Listener discretion is advised, this episode features discussions of murder, medical malpractice, mental health conditions and torture that may be upsetting. We advise extreme caution for listeners under 13. Once you cross the line, it's difficult to turn back. It can become an addiction, the rush of doing something illegal, unethical or deadly, and it can become impossible to stop. Dr. Marcel Petito crossed that line over and over from petty theft to financial crimes to drug dealing to murder.

Patio broke nearly every law he could. He loved the rush of getting one over on someone, a finding what he could steal from them and taking whatever he could, their money and possessions and eventually their lives. The doctor couldn't stop himself. Instead, he doubled down. This is Medical Murders, a Spotify original from podcast. Every year, thousands of medical students take the Hippocratic Oath. It boils down to do no harm. But a closer look reveals a phrase much more interesting.

I must not play at God. However, some doctors break that oath. They choose to play God with their patients, deciding who lives and who dies each week on medical murders.

We'll investigate these doctors, nurses and medical professionals. We'll explore the specifics of how medical killers operate not just on their patients but within their own minds, examining the psychology and neurology behind heartless medical killers. I'm Alastair Madden and I'm joined by Dr. David Kipper, M.D..

Hello, everyone. Dr. Cooper here to help Alastair by providing some medical insight into our final episode of that cut up of a Dr. Marcel Pettier.

You can find episodes of medical murders and all other Spotify originals from podcast for free on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts to stream medical murders for free on Spotify, just open the app and type medical murders in the search bar. This is our second episode on Marcel Patio, a French doctor who killed dozens of people during his medical career beginning in the 1920s and extending through the Second World War. Last week, we covered Dr. Patio's volatile early life, how he became a doctor and left a trail of crime and mysterious deaths in his wake.

This week, we learn how during World War Two, NATO killed dozens in a secret murder chamber. All this and more coming up. Stay with us.

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First online real money wager only for one thousand dollar risk free bet refund issued as non withdrawal site credit that expires in 14 days. Restrictions apply full terms at Sportsbook Dot Faneuil Dotcom Gambling Problem Call one 800 gambler. As 1942 dawned, the entire world was at war, the United States had entered the fray after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United Kingdom was hanging on for dear life after fending off air attacks from Germany in the Battle of Britain and France, the war had already taken a massive toll.

The country had been successfully invaded by German forces and was now being run by a collaborationist government. Nazi soldiers and Gestapo officers patrolled its capital city, Paris. Recognizing the threat of the Nazi regime, many Parisians fled their city, heading to areas in southern France that were not yet under German control. The population in Paris dropped from three million to barely 800000. Those who remained faced a new and terrifying reality with persecution and death lurking behind every corner. Because Nazi soldiers weren't the only murderous predators walking the streets of Paris, one of their neighbors and countrymen was a vicious serial killer.

Dr. Marcel Pacho had already lived a dramatic life by the time the war began. He'd been injured in the trenches of the First World War and spent time in and out of mental hospitals and being arrested multiple times for theft and burglary.

Later, Petito had eventually straightened his life out and become a popular doctor, local politician and state medical officer, first in a tiny village in eastern France, then in the big city of Paris.

But his kleptomania never went away, and Patio's still engaged in constant, petty theft and embezzlement in the midst of it all.

He'd been connected to several mysterious disappearances and murders, including the disappearance of his mistress and the murder of one patient's wife.

But Petito had managed to avoid the crosshairs of the police. He remained free to practice medicine.

In 1942, 45 year old Dr. Petito continued to operate out of his main clinic, as he had before the war, but now his practice had a new focus selling drugs to addicts. Piaggio ran a so-called detoxification program to help addicts overcome their dependency by providing them with increasingly smaller doses of their narcotic of choice.

Both a rapid withdrawal and the gradual tapering off of a controlled substance can be effective and safe.

But only when managed and outlined by trained, competent professionals without close supervision and the treatment of withdrawal symptoms, the sudden removal of a drug can be incredibly uncomfortable and dangerous for an addict.

And this is because of how controlled substances work.

The addictive drugs like heroin, morphine, tranquilizers and prescription pills, for example, create sedating, anesthetizing or stimulating effects that blunt or charge our nervous system reactions.

Prolonged use of these substances creates a physical dependency, and the body's soon develops a tolerance, thus needing more and more of a given drug over time to get the same effect.

