The Hidden Connection (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

In 2013, a police sergeant in northern France called the local telephone company and asked to set up a tap on a suspect's phone. He had a warrant in his hands and was ready to read off the details, but the operator on the line said, no, that can't be done, because that phone number was already being tapped as part of another murder investigation. But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place, because that's all we do. So, if that's of interest to you, the next time you and the follow button take a trip to the beach, every time they get up to go in the ocean, go ahead and cover their towel in sand. Okay, let's get into today's story. A little before 7 p.m. on March 14, 2013, a 45-year-old man named Dominique Laplace sat at his desk in his home in Colmont, which was a small rural village in northern France. And as he sat there, he held this old coin under a lamp to read the date on it. And then, when he saw what the date was, he typed the date into a search bar on his computer. So, Dominique liked to collect things like coins and guns. And he was a very good collector. He was also kind of a small-time treasure hunter. He would go out into the woods quite a bit with his metal detector and search for buried bits of history. This coin he was looking at now was actually something he had found on his last trip. And like most of his discoveries, it actually did not appear to be particularly valuable. There was really only one time recently when he had actually found something that was worth quite a bit of money. But that discovery had actually led to the end of his last relationship. So, until a couple of years ago, Dominique had been in a long-term relationship with a woman named Vero Pierret. She was a decade older than him and also happened to walk with crutches due to a physical handicap. Things between Vero and Dominique had always been very chaotic. And they'd finally broken up after a big fight over some jewelry that they had found in the woods together. Now, technically, Dominique was the one who found the jewelry first. But after they did some research and found out that this jewelry was literally ancient and worth thousands of euros, Vero had tried to claim all of it for herself so she could sell it. The more Dominique resisted this, the more aggressive Vero got. And eventually, the argument reached a breaking point and Dominique told her that this was it. Their relationship had just had to be over. And pretty much immediately, they went their separate ways. And since their breakup, they had not run into each other once. And in fact, Dominique, by this point, did actually have a new girlfriend whose name was Miriam Bernard. Dominique had actually known Miriam. Miriam, all the way since high school. But they had finally connected shortly after his breakup with Vero. And so now they'd been dating for about two years. And Dominique really had never been happier. During the week, Dominique worked as a special needs teacher for children and teens with family problems. And while it was very important work for him and he cared deeply about it, it was also pretty stressful. So during the work week, after he was done, he would come home and he really liked to spend time by himself, just kind of unwinding alone at night. But tomorrow, was Friday, and so the start of the weekend. And as usual now in Dominique's life, Miriam was planning to come over in the evening so they could spend the whole weekend together. Now, Dominique heard the oven timer go off in the kitchen. So he set down his coin and he turned off his computer. He went into the kitchen, he made himself a plate, and then he sat down at the table for dinner. And as he started to eat, he pulled out his phone and he was about to call Miriam. He'd actually briefly spoken to her on another phone call about an hour ago. But they'd had to hang up before they finished their conversation. But before he could dial her number this time, he heard a knock at his front door. And this is, you know, mid-week. He never had visitors during the week and he wasn't expecting Miriam tonight. And so he was just thinking how odd it was that somebody would be here now. But nonetheless, he, you know, put his stuff down, he got up, and he walked over to the door to see who it was. The next evening, around 6:00 PM, Dominique's girlfriend, Miriam, walked up the driveway of Dominique's house. She was a little on edge because Dominique had not been answering her calls or text messages all day. Now, this was definitely unusual, but she knew, you know, he could have just been having a very busy day at work. Maybe that's why. So ultimately, Miriam had come over at the same time she usually did on Fridays, and she just walked up to the front door and she knocked. But Dominique didn't answer. She waited and then knocked again. And still, there was no answer. So she reached down and she tried the door handle, and it creaked open. And that was really weird because Dominique never left his front door unlocked. And so she opened the door and she was about to step inside, but she stopped because she saw something on the ground in the foyer. And for a second, she was just frozen, and then she began to scream. An hour later, Major Nathaniel Urier of the Amiens Gendarmerie, parked his car outside of a small house on a quiet road. The Gendarmerie is a part of the French army that basically serves as police in rural areas like Caumont. At this point, all Major Urier knew was that the victim, Dominique Laplace, had been found dead by his girlfriend who had called it in. And so now he got out of his car and he walked toward the small, very modest house, and he went in the front door, which was already