Of All the Towns in the World

Casablanca · 2002–2003 · Recent

This episode describes dismemberment, mutilation of bodies, and a suicide. Listener discretion advised.

Through the winter of 2002 and into 2003, Casablanca kept finding pieces of people. They came packed in cardboard boxes, or left on the street, and the fingertips had been cut away so that nobody could say who they were.

The man the police wanted was a concierge — the caretaker of an apartment block near the Court of Appeal, a quiet employee who lived on the premises and had keys to everything. Detectives got to him through the boxes. The printing on the cardboard traced back to one supplier that sold to building sites, and from there they worked their way through the caretakers of the city, one at a time. In his room they found blood-stained gloves and a school notebook, and pressed into the blank page beneath the top sheet were the impressions of a letter that had been left on the last body.

They never got to arrest him. He vanished at the end of February 2003 and turned up days later in an empty ninth-floor flat in the building he looked after, dead by his own hand. There was no trial, so nothing was ever proved. Three victims were attributed to him in the reporting at the time; later retellings raise the number, move the bodies to different districts, and — in one case — end by asking whether he did it at all. Even his first name is disputed in the record.