Murder in the metro

On the evening of May 16, 1937, the train doors opened at the Port Dorée station in the Paris Métro to reveal a dying woman slumped by a window, a nine-inch stiletto buried to its hilt in her neck.  No one witnessed the Métro crime, and the killer left behind little forensic evidence.  The murder in the Paris Métro dominated the headlines for weeks, as journalists and the police slowly uncovered the shocking truth about the victim: a twenty-nine-year-old  Italian immigrant and spy, the beautiful Laetitia Toureaux.  Murder in the Métro unravels this captivating murder case as it details Toureaux’s story amid the conflicted politics of 1930s France. 

By examining documents related to Toureaux’s murder—documents that the French government and archivists denied existed when the authors first began investigating the story – Toureaux’s death is linked to a right-wing terrorist organization known as the “Cagoule” and to the Italian secret service, for whom the murdered woman had acted as an informant.  The research provides likely answers to the question of the identity of Toureaux’s murderer and offers a fascinating look at the dark and dangerous streets of pre-World War II Paris.