24. The Monster of Montmartre | Thierry Paulin

Behind the blinding neon lights, free-flowing champagne, and pulsing techno of the 1980s Paris underground, a predator was using high fashion as camouflage to hunt in plain sight. 

This week on Homocidal Tendency, we step off the dance floor of Le Palace and into the quiet, winding stone stairwells of the 18th arrondissement to track one of the most anomalous and terrifying true crime cases in modern French history.

​We break down the lethal folie à deux of Thierry Paulin and Jean-Thierry Mathurin a toxic partnership fueled by extreme narcissism, heavy cocaine addiction, and an insatiable lust for social status. We explore how they weaponized Parisian architecture, bypassed criminal profiling, and ultimately funded their glamorous nightlife by brutally terrorizing the city's most vulnerable demographic: elderly women living alone.

​This isn't a story of a brilliant mastermind. It's the story of a shallow illusion, a devastating police blindspot, and a final, infuriating cheat of the justice system.

​In This Episode We Cover:

• ​The socio-economic clash of 1980s Paris and the underground club scene.
• ​The psychological anatomy of Paulin and Mathurin's predator/prey partnership.
• ​The "Urban Architecture Trap" and how the killers bypassed the Digicode systems.
• ​The massive investigation failures and the miraculous survivor who cracked the case.
• ​The chillingly anti-climactic arrest and Paulin's final escape from justice.

​In Memoriam: Honoring the Victims

​True crime too often remembers the names of the monsters while forgetting the people they took from us. Thierry Paulin viewed these women as nothing more than walking vaults to fund his luxury lifestyle, but they were mothers, grandmothers, and lifelong Parisians whose lives mattered. We honor the known, documented victims of the 1984–1987 Montmartre attacks:

• ​Germaine Petitot (91) – Survived
• ​Anna Barbier-Ponthus (83)
• ​Suzanne Foucault (89)
• ​Ioana Sechero (71)
• ​Alice Cadot (84)
• ​Marie Chiffard (86)
• ​Jeanne Vautrin (83)
• ​Jeanne Estournel (82)
• ​Paule Vuillemin (79)
• ​Estella Foucher (89)
• ​Rachel Cohen (79)
• ​Berthe Finalteri (87) – Survived
• ​Geneviève Pinard (90)

​And to the women whose names remain sealed in the French courts or whose cases were never officially closed: you are not forgotten.

​A Quick Apology from Matt 🇫🇷

​Bonjour, je m'appelle Matt et je suis désolé. To all of my beautiful French and Francophone listeners.  Please accept apologies for my tragic, heavily Americanized pronunciation of your historic streets, designers, and legendary nightclubs. I promise I practiced, but my tongue got in the way.

​Connect with Homocidal Tendency

​If this case got under your skin, head over to our social media! We are posting the composite sketches, photos of Paulin from his club days, and the stark visual contrast of the 80s Parisian architecture we discussed today.

• ​Instagram: [@HomocidalTendency]
• ​Bluesky: [@HomocidalTendency]

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​Stay safe out there, and keep an eye on who's standing on your doorstep.

