that he was saying he had done, including the real estate agent less Sober, which was the murder that he had initially been suspected of, and then the chauffeur Coufy, the cook slash nurse Keller, the press agent LeBlanc, the associate from prison from and the American tourist Jane to Covin. Wiedmann had taken souvenirs from each of his victims, which he disclosed that his confession. He kept Madame Keller's wig. He was wearing Raymond le Bland suspenders when he was taken into custody and carrying his light, although they were too small for him. He also kept the real estate agent Less Sober's shoes. From the beginning, it had been believed that Videman was not alone in his crimes and had several accomplices. It was originally thought as many as nine people were part of his crime ring. Oigan initially denied that anyone else was involved, but he did eventually begin to give up information that confirmed detective theories, although he never mentioned anyone by name. His group had planned to lure tourists, particularly English and American tourists, to vide months home and exactly the way he had done with Jeane to Covin. Their goal was to target people in hotels or nightclubs, introduce themselves and the guys of being helpful or just friendly, and then arranged to meet again later. Or they would place an ad in the paper for a job or respond to job ads themselves the goal here was generally robbery, and murder kind of became a secondary part of it. After Videman, the most so after member of this ring was rog Millon, Parisian man several years younger than Vidman. Biedmont told authorities that Meon had actually been the one to kill roge Le Blanc and Vidman offered a guidance, and that his accomplice had also helped him kill Jeanine Keller. When Mion was questioned, he told police that he knew about the crimes but had not committed them. Yeah, we'll get to that questioning later. Jean Blanc was also a very unique accomplice. He was it seemed kind of in it for the thrill and not much else, and he actually paid for the privilege of being part of Vidman's gang. Blanc, unlike the others, had money, he didn't need to rob anybody. He was from a good family and his mother gave him a pretty generous monthly stipend to live on. He had given million Anigan Widmant thousand Francs over a period of time to participate in their crimes. But Jean Blanc was also not really newbie to crime when he joined up with Vidmon Uh. He had been involved in a counterfeiting operation with Million in Germany that had landed them in prison, and that was where they met Vibon, and this core team had been together since the beginning. The day Oregon traveled to Paris, Millon and Blanc had given him a fake passport that established an alias of Karay. It was in that name that the house in Saint Clu had been rented, and all of them had lived there together. Renee Trick Cole, who went by Colette, was dating Meal. Some accounts indicate that she had dated both Videman and Meal, and that time one gets pretty fuzzy. Yeah, journalists were pretty quick to take the most lascivious read of that situation that they could, but there's no real clue is to like whether or not she had been involved with both men. The motive for all of these murders was basic. Vide Mom and his team wanted an income without work. This is actually an interesting point, though, because the amount of money that they made from all of these victims is often reported with deeply varying numbers, but none of them are really huge. Papers reported that over the course of the murder, slash robberies. Vidmont's crew amassed anywhere from three thousand to francs. It's unclear where any of those numbers come from, and some may have included the money that Blanc was paying out or loaning wide Mont. Mrs Keller was buried in a cave in Fontambdeu forest south of Paris. When she had arrived at the train station to meet her new employer, for she had been told that she had gotten the job. She was met by two men claiming to be there at the behest of her new boss. They were driving Coofy's limousine, so Keller was impressed and believed them and got in the car, only to be shot once they were away from the busy train station. When police recovered the body, based on Oigan's confession, her shoes were missing, so something the French press thought might indicate some sort of fetish on Viteman's part. There was one odd clue in Keller's final resting place that vitamin had no explanation for. A photograph of him was found near the body. Yeah, and to give you the spoiler, there's no follow up to that. They never really resolved that in anything that I read in the case of theatrical agent Roge LeBlanc. Videman had explained they had responded to an ad that Leblan had placed for a salary job that required a young man well educated business knowledge. Milion had answered, feigning to be a loan agent interested in financing a play with Leblan. After some correspondence back and forth, Milion Entrecot arranged to meet Leblan to discuss a possible deal, and they told Leblan that he should bring several thousand francs to cover the fees needed to secure the loan. At the meeting, they told Leblan they wanted to introduce