When drugs like this are acutely withdrawn, the nervous system gets upset and responds by releasing agitating chemicals like epinephrine, which makes the addict uncomfortable.

The body here is basically acting like a bratty child, chemically letting the addict know that it needs more of the drug.

This manifests as some combination of severe anxiety, insomnia and agitation. It can even create more physical reactions like muscle aches, diarrhea, sweats, nausea, vomiting and seizures. The good news is that the discomfort goes away in about one to two weeks with proper medical guidance, which provides safe treatment that alleviates these withdrawal symptoms because of this ugly, sympathetic nervous system reaction, gradually weaning off a drug is better tolerated by the body. In this way, what Petto is claiming does make medical sense.

The biggest risk for both options is the failure to concomitantly treat any underlying mental health issues like anxiety, depression, bipolar disorders and some psychotic disorders without addressing these pre-existing factors. The addict will continue to experience the same symptoms when significantly stressed and will likely return to their chosen illicit substance for release. The relapse rate for substance abuse is over 90 percent, and this statistic hasn't changed for over a century. Patio provided his patients and customers whatever drug they wanted or needed, from morphine to heroin to peyote, the addicts saw Dr.

Patio as a sympathetic figure, one of the only members of the medical establishment willing to get them the help they needed. In reality, Pacho was just doing what he'd always done, breaking the rules to make as much money as he could. And it wasn't long before police caught wind of this new narcotics supplier. In the spring of 1942, the Paris police began a crackdown on drug users. Two of the drug users they arrested were Jean-Marc Vanderveer, a deliveryman, and Jeannette Gohl, his girlfriend.

Each of them had multiple prescriptions for heroin from the past three weeks or written by the same doctor, Marcel Pacho. The police apprehended Pacho and indicted him on narcotics charges, refusing to believe the doctor's claims that he was trying to help his patients sealing the deal, Vanderveer was prepared to testify that Pacho didn't care whether he was an addict and was selling drugs for the money. The charges were serious, if found guilty, Pacho could at the very least lose his medical license.

Overprescribing dangerous drugs are doing so for profit is a serious offense and absolutely a reason to strip someone of their medical license. If the goal truly is to wean someone off a harmful substance, then there's no medical misconduct in this approach. However, for this technique to be legitimate and legal, it needs to be well documented, and agreements between the doctor and patient need to be well delineated. There should also be specialists involved in this process or people familiar with these drugs in relation to how their withdrawals play out.

It's also important to have mental health professionals in the mix, like psychologists, in order to ensure abstinence from drug use and offer alternatives, self soothing methods. If a doctor or any professional involved in this treatment continues to support someone's ongoing dependency for any reason, it's considered medical malpractice. Overprescribing can be a problem because doctors can generate a lot of money by writing prescriptions.

It can even happen because unfortunately, there are doctors out there who aren't aware of the long term issues that come from prolonged drug use.

This unethical and reckless over prescribing has a long history in the medical community and luckily it's become much easier to regulate. This is attributed to greater supervision over pharmacies and physician prescribers, along with databases that track what drugs are prescribed, how often the exact doses and who's writing the prescriptions.

Considering the large number of prescriptions patio filled for the couple in such a short span of time, he should have been prevented from practicing medicine then.

And there must sound. Patio's medical career was hanging by a thread. Then, two months before the trial was set to commence, Jean-Marc Vanderveer suddenly disappeared. Pacho argued in court that Vanderveer had fled the city rather than face trial, which therefore proved his own guilt and patio's innocence.

And once again, the authorities chose to place their trust in the good doctor and let him off the hook with a small fine jannette goal.

On the other hand, served three months in prison. Her drug use worsened and she died from tetanus months after release. Meanwhile, Pacho returned to his other project, building a new clinic with Nazis patrolling the streets and Parisians fleeing south. Marcel Piaggio had decided it was the perfect time to expand his medical practice, taking advantage of the suddenly favorable real estate market. Piaggio had bought a townhouse in the city's coveted 16th arrondissement for nearly half a million francs.

The townhouse was in rough shape, so Patio undertook an extensive renovation, he told his wife that the house would be a new mental health clinic, but no clinic was ever opened. Instead, it remained uninhabited. The truth was, Pageau had other aspirations for the townhouse. Most importantly, he wanted to make sure that whatever he did inside remains secret. So he constructed high walls around the property to block out any prying eyes.