Transcript

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Paris, October 1984. If you were anyone in the city's underground scene, you were at La Palace. It was the Studio 54 of Europe. The music was deafening, the fashion was completely over the top, and the champagne never stopped flowing. Holding court at the center of the VIP section is a 21-year-old named Thierry Paulon. He is magnetic, dressed immaculate in high-end designer suits, tossing massive quads of cash to the bartenders, paying for the tab of the drag queens, models, and fashion icons. His friend thinks he's royalty, or maybe a high-rolling underworld boss. Either way, he is the undisputed life of the party. But the money funding this neon lit fantasy didn't come from a trust fund or a drug cartel. It came from the quiet, dimly lit apartments of the 18 Aerodesman. Just a few hours before Thierry hit the dance floor, an eighty-two-year-old woman opened her front door to a charming, well-dressed young man asking for a glass of water. She didn't know she was looking at a predator. She just saw a polite boy in need of a favor. She let him in the computer. A little bit of housekeeping before we get into the heavy stuff. A huge thank you to everyone who's been sharing the show lately. And if you haven't already, please take a second to rate and review the podcast on whatever app you're listening on right now. It's generally the best way to help us grow. I'll also be posting all the visual materials for today's episode on the socials. You're definitely gonna want to check those out because the aesthetic contrast in this case is completely dry. Alright, let's get into it. If you're an 80s kid like me, or even if you just love the vintage aesthetic of a decade, you know the vibe. It was an era defined by excess, the neon, the passion, the relentlessness, the driving sense pop. But every bright light casts a shadow, and in the fall of 1984, the Parisian club scene was casting one of the darkest shadows in European criminal history. While the city's youth was losing themselves on the dance floor of La Palace, a completely different demographic was locking the doors, terrified of a phantom who was hunting them in plain sight. To understand the monster of Montamois, you have to understand the illusion that he built. You have to look at the blinding, glamorous mask he wore to hide the absolute cowardness of his crimes. Let's do it. Let's have back to Paris. 1983. Understand how a 21-year-old became a serial killer. You have to look past the flashing lights of the dance floor. You have to look at the man himself. Because Thierry Palan wasn't just wearing disguise, he had systematically engineered a psychological armor that made him completely untouchable to the people around him. If you read the psychological profiles on this guy, his persona essentially breaks down into three terrifying layers: the chameleon, the narcissistic void, and the parasite. Let's start with the chameleon. When Thierry arrived in mainland France from Martinique as a teenager, he was a young, mixed-race gay kid trying to navigate a society that was aggressively racist, xenophobic, and homophobic. He was rejected by his family, ignored by the city, and completely broke. So Thierry decided to build a version of himself that was impossible to ignore. He looked at the early 1980s European New Wave scene and adopted it. Adopted it as a weapon. He bleached his hair to a stark flatten and blonde, he wore heavy white face powder, dramatic eyeliner, and he painted his nails. He also squeezed himself into hyper-structured designer suits that looked like they walked straight off a Jean-Paul Gautier runaway. In the 80s, looking like money was money. By adopting this hyper-stylized aesthetic, he bypassed the prejudice of the Parisian elite. He even retrained his voice, dropping his natural cadence to adopt a slow, deliberate, upper-class Parisian whisper. He became an optical illusion. But behind that beautiful neon lift facade was the second layer, the narcissistic. Thierry Palan was an empty vessel. He had zero internal self-worth. By day he worked as a waiter at a famous cabaret place called Paradise Latin. But to a severe narcissist like Thierry, this was a weekly agonizing humiliation. He absolutely loathed serving. He believed that he belonged on stage, or better yet, in the VIP section being served. He became addicted to what psychologists called narcissistic supply, which is the raw drug of attention on, and to get it, he would walk into clubs like La Palace, flash massive wads of cash, and buy rounds of expensive champagne for entire tables of total strangers. He didn't do this because he was a nice guy. He did it because he loved the feeling of the room turning around to look at him. He was quite literally buying a temporary set of friends every single night because he couldn't stand the silence of being alone with himself. And that brings us to the