Murder in the metro in Paris: the crime of the Porte-Dorée never elucidated
By Thomas Martin
Published on
That’s all first crime in the subway in Paris. On Sunday May 16, 1937, Laetitia Toureaux, a 30-year-old worker, was found dead in a metro train at the Porte Doree station. 85 years later, the mystery still hangs.
No lead to solve the metro crime
Ascended at the Porte de Charenton station, Laetitia Toureaux is dead when the metro comes to the next one. One of the passengers, a military doctor, discovers her collapsed in her first-class seat, a Laguiole-type switchblade knife stuck in her neck.
Nobody saw her with anyone, nobody was seen getting off the train, there are no leads to solve the murder of “train 382” also called the “metro crime” .
The investigation is led by Commissioner Badin. At first, the police think of a “sadist”.
We quickly retrace his Sunday. After spending her afternoon with her brother and friends in a tavern on the banks of the Marne, she then took a bus to return to Paris. The driver remembers her. She seemed nervous to him. She goes down Porte-de-Charenton and rushes into the metro where death awaits her.
But who is she?
A tumultuous life
Lætitia-Marie-Joséphine, known as Yolande, is the daughter of an Italian farmer, emigrated to France with her mother and her three brothers and sister. She married in 1930 with Jules Toureaux, pewter potter, who died of tuberculosis in 1935. She is naturalized French by this marriage.
In 1937, she was a worker in an industrial firm in Saint-Ouen specializing in the manufacture of shoe polish. “A model and helpful worker” for her factory comrades, she was in fact commissioned by the employers to spy on them.
Quickly, Commissioner Badin discovers that this young widow had a tumultuous life, working under a false name in a private detective agency, having lovers, frequently and discreetly visiting the Italian Embassy, and having contacts with fascist circles. Italians in Paris.
Alongside her activities, we learn that she goes out to little-known balls and guinguettes in the Bastille district, and holds the cloakroom at the As de Coeur, a dance hall. She has two lovers at the time of her death, who are military on sensitive sites, one on the Maginot line, the other at the port of Toulon.
So many avenues to explore but despite this, the investigation is stalling. His contacts with a member of the Cagoule, Gabriel Jeantet, questioned. Some cagoulards, arrested the day after their attempted coup in the capital on November 17, 1937 that she was investigating the Italian secret services and would have been liquidated for this. “She wanted to change tack, that’s why they killed her,” says one of her former boyfriends.
Changes after the war
The war occurs two years later and the case is closed, for lack of progress. It will nevertheless experience some twists and turns.
In 1948, a man interned in a psychiatric hospital accuses himself of the murder, in a letter to the police.
In June 1962, an anonymous letter to the Judicial Police in which he accuses himself of this crime, a priori passionate. He says that the police made the mistake of not questioning all the passengers who remained at the dock sufficiently, and of letting him go.
The crime being prescribed, the director of the PJ, Max Fernet, decides not to reopen the investigation. The name of Laetitia Toureaux’s killer will never be known.
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