Meanwhile, Patio expanded his medical operations in ways that are still unclear, Patchier reportedly became involved in the underground French resistance against the Nazis. Pacho allegedly used his medical bona fides to supply false records to help keep Frenchmen from being conscripted into the German armed forces. He also said that he treated the wounds of those who were sent to the front lines and passed the information he heard from them about German troop movements to the resistance and the allied powers.

Cacio claims that he was driven to action by patriotism and a desire to help defeat the occupying Nazi forces.

But even if that was his initial motivation, it was quickly subsumed by another impulse a desire to steal and kill. It was time for his new clinic to open for business. Coming up, new patients enter Dr. Patio's new house, never to be seen again.

You discover their practices, seek their advice, and let yourself become more vulnerable than ever before. They have the ability to heal what the doctors can't, or so they say. Hi, listeners. It's Vanessa from the podcast series Cults. Be sure to check out our four part special on Miracle Healers airing right now. Meet figures from around the world who claimed powers and pushed remedies but harbored more sinister intentions. You don't want to miss it. And if you're looking for more episodes on the most radical and deadly groups in history, tune into cults every Tuesday from Jim Jones and the People's Temple to Charles Manson and the Manson family.

To Keith Ranieri and Nexium, you'll uncover the unscrupulous methods used to turn bright eyed recruits into diehard believers. Follow the Spotify original from podcast Cults Free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Now back to the story. In Nazi occupied Paris, 45 year old Dr. Marcel Patio's saw an opportunity through his alleged connections with the French Resistance, Pacho became aware of the numerous people who were still trying to flee Paris Jewish people, soldiers, criminals. In 1942, Pacho even claimed to have helped out in some escape attempts aiding the resistance in acquiring false identity papers that could be used to escape into Spain. But Piaggio had no real interest in helping anyone escape France.

He was purely in it for the money. People running for their lives were willing to pay a small fortune for safe passage out of France. As the cost of escape increased, so did Patio's greed. He wanted that money all to himself. So it seems Dr. Patio's struck out on his own and started a new underground escape network. Using the pseudonym Dr. Eugene Petto told his resistance associates that he could get anyone to a safe country for a price of 25000 francs per person.

It wasn't long before he found a group of individuals who were among his earliest clients. In the summer of 1942, Petto became acquainted with the German Jewish Cannella family, who had left Germany because of rising anti-Semitism in 1933. And we're now looking to escape France for the same reason. From July 16th to the 17th, 1942, the Paris police arrested nearly 13000 Jewish citizens, dragging them from their homes and putting them on buses bound for concentration camps. The canal managed to avoid arrest, but knew they had to get out of France as quickly as possible.

Desperate, the canola's reached out to Dr. Eugene, who told them he could get them out of Paris the very next day and send them on the way to Argentina. On July 17th, Dr. Pacho visited the Kanellos at their apartment. He instructed them to pack all of their most valuable possessions in their luggage. Bizarrely, the doctor also demanded that they give him their furniture. As part of the deal, the connellan desperate, likely agreed without argument and spent the rest of the day packing.

The next night, patio led Mr. Canela through the dark Paris streets to his empty house in the 16th arrondissement. Mr. his wife and seven year old son followed on July 19th. Pepco claims the house was a checkpoint and safe house where they'd receive their false papers before being passed on to his associates who would get them safely to Argentina.

Luggage in hand. The Canellos followed Dr. Petit through the doorway and into his townhouse. Agio close the door behind them, and the cannolis were never seen alive again.

Based on findings uncovered by the authorities when they searched Patio's house in 1944, the doctor likely led the family through the main residence and across a small courtyard, towering walls around the courtyard prevented anyone from seeing in or out.

It's possible that the Canellos followed the doctor to a smaller building at the back of the property originally built for stables and Servants' quarters, it had been fashioned into something resembling a makeshift doctor's office.

Once Petitto had brought the Kanellos inside, he announced that the journey to Argentina required vaccinations and inoculations. Trusting the doctor, each of the Canellos allowed Petito to inject them. But it wasn't a vaccine. It was almost certainly a powerful sedative, one they would never wake up from.

Once the Canellos was sedated, Petito would have dragged their unconscious bodies one by one through a small passageway into a strange triangular chamber illuminated by a single bed light bulb patio, propped up his victim and tied them up to eight iron rings fixed into the wall. After setting everything up, Pego left the room. He peered through a spyglass he'd installed through the wall, perfectly framed on the face of his unconscious prisoner.