him to another business associate who lived in Saint clu So they drove to meet Vidmont and Roge Leblan followed behind in his car. When they got to the house, they all shared Leblan was killed and his car was driven to a road in Noie and left with the blond body wrapped in the curtain. The exact details of what led to Farmer's death remained somewhat vague. Vitamin confessed to killing him and told police where the body was, but refused to give additional details for a while. There was even some confusion in the press about whether Farmer was one of Vidman's gang before being killed, but that didn't seem to prove out. But Vidmin did obviously take Arthur's shots business card to use for his next ruse, which was contacting Les Sober over a potential rental property. After discussing what the client needed, Sober felt that he had just the right property and arranged to meet the man he thought was shot at a sanclude home. In this instance, Bidman shot his victim in the empty rental and left him on the spot after taking his money and driving his car away. So it seems like all of the crimes are solved at this point because Videmont told the police a lot and they sort of are. But the trial of Vidmont took a long time to happen, and his execution led to a lot of discussion about the death penalty in France. So we are going to end here on this rather somber note, and we will pick up with all of that in the next episode. Do you have some listener mail to tie us over till then yes, listen, this is a lot of murder, so I wanted to do something that had some joy in it for listening mail. Um, and this is from our listener, Angela, who writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy. Sorry if this is long, feel free to paraphrase. We're needed. I don't find this especially long, she says, I tend to ramble on when I'm excited. Um. I love your show and even though I've been listening for several years, it really helped me get through the start of the pandemic as I was sewing masks and burned them in night Oil. I have been dancing since I was little and owned the dance studio I danced at started by my mom for the last five years now, so having a creative outlet when the world was shut down was definitely a necessity. I was catching up on a few backlogged episodes for me since life has returned somewhat normal for me now, and I heard mention of a love for a goth nutcracker as a goth girl myself, I was totally agreeing with you out loud to my fluffy friends. Don't worry, pictures coming. There is an adult only dance studio near me that this past season did a Nightmare before Christmas in the style of the nutcracker for Halloween time. Their reasoning was adults are busy during the holiday season, so doing something at Halloween seemed to make sense. Since I owned my own studio, I was not able to participate due to the duties that go along with owning a dance studio. But what a cool idea. I thought this would be right up your alley. It is. Keep up the great work, and as promised, enjoy the pictures of my Flukes. We have Maggie, are elderly striped kitten who has always been tiny and weighing in at a staggering eight pounds. She's the moodiest of the pack. Then we have Magic, who was a recent addition to our pack. He was my sisters and my parents and now mine. He has since begrudgingly converted to an indoor only cat. He's the all black chalky boy at twelve pounds. He loves anyone and everyone and will sit in your lap if you're stationary more than half a second. Then we have the biggest of the Flukes are Dago Luca. He's the best dog. It was a perfect fit for our family that we got right before the pandemic hit. He went from the traditional working family dog to being the I love that my mom works from home now dogs since he can sleep on my bed or the couch all day. Uh, thanks Angie, this is okay. The animals are cute. Oh can I just tell you I'm going to fantasize about a nightmare before Christmas Nutcracker, for it's going to occupy a significant portion of my days going forward. Um, and all of these babies are so cute. I too have a teeny tiny cat that uh thinks he runs everything, and several large ones as well. I tend to go to extremes. Apparently that dog is the cutest thing I've ever seen and has the great soulful eyes that say, please bake me a dogcake, and I would if I could. Uh. There's one of the pictures she sent is very cute because it's the dog kind of like lying down and looking at the cat while it eats, and I don't know why. To me, that is magical and I love a black cat. I need more in my life. So thank you so much for offering us this balm to all of this murder talk on this episode, and just for sharing all of your pets and that amazing Nutcracker idea with us. