The Butcher of Moss is released weekly absolutely free, but you can binge the entire season now with iHeart True Crime Plus exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

You'll also get ad free listening and exclusive bonus episodes.

So head to Apple Podcasts, search iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.

The views and opinions expressing this podcast are solely those of the podcast's author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartMedia, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees.

This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be suitable for everyone.

Listener discretion is advised.

It was November two thousand and six, approximately ten years after the first victim of The Butcher of Moss was murdered.

Agent Mike Clarke and two profilers from the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia, found themselves thousands of miles away from home in the eastern European country of Albania.

They were there to assist local authorities to investigate a series of gruesome murders that they believed could be the work of a serial killer.

Weeks earlier, the torso of a new Jane Doe victim was found floating in a small lake near Tirana, the capital city of Albania.

Police had located several body parts, but the head was missing.

Shortly after arriving, the FBI agents found themselves standing over a badly damaged corpse in the examination room of an unrefrigerated morgue.

They were shocked to find that doctors had crudely stitched the body back together and incorrectly attached the left leg to the right hip and the right leg to the left.

Properly examining the corpse and these conditions was impossible, so they sealed the body into a lead lined casket and shipped it back to Quantico.

They had no way of knowing this at the time, but the gruesome discovery would soon lead them to Belgium to examine the infamous unsolved case of the Butcher of Moss, a.

Mysterious sect of all the rest unity, the disappearance of a woman from Mount Xa.

The condition of the victims was sickening.

And the question remains, where is the killer?

From Tenderfoot TV and Iheard podcasts, I'm your host Matt Graves and this is le Monstre Season two, The Butcher of Moss by the summer of nineteen ninety seven, women in and around mass were being urged to avoid going out alone, and any new female missing person's cases were treated with urgency.

It was against this backdrop that a woman returned to her home near Moss after a vacation to notice that her neighbor, a woman named Boggia Valencia, seemed to be missing.

Begonia was thirty eight years old at the time and lived a few doors down from the neighbor in the municipality of Fremerie.

It was a quiet, working class suburb on the outskirts of Moss, the type of street where neighbors knew each other and looked after one another.

She had already been worried about Begonia before leaving on her vacation because she hadn't been well.

Investigative journalist Frederic Lau covered Bogoonia's disappearance in real time and spoke with his neighbor.

So after her disappearance, I went to the neighborhood.

I had several contacts with the neighbors of Beagonia, and I remembered that someone a woman who were living next to Bagonia, and that neighbor told me that before, she used to meet Beagoniac quite often.

She had a quite good relationship with her.

She told me that she had changed at that time, she was mentally unstable and she was afraid of her because of her appearance physical appearance, because at that time, she told me, Begonia was very kinney, she had lots of spots in her face, and that neighbor was afraid about our children.

She didn't want our children could meet Bagonia into the streets, and the situation was all full.

At that time, Bogonia suffered from depression and serious mental illness, often slipping in and out of psychotic episodes.

Her husband also suffered from mental illness and was in psychiatric care, leaving Bogonia alone and in a deteriorating state.

When family members confirmed they hadn't seen Bogonia, the neighbor contacted the police to report her missing.

A thirty eight year old woman disappeared two weeks ago in Mon's Investigators are exploring a link with the butcher of Mon's case in so far as the missing woman has a similar profile as other victims of the serial killer.

For the first time, an active missing person was a suspected victim of the butcher of Moss.

Bogonia Valencia disappeared during the month of July.

She lived in a small working class home with her husband.

Plagued by depression, the young woman had changed recently.

At the time of her disappearance, she only weighed around seventy pounds.

Apparently, she also frequented the area around the Mons train station, from where the four other victims of the serial killer disappeared.

Police discovered that Bogunia Valencia was often seen around the train station, the epicenter of the killer's hunting ground, and like other victims, Madame Gange, the owner of the Hotel Metropol, also knew Bogunia.