Then he allegedly pumped gaseous hydrogen cyanide into the triangular room and watched them die. Hydrogen cyanide is a colorless liquid or gas. It was discovered in the 18th century. It's used in a variety of chemical processes, including fumigation. It's gashes form was first used as a chemical weapon during World War One, though many people could not detect it smell. Some describe it as having a bitter, stale ailment like odor. The effects of this chemical compound on human beings are proportionate to the amount of exposure.

If small amounts were inhaled, someone can experience respiratory tract or eye irritation, headaches, fatigue, nausea and vomiting. Larger doses generally result in irregular heart rhythms, extreme difficulty breathing seizures, loss of consciousness and a rapid death. Hydrogen cyanide stop cells from using and processing oxygen and virtually effects all of the body's vital organs. This is especially detrimental to the heart, brain, blood vessels and lungs, all of which require high concentrations of oxygen to function.

If these structures fail, death will occur in a matter of minutes. In the case here, Patio's victims also had sedatives in their systems when they were killed. Because this family of drugs relaxes your central nervous system, it slows heart rate and respiration. In this way, it's likely the combination of sedatives and hydrogen cyanide gas hastened oxygen deprivation in the victims bodies, causing them to die a bit quicker because they were unconscious. They likely didn't suffer much when they were gas.

It's similar to how the Nazis systematically killed during this same time in history, although they didn't use sedation. Patio's method, although monstrous, was much more humane in comparison.

After each of the three Kanellos was dead, Petto moved onto his favorite activity, theft, and it seems he attempted to steal everything they had.

Years later, it was estimated that patio collected over 200 million francs from his many victims. And though he robbed all of his victims, he didn't kill them all with gaseous hydrogen cyanide. It suspected that Dr. Petko experimented in the triangular chamber in ways that still aren't known today. But he didn't stop a theft and McHarg Experimentation Patio's cover ups were even more elaborate than the murders themselves.

To cover his tracks, he often forged letters to the family or friends of the attempted escapes, posing as his victims and assuring them that they'd reach safety in Argentina. Then there were the bodies to take care of those. Pacho relied on his medical training, his scalpel and a generous amount of quicklime.

Quicklime is a name for the chemical calcium oxide, which at various times throughout history has been used for its ability to stop the spread of bacterial disease from dead bodies and hide their smell. When quicklime is dumped onto a body, it soaks up moisture from the corpse and the surrounding environment, like the air and ground. When the quicklime or calcium oxide mixes with water, calcium hydroxide is formed. This is also known as Slaked Lime, and its creation causes an exothermic release of heat.

When left on a corpse, its heat kills much of the bacteria that causes putrefaction or the process of decay. So killing the bacteria also eliminates the odor.

Despite burning and ruining the integrity of the skin, the chemical compound tends to preserve the body as a whole by drying it out, basically mummifying it. I suspect Petto is particularly fond of how quicklime led to the dehydration of this dead victim's tissues. It would have helped him break the bodies apart by making them brittle and render them easier to dispose of. But it definitely would have helped him hide the smell to.

With the bodies split into smaller pieces and easier to carry, Piaggio could now easily and secretly dispose of the remains anywhere in the city.

In August of 1942, a mysterious bag was found floating in the sand when Parisians fished the bag out of the water. They discovered a horrific sight, the butchered corpses of a young boy and a middle aged woman. And that was just the beginning. Throughout the rest of that year and the next human remains were discovered all around the city, mostly pulled from the sand or sometimes left in packages in alleyways. The police never recovered a full body.

Instead, they found seemingly random collections of body parts, arms, ears, scalps and genitals. A chief medical examiner in Paris took a closer look at the body parts recovered and discovered that they were identifiable trademarks to the mutilation of each body. Each scalp had been shaved with the eyebrows removed. Each hand had his fingerprints filed away or burned off with acid. There was no doubt about it, the man who killed these people and scattered their remains around the city knew his way around a human body, and he also knew how to use a scalpel with the skill of a pro.

.

What most concerned the medical examiner was small marks left in the thighs of the bodies, places where the scalpel was stuck into the leg as if in a pincushion using the thigh. That way was common practice for someone with medical training at the time.

It would be relatively easy to tell the bodies were handled by someone with medical training, starting with the scalpel marks in the thigh, using the thigh as a pincushion is a common technique practiced by medical professionals who are examining or dissecting cadavers when they need another instrument or the use of their hands for something else. Rather than placing a scalpel down, they'll conveniently use the thighs flesh to hold it. This is something that's often taught to coroners and their physician residency programs.

