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Four years ago I discovered, during a boring condominium meeting, that a serial killer had once lived on the second floor of my building. At that very moment, my life changed forever. That man was Jean-Thierry Mathurin, accomplice and lover of Thierry Paulin, a forgotten criminal who is probably the greatest French serial killer. In the 1980s, he would have cruelly taken the lives of about forty women. Older women, often alone, widows and quickly forgotten by everyone.

At the beginning, I felt the need to immerse myself in this story and to observe, to collect possible traces of the case and its victims.

Thirty-five years after the events, I set out to investigate the first crime scenes, using a very personal method: I arrived with a microphone in hand, without warning or casting, and I let myself be guided by unexpected encounters, taking care to record the words of each person whose path I crossed.

From the very first episode, I said these words without understanding their meaning at the time: "We'll see where this story takes me".

Soon, this case will lead me to Martinique on the tracks of Paulin's family, to the four corners of France to meet the protagonists of the case. I spoke to countless strangers, a Romanian priest, a retired police commissioner, shopkeepers from the 18th arrondissement, neighbors of the victims, former Palace partygoers, the writer Philippe Jaenada or the philosopher Vinciane Despret. I drank hundreds of coffees and I no longer count the hours spent alone at my editing table.

I allowed myself real digressions that took us away from the assassins for several episodes, in order to tell other stories that are as much sociological as they are cultural and political: the portrait of Paris in deep change in the 1980s, the isolation of the elderly or the arrival of AIDS...

At the antipodes of a classic investigation, I let myself be intuitively guided towards so many tracks that I would never have anticipated, in the hope of giving back an individual story to the murdered people, as a timid attempt of reparation.

Today, the CERNO podcast has over 4 million downloads. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)