23. The Sadist of Romont | Michel Peiry

This week, Matt takes you on a chilling journey into the pristine, frozen passes of 1980s Switzerland a place synonymous with safe neutrality, immense wealth, and postcard-perfect landscapes. 

But beneath the snow, a predator is hunting. In this episode, we deep dive into the case of Michel Peiry, the charismatic, well-dressed soldier known as "The Sadist of Romont," who weaponized Swiss society's trust and indifference to target an entire generation of marginalized young men.

We explore the complex psychology of a killer, the incredible survival story of a 16-year-old victim, and the systemic failure that allowed Peiry to claim up to eleven victims across multiple European borders. This is true crime through a cold, atmospheric, and distinctly different lens.

​In This Episode:

​** Cold Open**

Matt sets the 1980s horror scene, high in the Swiss Alps, contrasting the picturesque landscape with the terrifying reality of a hitchhiker stepping into a killer’s trap.

​** Introduction & Housekeeping**

Welcome back to Homocidal Tendency. Matt gives some quick updates and a shout-out to all the new listeners binging the backlog.

​** The Thumb and the Void: Hitchhiking in 1980s Europe**

A deep cultural search into the accepted (and now lost) culture of Swiss "ride-sharing" and the societal trust that created the perfect hunting ground.

​** Postcards from the Void: The Geography of a Killer**

A look at how Switzerland’s dramatic mountain passes and isolated rural regions provided both physical camouflage and logistical protection for Peiry’s crimes.

​** Shadows in the Snow: The Queer Reality of 1980s Switzerland**

Matt breaks down the legal and social climate of 1980s Switzerland, exploring the discriminatory age of consent laws and the impact of the AIDS crisis on the isolated, underground LGBTQ+ community.

​** The Mask of Normality: Michel Peiry’s Origins**

A deep search into Peiry’s early years, analyzing the complex collision of an abusive home life, intense social repression, and a twisted sexual awakening that created a calculating monster.

​** The Anatomy of Control: The M.O.**

Matt goes into detailed analysis of Peiry’s method, from the initial "lure" and manipulative connection to the horrific transition of control and the specific, sadistic rituals he used to torture and murder his victims.

​** The Ghosts of Europe: The Victims and the Missing Men**

Honoring the confirmed and suspected victims:

• ​Sylvestre (United States, 1981) - Missing
• ​Frédéric (France, 1984) - Victim
• ​Fabio (Switzerland, 1986) - Victim
• ​Cédric (Switzerland, 1986) - Victim
• ​Silvio (Yugoslavia, 1986) - Confessed/Missing
• ​Vincent (Switzerland, 1987) - Victim
• ​Yves Ath (Switzerland, 1986) - Survivor

​We also explore the potential links to the famous, unsolved "Mourmelon disappearances" in France.

​** The Silence of the Sirens: Systemic Indifference**

Matt breaks down the concept of the "less dead" and details how police homophobia, bureaucratic indifference, and societal erasure enabled a serial killer to operate in plain sight for six years.

​** The Botched Attack: A Survivor’s Victory**

The incredible, minute-by-minute story of 16-year-old Thomas, who was beaten and handcuffed before being thrown into a freezing river by Peiry. We follow his harrowing trek for survival that would ultimately lead to the killer's downfall.

​** The Takedown: Hiding in plain sight**

A deep dive into the manhunt and the shocking, almost surreal arrest of Michel Peiry—while he was in uniform, performing compulsory service at a Swiss military base in the Canton of Bern.

​** The Interrogation and Conviction**

The sterile chill of the Interrogation room. We cover Peiry’s cold, detached confessions, the psychological games he played, and the maximum-security prison (Bellechasse in Fribourg) where he is serving his life sentence today.

​** Conclusion: The Forgotten Monster**

Final thoughts on the case. We analyze why Peiry is not widely known internationally and the tragic lesson he leaves behind: that the greatest terror isn't the monster in the woods, but a society that refuses to look closer at the people who disappear.