The idea behind this is always knowing where the scalpel is and avoiding accidental cuts by the uncovered blade. It's a small detail, but something that would be quickly noticed by a doctor examining a corpse with these kinds of puncture marks. The fact that individual body parts of the victims were removed and kept intact is also something that implies the perpetrator had medical training. And that's because this kind of cutting and body dismemberment requires precision and skill. Someone would have to know where and how to cut into these areas in order to neatly accomplish this sort of mutilation petticoats.

Medical proficiencies were very useful when it came to covering his tracks as his mismatched collections of unidentifiable body parts created confusion. Ironically, though, these skills also tipped the police off to the fact that he was a doctor.

The medical examiner was horrified by the realization that the predator haunting his city was most likely a doctor, maybe even one he personally knew. The examiner seriously considered the possibility that one of his assistant examiners might have been the murderer while he eventually ruled that out. The disturbing reality remained. There was a doctor somewhere in Paris who is also a serial killer.

But no one knew it was Marcel Pageau, Dr. Patio's efforts to hide the murderous truth of his escape network were enormously effective. By 1943, Marcel Pacho, also known as Dr. Eugene, had a good reputation in underground Paris. Desperate people from all over the city came to him seeking a reliable way to secretly escape France. They believed the doctor was their ticket out of the country, and there was no reason to suspect that there was anything nefarious going on.

More and more people enter Dr. Patio's house in the 16th arrondissement and were never seen again.

As more people disappeared, the police and escapee's weren't the only ones searching for Marcel Pacho, the Gestapo, to begin an investigation into the mysterious Dr. Uzan. Not because they believed he was a killer, but because they thought he was helping Jewish people escape. In the spring of 1943, the Gestapo decided to get aggressive. They blackmailed a French Jewish man named Yvonne Dreifuss and forced him to infiltrate the resistance network and retain doctors and services. Dreifuss made contact with doctors and started the escape process and disappeared.

Undeterred, the Gestapo tried again. They sent more informants into the resistance, eventually uncovering two men who referred escapees to Dr. Ogen. The Gestapo tortured the men until they revealed the doctor's address. It was one of the properties of Marcel Pacho. In May of 1943, the Gestapo marched into Marcel Patio's home and arrested him. The Paris police, meanwhile, are working completely separately from the Gestapo. Weren't making any progress in their investigation of the dead bodies left around the city.

Their trail had suddenly gone cold. Coming up, the Paris police continue investigating the serial killings while Marcel Pacho fights to keep the truth of his crimes hidden.

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GBW are the owner's manual for important operating instructions. This episode is brought to you by click up, you don't need to exist on four hours of sleep to be considered productive, you can get more done in less time by using click up the all in one productivity and project management platform that simplifies your tasks. This is the future of work managed projects, people, resources, roadmaps and goals, all on one app built for teams of all sizes and industries.

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In Paris, the city's police continued to search for answers. They still had no suspects for the killer who left mutilated corpses in the sand and all around the city. But the trail had gone cold. The last body was uncovered in the spring of 1943, and there were no further clues because their killer was already in prison. Forty six year old Marcel Pacho sat in a dark cell in Fren prison just south of the city. The Gestapo believed him to be the man code named Dr.

Eugene, who helped Jewish people escape France four months. Petraeus refused to confess or name any other resistance members.

The Gestapo also searched his home and interrogated his wife, searching for evidence of his escape network but finding none.

In a stroke of luck for Pacho, the Gestapo didn't find out about his empty house in the 16th arrondissement. The truth about Dr. Jens real activities remained secret. After eight months in prison, the Gestapo gave up on getting information from Patrizio and his two associates and release them. For the umpteenth time, Pacho walked away from serious trouble and remained a free man that you may have been tempted to take his crimes even further. Feeling invincible over his life, it seemed as though everyone around him had tried to lock him up.

The military had tried to commit him in an asylum. The police had arrested him regularly. The Gestapo had thrown him in prison. None of them could take Marcel Pacho down. Not yet.

On March six, 1944, thick black smoke began belching out of the chimney arpeggios empty house in Paris. The smoke wafted into adjacent houses, annoying neighbors with its unpleasant smell similar to burning rubber. Five days later, the smoke hadn't abated, so the neighbors called the police to complain. When the police arrived, no one answered the door after talking to a neighbor. They found out that the owner was Marcel Piaggio. They gave the doctor a call and patio, promised to meet them there and warned them not to touch anything.