third and the darkest layer, the parasite. This is the part of Thierry that the club kids never saw. Behind the eyeliner and the designer's stuff was a cold, calculating sociopath with a complete absence of human empathy. To Thierry, people were not human beings appealing to lives. They were just objects. They were either mirrors meant to reflect his greatness, or they were ATMs meant to fund his lifestyle. If you gave him attention, you were his best friend. But if you had money he wanted, you were just an annoying obstacle between him and his next fix of adrenaline and luxury. Now, if you were sitting in the VIP Lounge of La Palace in 1984 watching TRE Pallon burn through thousands of francs a night, a very obvious question would have to cross your mind. Where is a 21-year-old cabaret waiter getting this kind of match? His friends weren't stupid. They knew what the Predice Latin paid. They knew his salary couldn't cover the Vinish Champagne, the Premium Cocaine, or the Tailored Silk Suits. But in the 1980s Parisian Underground, nobody asked for a tax return. Instead, his social circle created a myth around him. They turned him into a romanticized outlaw, and Thierry was more than happy to let them rewrite the script. To his inner circle, Thierry didn't just possess both, he performed it. He didn't carry a wallet. Instead, he carried thick rubber-banded bricks of high domination bronx just stuffed loosely into his trouser pockets. When the bill came due at a five-star restaurant, Thierry would pull out the entire roll, casually peel off a massive note while looking at the numbers, and tell the waiter to keep the change. He also refused to set foot on the Paris Metro. That was for the working class. Thierry took private taxis everywhere, sometimes paying a driver a small fortune just to sit outside a nightclub for six hours so he wouldn't have to wait in the cold when the doors closed at 4 a.m. Because of all these shenanigans, the rumor mill and the scene started to spin. The most popular theory? Thierry was a high-level drug dealer. And we have to remember the context here. In the counterculture of punk and first scenes of 80s Paris, breaking the law wasn't viewed as a moral failing. It was almost a badge of honor. To his friends, the idea of a handsome, stylish young gay man outsmarting the conservative French police to hustle party drugs was pretty glamorous. It was my vice in the city of lights. Thierry leaned into this preference. He would drop vague calculated whispers. He checked his designer watch, leaned over to a friend, and said he had to go to a meeting or take care of some business before vanishing into night. Others whispered that he was a high society escort, catering to closeted, ultra wealthy politicians in the upper crust and the upper neighborhood. Both theories gave his friends a plausible cool explanation for his wealth. It allowed them to romanticize him, completely masking the pathetic, parasitic reality of what he was actually doing. But the real tragedy of this persona is that the club community inadvertently protected him through its own unwritten code. Nightclubs like La Palace or Broadside were sanctuaries. There were places where people went to escape judgment, abusive families, and society's rule. The foundational rule of the night scene was simple. We don't ask about your day job. Under the strobe lights, everyone was reinventing themselves. And honestly, nobody wanted to pop the bubble. Thierry was funding a lifestyle for everyone around him. He was buying the drugs, paying the covers, and training broke models and artists like Worlds. To question the money meant risking the free ride. His friends chose to believe the glamorous lie because the alternative meant the party had to end. An aggressive narcissist like Thierry Pallon can survive for a while on the shallow admiration of club strangers. But to truly thrive, a predator needs a mirror. He needs an audience of one who looks at him with absolute uncritical devotion. In the spring of 1984, inside a crowded Paris Knight Club, Thierry found his mirror. His name was Jean-Thierry Montyron. And the second these two met, it wasn't just a wrong match. In True Crime, we talk a lot about a follow-do, a shared matters, where two people feed each other's delusions until they cross into extreme violence. But with Paulon and Montyron, this wasn't a partnership of equals. It was textbook Predator and Frey. That was the dynamic. On paper, they shared the same exact scars. Jean-Thier and Montyron was only 19 years old and an immigrant from French Guyana. Just like Paulan, he was young, gay, a black kid who had came to mainland France only to find himself completely marginalized, isolated, and ignored by mainstream society. But where the rejection made Martyrand vulnerable, it made Paulan lethal. When 19-year-old Montran looked at Paulan under the strobe lights, he didn't see a monster. He saw a god. Paulan was