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and you can subscribe to the podcast on the iHeart radio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So we recently mentioned the surprisingly late date for the last public guillotineing in France on the show. That date was nine and the episode it came up on was the one about the punitive Benin expedition. Just to avoid any confusion, if you look up the last execution by guillotine in France, that was much later, nineteen seventy seven. The distinction here is that the one we are talking about was the last time it was public, and we'll talk about why it was the last time it was public. Uh, it just so happened that I actually had the case tied to all of this, this last public guillotineing on my list, and that kind of popped it up to the top. So we're going to talk today about the crime and the trial. We will get to the execution next time. Because this became an accidental two parter um in a way, because I feel like when you usually look at articles about this or mentions of it, they're very brief and they really don't capture all of the many things that were going on, um, in terms of how the police were handling things and what was going on with the family of one of the people involved, because we have a lot of coverage of one particular victim and how it all played out, and the kind of accidental way that the person slash persons involved in all of this were apprehended. Um, it's a difficult story. Aside from the fact that there's like a missing person and and we do have record of the pain of a family going through that, there's also some accusation of lackadaisical police attention to the case, and ultimately there is so much evidence that was discovered that it seemed almost like, uh, they didn't know what to do with it at all, because it was pretty significant and it is probably obvious by now, but just in case, this episode is going to involve discussion of violence, specifically murder, and quite a bit of it, uh. And then this is part one of two. Second one will also have violence as well as execution. In nineteen thirty seven, Jean Da Covin was twenty two. She was a dancer from Boston, Massachusetts, and had moved to New York when she was still young. She went to n y U and studied dance in both New York and Chicago. She had recently started teaching classical dancing and ballet to about twenty students in a studio on the bottom level of the apartment building where she lived with her mother. She went to Paris in July of that year for a vacation. She arrived on the ship the Normandy on July nineteenth and stayed with her aunt, Ida Sackheim, who she called Sucky. They stayed in a hotel on the Left Bank, and early on in their stay, a German Man a pro to Jean in the lobby of the hotel room and offered to help the two women as an interpreter. They had been struggling to find someone who was staying in the hotel. Ambassador and Ida Sackheim described him as having quote the most gracious smile she had ever seen. Jean, who was very outgoing, was charmed by the idea of having met an interesting stranger while she was traveling abroad. Later that night, Jeane to Covin wrote a letter to a friend about the encounter, writing quote, I have just met a charming German of Keen intelligence who calls himself Siegfried. Perhaps I'm going to another Wagnerian role. Who knows I Am going to visit him tomorrow at his villa in a beautiful place near a famous mansion that Napoleon gave Josephine. This is not really a villa, but an apartments, but that would be a minor detail in the story. Jean was just excited to spend time with a local, so in the afternoon in July she went out for her date. She was supposed to at and the Opera that evening to see a production of Ariadne and blue Beard. You talk about in the behind the scenes, but that's a particularly strange bit of coincidence. But she never showed up for that performance, nor did she return to the hotel that evening. Jean's aunt Ida was of course deeply worried, and the next morning Miss Sackheim received a telegram that everything was fine, which of course was incredibly suspicious. Later that day there was another missive, and this was even more troubling. This was a letter that said that Jean was safe, that she had been kidnapped, and that she would be returned after a five hundred dollar ransom was paid naturally. Ida Sackheim took this to the authorities, notifying both the American consulate and the Paris police, but their reaction was really not what she expected or hoped for. She was frantic, and the police seemed to think that in all likelihood, Jean just had a little fling and hadn't come home yet. Authorities assured her that this kind of thing happened all the time time when tourists from the United States went out partying and either slept somewhere else in the city or just couldn't find their way back to their hotel for a bit. This letter seemed like somebody was just playing with Sackheim, and this case, on the surface, did seem a little like Jean may have gone on a date that simply hadn't ended yet. Aunt Ida had mistakenly described the man involved as a handsome Swiss gentleman, and authorities took that as a further indicator that this was probably just a romantic escapade rather than anything sinister, and Jean was an adult who had gone out with this man of her own accord. But the kidnapper or the person who was saying they were a kidnapper continued to send letters, and they started coming with requests like that Ida should place notices in the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune that was popular with tourists asking Jeane to reach