wide open. And right inside, Urier saw a forensics team huddled around Dominique's body, which was lying in a pretty big pool of blood right in the middle of the foyer. And he had what appeared to be a stab wound to the chest. Urier knelt down to get a better look. And as he got closer, he saw that there was literally, at least as far as he could see, just one single stab mark, but it was directly into Dominique's heart. And Dominique also had some very severe bruising on his face, and also what appeared to be some defensive wounds on his hands. And this was all kind of interesting because the stabbing, the single stab anyways, was very precise and apparently very efficient. But based on the defensive injuries, it looked like the killer had also beaten Dominique pretty brutally, as if they were in like a fit of rage. So it's like sloppy, kinetic raging and highly efficient stabbing all in one. And based on where Dominique was lying, Urier thought he'd probably gone to open the door for his killer or killers, and they had attacked him probably immediately. Urier stood up and he let the forensics team continue their work, while he began to take a look around the house. Further inside, he saw there was a half-eaten plate of food on the table, as if Dominique had been interrupted in the middle of eating dinner. From the kitchen, Urier went into the living room and he saw it was a total wreck. All the cabinets were open and stuff was strewn about all over the floor, as if robbers had ransacked the place. But Urier doubted that this was a random crime of opportunity, because there didn't appear to be any forced entry, and Dominique, despite being brutalized, had been killed really quickly and very deliberately with that one stab to the chest, at least from the looks of it. And so to Urier, it seemed much more likely at this point that the victim was murdered by someone that he knew. And then after the murder, the killer or killers ransacked the house, either to stage it to look like a robbery, or maybe they were looking for something specific that they knew Dominique had. Over on the couch, Urier saw an office, an officer questioning a woman who appeared to be in her forties, who was curled up in a blanket, and she was crying and shaking. And so Urier guessed that this must be the girlfriend, Miriam Bernard, who had called the sin. Urier walked over and when he had a chance, he introduced himself to the officer and then asked if he could take over for a few minutes, questioning Miriam. That officer nodded, and then once Urier had sat down, he turned to Miriam and he asked her to please walk him through what had happened. After calming down, Miriam told Urier that the night before around 5:50, she'd been on the phone with Dominique. And at some point he said that he had to hang up, but he told her he'd call her right back, but he never did. And she said when she got to his house around six tonight, so 24 hours later, she'd found the door was unlocked and Dominique was dead on the floor. Now as the victim's girlfriend, Miriam was obviously a suspect. Urier made a mental note to get a hold of Miriam's phone records to see where she'd been over the past 48 hours or so. But at this point, she seemed really genuinely devastated by Dominique's death to the point that Urier really doubted she could be involved in the murder. Plus, she was also physically quite smaller than Dominique, and so it was hard to believe that she could have overpowered him like that. He asked Miriam if she had noticed anything missing from Dominique's house, and she thought about it for a second and then just said it was really hard to tell, because Dominique collected so much stuff, like she didn't have a good sense of really what he even had. But she said that she had noticed right away that at least one thing was missing, one of Dominique's.22 caliber rifles. On the morning of March 16th, 2013, so a day after Dominique Laplace was found stabbed to death, Major Nathaniel Urier sat down in the kitchen of Dominique's best friend, Jean Michel. Michel Picot. He was hoping that Jean-Michel could answer some of his questions about this case, which really so far was quite baffling. The forensics analysis had come back with nothing. No footprints, no fingerprints, no DNA traces from the killer. But even though that was a setback, it was also sort of further proof that Dominique's murder had likely been carefully planned. It was not just some random, you know, crime of opportunity or something. And so the question now was, okay, well, if this was planned, who planned it? Dominique's computer had been turned off at 6.55 on the evening of the 14th. And the fact that he hadn't finished eating dinner or cleaned up the kitchen, at least based on what they saw, meant that he very likely had been killed before he went to bed that night. So after turning off his computer before bed, sometime around dinner, that's likely when he was killed. The GPS data from Miriam's cell phone seemed to confirm her alibi, that she was at her own house the whole night. And with really nothing else against her, Yurie was ready to rule her out as a suspect. And since Miriam had not offered really any useful leads to this point about other potential suspects, Yurie was hoping that Dominique's friends could help fill in some of the blanks. And so now Yurie asked Jean-Michel if there was anyone who might have wanted to harm Dominique. And Jean-Michel immediately said, yes, Dominique's ex-girlfriend, Vero Pierre. Jean-Michel said Vero could be very jealous and violent. And in fact, one time she'd even thrown a flower pot at Dominique and broken some of his teeth. He said that Dominique had finally ended this toxic relationship with Vero a couple of years ago after they had gotten