everything Montran dreamed of being. He was tall, striking, beautifully dressed, completely unbothered by the racism around him, and seemingly dripping in wealth. To Montran, Pallan looked like the man who had successfully conquered Paris. He was instantly spellbound. And as for Pallan, the kid's adoration was the alternate ego fix. Polan didn't want a boyfriend, he wanted a disciple. By stepping into the role of Montron's wealthy survivor, Paulan got to validate his own manufactured illusion of power. But Palan didn't just rely on psychological charm to keep his new disciple in line. He used a much more sinister anchor, Heavy Chemical Addiction. Matron was already struggling with drugs when they met, and Palan immediately weaponized that vulnerability. He used the cash from his early undetected muggings to buy a massive quantity of high-grade cocaine and heroin, and became Matchron's exclusive supplier. Their days and nights quickly blurred into a continuous drug field haze. Under the influence of free-flowing cocaine, Palan's grandiosity reached a fever pitch, while Maturan's reality became completely warped. By keeping the kid constantly high, Paulan systematically eroded his moral compass until the boundary between right and wrong had just dissolved. Within weeks, Maturan was completely dependent on Palan for his shelter, his lifestyle, his emotional validation, and for his next fix. He had completely surrendered his autonomy. And that is exactly when the romance transitioned into an active, synchronized hunting unit. To really know how Thierry Paulon and Jean-Thierry Montyrand managed to terrorize Paris for months without getting caught, you have to look at the clinical, terrifying precision of their modus operandi. If you visualize Paris in the 1980s, especially around the 18th era Desmond, around Montmartre, it's not just postcards and cafes. It's a maze of steep, winding streets lined with classic centuries-old Haussmann stone apartment buildings. Beautiful on the outside, but on the inside, a labyrinth of blind spots. This brings us to the first phase of their ammo, the urban architecture trap. During this era, Paris wasn't just installing those digital digicode keypads on building entrances. But they were primitive and easy to exploit. Alon and Matron would casually just hang around the straight corner, wait for a resident to open the heavy glass door, and slip right inside behind them before it could click shut. Once inside the lobby, they ignored the ground floors. They would climb those narrow, winding wooden staircases or ride the tiny creaking iron elevators all the way to the top to the fourth, fifth, or sixth floors. They did this because they understood the acoustics. They knew if an elderly person screamed from a top floor apartment, the sound would be swallowed by the thick stone walls and muffled by the empty hallways before it ever reached the courtyard or the street below. The second phase was the most insidious because it relied entirely on the psychological manipulation at the doorstep. This is where Pallon weaponized his carefully crafted love persona. Imagine, you're an 80-year-old woman living alone. If a rough, disheveled mugger knocks on your door in the late afternoon, you're gonna slam it shut and call for help. But Thierry Pallon didn't look like a mugger. He would stand in the dimly lit hallway wearing his pristine high-fashioned designer suits. He had had his immaculate platinum blonde hair, his delicate makeup, and he spoke in that soft, highly polished, upper-class Parisian accent. He looked like an eccentric, wealthy neighborhood kid, completely not threatening. He would deploy a simple route. He'd knocked, and when the door opened, he would politely explain that he was looking for a lost cat, or he lived a few floors down and was suddenly feeling faint. Could he please just have a glass of water? And because he looked like a harmless fashion model, the victim's natural defenses would drop. They didn't see a threat. They just saw a polite boy and need of a favor. The moment the elderly woman turned their back and stepped into the kitchen to get the water, Alan would sentinel march around. They would cross the threshold, step into the apartment, and quickly lock the wood door behind them. Which brings us to the final phase the violence. Inside the apartments, things turned brutal, primitive, and completely remorseless. They never brought weapons with them. Guns make noise, knives leave blood, and they leave highly specific forensic footprints. Instead, they relied purely on physical restraint and whatever household items that were in arm's reach. Montyron would use his youth and physical size to violently pin the elderly women down, while Paulon would use sofa pillows, plastic shopping bags, dish cellos, or telephone cords to sound itself. It was a slow, quiet, agonizing method of murder that left the surrounding apartment walls completely