out. This was really like them setting up a code. The wording indicated to the kidnapper that Sackheim had received the missives and was cooperating, and sometimes she would place them when they had not had a response that she expected. So those placements were listed in what's called an agony column, sort of like miss connections, but usually for scenarios where somebody in Ida's exact position would try to urge a missing person to get in touch. That term, sometimes also called agony ants, is also used for advice columns sometimes, but in those cases was trying to find missing people. The brief ads that Sackheim had the paper run were short and simple. They said things like Gene, please come back, or Gene, do not understand your way of acting, want proposition immediately. And although they had been sort of dismissive of the situation, the police were following the ads to see if there was any response in the paper, and they also sort of worked quietly on the investigation without really disclosing that was what they were doing. They also kept an eye on the proposed meet up spots that the kidnappers notes had indicated when they sent things to Ida suggesting she give them some money, But the police were not super widely about this, and eventually Ida got a postcard that read, quote, remind the least sign we have of the police, and we don't send nobody to get the money. But then Jeans travelers checks started to be cashed around Paris. If you've never encountered travelers checks, they are an alternative to currency, but they offer a little bit of protection over carrying cash, so think of it as kind of like a gift certificate, but not a specific retailer. The traveler could and still can, although this isn't that common anymore, purchase traveler's checks through the bank and then no they would be able to use them in other countries without having to go through a currency exchange. Was if you lost your travelers checks, the bank usually had coverage for them, so it wasn't like if somebody just stole your money out of your wallet. These have mostly fallen out of favor in the digital age, but they were really common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They're guaranteed traceable and replaceable. So when some of the checks that Jean had purchased before going to Paris were used with obviously forged signatures, the police started to get a lot more serious about the case. Yeah, Normally, when you purchased travelers checks, which I have done I think exactly once in my life, you had to sign it there at the bank in front of a bank official, and then that signature is kind of what establishes it as your traveler's check. So any subsequent sign over has to also include a second signature that should match the first. So these checks were worth ten dollars US each and over the course of a few days, twenty four of them were used in Paris in banks, high end shops, and the Paris Exposition. When investigators started tracing the transactions and interviewing clerks and shopkeepers, it became apparent that there were multiple people involved, and that a lot of people had been pretty lax in taking those checks. There were descriptions of four different people, two men and two women, who had forged Gene's signature, and all of them had been using Gene to Covin's passport as the I D and as these forgeries piled up, the police decided to announce their investigation publicly, which they did on August seven. The forged travelers Check stopped once the story hit the papers, and at that point jean had been missing for more than two weeks. Ida could not bring herself to believe that Jeane might be dead, but she felt certain that the man they had met in the hotel lobby was involved in Jean's disappearance. Jeane's photo was published as part of the coverage of the kidnapping. This led to a seemingly endless string of tips coming in from people who thought they had seen her. This also meant that the public was formulating their own ideas about who Jeane was and what really happened. Plenty of people and some police, suspected that because Jeanne was an entertainer, this whole thing was a publicity stunt. Others thought she had just run away from her aunt, either to lead a thrilling or has some people believed, a debased life. Some people called her aunt's hotel trying to get money in exchange for information that they claimed to have. Yeah Ida had said like, I will give rewards for information, and so all kinds of fake info started to flit in. The search for Jean was also covered in the U S, Canadian and English press at length. Initially, these were brief mentions, and they often cited the de Covin's family dismay and feeling pretty hopeless and kind of dismissed by French authorities. But as details emerged about the case, there was a web of connections that involved those countries we just mentioned as well as Germany, and press coverage kind of shot up. Nine days after the story broke in the press, Jeane to Covin's brother Henry got to Paris, he announced that their father, Abraham to Covin, was offering a reward of ten thousand francs. Henry stayed in Paris for a month in part to try to convince Aunt Sachie to come back to