​Connect with Homocidal Tendency:

• ​Instagram: Follow @HomocidalTendency for detailed episode visuals, maps, and archival photos from this case.
• ​BlueSky: We are on @Homocidaltendency for live updates and discussion on our upcoming episodes.
• ​TikTok: Check out @HomocidalTendency for mini-deep dives and atmospheric teasers.
• ​Listen Backlog: All 22 previous episodes, from the Bayou Strangler to current tales, are available for you to binge right now.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Picture the opening scene of every 80s slasher movie you've ever seen. It's past midnight. The road is pitch black and dead quiet. There's a lone guy standing on the shoulder, shivering, sticking his thumb out into the boy, just praying for a pair of headlights. You know exactly what happens next. The ominous van rolls up, the door slides open, and the base drops. But this isn't a movie set in a sleepy American suburb or in an abandoned summer camp. This is 1981. We are high in the pristine frozen passes of the Swiss Alps. A place famous for extreme wealth, absolute neutrality, and postcards so beautiful they look fake. It is, statistically, one of the safest places on Earth. A car pulls over. The driver rolls down the window. He isn't wearing a hockey mask. He's handsome. He's incredibly well dressed. He smiles a warm, disarming smile and offers a ride to get out of the biting cold. The young man in the cold, maybe he's a soldier on leave. Maybe he's just a kid looking for an escape, looking for someone who understands him. So he smiles back. He opens the passenger door. He gets in. And he's never seen alive again. Because beneath the postcar perfect snow of Switzerland, a predator is hunting. He knows exactly who Society ignores. He knows exactly who the police won't look for. First off, a massive thank you for everyone who has been finding and sharing the show recently. Whether you started with the Vayu Strangler or just found me with today's episode, I appreciate you hanging out with me here. And if you're digging the podcast, please take a few seconds to hit that subscribe button on whatever platform you're listening on right now. And if you don't mind, leave a five-star rating in review. It's the absolute best way to help the show grow and to let other true crime fans find it. Also, make sure you're following along on our socials. I'll be posting today's episode card, along with some gritty vintage visuals from the case, and the key locations that we're talking about today. All the links to our socials and the links to sources will be down in the show notes. Alright, that is it for the business things. Um, so let's turn down the lights, turn up the volume, and let's get into it. If you grew up in the US in the 80s and the 90s, you were probably taught that hitchhiking was basically a death witch. We had the high-profile adductions of the 70s, we had the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the media was constantly pushing the Stranger Danger panic. By the time the 80s rolled around in America, sticking your thumb out was seen as reckless. But Europe and specifically Switzerland, it was a different sort. In Switzerland during the early 80s, hitchhiking wasn't just for hippies or drifters. It was a legitimate, socially accepted form of public transit. In rural areas, they even had official ride training benches where you could sit and wait for a neighbor or a stranger to pick you up. It was built on a foundation of intense societal trust. You were living in a wealthy, neutral country with historically low crime. The idea that a serial killer was cruising the mountain passes, it just didn't compute. When you pictured the 1980s in Switzerland, your mind probably goes straight to the cliches. You think of James Bond's skiing down pristine sun-drenched ski slopes. You think of extreme wealth, secret bank accounts, glowing ski chalets, and a country completely insulated from the grit and grime of the rest of the world. But there is a flip side to that postcard. Roman is a town in a French-speaking Kenton. The name literally derives from Roundhill. It's an ancient elevated place built around a medieval castle. During the day, looking out from Ramon, you will see these incredible, sweeping layers of the valley backed by the jagged, snow-capped chains of the Alps. But at night, that dramatic geography changes from breathtaking to terrifying. Once you leave the glow of the towns, you're instantly swallowed by the landscape. The 1980s infrastructure in these rural cantons meant that it was a network of winding, narrow roads cutting through dense, ancient woods and deep valleys. There were very few streetlights. In the winter, the fog rolled in thick, and the temperature drops below freezing, and the darkness is absolute. Here, the environment can be the greatest accomplice to our serial killer. The isolated bus stops along the edge of the woods, quiet highways and the on-ramps, the desolate mountain passes connecting