undisturbed. The neighbors next door, they they heard nothing. While the victim was bound or dying on the floor, the two men would ruthlessly tear the apartment apart. They weren't looking for expensive art or electronics, those were too hard to carry and too easy for cops to track. They wanted cold, untraceable cash. They hunted for pension money hidden under mattresses, savings captain kitchen tens, and sentimental heirloom jewelry that could be quickly fenced on the black market for cash. The calculation here is what makes my skin crawl. Alan used the exact same charm and high society camouflage that made him a favorite at La Palace to get defenseless grandmothers to open their doors. He was a chameleon by night and an apex predator by day. When we look at serial killers who operate the teams, there's usually a ramp up here. A testing of boundaries, but for Thierry Pellon and John Thierry Montrand, there was absolutely no learning curve. It was an instant, vicious addiction loop, fueled by complete disassociation from reality. I want you to think about the absolute compartmentalization required here. They would wake up, eat lunch, walk into a dusty, quiet apartment that smelled like old paper and lavender, brutally strangle an elderly woman to death, and then, three hours later, they'd be standing under the neon lights, complaining that their champagne wasn't cold enough. Alright, so let's get into it. The nightmare, it began earnestly on October 5th, 1984. The first target was 91-year-old Jermaine Putito. Palan locked on her door. Matran used his weight to pin the frail woman to her bed, while Palan suffocated her with a pillow. Surprisingly, she survived, but was too traumatized to give a description. She almost lost her life for a few hundred francs, a dusty jewelry box, and some pocket change in the grand scheme of things. But it was enough to trigger the fuse. They walked out of the apartment building, wiped their hands, and went straight to the boutiques. They bought matching designer outfits and spent the rest of the night at La Palace. Playing the role of underground royalty. Their brains instantly hardwired to the act of murder to stimulate their social validation. Next, they went on a complete blitz. On October 9th, they targeted Anna Barbé Pontus, 83, who was smothered with a pillar. By the end of November 1984, they had attacked eight elderly women. The sheer velocity of the crimes completely paralyzed Paris. This wasn't a killer who struck every few months, this was a daily suffocating threat. The media dubbed him the Monster Mamart, and a heavy wave of terror settled over the city. Elderly women were terrified to even open the doors to get the mail. Deadbolts were installed, chains were locked, and the streets were quiet. But inside Paulan's orbit, the pressure cooker was finally cracking. Montran was only 19, and the psychological toll of holding down women was starting to destroy. He was consuming massive amounts of heroin just to sleep. Every time he saw a Parisian police officer on the street, he spiraled into paranoic. Paulan, on the other hand, was completely unfaced. He was agitated that Montran was losing his nerve. In late November, they had a massive explosive falling off. Montran packed his bags, fled Paris entirely, and retreated to his family, uh to the south of France. And just like that, the monster of Montreal vanished. For nearly two years, the killing stopped. The police assumed the murderer had died, moved away, or had been locked up on unrelated charges. Which are all true in a certain way. And I know we didn't go through the entire list eight for eight for all the victims. Um I will leave a detailed list of all the victims in the show notes. It's a little bit exhausting and depressing, like to hit every single one. But to respect them, I'll I will leave it in the show notes if you're interested. So by 1986 and 87, Paulon's illusion was starting to rot from the inside out. His drug habits had escalated to a heavy daily cocaine abuse. He was living out of expensive luxury hotels, racking up massive debts, and trying to sustain a career performing as a drag artist under the name Clovis. And I also saw somewhere in this part of the timeline, he was arrested and went to jail for some kind of altercation with his drug dealer. But while he was in jail, they didn't um match his fingerprints to anything because there wasn't a national database or anything like that at the time. Um so they didn't know that he was actually this monster that was killing all these grannies. But he was burning through cash, and he didn't have Montran to act as his muscle anymore. So, driven by the desperation of his addiction and the echo chamber of his own narcissism, Palin descended back into the shadows alone. And this is where the pristine untouchable communion completely devolves. Without Montran's physical strength to quietly pin the victims down, Palan's emo turned