Encore

💡 Did You Know?

This episode appears to be based on two separate cases:

• The 1915-1919 Henri Désiré Landru (a.k.a. "The Bluebeard of Gambais") case. Landru murdered at least seven women in the village of Gambais between December 1915 and January 1919. Landru also killed at least three other women, plus a young man, at a house he rented from December 1914 to August 1915 in the town of Vernouillet, 35 km northwest of Paris. The true number of Landru's victims, whose remains were never found, was almost certainly higher.
• The 1995 Maria Isabel Pinto Monteiro Alves case. In 1995, Maria, who was jogging in Central Park and training for the New York City Marathon on September 17th of that year when she was savagely beaten. Her attacker was Aldolpho Martinez, who was a drifter who collected cans and had previous arrests, including one for rape. He had been living in an SRO not far from the site where Alves was killed. Martinez told people he'd seen Alves jogging previously and wanted to rob her Walkman music device but she didn't have it that day because it was raining heavy outside. Martinez made direct statements to multiple people to implicate himself in the murder but he died of tuberculosis in the late 1990s before he could be prosecuted.