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On the morning of May 17th 2014, a detective furiously scribbled notes as she sat next to the hospital bed of a mortally injured 77-year-old woman.
This woman had been in a coma for the last 10 days and the detective had been desperately working to figure out who had tried to kill her.
And now that the woman had woken up, the detective was finally getting the chance she'd been waiting for to ask her victim directly what happened.
But right as the woman was about to say something, she stopped.
Her eyes were wide with panic, and she just told the detective that she was afraid.
She did have a lot to say and she wanted to say it to police, but she said she couldn't say it here, not at the hospital.
And then she looked around one more time and just told the detective she was still in danger.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast, because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, please take the follow button out for a beach day, but make sure you first replace their sunscreen with cooking oil.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
Late in the afternoon on May 6th 2014, 77-year-old Helene Pastor sat at her office desk in Monaco with her beloved dog Belle, at her feet and a phone pressed to her ear.
On the other end was one of Helene's many tenants, doing what they did best, which was complain.
This time, there was a problem with their water heater and the plumber was late.
Helene listened patiently because she was a landlord and that was her job.
But when her tenant was finished, Helene told them in a soft but firm voice that the plumber would be there eventually and they were not too important to wait.
Then she hung up.
Now, Helene knew her tenant would not like that comment, but she also didn't have patience for entitled wealthy snobs.
But, unfortunately for her, she actually spent a lot of time with people like that, because Helene was actually the single richest woman in Monaco and therefore attracted a lot of these people.
So monaco is a country located on the mediterranean coast and it's surrounded on three sides by france, so the two countries share a lot of cultural similarities.
But monaco is very small, just under a mile wide, and has only about 39 000 citizens, and many of those citizens are incredibly wealthy.
It's essentially a country of millionaires and billionaires living in luxury condos and high-rises that cover the entire tiny coastline, And Helene and her family, the Pastors, owned most of those condos, which meant they had thousands of high-income tenants and were among the wealthiest landlords on the planet.
The Pastors' multi-billion-dollar real estate empire had begun three generations earlier and Helene was now in charge of it.
Now it was obviously a ton of work and Helene theoretically could pass it off to somebody else to do, but she was a pastor and pastors worked for what they had, which was why Helene was a very hands-on landlord and spent long days in her office with her staff dealing with accounting and handling tenants' requests.
Now Helene leaned back in her chair to scratch her dog Belle's head and she watched as Belle closed her eyes and suddenly Helene felt the urge to do the same thing.
However, she still needed to call her daughter, Sylvia, before she left for the day.
Sylvia was 53 and had been diagnosed with breast cancer two years earlier, so Helene naturally worried about her a lot and made sure to check in on her daily.
Helene reached for the phone again and dialed Sylvia's number.
When she heard her daughter say hello on the other end, Helene asked her how she was feeling.
But Sylvia said she couldn't talk because her massage therapist had just arrived.
So she excused herself and hung up.
Helene stared at the receiver as the dial tone blared through it, trying hard not to feel hurt.
It was moments like these where Helene wondered if her own daughter even liked her.
But deep down, Helene knew exactly who to actually blame here, Silvia's boyfriend, Wojciech.
Silvia had been with Wojciech for almost three decades and it seemed like everybody in Monaco absolutely loved him.
He was charming and gregarious and gave a ton of money to charity.
But Helene had always felt like there was something off about him and she worried that he was taking advantage of her daughter's famous last name.
But she couldn't bring herself to actually tell Sylvia about her suspicions, so instead they had a lot of unspoken tension, which caused lots of little arguments.
Helene looked over at the time, then stood and smoothed out her Chanel suit.
She needed to get on with it if she wanted to see her son, Gildo, tonight.
Gildo had been at the hospital for the last few months after having a stroke, and so Helene visited him daily, making the 45-minute drive from Monaco to where he was hospitalized in Nice, France.
Now the daily commute was a lot, especially because Helene was always so busy, but she never even considered doing anything else.
Gilda was 47 years old, but he was still her child, and the whole ordeal had been awful and emotional for Helene, especially on top of Sylvia's cancer diagnosis.