messy, desperate, and loud. He can no longer rely on the silent suffocation. He had to basically fight these up. He began grabbing whatever was nearby. With walking sticks, iron cookware, telephones. He would wrap telephone cords around their necks and bludgeon them into compliance. In the fall of 1987, he went on a frantic solo rampage. He targeted 79-year-old Rachel Conn and then Bertha Finoteri, 87. Because he was working solo, the immaculate facade was cracking. He was sweating through his tailored suits, he was leaving fingerprints on the door frames. He was staying inside the apartments far too long because he didn't have to look out to watch the stairwell. He was a runaway train fueled by cocaine, completely blind to the fact that his high society camouflage was wearing incredibly thin. He didn't realize it yet, but in his chaotic solo frenzy, he had just made a fatal mistake. One of his victims wasn't dead, and she got a very good look at its face. If you dig into the archival police falls from Paris in the mid-1980s, you can feel the absolute suffocating frustration radiating off those pages. The investigation into the monster of Mamatra wasn't just cold, it was fundamentally broken. And honestly, you can almost understand why. First thing was Polon's emotion. It completely shattered every standard criminal profile the Frisian detectives had on file. Think about how homicides were investigated before DNA and digital surveillance. Police relied on the story the crime scene told them, but Paulon's crime scenes were silent. First, there was never any sign of Fourth Entry. The wooden doors they weren't kicked in, the locks, they weren't jimming. Because of this, investigators operated under the fatal assumption that these utterly women knew their attacker. Detectives wasted months hauling in innocent nephews, local grocers, and deliverable with brutal interrogations. They completely missed the fact that the killer was just a charming stranger that acts for maybe a glass of water. Second, the forensic footprint was pretty much non-existent. Colin didn't bring a gun, he didn't bring a knife, because he used what was there, suffer pillows, plastic shopping bags, and telephone cords. There was really no murder weapon left behind, per se. No ballistics to trace, no specific blade angles for the corner to analyze, just quiet, agonizing violence that left zero scientific trace. And finally, the timeline played a vicious trick on the police. When Jean-Thierry Montterand fled Paris in the late 84, the murders abruptly stopped. The detectives assumed the killer had either died of a drug overdose, fled the country, or was locked up in a different jurisdiction. So when Paulan started hunting again in 1987, the police were completely confused. They had to start from scratch, while the entire city was gripped in a renewed wave of absolute terror. But then there's the universal truth about narcissists. They always get sloppy when they think they're invincible. By the winter of 1987, Palan's cocaine-fueled ego made a fatal mistake. Like we said, he knocked on the door of 87-year-old Bertha Finaltery. He attacked her using his frantic, chaotic solo method, brutally bludgeoning her and choking her until she went silent and limp on the floor. Satisfied that she was dead, he tore her apartment apart, pocketed her cash, and casually left to go celebrate his twenty-fourth birthday at the clubs. But he didn't check her faults. Against all odds, Miss Final Terry wasn't dead. She survived a brutal attack, dragging herself for help, and she was rushed to the hospital. And when she woke up in that hospital bed, her mind was crystal clear. She had gotten a perfect, unbelievable look at a charming young man who stood in her doorway. She gave the police a hyper-specific description. A mixed race man in his early twenties, highly stylized, dressed in expensive designer clothes with a very specific haircut and a distinct earring in his left ear. The police immediately mocked up a composite sketch and flooded the streets with it. For the first time in three long years, three bloody years, the monster finally had her face, and the woman who gave it to them was one of the very targets he thought was too weak to even matter. When you listen to a true kind podcast about a serial killer who terrorized a major city, you usually expect the capture to be cinematic, a massive SWAT raid at midnight, high-speed car chase through a neon streets, a dramatic standoff on the rain. But the rest of Thierry Pallon was exactly like the illusion to build. Shallow, pathetic, and totally anticlimatic. On the afternoon of December 1st, 1987, a local police inspector named Francois Jigob was on a completely routine foot patrol. He was walking down a street in the 18th Air d'Aswan when he saw a young man casually strolling down the sidewalk. The man matched Final Terrier's composite perfectly. The dyed hair, the expensive clothes, the