into this huge fight over a set of jewelry that they actually had both found out in the woods. And Vero had not taken this well. She had not taken the fight over the jewelry well, and she had certainly not taken the breakup well. And when Yurie heard this, his mind immediately went back to the way Dominique's living room had been torn apart, as if the killer or killers were looking for something specific. Now, Yurie had assumed that based on what Miriam had said about the missing.22 caliber rifle, that the reason the house looked the way it did is they were looking around for that rifle. But maybe it really was this jewelry. Maybe that was the main target. So Yurie asked Jean-Michel to tell him more. And so Jean-Michel said that a few years ago, Dominique and Vero had gone out to the woods together with a metal detector. And they'd uncovered this necklace and bracelet and some earrings that were all thousands of years old. Altogether, the jewelry was likely worth almost 5,000 euros. And upon this discovery, Jean-Michel said that Vero had immediately wanted to keep all the jewelry for herself. And as soon as she made that clear, this spiraled into a huge conflict between Vero and Dominique. And so Jean-Michel said that a few years ago, Dominique and Vero had broken up with her essentially over this jewelry. And then after the breakup, Dominique completely refused to give Vero any of the jewelry. And for months after the breakup, Jean-Michel said that she had kept calling him and she kept threatening him about this jewelry. The next morning, Major Yurie knocked on the door of Vero's house. Now, he had gotten a photo of the house from one of Dominique's friends. And he had gone and searched Dominique's entire house for anything that looked even remotely similar. And it was clear that the jewelry was definitely not there. And so his theory at this point was that Vero must have killed Dominique to take the jewelry. But when Vero answered the door, Yurie was a little surprised to see that she was this tiny, frail-looking woman who actually walked with crutches. And Yurie immediately realized that there was just no way for her to be able to get the jewelry. And so she went to the house and she said, no way, Vero could have overpowered someone as big as her ex-boyfriend Dominique. Like, logically, it just couldn't happen. But nonetheless, Yurie introduced himself and then told Vero that, unfortunately, Dominique has been murdered. And when he said that, he watched Vero closely for her reaction. But she didn't really react. She just calmly replied that she'd already heard the news and that she was totally shocked. But Yurie didn't really believe this because she didn't seem remotely upset here. Yurie asked her if he could come in and ask her a few questions. And Vero said, of course. And so he went inside and he followed her as she hobbled into the living room. And then once they'd sat down, Yurie asked about her breakup with Dominique and also the jewelry that they had fought over. And Vero said the breakup was Dominique's fault. She said that he'd been a narcissist and was always flirting with other women and that she'd been glad when the relationship ended. I mean, he broke it off, but it was a good thing. She'd moved on a long time ago. And then as for that jewelry, she was like, yeah, you know, we fought about it, but she had no idea what happened to it and she hadn't thought about it in years. Now, Yurie didn't really know what to make of what she was saying. Like, he had no idea if this was true or not. All he knew is that it was really suspicious that she was so unbothered by Dominique's death here. In some ways, it was sort of obvious that she just outright did not like him and maybe even was happy that he was dead. So, he asked Vero where she'd been on the night of Dominique's murder. And Vero said she had been at home all evening with her adult nephew, Mallory Kubel. She said Mallory had come by in the afternoon to help her fix her bathtub because she said physically she just couldn't do it herself. And then later on, Mallory's girlfriend, Emily Vizur, had also come over and they'd all had dinner together. So, Yurie wrote down Mallory and Emily's names and then asked for their contact information. Later that day, Major Yurie sat down with Vero's nephew, Mallory, at his home in Lawn, a town 25 miles away from Coman. In the next room over, Yurie could hear Mallory's girlfriend, Emily, playing with her five-year-old son. Yurie asked Mallory to walk him through everything he did on March 14th, hoping that his story would potentially contradict Vero's. Mallory said he'd gone over to his Aunt Vero's house that afternoon to fix her bathtub, which was exactly what Vero had told Yurie. But Mallory said he left Vero's house in the late afternoon because he'd forgotten some of his tools. So, he went home to the house he shared with his girlfriend, Emily, and her son, and they all had dinner together. Then, he went back to Vero's around 10 p.m. And at this, Yurie perked up because this was not the same story Vero had just told him. She'd said that the whole group had eaten dinner at her house, at Vero's house. So, somebody had to be lying here. And to figure out who was lying, Yurie now planned to check Vero and Mallory's house. So, Yurie and Mallory had to be lying here. And to figure out who was lying, Mallory's alibis against their cell phone's GPS data. A few days later, on March 20th, Yurie sat at his desk reading over a forensics report. He was frustrated because this case had seemed to be progressing, but now it was like he was at a total dead end. By this point, Yurie had looked into Vero and Mallory's phone records, and they seemed to confirm that Mallory was telling the truth. GPS data showed him at