the US with him. Henry believed that Jean was dead, and the authorities did as well. By the time idasak Iim and Henry to Covin set sail for home on September. When Henry to Covin got to New York on September, he told the U. S Press that he felt the Parisian police were not taking the case seriously. At that point, there was this sort of pervading feeling that Jeane to Covin was doomed to become an unsolved missing person's case forever what happened to her was discovered, although it did not happen for several months. We mentioned that Idasak I'm thought that Jean's friend Siegfried was involved. We will talk about who exactly he was in a moment, but first we will pause for a sponsor break. The man at the center of this whole thing was not named Siegfried. He also wasn't named Bobby, which was what he had told Ida Sacheim she could call him. His name was Oygan Weidmann, and when he met up with the two tourist women from the US, offering to be their interpreter, he already had a lengthy criminal history. Oigan was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on February eight and he was a really smart kid and from a very young age he was in trouble with the authorities. At the age of fourteen, police identified him as the ringleader of a group of schoolboys who had committed several robberies. For the next several years, he got into one scrape after another. As he was discovered to have committed a variety of petty crimes, his parents decided that the best thing for eighteen year old Oygan was to remove him from the environment and the friend group that he had been running with, and they sent him to a school in Canada in ninety six. It was not long before he was arrested and jailed in Canada, first serving three months in for forgery, and then once again in nineteen twenty nine, this time serving a one year sentence for theft. He and a group of accomplices had held up the paymaster of a wheat company in Saskatchewan, which is where he was working as a farm hand. After he served his sentence, he was deported back home to Germany. In Germany, he was in hot water again pretty soon. In nineteen thirty one, he was found guilty of assault and robbery and was sentenced to five years in prison. While he was incarcerated, he was by all accounts, well liked by prison officials because he was smart and polite and didn't cause trouble. During his time in prison, he worked in the prison library, and he spent that time well. This was part of why he seemed so erudite to Jean. He read a great deal. He studied all manner of topics. He loved Wagner and could speak about opera at length, and that was something he had also studied in prison. Wigan was incredibly smart. He had a gift languages. He spoke English and French fluently and could also manage in Portuguese. When he was released from prison, he lived with his parents for about six months, and then he left for France sometime in the spring or early summer of ninety seven let's see differing dates issued there. This was, to his parents another chance at a fresh start. Oigan would later say he left Germany to avoid having to enlist, and this was of course a time when Germany was in turmoil and events were already in motion that would lead to World War Two. But unbeknownst to Oigan's parents, their son actually had plans. He was going to meet up with some of his friends from prison in Paris. That of course put Oigan widman in Paris at the time that Jean Dacovin vanished, and then there were several other crimes in the area that seem on the surface completely unrelated. Jean had disappeared on July, although the case was kept private until the first week of August, a month after the pres US ran the gene to COVID kidnapping story, a man named Joseph Coufey was found dead, shot in the back of the neck in a wooded area. This happened not in Paris, but near Tours, which is a little less than two hundred forty KOs or a hundred and fifty miles southeast of Paris. This man was a chauffeur. He ran his own small luxury limousine service, and he had picked a client up in Paris where he lived, then was not seen alive again. It was reported that he had been robbed of francs. Yeah, we'll talk about those money numbers a bit, because they're really inconsistent in the reporting. Another seemingly unrelated murder happened on October three. A woman named Jasmine Killer traveled to Paris to respond to a job posting for a travel companion who could also cook and manage the health needs of the client. Sometimes this is listed as like a nurse companion job. It doesn't matter because that job was not real. She was shot in the same manner as Koufy, and the money she is carrying, reported as fourteen hundred francs, was stolen along with a ring. A third murder took place on October sixteenth. This time the body of Roger LeBlanc was found in a parked car, shot and robbed. In this case, the body was wrapped in a curtain that had the initials m B written on a tag. That curtain and information from Leblong's girlfriend that he was meeting somebody named Prandier on business led police down a rabbit hole. They were looking for anybody with the name Prodier or the initials m B. Both of those efforts, which