earring. The inspector walked up and asked to see his identification papers, and realized he was standing face to face with the monster himself. There was no fight, no traumatic monologue, no shootout. Thierry Palan, the man who had bought thousands of drinks, bore the finest silk, and brutally murdered 21 grannies, was quietly handcuffed on the pavement and shoved into the back of a police car and broad daylight. And when the investigators broke into his home, they didn't find a dark, terrifying lair of a criminal mastermind. They found a messy, chaotic, foul-smelling room, littered with empty champagne bottles, crumpled nightclub flyers, stained designer clothes, and stolen low value trinkets of dead grandmother. But the glamour was completely gone. The music had stopped. And now Palan was sitting in the interrogation room, and he was about to open his mouth. When detectives sit across the table from a serial killer, they usually prepare for a war of attrition. They expect denials, crying, rage, or a labyrinth of lies they have to slowly dismantle piece by piece. But when investigators sat down with Thierry Palan in December 1987, they didn't have to break him. He just sat back in his chair, smoothed out his expensive clothes, and started to talk. His demeanor was completely chilling. Detectives later noted that he didn't act like a cornered animal. He acted like a bored celebrity giving an interview to magazine. He was perfectly polite, soft-spoken, and entirely nonchalant about the horrors that he had inflicted on the city. The police initially suspected him of a hand for, but Palan casually corrected them. He elicited off addresses and said, I didn't just do that one, he told them, I did this one and this one. By the time he stopped talking, he had confessed to 21. But the most terrifying part of the confession wasn't the number, it's the way his memory worked. Palan had this photographic memory of the crimes. It was entirely transactional to him. He could tell the detectives the exact addresses of every building. He could describe the wallpaper in the hallways. He could tell them exactly where the furniture was placed, which drawers he had ransacked, and the precise amount of francs he stole from the tent on the kitchen counter three years earlier. But when detectives showed him the photographs of the victims and asked him to identify them, Palan just stared blankly. He didn't remember a single face. He couldn't remember their names. When pressed on it, his answer was essentially why would I look at their face? It was the ultimate confirmation of the third psychological layer that we talked about. The parasite. To Thierry Palan, these women were never human. They were just vaults. You don't memorize the make a model of an ATM, you just take the cash out. And if you thought there was any honor among thieves or lingering romantic loyalty to his former partner, you don't understand how a narcissist thought. The second the police started pressing, Paulin didn't hesitate. He completely threw Jean Tyr and Montran under the bus. He gave the Montran's name, his role in the crimes, and his location. He blamed Montran for the physical brutality of the early murders, framing himself almost as a passive observer, which of course was a complete lie. Within 48 hours, the police raided Montran's family home and dragged him out in handcuffs. The dynamic duo was finally entirely encasted. The monster of Montpellier had confessed the city of Paris could finally exhale. Families of 21 women who were told the men who slaughtered their grandmothers were going to face the guillotine of the French justice. But true crime rarely gives us a claim. And the final chapter of Thierry Bellon's life is a masterclass and denied justice. When a serial killer is finally caught, the public enters a kind of waiting period. The panic subsides, and the expectation of justice takes over. In 1988, the Parisian media was foaming at the mouth. The public wanted a spectacle. They wanted to see the monster of Montreux dragged into the light, seated in the courtroom, and forced to look into the eyes of the families he had destroyed. The stage was set for the trial of a decade. But True Crime doesn't care about satisfying narrative arcs, and Thierry Palan was about to pull off its final and ultimate cheat. While Palan was sitting in a high security prison awaiting his trial, his body began to aggressively fail. The symptoms started early in his incarceration, but they escalated terrifyingly fast. Let's remember the world that Palan lived in. This was the mid-1980s, the underground club scene. It was an era of profound excess, but it was also the epicenter of a silent sweeping plague. Halan was diagnosed with HIV, which had rapidly progressed into AIDS. Its glamorous, untouchable persona had survived the police for years, but it had survived its own biology. He was transferred to the hospital wing up front prison. The man