Switzerland to the rest of the continent, and the very things that made the landscape so idyllic, the untouched forest, the towering mountains, the sheer vastness of the rural landscape, it was the ultimate cover. And out on these roads, once you were in a stranger's car and the doors locked, there were no fences. But there was just the hum of the engine, the winding black asphalt, and the void of the mountains all around you. On paper, Switzerland looked incredibly progressive. They actually decriminalized same-sex activity nationwide way back in 1942. But here is the massive catch, and it's a catch that created the exact demographic that was hunted. While it was legal, the age of consent was not equal. For heterosexual couples, the age of consent was 16. For homosexual couples, it was 20. And that law didn't change until 1992. That meant if you were an 18 or a 19-year-old gay kid in 1981, you were legally a criminal if you acted on your own sexuality. This created a severe chilling effect. You had an entire generation of young gay men who were legally forced to hide. Furthermore, the authorities they weren't friendly, surprise, surprise. Throughout the mid-century, police in major Swiss cities were known to raid underground meeting spots and keep little registries of suspected homosexuals. So if you couldn't go to a club because you were underage, and you couldn't be open in your hometown because society was intensely conservative, then where did you go? You went to the margins. You met in public parks after dark, at Howie rest stops, or you hitched a ride to the French-speaking cantons, which where the culture was considered slightly more permissive than the strict German-speaking areas. Connection became something that only happened in transit, in secret, and in the dark. And then the 1980s arrived. In 1982, the first news of the AIDS crisis hit Switzerland. At the time, the press was calling it the gay cancer. Almost overnight, the small amount of progress that activists had made in the 70s was swallowed by an intense public fear and brutal social ostrification. Homophobia was practically at its its height. Men were losing their jobs, being kicked out by their families, and dying in hospitals without their partners being allowed in the room. Imagine the psychological weight of that era. You're young, you're criminalized by your own government, society views you as a walking plague, and your only outlet for human connection requires you to put your physical self in vulnerable situations. You stick your thumb out on a freezing road. Hope and the guy that pulls over is someone like you. When that stranger opened his passenger door, they weren't just offering a ride. They were offering a temporary sanctuary to men who had nowhere else to go. When these young men vanished, they didn't generate massive police searches or front rage news. Because in the eyes of the law and society in the 1980s, there were ghosts long before a killer ever got his hands on them. When we look for the origin stories of the monsters we talk about on the show, we usually were hunting for the obvious red flags. We want the comfort of knowing that evil is easy to spot. We look for the neighborhood outcast, the kid who was caught torturing animals in the woods, the teenager that everyone crosses the street to avoid. We want a neon sign that says warning. Something is wrong here. But sometimes, the scariest thing is a person can be perfectly, utterly normal. Let's go back to 1959, to the canton of Friar. A boy is born in what looks like from the outside, like a standard, respectable, working class Swiss family. But behind the closed doors of that home, the reality is incredibly dark. The boy grows up under the heavy hand of a violently abusive father. He learns that violence doesn't happen just in the dark alleys, it happens quietly in the living room. Behind the respectable facade of a family home. He learns how to keep his secrets, he learns how to wear a mask. And as he hits his teen years in the 1970s, he realizes he has a massive secret of his own. Growing up in the deep conservative traditions of rural Switzerland, he realizes he's gay. And we've already talked about how suffocating that cultural climate was. There's no space for him to explore who he was. There's no safety. He is forced to bury his identity under a suffocating layer of shame and the absolute terror of societal rejection. This intense repression acts like a pressure cooker, and during his formative years, a specific spark is thrown into that pressure. Through his own later omissions, we know his sexual awakening didn't come from a normal, healthy teenage crush. It came from discovering a magazine left behind somewhere, a magazine that depicted intense bondage and sadomasochism. For a teenager whose brain is already conditioned by a violent father and who already associates his own desires with deep shame, this imagery doesn't just arouse him. It fundamentally rewires his developing