totaled up some more than a thousand people who were questioned by the police, those were fruitless. Then a young Jewish man from Germany named Fritz Fromer vanished on November. Like the other murders we have just mentioned, he was shot and robbed. And then there was one more shooting and robbery victim who was killed on November. This time the deceased was a real turn named Raymond Lesbra who was showing a small house to his perspective Renter when he was killed, and it was Lasber's murder that finally offered a clue that tied all of these seemingly unrelated crimes together. Lesobra was found at the rental property, and one of the pieces of evidence retrieved at the scene, which was in the Paris suburb of Saint clu, was a business card with the name Arthur Shot on it. According to this card, Shot was a traveling salesman and was based in Nice. The detective on the Losober murder case, who was Commissar prim Borne, tracked down Arthur Shot, who at the time was in Strausbourg. Shot was told he needed to come to Versailles for questioning, which he did. He explained that he had distributed thousands of those cards. One of them had been given he said to his nephew Fritz Fromer, that was indeed the same from Her who was killed on November twenty. There's already a connection between from Her and Oigen Vitemin. They had been prisoned together in Germany, and as you recall, Widmann was incarcerated for robbery. Farmer was incarcerated as a political prisoner. He was there because he had criticized the Nazi Party. At this point, no one knew that Fritz Farmer was dead, and no one had connected him to Vitamin. When prim Borne followed up on the Fromer lead, he discovered that the young man had left his hotel on November two and never returned. They learned this from the hotel clerk, and the hotel had just chalked it up to him skipping out on his bill. Since this was suspicious, and it kind of seems in some readings of reports here that Fromer may have been a suspect at this point, the detective next track down a contact that had been on Fromer's hotel paperwork that led him to another uncle, and this uncle mentioned that his nephew had not been showing up for family dinners, which he normally did, and that he knew that his nephew had been in contact with the man named Kare, who he had known in prison. The uncle believed he lived somewhere near or in Saint Clue, in a villa called love Z. As an aside here we mentioned before, but I really want to reiterate when we say villa, because it comes up a lot. You might be conjuring up a luxury vacation home, and that is absolutely not the case. Uh in some usages it actually refers to a fairly modest space that's often shared with roommates, a pretty common usage in France in the nineteen thirties. And that is what we're talking about here, a pretty simple cottage that would have been like multiple renters under one name. Yeah, I'm imagining like it's got little trellis is with climbing vines growing up overlooking a vineyard. And that's not that you would be very disappointed. The next bed of detective work was to start asking after Career among various rental agents of sant Clu in search of this villa, and prim Borne discovered that Marie Brow, a landlady, did have a renter named Career, and on December eight the detective assigned two of his men, Inspector's Emile Bourges and Poignan, to watch the front of this little cottage where Career was living. When it came out there was a skirmish. So this person that they were looking for was in fact Oigan Viidmund and he had first asked the men who they were when he saw them outside his house, and they identified themselves as tax officers, and the three men began walking into the house to talk uh. There is some speculation and some indications in some of the testimony that when they had flashed their ideas tax inspectors, he had actually seen that one of them was a policeman. So they walked into the house, and once they were inside, the suspect turned and fired a gun three times. Both of these policemen were wounded. One bullet had passed through Bourgan's hat, grazing his head, the other had hit Poignan in the shoulder. But the officers, who were unarmed, put up a fight. In a hand to hand struggle, Borgun knocked Vidman out with a hammer that he had found in the home, and Vidman, unconscious, was taken into custody. Some of the most common photos that turn up in a search for Videman online show him with a bandage around his head, and that is because it is right after he was arrested, and it is from the injuries that he sustained during that fight. Right away, there were two very large, damning and obvious clues at Videbun's home. Two cars, one belonging to the chauffeur Koufi and the other to real estate agent Raymond Lusob were found behind the house. We'll talk about Oigan Vidman's statement to the police and just a moment, but first we'll take a break here from the sponsors that keep Stuffy miss in history class going. Once he was taken in by police, Oigan is of course questioned. After a few hours in custody, he became completely cooperative and he was a study in seemingly disparate temperaments. He gave his confession directly and