I knew Bogonia.

She had a lot of blemishes on her face, so she was easy to recognize.

She came to La Metropol from time to time with friends.

She would come at night to have a drink.

Summer turned into fall with no sign of Bogognia Valencia.

It had been three months since her disappearance when some local kids playing in the woods stumbled across skeletal remains.

It was a human skull found just off of Bethlehem Road, next to a small river named Feer Creek.

Police searched the area closely and found fragments of vertebrae.

They concluded that the head had been decapitated with a handsaw.

Further tests were able to identify the victim as Bogugnia Valencia.

Saw marks were identical to those of the other women who had been dismembered.

She was confirmed as the fifth victim of the butcher of Moss.

Hopes that the serial killer had either stopped or moved elsewhere were immediately crushed.

The fact that Pagonia was murdered at the height of the then sprawling investigation proved that the killer was unfazed by the increased police presence and media attention.

The end of nineteen ninety seven was the beginning of a long period of frustration.

Police were furiously working the case, but no new arrests were made.

I was able to track down the clerk of the investigating judge overseeing the entire case when it started.

Alain Cardon was right there from the beginning, visiting each of the gruesome dumb sites as they were discovered, and coordinating the entire judicial investigative process.

He sat down with me for an interview.

I was the clerk of the investigating judge who attended the scene on Saturday, the twenty second of March nineteen ninety seven during the discoveries of the first thrashbags.

I remember it very well.

It was a Saturday and we had already had a busy morning in an affair or norm The scene was completely out of the ordinary and we had to move quickly and try to determine who was in the trash bags.

We noticed that there were multiple victims and that there were women.

It's certain that for me and many others there was a before and after the twenty second of match, because to be confronted with a scene like that, with body parts that had been cut up.

The complete himselt from a man.

Arms, legs, hands.

We never found the heads.

It's traumatizing.

Afterwards, we spent thousands of hours on the case.

In the days, weeks and months that followed, we spent ninety percent of our time on it.

You have to understand that this was one of one hundred thirty active cases we were working at the time, and it happened at the same time as the dou Treux affair, and police officers, investigators, forensics experts, and generally the whole judiciary was focused on the Dutra case, which is normal, but the extra reinforcements we would have needed never arrived.

I can't share the details, but after Le Paul Bogaert was arrested, charged and then later released, there were several other lines of investigations that were analyzed, and there were suspects who were interesting, even disturbing, but not enough to make an arrest.

Over the years, we continued to work on the case and interviewed over one thousand people America, and then at one point we were contacted by the Americans.

At the top of the episode, he heard about FBI agents investigating a mysterious case in Albania.

They were assisting local authorities so file a potential serial killer who was murdering and dismembering women.

So they transported the latest victim's remains to the United States for examination.

When the FBI agents returned to Quantico, they learned that their colleagues in New York were also working on a case from the region from which they just returned.

They were searching for a man who they believed was responsible for the murder and dismemberment of a woman on us soil.

The forensics of this American case were eerily similar to the Jane Doe from Albania, whose autopsy had revealed that she was murdered and then dismembered with a sharp instrument, likely a handsaw.

Could this just be a coincidence The suspect they're pursuing for the murder and dismemberment of an American woman happens to hail from the same region from where another woman was found murdered and dismembered in almost the exact same way.

Coincidence or connection, they had to look into it.

The problem was that the suspect had apparently fled from the United States dates to Belgium.

To understand this complicated international investigation and how it relates to the butcher of Moss, we have to go back to the year of nineteen ninety.

In Brooklyn, New York.

On the morning of September fifteenth, nineteen ninety, a woman spotted a black garbage bag on the sidewalk near her office in the Vinegar Hills section of Brooklyn, New York.

When she picked up the bag to move it off the sidewalk, it seemed to be leaking blood, so she called the police.

The trash bag contained human remains.

Within hours, two more trash bags containing body parts were found in the same area.