brain. In his mind, sexual gratification and physical violence become permanently fused together. He literally can't separate the two. But he's a master at wearing his mask. He enters his early twenties. He's handsome, he's impeccably clean-cut, he holds down a study job, he's polite to his elders, and he's generally well liked by everyone in his town. He even completes his compulsory service in the Swiss military with flying colors, learning discipline and weapons training without ever raising a single red flag to his superiors. He's the perfect Swiss citizen. He's the guy you would proudly introduce to your parents. No one sees the boiling, violent fantasies that he's struggling to control. He knows he cannot act on these urges in his daily life without destroying his flawless that he's spent 20 years building. He needs an outlet. He needs to find people who won't be missed. And in 1981, at the age of 22, in the mask, it finally slips. The clean-cut young man that we're talking about is Michelle Perry. And the terrifying reign of the Setus of Roman was about to begin. When we break down the modus operandi of a serial killer, we're looking at their signature. We're looking at the specific calculated steps they take to gain control. And Michelle Paris, his MO was a masterclass in psychological manipulation and absolute terrifying control. He didn't stalk his victims through the woods like a movie monster. He didn't break into the homes in the dead of the night. Paris' hunting ground was the passenger seat of his own car. Let's walk through the anatomy of a typical attack. Phase one was the lore, and it relied entirely on that flawless mask of normality that we talked about. Carey would cruise the highways, the remote bus stops, and the mountain passes late at night. He was specifically looking for young men who were alone. Hitchhackers, runaway kids, soldiers trying to get back to the base. He would pull over. He was well dressed, spoke softly, and drove a clean, reliable car. He was the pitcher of Swiss safety. The victim would get in, grateful to be out of the biting cold, entirely unaware that they had just stepped into the mobile torture chamber of a psychopath. Phase two was the transition. As they drove, Caree would engage in casual conversation. He would ask them about their lives, where they were headed, making them feel seen and comfortable, but he was assessing them. Slowly, the route would change. He wouldn't take the main highway. He would turn off onto the narrow, winding forest roads. The streetlights, they would vanish. Imagine the creeping sense of dread. You're in a stranger's car. The warm heater is blowing. But the darkness outside the windows is absolute. You ask where you're going. He smiles and says he knows a shortcut. Phase three was the trap. Karee would pull the car over in a completely desolate location in the deep woods, or an abandoned gravel pit, or an empty military firing ranch. It was here that the polite, handsome young man vanished, and the Sadis of Ramont took the wheel. The violence didn't start in a frenzy, it was methodical. Perry would often pull a weapon like a knife or a gun to establish immediate dominance. He would force the victim to strip, stripping away their dignity and leaving them entirely exposed to the freezing alpine air. Then came the restraints. This is where Paris' deeply ingrained statomasochistic urges took over. He brought specialized bindings with him. He would tie them up securely, ensuring they couldn't fight back or run. The horror for these young men wasn't a sudden quick end. It was an agonizing realization that they were completely trapped, completely isolated, and at the mercy of a man who was getting a thrill from their terror. Part four was the execution. I won't detail every gruesome injury on the show, but we have to understand the sheer brutality of what happened in the woods. Korea didn't just kill, he tortured them. He beat them, he slashed them, and in several instances, he burned them alive. The suffering was the point. He was finally acting out the violent fantasies that had been boiling inside him for a decade. He would prolong their agony for hours before finally ending their lives, usually through strangulation or stabbing. Or being burned alive. Phase five was the final phase, the disposal of the people. Perry was cold and calculated. He rarely left the bodies where they died. He would load them into the trunk and use the geography of Europe to his advantage. He had dumped bodies across borders, leaving remains in rural France or Italy, or in the deep Swiss underbrush, where the snow would hide them until the spring thought. He scattered his victims like discarded trash, washed the blood out of his car, put his perfectly pressed clothes back on, and drove back to his normal life, leaving behind a trail of ghosts that wouldn't even be noticed for years to come. When we talk about serial killers, it's dangerously easy to let the monster become