calmly. He told the police that he never lied, and that actually did seem to be the case. The details that he gave about how any of the murders had happened was supported by the evidence, and he gave them a lot of details. And that's the thing. This all was a lot of discussion of very brutal murders that he was saying he had done, including the real estate agent less Sober, which was the murder that he had initially been suspected of, and then the chauffeur Coufy, the cook slash nurse Keller, the press agent LeBlanc, the associate from prison from and the American tourist Jane to Covin. Wiedmann had taken souvenirs from each of his victims, which he disclosed that his confession. He kept Madame Keller's wig. He was wearing Raymond le Bland suspenders when he was taken into custody and carrying his light, although they were too small for him. He also kept the real estate agent Less Sober's shoes. From the beginning, it had been believed that Videman was not alone in his crimes and had several accomplices. It was originally thought as many as nine people were part of his crime ring. Oigan initially denied that anyone else was involved, but he did eventually begin to give up information that confirmed detective theories, although he never mentioned anyone by name. His group had planned to lure tourists, particularly English and American tourists, to vide months home and exactly the way he had done with Jeane to Covin. Their goal was to target people in hotels or nightclubs, introduce themselves and the guys of being helpful or just friendly, and then arranged to meet again later. Or they would place an ad in the paper for a job or respond to job ads themselves the goal here was generally robbery, and murder kind of became a secondary part of it. After Videman, the most so after member of this ring was rog Millon, Parisian man several years younger than Vidman. Biedmont told authorities that Meon had actually been the one to kill roge Le Blanc and Vidman offered a guidance, and that his accomplice had also helped him kill Jeanine Keller. When Mion was questioned, he told police that he knew about the crimes but had not committed them. Yeah, we'll get to that questioning later. Jean Blanc was also a very unique accomplice. He was it seemed kind of in it for the thrill and not much else, and he actually paid for the privilege of being part of Vidman's gang. Blanc, unlike the others, had money, he didn't need to rob anybody. He was from a good family and his mother gave him a pretty generous monthly stipend to live on. He had given million Anigan Widmant thousand Francs over a period of time to participate in their crimes. But Jean Blanc was also not really newbie to crime when he joined up with Vidmon Uh. He had been involved in a counterfeiting operation with Million in Germany that had landed them in prison, and that was where they met Vibon, and this core team had been together since the beginning. The day Oregon traveled to Paris, Millon and Blanc had given him a fake passport that established an alias of Karay. It was in that name that the house in Saint Clu had been rented, and all of them had lived there together. Renee Trick Cole, who went by Colette, was dating Meal. Some accounts indicate that she had dated both Videman and Meal, and that time one gets pretty fuzzy. Yeah, journalists were pretty quick to take the most lascivious read of that situation that they could, but there's no real clue is to like whether or not she had been involved with both men. The motive for all of these murders was basic. Vide Mom and his team wanted an income without work. This is actually an interesting point, though, because the amount of money that they made from all of these victims is often reported with deeply varying numbers, but none of them are really huge. Papers reported that over the course of the murder, slash robberies. Vidmont's crew amassed anywhere from three thousand to francs. It's unclear where any of those numbers come from, and some may have included the money that Blanc was paying out or loaning wide Mont. Mrs Keller was buried in a cave in Fontambdeu forest south of Paris. When she had arrived at the train station to meet her new employer, for she had been told that she had gotten the job. She was met by two men claiming to be there at the behest of her new boss. They were driving Coofy's limousine, so Keller was impressed and believed them and got in the car, only to be shot once they were away from the busy train station. When police recovered the body, based on Oigan's confession, her shoes were missing, so something the French press thought might indicate some sort of fetish on Viteman's part. There was one odd clue in Keller's final resting place that vitamin had no explanation for. A photograph of him was found near the body. Yeah, and to give you the spoiler, there's no follow up to that. They never really resolved that in anything that I read in the case of theatrical agent Roge LeBlanc. Videman had explained they had responded to an ad that Leblan had placed for a salary job that required a young man well educated business knowledge. Milion had answered, feigning to be a loan agent interested in financing