The remains belonged to the same female victim, and the dismemberment appeared to have been carried out using sharp instruments, including a handsaw.

Her head was never found.

A week later, police received a tip about a woman who went missing on the same day the bags were found.

Her name was Mary Beale from the Bronx.

Here's a clip from a nineteen ninety news interview with one of Mary's neighbors.

She always thought that you know that she was being harassed by someone.

I don't know that someone was, I can really tell you, and she went out.

She always said, if I'm not back in my store by two days, come up for me.

Police use Mary's medical records to compare X rays from a previously broken ankle to the recovered remains.

Police are now confirming that the body, cut into pieces and stuffed into two plastic garbage bags found in this lot near the Brooklyn Navy Yard last month, is indeed that of sixty one year old Mary Beale.

It didn't take long for police to identify a prime suspect.

Mary had been seeing a man named Smayo Jerlik.

Smayo was originally from the former Yugoslavia near the Albanian border, but had been living in New York for over twenty years working as a taxi driver.

He was fifty years old at the time.

At under five feet tall, with a pudgy frame and balding sma Yo didn't seem threatening, but he had a rap sheet with violent offenses, including a case where he beat a man in Midtown with a night stick because the man banged on the roof of his taxi.

Police found several lewde messages from Smayu on the victim, Mary Beale's answering machine, and several people who knew her confirmed that she was seeing him romantically, despite him being married to another woman who was his third wife.

They also confirmed that Mary had complained that Smayo was manipulative and that he constantly harassed her.

After acquiring a warrant, authorities went to his residence only to find it empty, with a stack of unopened mail at the entrance.

When they carried out a search, they found a knife on the breakfast table and blood was detected in his residence that was consistent with Mary Beale, Smayo had apparently skipped town with his wife.

It would be years before authorities would find any trace of him.

In nineteen ninety four, they tracked down his then estranged wife, who was living in Belgium, and confirmed that she had moved there from New York with Smayo, but she claimed that she didn't know where he was.

Just over a year later, the gruesome murders of the butcher of Moss would begin.

We now know that Smayo was living in Belgium in nineteen ninety six and nineteen ninety seven.

The striking similarities of the murder, dismemberment, and disposal method of body parts gave pause to both American and Belgian investigators.

I spoke with the award winning journalist Nicholas Schmidtl, who reported extensively on the Smayo Jurlik case in the New York Times.

I was writing for the New York Times magazine.

And we know when you're into a story and you realize that no one else has that story, and it's something that it feels like you could really sink your teeth into it.

Schmeo Deserlich.

This individual who had been identified as the probable killer of this woman in I believe in nineteen ninety in New York.

And then there was this string of murders that bore a very similar signature to the New York murder that took place in Belgium in the mid nineties at the time that that Schmeo was living there.

And then you have at least.

One, but maybe more murders in Albania in two thousand and six, and Smeo de Gerlich was living in New York and was ultimately convicted of the murder in nineteen ninety.

He was living in Belgium around the time of the unsolved murders in Moms, and he was living in southern Montenegro, not far from the site of these other murders.

It took place in two thousand and six.

So there was from an investigative perspective, at least one constant to all of these murders, and that was the style of which these bodies were dismembered, and the fact that Smeo de Gerlich was living in or near these places when they took place.

I remember the type of saw that was used to dismember the body's post mortem appeared to be the same kind of saw.

You likely know the details of the Mons murders better than I do, but there there were similarities to the style.

And because Smeo once he had been implicated and was about to be charged for the murder of Mary Beale, he fled the country and went to Belgium.

And so the fact that he was in Belgium around the time of the Mons murders, which remained unsolved but bore many of the same hallmarks, if you will, kind of macabre hallmarks of the Mary Beeal murder, I think, left many to suspect that he may have been involved in those as well.

Nicholas was able to interview the FBI agent Mike Clark extensively, and he even traveled to Belgium and Albania to investigate this Smyoerlic case.