the main character. We get caught up in the psychology, the geography, and the gruesome details. But on homicidal tendency, we never want to lose sight of the fact that every single name on that killer's list was a human being, with a family, a future, and a life that was violently stolen. Michelle Perry is officially convicted of five runners, but he's been linked to and occasionally confessed to up to 11. And because he hunted transient men across multiple international borders, the true number of his victims may never be known. Let's talk about the men he took from us. His first known victim wasn't even killed in Europe. While traveling, Perie met a young Canadian man named Sylvester. Sylvester vanished without a trace on September 1st, 1981. Paris would later confess to his murder, but then retracted, and then confess again in his manipulative game. He would play this game with authorities regarding almost all of his victims. After returning to Europe, the violence only escalated. On February 4, 1984, he murdered a young man named Frederick in France. In June 1985, he deviated from his usual profile and murdered his only known female victim in southern France. Perie couldn't even remember her exact name. He told the police it was Anne Lori, Flora perhaps, and Flora. The callousness of not even remembering the name of someone who murdered is staggering. In May 1986, Perry claimed his first known Swiss victim, a young man named Cedric, whose body was dumped in the isolated mountain regions of LA. During the summer of 1986, Perry turned his car into a roving nightmare across Europe. He traveled to Yugoslavia and confessed to murdering a man named Silvio near present-day Croatia. Just weeks later, in August, he was back in Switzerland. He picked up a young hitchhiker named Fabio and subjected him to his signature terrifying MO. By November of that year, Marie attacked a man named Eve. I'm a little sketch on the way that is pronounced, but I looked it up, and that's what good old Google told me. So we'll we'll run with it. Hopefully it's respectable. Eve was subjected to unthinkable sexual violence and torture, but miraculously, he survived. In March 1987, another victim, a young man named Vincent, was found in a horrifying escalation of Korea's violence. Vincent's body had been burnt. A month later, in April 1987, Paris struck in the Como region of Italy, killing a young Frenchman. And finally, on April 24th, 1987, he attacked a young man named Thomas, who fought back and survived the encounter, eventually leading to Paris' downfall. But the confirmed names only tell part of the story. The geography of Paris' crimes opened up a massive, terrifying black hole of missing persons cases. During the early and mid-80s, Paris frequently spent time around a military camp in the Due region of France, right near the Swiss border. This is critical because it overlaps with one of the most infamous unsolved mysteries in French history, the Montmalin disappearance. Over a span of several years, multiple young males' conscripts simply vanished from military bases in that specific region. Because Perry was known to target young men, and because he was actually hunting in that exact area, he became a prime suspect. Ultimately, the police could never definitely tie Perry to the missing shoulders of Montmalon, and due to the lack of physical evidence, the leads were abandoned by 1990. But when you look at the timeline, the locations, and the specific demographic of the men who vanished, it's a chilling coincidence. How many other young men walking alone on the dark European roads got into a car with a handsome, smiling Swiss man and were just never seen again. In the world of true crime, criminologists and sociologists use a term that is heartbreaking and it's interraging. And I've had to say it way too many times on the show. They call it the Lex Dead. It refers to victims who were marginalized by society, and they could have been sex workers, unhoused people, addicts. And as we said many times before, the horrific reality of the Lester is that when they go missing, the alarms don't sound, the helicopters don't launch, the front pages of the newspapers don't run their photos, society just collectively shrugs. Michelle Perry didn't just understand this concept, he built his entire hunting strategy around it. If a young, wealthy Swiss heiress had vanished from a luxury ski resort, it would have been an international media frenzy. The police would have locked down the borders. But Perry wasn't hunting heiresses, he was taking young men who were his. Hiking. He was thinking soldiers on leave, drifters and burkids who were already living in the shadows. When these men vanished, the systematic indifference was immediate and definite. First, you have the immediate assumptions made by the authorities. When a hitchhiker goes missing, the easy administrative answer is that they simply moved on. They're a drifter, they went to another country, they cut