Vero's in the afternoon. Then, it showed him going home around and then it showed him returning to Vero's house later, like he said. And also, Mallory's phone wasn't just physically located at these locations static the whole time. I mean, he'd been using it all night. He'd sent about 30 texts to a friend during the same window when Dominique was being murdered. So, this seemed to clear Mallory of any involvement. But if Mallory was telling the truth and appeared not to be involved whatsoever here, that really meant Vero had to be lying. But Yurie didn't know that. I mean, her GPS data from her phone showed that she was at her own house the entire evening. And her phone had also been active that whole time too, further reinforcing that she was at her own house. And so, basically, without more information, all Yurie had learned was that very likely, neither Vero nor Mallory or his girlfriend had gone anywhere near Dominique's that night. And now, as Yurie is flipping through this forensics report, he was only getting more frustrated because this report was telling him that he was at his own house the entire evening. But the report only contained more bad news. So, forensic investigators had searched Vero's house top to bottom, and they had even used luminol to look for traces of blood. But they'd found absolutely nothing that tied Vero to Dominique's murder. And on top of all this evidence that basically said she wasn't involved, Vero's motive to kill Dominique had also fallen through. Because after doing some more digging, Yurie had discovered that the jewelry the couple had found in the house was stolen by Dominique two years earlier. So, that's why it wasn't in Dominique's house anymore. Not because it had been stolen. And so now, with Vero basically cleared as a suspect, as well as Mallory and his girlfriend, Yurie didn't have any good leads left. There really was no evidence against anybody else in Dominique's circle. Not Miriam or any of Dominique's other friends. And so now, Yurie really had no idea where to focus next. Now, Yurie had tapped the to Dominique just to see what happened. But so far, nothing had come of it. And so, Yurie was really starting to feel like he was just on the wrong track. Nothing added up, and he knew he had to be missing something. But just then, his phone rang. He answered it, and it was a police sergeant from another town in the region. And the sergeant said he was investigating a shooting, and he just tried to set up a wiretap on a suspect's phone. However, a rep from the phone company had told the suspect that he was on the wrong track. And so, Yurie was really starting to feel like that that wasn't possible because that particular phone number was already being tapped by Yuriy's team in connection with the murder of Dominique Laplace. Yuriy couldn't believe it, and as he listened to what the sergeant had to say, he realized there might be a whole other side of this case he didn't know about, and maybe he wasn't on the wrong track after all. On the afternoon of March 20, 2013, so six days after Dominique Laplace was killed, Major Yuriy sat at his desk frantically taking notes as the police sergeant on the phone told him about a completely different case in a town 25 miles away. The victim in this second case, 47-year-old Jose Barrera, was a tattoo artist and marijuana dealer. And two days after Dominique's murder, on the night of March 16, Jose had been shot outside his own house with a.22-caliber rifle. Yuriy remembered the.22-caliber rifle that had been stolen from Dominique's house, and he wondered if this could be the same weapon. Because so far, he couldn't envision any other connection between these two cases. Jose had been shot to death, not stabbed, and he lived in a different town, and seemed to move in a totally different social circle. But then, the other officer explained that after the shooting, something kind of incredible happened. Jose had briefly woken up in the hospital. Now, he'd been too badly hurt to speak, but the police had given him a whiteboard and asked him to write down the name of anyone he thought might have been involved. And Jose had written three letters. And when Yuriy heard what those three letters were, he immediately understood how these two seemingly unrelated murders were linked. And everything started to fall into place. Based on forensic evidence and confessions, this is what police believe happened to Dominique Laplace on the night of March 14, 2013, and to Jose Barrera the following night. Around 7 p.m. on the evening of March 14, the killer and an accomplice parked their car down the road from Dominique's house. The killer was very nervous. They knew this had to be done. And so the killer, once they were ready, they crept up to the house and they knocked on the front door. Meanwhile, the accomplice hid around the side of the house, where Dominique wouldn't see them. They were armed with a gun in case the killer needed backup. When Dominique opened the door, the killer quickly told him that their car had broken down in the street and would Dominique help them. Dominique agreed to help, and he told them to come on in while he grabbed his coat and shoes. The killer stepped inside, pulled a knife out of their pocket, and immediately grabbed Dominique and stabbed him directly in the chest. The killer watched as Dominique had this look of absolute terror on his face, and he gasped and he fell to the ground. And the killer, they felt sick to their stomach watching the blood pour endlessly from Dominique's chest. They couldn't believe they actually had done this. And then while they're standing there, kind of in shock at what they had done, trying to remember, what to even do next, their accomplice came in the front door and stood