So I went up to New York and some time with the New York Police Department detectives who worked in that case, and then I went to Belgium and spoke to authorities there in Mons.

And it was an interesting conversation because I think the FBI agents whom I spoke with felt that the Belgian authorities were convinced that Smeo de Zerlik was not the butcher of Mons, but they were in the minds of the FBI agents sort of insufficiently curious upon subsequent evidence, which was the two thousand and six murder, that maybe he was involved.

After reviewing the case in detail, authorities in Belgium were not convinced that Mayo Jerlik was the butcher of Moss.

He could never be placed in Moss at the time of the murders, and police believed he'd been outside of Belgium when some of the crimes were committed.

No proof of this was ever shown to the FBI, leading them to still question Smayo's involvement.

In our extensive review of the case, it seems highly unlikely that Smayo Gerlik is the butcher of Moss.

Not only are police confident that he wasn't there when some of the murders took place, but as you've heard, we believe the perpetrator spent time around the central station area of Moss, and that he must have been known by or was familiar to the victims.

Smayo had never been identified as someone who knew any of the victims.

Alain Cardon, the Clerk of the investigating judge in Belgium who I spoke to earlier, explains.

He was a serious person of interest.

This line of investigation followed a certain amount of time until the points that after all of the investigations possible, we concluded that it couldn't be him.

We had to verify everything, including his timeline in Belgium because it traveled a lot, but he was eliminated because of lack of proof.

Nonetheless, Smayo Jerlik was eventually tracked down and and arrested for the murder of Mary Beale in Brooklyn.

Schmeda moves from Belgium in the mid nineties, I think ninety six ish and he returns to his ancestral home in the former Yugoslavia, and the authorities in Montenegro, working very closely with the FBI, arrested Smandriashrlik and tried him remotely for the murder of Mary Beale in New York in nineteen ninety and ultimately convicted him for that murder, and he was sentenced to twelve years in prison.

And through a extraordinary fixer who I've worked with on multiple stories in the former Yugoslavia and in that region, was able to gain access to the prison and with a New York Times magazine photographer and this fixer, and the three of us went into the prison and interviewed Schmeo for about an hour.

And it was eerie and very very unsettling experience because at this point I knew that he had already been convicted, even though he denied it, of murdering Mary Beale, and not just murdering Mary Beale, but and dismembering her body.

And then, you know, I ultimately asked him what no one had asked him before, which was as to whether he was also responsible for these other murders in Belgium and Albania.

And I asked him and he denied it, and he said that that it was destiny.

And I was like, you know, what do you mean destiny.

He's like, well, it's my it's my destiny to be accused, and he, you know, he was dismissive, but like I said, in the most vacuous and unconvincing of manners.

And I do remember when we left, the photographer who I was with, who has photographed some of the most awful war zones in the nineties, and he just said that was among the most terrifying conversations that I've ever witnessed.

We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with with nightmarish secrets.

Smaiyo Jerlik may not have been the Butcher of Moss, but his known and suspected crimes earned him a different moniker, the Bronx Butcher.

Our team investigating the case holds regular zoom calls to divide up work and follow up on various leads.

This week, Fred provided an update on what he's learned about the DNA that was extracted from a strand of hair from one of the trash bags and partially matched to Shesai.

Okay, so Craig, could you say that in English real quick?

Please?

Yes, this simple was entered into the DNA database for compar reason that no direct match was phoned.

So just the other day we weren't even sure if it was tested against gizls DNA specifically.

Do you know if it was.

Yes, they didn't find any direct match.

God, that's such a bummer because I really thought we had something there.

What I don't understand is that if you if you find an unidentified DNA profile that could be anyone anywhere in the world technically, and it hit on this woman living in most in nineteen ninety six, actually very close to where the crime scenes took place.

Also kind of in a strange circumstances, you know.

So I just don't understand.