ties with their family, case closed. There was no push to investigate further because the victim's lifestyles were viewed as inherently unstable. Then you have the jurisdictional nightmare. Paris was brilliant at using the geography of Europe to weaponize the police bureaucracy. He would pick someone up in Switzerland, torture them in the woods, and then maybe dump their body in France or Italy. In the 1980s, before centralized European databases and instant digital communication, police departments across these borders, they weren't talking to each other. A missing person report in Switzerland was never cross-referenced with an unidentified body found in France. The dots were there, but they were never on the same piece of paper. But the darkest layer of this indifference comes back to the deep-seated homophobia of the area. On the rare occasions when the police did suspect foul play, crimes involving the queer community were often aggressively dismissed. If a gay man was found murdered, it was frequently written off by the investigator as surprise, surprise, a lover's quarrel, or the enabled jolt of a defiant, deviant underground lifestyle. The police didn't want to venture into the gay cruising spots or the underground network to ask questions because they view the community with suspicion and disgust. And remember the timeline. This is the mid-80s. The AIDS epidemic is tearing through Europe. The mainstream media and conservative governments were actually fueling public panic and moral outrage against the gay community. Society was aggressively looking the other way. Michelle Ferry's greatest accomplice wasn't the mountain roads or the freezing weather. His greatest accomplice was a society that simply did not care about these men. They didn't care they were disappearing. The authorities essentially handed him a blank check to keep killing, because they refused to acknowledge the value of the lives that he was taking. There's a dangerous point in the timeline of almost every serial killer. It's the point where they cross over from cautious to arrogant. When you've been hunting for six years, crossing international borders, leaving a trail of bodies, and the police haven't even knocked on your door, you start to think you're invincible. You start to get sloppy. By April of 1987, Michel Perry believed he was untouchable. He was moving faster, the gaps between his attacks were shrinking, and his confidence was about to be his undoing. Let's jump to April 24, 1987. We are in Luzon, a beautiful city sitting right on the edge of Lake Geneva. A sixteen-year-old kid named Thomas is standing on the side of the road. He's just trying to get home to his parents' house in the suburbs. It's getting late, the temperature is dropping, and he does what any young guy in Switzerland does in the eighties. He sticks his thumb out. A car pulls over. The driver is a sharply dressed, handsome twenty-eight-year-old man. He smiles. Thomas gets in. And then almost immediately the script flips. Paris doesn't take the route towards Thomas' home. He steers the car out of Luzon, taking the dark, windy road towards Echelon, and then further out towards the rural district of Adon. The streetlights disappear. The houses vanish. They're out in the absolute darkness of the Swiss countryside. When Paris finally stops the car, the polite mask is completely gone. The attack on Thomas is brutally fast. Paris drags the 16-year-old out of the car. He beats him viciously, disordering the kid before snapping a pair of heavy handcuffs onto his wrist. He subjects Thomas to a horrific, agonizing ordeal, playing out the same dark, sadomestic rituals that he had forced upon his other victims that we talked about earlier. But then Pari makes his fatal mistake. Maybe he was tired, maybe he was rushed, or maybe he just genuinely believed the elements would do his dirty work for him. After the attack, Pari drags Thomas' beaten, bound body to the edge of a freezing, rushing river, and throws him in. Pari walks back to his car, washes the blood off his hands, turns the heater on, and drives away. In his mind, Thomas is victim whatever. Just another body that the water will carry away, or the freezing temperatures will f will finish off. He didn't realize who he was dealing with. Thomas is sixteen years old. He had just survived a nightmare. He's handcuffed, he's severely beaten. The freezing water of the river is actually pulling the heat out of his core. Hypothermia is setting in by the second. Everything in his body is telling him to close his eyes and give up. But Thomas Thomas refuses to die in the dark. Somehow, he manages to keep his head above the water, with his hands bound, fighting the current and the agonizing pain of his injuries. He drags himself up the muddy, freezing bank of the river. He doesn't know exactly where he is. There's no lights, there's no traffic, but he forces himself to stand up, and he starts to walk. In the pitch black of rural