When Pacho failed to show up. The police decided to force their way in. The leader of the fire brigade climbed a ladder to a second floor balcony, smashed the window and crawled into the townhouse. The firemen walk through the dark, empty house, trying to locate the source of the black smoke. They followed the sickening smell of the smoke to a room in the basement sealed with an Iron Dome.

When the firemen opened the door, the first thing they saw was a decomposing human hand hanging out of a burning stove.

The firemen walked farther into the basement and discovered even greater horrors, human skulls, bones and piles of rotting body parts were strewn across the floor. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of burning flesh and quicklime nauseated and terrified. The firemen left the basement as fast as they could. They alerted the police outside who stormed the house and began searching the entire property as the search began. Marcel Patio finally appeared at the scene, claiming he was the homeowner's brother.

Patio brazenly approached the police on his bicycle and spun a tale for them in hushed tones. Patio told them that he was a leader of a resistance group and that the bodies found inside belonged to Nazis and French traitors. Petto called upon their patriotic duty to help him sympathetic to the resistance and no friend of Nazis, the policemen took Braccio at his word, so they told him to flee and Patio did. Once again, the doctor slipped away. But Piaggio knew the jig was up, his career as a doctor was over and it was time to go on the run.

He didn't return home.

Instead, he went to his old resistance associates who were happy to find him after he told them the Gestapo was once again after him. Meanwhile, the police began their investigation into the pile of bodies they recovered from the house. The medical examiner immediately noticed the similarities between the bodies discovered in the house and the corpses fished out of the sand a year earlier. The bodies bore the same scalpel marks and telltale signs of a medical professional. But there was another element to the bodies from the house while they were dissected with the precision of a doctor.

They were also crudely broken apart. In one instance, the killer had cut out the arm and shoulder of one body in a way that more closely resembled cutting a chicken than dealing with a human corpse.

The medical examiner came to the conclusion that while the killer may have started dismembering the corpses in order to destroy or hide them easier, he had begun to enjoy it.

Marcel Petto knew how to thoroughly dissect a body due to his medical training, albeit overly expedited, but he absolutely went above and beyond in reference to the crude dismemberment you just referred to Alistar. Maybe he had an academic interest in seeing what trauma to the human form looked like. Perhaps there was some morbid curiosity that drove him to experiment with unconventional methods of removing appendages. It's also conceivable that he wanted to humiliate his victims in some way or feel a sense of control and power over their bodies.

These mutilations could have also been the result of misplaced anger, giving him some kind of catharsis. Although I will never understand the true reasoning behind this strange approach to deconstructing a corpse, it's safe to assume that he knew what he was doing.

The extent to which Petto disfigured the bodies shows that at a certain point he took sadistic enjoyment from it.

The sadism and brutality of Patio's crimes hit the Paris newspapers and soon became the biggest story in the city. Sensationalized articles ran rampant, reporting increasingly outlandish tales of what Marcel Pacho might have done to his victims. Months passed as the police continued their search, but the murderous doctor was nowhere to be found.

On June six, the allied powers stormed the beaches of Normandy and began taking back France from the Germans. By August, the allied forces had marched into Paris and began fighting to liberate the city as war reached Paris. Marcel Piaggio came out of hiding under the name Honourary. Valery Petto joined the French forces of the interior to fight the remaining German forces.

By the end of August, Paris was liberated and the Nazis were fleeing the country. Captain Henri Valery continued fighting with the French forces of the interior, now working to hunt down and round up collaborators who remained in the city. The French police were still searching for Marcel Piaggio, but the trail had gone cold. The detectives were starting to think that Patio had taken advantage of the upheaval and fled the country. Then, nearly eight months after the discovery of Patio's House of death, investigators finally caught a new lead.

In September, a Paris newspaper published the supposed deposition of a man who claimed to have known Pacho personally.

The deposition alleged that the doctor had actually been working for the Nazis targeting French resistance fighters, Petto read the newspaper and was incensed. It was one thing to be called a sadistic serial killer.

It was far worse to be called a Nazi collaborator. So Patio's sent his own letter to the newspaper, blasting the deposition as nothing but lies. That was all the investigators needed. Now, they knew Piaggio was still in Paris.

Policemen were put on high alert.