Seeing her children suffer like this had reminded Helene that money really couldn't save you from everything, even in Monaco.
Helene grabbed her very expensive Hermes purse and told her dog Belle it was time to go.
Helene and Belle walked out the door of her office and climbed into a black minivan that was waiting on the curb.
As soon as Helene slid into the back seat, she was greeted by her 64-year-old driver, Mohamed Darwich.
Mohamed had been working with Helene for the past 15 years and while he primarily was her driver, he also did cooking and other things and basically whatever Helene needed, which sometimes was just to be a friend.
And that's really what she needed today.
So the two spent the 45-minute drive to Nice talking about their kids.
Helene filled him in on Sylvia's cold shoulder that day and how she was also feeling relieved that Gildo might be released from the hospital soon.
Then Mohamed told her about how he was missing his own daughter, who lived back in Egypt with her mom.
And he also updated Helene on his son, Wassam, and how he liked living in France.
Their conversation made the drive go a lot faster.
Before Helene knew it, they were at the hospital.
By about 6 p.m. that night, Aline was sitting by Gildo's bedside helping him drink some water.
Like his mother, Gildo had been both blessed and cursed with the pastor work ethic.
Despite all the family money, Gildo was constantly starting new ventures and investing in businesses.
His latest thing was a new electric racing car and he really wanted to focus on it, but obviously he couldn't because he was in the hospital.
And Helene knew that.
She knew that this hospitalization had been really hard for him, not just physically but, you know, sort of emotionally.
He wanted to get back to work.
Gilda was awake and alert, but he was still partially paralyzed, and he couldn't speak very well.
Helene sat with her son, talking to him and checking him with his doctors, and after about an hour she kissed his forehead and told him she would see him soon.
Just after 7 p.m., Helene left the hospital and walked over to the minivan where Mohamed was.
She climbed into the front passenger seat this time because Belle had stretched out in the back seat.
Mohamed started the car and began making his way out of the lot towards the busy streets of Nice.
The exit was very congested, with cars trying to get around one another and pedestrians kept crossing the street.
But eventually Mohamed was finally able to pull out of the lot and turn right before pretty much immediately getting stopped again by traffic.
Helene simply leaned back in her seat and just let the noise outside fade to a blur, as she tried to just accept that she'd be in traffic for a while and so she should just relax.
But as soon as she put her head back, suddenly something out her window caught her eye.
It was a person jogging straight towards them.
This person had a hat pulled down low around their eyes so Helene didn't know who it was.
But then she saw what they were holding and immediately she screamed at Mohamed to drive.
But before Mohamed could react, Helene heard a loud bang and the sound of shattering glass.
Then Helene was dimly aware of the pedestrians all around the car screaming, before she heard another bang, and then everything went black.
About 15 minutes later, the commissioner of the Nice police, Philippe Frisson, pulled up to the hospital with the sirens on.
He'd been in his office about to finish up for the day when he had heard a call about potential shots fired, but he had no idea how serious it was.
So when he got to the scene, he parked and jumped out of his car.
And the first thing he saw was this big crowd of people gathered on the street right across from the hospital.
And they all appeared to be staring at this parked black minivan with Monaco plates and a shattered passenger side window.
Brisson jogged over.
He was the first officer on the scene, but a firefighter standing by the minivan told him a few details based on what he'd seen and what the crowd had been saying.
Apparently, a man dressed in black had come out of nowhere on foot and fired two shots into the minivan, hitting both the man and the woman who were inside, both in the head.
There had been a dog in the car, but it was uninjured.
The shooter had disappeared back into the crowd and witnesses saw a second man, also dressed in black, follow after him.
The firefighter said the two victims had been rushed to the hospital and were clearly in critical condition, but beyond knowing it was a man and a woman, he had no other information on their identities.
Immediately, Frisson's mind went to carjacking.
Nice didn't have a huge amount of crime, but one of its more common issues was something called the car door grab, which was when criminals would target cars stuck in traffic for robbery.
He wondered if maybe the carjackers, in an effort to rob this car, had somehow gotten flustered or something had happened which caused them to open fire.