who used to command the VIP lodges of La Palace and tailored Gauthier suits was now withered, bedridden, and died. On April 16th, 1989, less than a year after his arrest, Thierry Paulan died of AIDS-related complications. He was 25 years old. Now I say this like he was a total piece of shit, and I would have punched him in the face and knocked him to the fucking ground. But even being the giant piece of shit that he is, no one deserves to die of AIDS. And with that, he never faced the judge. He never sat before a jury. He never had to listen to a single victim intact statement. He essentially slipped out the back door of the justice system, robbing the families of the 21 women he had murdered of any real closure. But Paulin's death left a massive, unresolved vacuum in the French courts, and standing alone in the center of that vacuum was Jean Tier and Montrean. With Paulin dead, the entire weight of the prosecution slammed down on Montrean. In December of 1989, he walked into the courtroom, completely alone. The dynamic of the trial was incredibly bizarre. Montran was on trial for the murders they committed together in 1984, but the architect of the Nyramir was dead. Montran's defense attorneys played the only card they had, the puppet narrative. They painted Monturan as a tragic, drug-addicted kid who was brainwashed and physically dominated by a psychopath. They argued that Monturan was just another one of Pallan's victims, a kid completely stripped of his free will by cocaine and manipulation. And we get it. There is some truth to that dynamic. Pallan was the mastermind, but the prosecution countered with a brutal reality check. Montran wasn't just a bystander, he was the muscle. Palan was a slender guy. He needed Montran's strength to pend the terrified women to their bed. Montran didn't just watch, he held the women down while they were suffocating. He helped tear the apartments apart. And when the murders were done, he happily put on the stolen designer clothes and drank the expensive champagne. The jury didn't buy the brainwashed victim defense. The sheer brutality of the crimes was too much to forget. On December 20th, 1989, Jean-Thier Montrand was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, with a mandatory minimum of 18 years before he could even sniff a roll. But as the gavel came down, the courtroom felt incredibly hollow. Because everyone knew that the true monster had already gotten. When we step back and look at the entire scope of this case, the Thierry Palon story stands out as a bizarre, terrifying anomaly in the true crime landscape. If you look at the history of serial killers who operate within the queer community, guys like Jeffrey Dahmer, Dennis Nielsen, or John McGacy, the psychology is usually rooted in deep, internalized sexual compulsion. They hunt men because their violence is intertwined with dark, twisted sexual desires. But Palon breaks that mold entirely. There was absolutely zero sexual component to his crimes. He was an openly gay man living freely in the most liberal city in Europe, surrounded by beautiful people and a thriving counterculture. But his lust wasn't for flesh. It was for status. He didn't hunt other gay men. He hunted granits. He crossed completely outside of his own social sphere to targeted demographic he viewed as nothing more than walking ATMs. The violence wasn't a sexual release. It was just a brutal administrative task he had to complete to afford his next bottle of champagne. And that's what makes this case so deeply unsettling. It's the ultimate corruption of the 1980s ethos. It was an era defied by the mantra that greed is good, and that looking wealthy was the only thing that mattered. Thierry Palan just took that philosophy to its absolute psychopathic extreme. In the end, Jean Thierry Montyron served his time. In 2009, after 21 years behind bars, he was quietly performed. He was 42 years old. He stepped out of that French prison into a completely different world, disappearing into a quiet anonymity that his former lover had been so terrified of. But Thierry Palan remains frozen in 1989, a 25-year-old club kid who tried to buy his way out of the shadows, only to realize that a monster in a tailored suit is still just a monster. He bought the drinks, and the grannies paid the price. And that's it for this week's episode of Homicidal Tendency. Thank you all so much for listening. If this case got under your skin as much as it did mine, make sure you check out the social media pages. I'll be posting the composite sketches, photos of Paulan from his club days, and some of the 80s Parisian architecture we talked about today. The visual contrast is absolutely crazy. And if you haven't yet, please hit subscribe, leave a rating, and share the show with your fellow True Crime addicts. It helps the podcast grow and it really keeps the lights on here per se. Until next time. Keep an eye off who's standing on your doorstep.