It just seems too strange to me that they thought it was a match, they had a partial match, and then suddenly it's not a match.

Yeah.

But when they carried out this research resulting in a list of one hundred and fifty genetic profiles.

Right, so they weren't searching, they weren't searching like everywhere.

They were kind of narrowing their search on us.

Yeah.

Yeah, and the investigators were based on what we've learned, it was a restricted search of profiles, meaning that they weren't searching for partial matches everywhere in the world, but rather casting a targeted net.

On one hand, it's disappointing, but on the other hand, I'm encouraged that police were able to isolate and test the strand of hair from the gruesome evidence of thirty seven different body parts and fifteen different trash backs, and it means that they have at least one unidentified profile mixed with the remains.

Any future match of this profile could lead to a number of avenues, ranging from another victim, to an accomplice or even the perpetrator.

The Gounia Valencia was the as confirmed victim of the Butcher of Monts.

Apart from her skull and pieces of vertebrae, the rest of her remains were never found.

The murder stopped after mid nineteen ninety seven.

To this day, there's only been one arrest in the case, that of Leopold Bogart discussed in the previous episode, who is cleared and released shortly after his apprehension.

According to Belgian law, statute of limitation for murder is thirty years.

If charges are not laid in the next fourteen months from the time of this recording, the Butcher of Man's case will be closed indefinitely.

This means that even if the perpetrator were to come forward and confess after the fact, he could not be charged.

Technically, the investigation by Belgian authorities is never stopped and is still active today, but as far as we know, there's very little activity on the file.

However, thanks to Morgan's painstaking work, we've identified a new person of interest.

You'll recall that the first victim we covered in this series was Jacqueline Leclaire, who went missing just before Christmas in nineteen ninety six.

Shortly before her murder, she'd mentioned to her sister that she kept bumping into a mysterious man randomly, and that she thought he might be following her, or at least finding excuses to bump into her.

And off the record discussions with former police officers, we learned that this man was never identified.

Our team has spent countless hours trying to put a name on this mystery man, and just recently, Morgan made a breakthrough, sending us down a path of unexpected connections and coincidence is so good, Larry that they're impossible to ignore.

Next time on season two of La manstre I'm always suspicious of people who are a little too clean, too polished, and you don't really know who they are.

He was someone who was always very well dressed in his early sixties.

He spoke eloquently and his French was impeccable.

He calls himself a medium, and it's true that he was able to gain the trust of the people who knew him and consulted with him, And we know that he knew several of the victims.

Jacqueline.

We already know that he knew Jacqueline.

Without a doubt.

The man that she had met several times is the man who killed her.

Mister, but it's not Do you understand lidipussy to kill five women and cut them up?

Do you realize he had to have a special place to do that.

So the perpetrator is inserting himself in an investigation when he's looking for controlling the narratives and monitoring progress.

This is really important for him because then he can adapt.

Yeah, for example, the BTK got involved in the investigation.

Le Montre is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, hosted, written, and executive produced by me Matt Graves, Donald Albright, and Payne Lindsay are executive producers on the behalf of Tenderfoot TV, with producer Makeup and Vanity Said.

Matt Frederick and Trevor Young are executive producers on the behalf of iHeart Podcasts.

Originally music by Jay Ragsdale, sound design and master by Cooper Skinner, Cover design by Byron McCoy and Trevor Eiler.

La Monstre includes archival audio from Sonema RTBF Archives.

Special thanks to Aren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, the Nord Group and our active investigation team Morgen van Lehrberg, Fredrich Lauer, xervid Com and Annan Gardon, as well as the teams at iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV.

Find us on social media at Monster Underscore pod For more podcasts like Lea Monstre, search Tenderfoot TV in your podcast app or visit Tenderfoot TV.

Ready to keep listening, remember you can binge the rest of the season right now with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

Plus.

You'll get exclusive bonus episodes and ad free listening.

So head to Apple Podcasts, search iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.