The manhunt intensified. On October 30 1st, 1944, Marcel Pacho walked into a metro station in Paris, three military officers approached him and asked him for the time when Piaggio lifted his hand to check his watch. An officer locked handcuffs around his wrist while another officer violently kicked him to the ground. The killer, who'd hunted Paris for years, was finally in custody. Charged with 135 crimes in relation to the 27 murder victims that authorities were able to identify, Pacho responded with his typical lies and overconfidence.

He continued to claim that he only killed Germans and Nazi collaborators and did so for the sake of his country and the resistance. On March 18th, 1946, the authorities brought Pacho to trial there with an audience of a judge and jury, Pacho delighted in putting on a show just like in his politician days, his charisma and persuasiveness won over many in the audience who began to believe his resistance claims. The defense team also placed a number of Dr. Patio's past patients on the stand, they couldn't believe that the man they knew was capable of such evil.

However, despite glowing praise from a number of patients, there was simply nothing that proved anything, Petraeus said in his own defense. There was no record of his activities among official resistance documents and roster's. The physical evidence of Patio's crimes, on the other hand, was overwhelming.

After a lifetime of narrowly avoiding consequences, Marcel Pacho finally found himself facing something he couldn't escape when the trial came to a close, the judges and jury deliberated for only three hours, 80 seconds per charge.

They found Pacho guilty of 126 of the 135 crimes and sentenced him to death.

As Petto was let out of the courtroom after the verdict, he turned back and yelled to the audience, I must be avenged. Yet 49 year old Marcel Petito was strangely upbeat after his death sentence was handed down. He spent his last weeks happily reading poetry in his prison cell and remained calm as he walked to the guillotine on the morning of May 25th, 1946.

According to witnesses, Pacho was smiling as the blade fell.

From childhood, Marcel Pacho preyed on people's trust, his parents, his teachers, his commanding officers to steal everything he could through his time in mental hospitals, he learned first hand the power that the doctor wielded and sought it for himself.

Marcel Pacho was found a destructive path from the very beginning. He clearly had narcissistic leanings and seemed to always be a violent manipulator. His impulsive and obsessive tendencies were on a blatant display from an early age, which we saw manifested in his kleptomania and misconduct in school. His behaviors demonstrated a clear imbalance in his certain gergich and dopaminergic brain circuitry, which likely contributed to his eventual relationship with murder, just like his natural dopamine deficiency would have predicted him to the rush of theft.

It must have also led to his severe impulse to kill. Over time, the dopamine surge he got from killing probably became insatiable, which could explain how his methods of killing seemed to progressively evolve. Like a true addict, he steadily needed to intensify his criminal acts. His serotonin imbalance then perhaps contributed to his obsessiveness with murder and facilitated his meticulous proficiency to cover his tracks. To me, Marcel Patio was a dangerous cocktail of personality disturbances mixed with an imbalance neurochemistry.

He's a cautionary tale of how read behavioral Flagg's need to be addressed, especially when it comes to powerful professions like those in medicine. It goes to show once again that not everyone should be allowed to become a doctor. Marcel Pacho never offered an explanation for his crimes, his deeper motivations remain unknown, but the Mark Pacho made on Paris lasted long after his execution. He's remembered as Dr. Satan, one of the most prolific serial killers in modern French history.

Thanks for listening to medical murders and thanks again to Dr. Kipa for joining me today. Thank you, Alistar. For more information on Marcel Pacho, among the many sources we used, we found the unspeakable crimes of Dr. Pacho by Thomas Mader and Death in the City of Light by David King. Extremely helpful to our research. You can find all episodes of medical murders and all other Spotify originals from podcast for free on Spotify, not only to Spotify already have all of your favorite music, but now Spotify is making it easy for you to enjoy all of your favorite Spotify originals from podcasts like medical murders for free from your phone, desktop or smart speaker to stream medical murders on Spotify.

Just open the app and type medical murders in the search bar. We'll see you next time. Medical murders is a Spotify original from past. It is executive produced by Max Cutler, Sound Design by Trent Williamson with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Carly Madden, Christine Acevedo, Jonathan Cohen, Alexandra Trick for daughter and Bruce Kaktovik. This episode of Medical Matters was written by Ryan Lee with writing assistants by Megan Meier and Lauren Dalil, fact checking by Bennett Logan and research by Chelsea Wood.

Medical murder stars Dr. David Kepa and Alastair Murden.