a play with Leblan. After some correspondence back and forth, Milion Entrecot arranged to meet Leblan to discuss a possible deal, and they told Leblan that he should bring several thousand francs to cover the fees needed to secure the loan. At the meeting, they told Leblan they wanted to introduce him to another business associate who lived in Saint clu So they drove to meet Vidmont and Roge Leblan followed behind in his car. When they got to the house, they all shared Leblan was killed and his car was driven to a road in Noie and left with the blond body wrapped in the curtain. The exact details of what led to Farmer's death remained somewhat vague. Vitamin confessed to killing him and told police where the body was, but refused to give additional details for a while. There was even some confusion in the press about whether Farmer was one of Vidman's gang before being killed, but that didn't seem to prove out. But Vidmin did obviously take Arthur's shots business card to use for his next ruse, which was contacting Les Sober over a potential rental property. After discussing what the client needed, Sober felt that he had just the right property and arranged to meet the man he thought was shot at a sanclude home. In this instance, Bidman shot his victim in the empty rental and left him on the spot after taking his money and driving his car away. So it seems like all of the crimes are solved at this point because Videmont told the police a lot and they sort of are. But the trial of Vidmont took a long time to happen, and his execution led to a lot of discussion about the death penalty in France. So we are going to end here on this rather somber note, and we will pick up with all of that in the next episode. Do you have some listener mail to tie us over till then yes, listen, this is a lot of murder, so I wanted to do something that had some joy in it for listening mail. Um, and this is from our listener, Angela, who writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy. Sorry if this is long, feel free to paraphrase. We're needed. I don't find this especially long, she says, I tend to ramble on when I'm excited. Um. I love your show and even though I've been listening for several years, it really helped me get through the start of the pandemic as I was sewing masks and burned them in night Oil. I have been dancing since I was little and owned the dance studio I danced at started by my mom for the last five years now, so having a creative outlet when the world was shut down was definitely a necessity. I was catching up on a few backlogged episodes for me since life has returned somewhat normal for me now, and I heard mention of a love for a goth nutcracker as a goth girl myself, I was totally agreeing with you out loud to my fluffy friends. Don't worry, pictures coming. There is an adult only dance studio near me that this past season did a Nightmare before Christmas in the style of the nutcracker for Halloween time. Their reasoning was adults are busy during the holiday season, so doing something at Halloween seemed to make sense. Since I owned my own studio, I was not able to participate due to the duties that go along with owning a dance studio. But what a cool idea. I thought this would be right up your alley. It is. Keep up the great work, and as promised, enjoy the pictures of my Flukes. We have Maggie, are elderly striped kitten who has always been tiny and weighing in at a staggering eight pounds. She's the moodiest of the pack. Then we have Magic, who was a recent addition to our pack. He was my sisters and my parents and now mine. He has since begrudgingly converted to an indoor only cat. He's the all black chalky boy at twelve pounds. He loves anyone and everyone and will sit in your lap if you're stationary more than half a second. Then we have the biggest of the Flukes are Dago Luca. He's the best dog. It was a perfect fit for our family that we got right before the pandemic hit. He went from the traditional working family dog to being the I love that my mom works from home now dogs since he can sleep on my bed or the couch all day. Uh, thanks Angie, this is okay. The animals are cute. Oh can I just tell you I'm going to fantasize about a nightmare before Christmas Nutcracker, for it's going to occupy a significant portion of my days going forward. Um, and all of these babies are so cute. I too have a teeny tiny cat that uh thinks he runs everything, and several large ones as well. I tend to go to extremes. Apparently that dog is the cutest thing I've ever seen and has the great soulful eyes that say, please bake me a dogcake, and I would if I could. Uh. There's one of the pictures she sent is very cute because it's the dog kind of like lying down and looking at the cat while it eats, and I don't know why. To me, that is magical and I love a black cat. I need more in my life. So thank you so much for offering us this balm to all of this murder talk on this episode, and just for sharing all of your pets and that amazing Nutcracker idea with us. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and you can subscribe to the podcast on the iHeart radio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H