Switzerland, bleeding, freezing, and in absolute shock, Thomas walks for two solid kilometers, over a mile, putting one foot in front of another, propelled by nothing but the sure adrenaline and the will to live. Eventually the dark shapes of buildings start to appear. He has stumbled into the tiny village of Solids. He manages to find a house. He throws himself against the door. The person who opens the door is a local educator. What they see standing on their porch is the bloodied, freezing, handcuffed teenager who had just crawled out of hell. The authorities are called immediately, and for the first time in six years, the police have something they've never had before. They have a living witness. They have a timeline. And they have the description of a handsome, well-dressed Swiss man with a monster hiding behind his eyes. The Sadis of Roman has finally left a survivor and the clock is ticking. For six years, the Sadis of Roman had been a ghost. He struck in the dark, moved across borders, and relied on a society that looked the other way to clean up his messes. But when sixteen-year-old Thomas dragged himself out of that freezing river, he didn't just survive. He blew Michelle Perry's perfect cover to pieces. The authorities, they had the one thing they had been missing since 1981, a physical description of the monster. Thomas was able to tell them everything. He described the car, he described the handcuffs, but most importantly, he described the man. Handsome, late twenties, immaculately dressed, a polite, articulate Swiss citizen. In the United States, finding one man with a vague description can be like finding a needle in a haystack. But Switzerland is small. Its population in 1987 was about 6.5 million people, and the police were specifically looking for a local in the French-speaking cantons who fit a very precise, very clean clap profile. The manhunt was fast and it was quiet. The authorities didn't want to alert the killer that they had found a survivor. They cross-referenced vehicle registrations, local records, and the description Thomas provided. There's also accounts that Harie's brothers turned him in, so I mean take it with a grain of salt. But it didn't take long for the name Michelle Paris to hit the top of the suspect list. He fit the age, he fit the physical profile. But when the police went looking for him at his home, he wasn't there. He hadn't fled the country though. He hadn't gone off the grid to hide in the mountains. Michelle Perry was in plain sight, doing the absolute most respectable, deeply Swiss thing a young man could do. As we said, in Switzerland, military service is compulsory. After your initial training, you were required to attend regular refresher courses. Michelle Perry, the man who had just spent the last six years torturing and murdering young men across Europe, was currently serving in the Swiss military. He was wearing a uniform, carrying a government-issued assault rifle, and surrounded by hundreds of other young men. Think about the terrifying irony of that, the ultimate predator hiding perfectly inside the machinery of the state. On May 1st, 1987, exactly one week after he threw Thomas into the freezing river, the manhunt had come to a sudden anticlimatic end. The police arrived at the military base and burned. There was no high speed chase. There was no shootout in the Alps. Michel Perry was pulled from his military booties and placed under arrest. The other soldiers, his commanders, and the people who lived in the hometown of Ramon, they were suddenly stunned. To them, the police were dragging away a model citizen, a polite, handsome young man who did what he was told and served his country. They couldn't reconcile the face they knew with the charges the police were bringing against them. But as the detective saturie down in the interrogation room, still wearing his military fatigues, the mask of the perfect Swiss citizen finally shattered completely. The ghost had a name. And he was about to start talking. When a serial killer is finally caught, there's usually one or two reactions in the interrogation room. They either deny everything and demand a lawyer, or the pressure breaks them and they collapse into tears and excuses. Michelle Perri didn't either. When the detective sat him down and presented the evidence, the survivor, the car, the timeline, Perry didn't panic. He simply just took off his mask. The polite, respectable Swiss soldier vanished, and what was left sitting in that chair was cold, detached, and utterly empty. Pare started to talk, and he didn't just confess about the attack on Thomas. He began unrolling a map of horrors that stretched across an entire decade and multiple international borders. But what terrified the seasoned detectives wasn't the body count, it was how he talked about it. There was no remorse, there was no empathy for the young men whose lives he destroyed. He described them not as human beings, but as props in his own twisted, sadomasochistic theater. He