over Dominique's now somewhat motionless body. He was still bleeding out. And the accomplice began screaming with rage, and they started hitting Dominique in the face over and over again with the back of their rifle. And Dominique, who was not quite dead yet, began putting his hands up, trying to defend himself, but he really couldn't, and then he went still. After Dominique was dead, the accomplice walked off and began rummaging through Dominique's house. In fact, the killer heard them sort of opening drawers and closets, throwing things around. And then the accomplice eventually came back out, carrying one of Dominique's rifles along with their own gun. And they told the killer, it was now time to go. After all, they had more work to do. And so the killer followed the accomplice outside of the house, but by the time they got outside, they literally felt sick from what they had just done. And halfway back to the car, they vomited. And at this point, the killer turned to the accomplice and just said, I can't do any more tonight. We have to postpone our work until another day. And so their plan was pushed until the very next night, in the very early morning hours of March 16th, when the killer and the accomplice drove out to Jose Barrera's house. They parked on the street, and this time the accomplice went up to the front door while the killer hid around the corner, holding the rifle they had stolen from Dominique. The killer peeked out from behind the bushes and watched as Jose opened up his door and then followed the accomplice down the driveway. And when the two of them got out to the street, the killer jumped out, raised the rifle, and shot Jose. After that, the killer and the accomplice rushed back to their car, they sped out to the woods, and then they burned all their clothes and their shoes to get rid of any blood traces. Meanwhile, a second accomplice was at home, sending a flurry of texts from the killer and accomplice's phone to make it look like they'd been miles away the whole night. The actual killer of both victims was Vero's nephew, Mallory Kubel, but it was not his idea. The instigator was actually Mallory's own girlfriend, Emily, who had asked him for help killing Jose Barrera, who happened to be her ex-husband. They'd been fighting over custody of their five-year-old son, and Emily wanted Jose out of the way. And when Emily made this request of him to go kill Jose for her, Mallory didn't know what to do. So what did he do? He went to his aunt, Aunt Vero, for advice. And Vero's advice was, well, I'll help you guys kill Jose if you help me kill my ex-boyfriend, Dominique. Because it would turn out, Vero was still very much holding a grudge against Dominique after their breakup. And so Vero, Mallory, and Emily were all involved in planning both murders. Vero went together to the victims' houses. And because Vero was on crutches, Mallory did the actual killing. Meanwhile, they left their cell phones at home with Emily, who built their alibis by going from one house to another, sending text messages to various people all night from the different phones. But unfortunately for them, Jose lived long enough to write down those three letters on the whiteboard. And the letters were E-M-L. And while that was not a perfect spelling for the police, like what he was trying to do is point them towards Emily, his ex-wife, as a suspect. And when Major Urier realized Emily's name had now come up in two different murder cases that happened, you know, a couple of days apart, he thought it was just too bizarre to be a coincidence. So even though she did have an alibi for both murders, Urier kept digging into her. And eventually, Vero, Emily, and Mallory were all arrested. And eventually, they all cracked. And confessed. Mallory Kubel was charged with murder. However, he took his own life in jail before his trial. Vero Pierret and Emily Vizior were both convicted of complicity to murder. Vero was sentenced to 20 years, and Emily was sentenced to 10 years, but only served three. Also, just a quick footnote, we're not entirely sure why Vero was lying about, you know, when Emily and Mallory were at her house on the day of the murder, and where they actually had dinner or not. It just seemed to be a matter of time before they would be able to talk to each other again. It just seemed like she couldn't quite keep her story straight. A quick note about our stories. They are all based on true events. But we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes. The Mr. Ballin Podcast, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballin. Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bone and Cole Lacascio. This episode was written by Kate Gallagher. Story editing by Luke Baratz. Research and fact-checking by Shelley Hsu, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Alex Paul, Ben Faciano. Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear. Audio editing and post-produced by Whit Lacascio and Jordan Stidham. Production support by Antonio Minotta and Delaina Corley. Artwork by Jessica Clogston-Kiner. Theme song, Something Wicked. by Ross Bugden. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast. And just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr. Ballin Podcast, you can also now watch on the Mr. Ballin YouTube channel that very same day. And trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe. Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballin. If you want to listen to episodes one week early and ad-free, you can subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit SiriusXM.com. SiriusXM.com slash podcast plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. So that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time. See ya. SiriusXM Podcasts Plus