And then they quickly realized the area was far too crowded to just get away, so they abandoned their robbery and just disappeared.
Frisson radioed back to the station for backup.
A crime like this clearly needed more officers than just him.
And when Frisson got through to the dispatcher, not only did she say she would dispatch more officers, but also she had some new information the identities of the two victims.
And the reason she already had their identities is because one of the two victims was incredibly famous.
The woman who had been shot was the Helene Pastor, and the other victim was her driver, Mohamed Darwich.
Frisson instantly froze, because of course he knew Helene Pasteur's name.
Everyone did.
She was the matriarch of the Pasteur dynasty, who owned most of Monaco.
She not only had billions of dollars, but she had connections to Monaco's actual royal family.
And so, even though Frisson had been on the force for over 30 years by this point, when he heard this new piece of critical information suddenly he felt nervous.
This was going to be by far the most high-profile case he had ever worked.
And also now that he knew the identities of his victims, his theory of what actually happened here completely changed.
There was no way the richest woman in Monaco just happened to be targeted by random carjackers.
This had to be a hit.
Frisson got off his radio and walked over to the minivan and looked inside.
He could see there was a purse on the dashboard covered in glass shards, and this solidified his belief that this was no robbery.
But then he noticed something else.
The front seats were covered in all these little holes, these little punctures, almost like somebody had fired a BB gun repeatedly into the seat.
But Frisson knew what this actually meant.
He was looking at the blast from a shotgun.
And this struck Frisson as being very strange.
A shotgun was just an odd weapon to use if this really was a hit, because it was big and bulky.
I mean, you really couldn't carry it around in public without attracting a lot of attention.
And so if you were a skilled hitman, a shotgun is not your first choice for a weapon.
And so this fact, combined with the broad daylight approach, told Frisson that whoever had shot Helene and her driver was likely not an experienced hitman but an amateur, which was not what he would have expected.
Just then, Frisson heard police sirens cut through the air.
His backup had arrived.
Minutes later, the scene was surrounded by dozens of uniformed officers, crime scene tape and technicians who were gathering swabs and other evidence from inside the van.
The witness reports were hugely helpful, but Frisson also wanted to check if there was surveillance in the area.
So when he was done taking statements, he pulled another officer aside and asked him to go look for CCTV cameras.
So in France, many cities and towns have what's called closed circuit television in outdoor public places, which is a network of surveillance video that law enforcement can access.
Nice has more of these cameras than any city in France.
So Frisson was hopeful they'd find at least one camera that caught the attack.
And so the officer hurried off to go look, and Frisson decided to head back to the station while the crime scene techs finished processing the scene.
After all, it was getting late and he needed to meet with his team and make a game plan.
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A few hours later, Frisson was back at the station talking to his team, which now included one of the city's very best detectives, investigator Catherine Messonnier.
At this point, both of their victims, Mohamed and Helene, were in comas, and their attack was already the leading news all around Europe.
The actual Prince of Monaco had already issued a statement of support for the Pastors.
But Frisson wasn't worried.
Of course there'd be pressure.
But he knew he would have some answers soon, because police had already found two CCTV cameras at the scene that likely recorded the whole shooting.
And so Frisson was waiting on that footage, but in the meantime he wanted to speak to Helene's immediate family and friends to see if maybe she had any enemies.
Helene's children, Sylvia and Gildo, would likely know if there was anybody who wanted their mother dead.
But Frisson also knew that Sylvia and Gildo were not just sources of information.
They were also suspects.
Now, Frisson did not have access to the details of Helene's estate, but he knew enough about the family to guess that whatever inheritance Helene left behind was likely in the billions.
Which meant her death would likely make Sylvia and Gildo billionaires.
Now, Frisson didn't think that either of them had actually pulled the trigger.
To start with, the shooters were apparently male, and Sylvia was a woman.
And secondly, Gildo was in the hospital, but he was very unwell after his stroke.
However, what Frisson did think was that both of these siblings had the motive and certainly the means to hire somebody else to do the shooting on their behalf.
However, Frisson had one big problem.
Silvia and Gildo, and all of the people he wanted to speak to, lived in Monaco.