admitted that his urges were completely out of his control, fueled by his abusive childhood and the violent imagery that had warped his repressed sexuality. But then the calculated way he haunted these men proved that he was in total control of his actions. And then the psychological games began. Burry realized that his confessions were the only power he had left. So he began to toy with the investigators. He would casually confess to a murder in France, giving chillingly accurate details, then a week later he would retract it. He claimed up to eleven victims, including a young Canadian man in the United States and the hitchhiker in Yugoslavia. But he kept the police running in circles, dangling the identities of these busy men just out of reach, ensuring he remained the center of attention. Because of the complex international timeline and Peria's constant retraction of his confessions, building the final case took time. But in 1989, Michel Parri finally stood trial. The courtroom was packed. The Swiss public completely unaccustomed to this level of sensationalism. American style true crime horror, we would say. They were mesmerized and disgusted. The media had finally dubbed him the sadist of Roman. Paris sat in the docket looking exactly like the clean-cut citizen he had always pretended to be. But the illusion was dead. The prosecutors systematically dismantled his defense. They didn't just try him for the murders. They exposed the calculated predatory nature of how he used the Swiss highway system and the marginalization of his victims to his advantage. At the end of the trial, the court didn't buy the defense that his violent urges made him legally insane or unaccountable. They recognized him for exactly what he was: a highly organized sadistic killer. In Switzerland, there is no death penalty. The absolute maximum sentence the justice system can hand down is life in prison. Michelle Perry was found guilty of five counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder, and numerous counts of abduction and sexual violence. The judge handed down the maximum sentence. Perry was locked away. The monster was finally in a cage. But as the trial ended and the media packed up their cameras, the families of the known victims and the families of the men who simply vanished into the dark European nights were left with a void that no court sentence could ever fill. When you think of the notorious solo killers of the 1970s and 80s, certain names immediately come to mind. You think of Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer. They have endless documentaries, podcasts dedicated to them, their faces are burned into our collective pop culture memory. But outside of Switzerland and parts of France, the name Michel Paris draws a blank. The citizen Roman is effectively a ghost in the international true crime world. But why is that? Why did a man who tortured and murdered his way across Europe for six years completely fade into obscurity? The answer comes down to two very dark, very uncomfortable truths. First, there's the Swiss PR machine. Swiss's entire global identity is built upon being safe, neutral, and pristine. A high-profile, deeply sexistic killer operating in their beautiful mountains completely shattered that illusion. Once Furrier was locked away, the authorities and the media were more than happy to let the story die. They buried him to protect the postcard. But the second reason, and the one that really matters, it goes right back to who his victims were. They were the hitchhikers, they were runaways, and crucially, many of them were young queermen living in an era that actively hated them. Society was already trying to erase the LGBTQ community in the 80s. When Michel Paris started physically erasing them, the world simply didn't care enough to remember their names. The silence that surrounds the case today is exactly the silence that allowed him to keep killing back in 1981. The legacy of Michel Perry isn't a story of berreliant police work or a thrilling manhunt. It's a tragic lesson in what happens when society decides that certain people are disposable. And as we close the book on the Sadis of Raman, I don't want you to remember the well-dressed man in a military uniform. I want you to remember the young guy standing on the side of the Freezing Mountain Road, just looking for a ride, looking for a connection, and looking for a safe place in the world that refused to give them one. And that's gonna do it for this episode of Palmo Sunno Tennancy. If you want to see some of the vintage atmospheric visuals from today's case, head over and follow the show on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter slash X, and Blue Sky. A massive thank you to everyone that's been leaving reviews and sharing the show. It really is the best way to keep this indie podcast growing. Until next time, stay safe out there. Keep your doors locked, and remember, the scariest monsters, they rarely hide in the woods.