Since Frisson and his team were French and his crime had happened in France, they had no jurisdiction there.
They could not just walk up to citizens of Monaco, especially very notable citizens like the Pastors, and demand an interview.
So, in order to talk to Helene's children and her inner circle, they really couldn't even imply that they were suspects.
They had to treat them really nicely and just hope they cooperate.
The next morning Frisson sat inside of a very expensive-looking living room in one of the Pasteur's many Monaco apartment buildings.
He had been up all night and was basically running on pure adrenaline.
But he hoped it was worth it.
Because across from him, on the other couch, was Helene's daughter Sylvia, and her 64-year-old boyfriend Wojciech.
A large white dog paced around them.
It was Helene's dog, who had been in the car during the shooting.
When Frisson had reached out to Silvia and Wojciech for this interview, they were both eager to give it.
And now, sitting here face to face with them, it seemed fairly obvious that they were completely devastated by what happened.
Silvia appeared to be somewhere between shock and panic, but appeared to be doing everything she could to try to stay calm.
She kept taking deep breaths and looking out the living room window at the view of the Monaco harbor.
As for Wojciech, he kept a hand on hers at all times, although Frisson couldn't tell if the gesture was protective or possessive.
Frisson wanted to tread carefully here, because Sylvia and Wojciech could actually just kick him out at any moment and he couldn't do anything about it.
And the last thing he needed was a headline that said the French police were bullying the Pastors.
So he started with just some light background questions about Helene.
And in a shaking voice, Sylvia described her mother as tough, but incredibly generous.
She admitted that she and her mom actually did fight a lot, but it was just over silly things and they were actually very close.
She said Helene called her frequently because Sylvia had been battling breast cancer and her mother liked to check in and make sure she was okay with her treatment.
When Frisson asked her about enemies, Sylvia shook her head.
She said that her mother tended to keep to herself and didn't typically engage with the Monaco social scene, and so the idea that somebody would want to hurt her just didn't make sense.
Wojciech seemed equally mystified.
He told Frisson that he and Sylvia had been together for 28 years and they had a daughter together.
And so he knew Helene very well, and she was a very involved grandmother.
And so he said that he and Helene had always had a great relationship.
And you know he said that she had always been very generous with his family financially, even though he had his own businesses and income separate from the pastores.
The mention of finances made Frisson perk up.
He stopped Wojciech and asked him to be a bit more specific about Helene's financial generosity.
And that's when he noticed a look of uncertainty cross Wojciech's face.
For a second, Frisson wondered if he had touched on a sore spot.
But Wojciech recovered quickly and with an easy smile he explained that Helene gave both Gildo and also Silvia a monthly allowance of about 500000 euros each, which is about 600000 US dollars.
When Frisson heard this, he had to force himself not to raise his eyebrows.
That was a staggering amount of money to get every month.
It was so high, in fact, that it actually made Frisson doubt whether either of Helene's kids would feel a need to kill her.
But Wojciech wasn't done.
He cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably in his seat before saying that he and Sylvia used the money Helene gave them on household expenses.
But if he was being honest, he'd heard that Gildo had spent his money on other stuff.
Wojciech said that Sylvia's brother owned some companies that were not doing well, so he was presumably very deep in debt.
And this, for Frisson, opened a new investigatory door.
He jotted down this information on his notepad.
He was meeting with Gildo next and, if Wojciech was right, the debt was a huge red flag and made Gildo look like a pretty good suspect.
The detective spoke to the couple for a bit longer, but they didn't have much else to say.
So, eventually, Frisson thanked them for their time, and he got up to go.
When Frisson walked into Gildo's hospital room 45 minutes later, he was shocked by what he saw.
He had known that Gildo was sick, but he hadn't been prepared for just how sick.
Gildo could barely move or speak.
In fact, the only way he could reasonably communicate was by blinking.
And so Frisson sat down at his bedside and started with a few simple questions.
It took a long time for Gildo to blink out his answers, and he also couldn't communicate anything more than maybe a few words at a time.
And so it was obvious very quickly that, due to this communication, snafu Frisson wasn't going to get much and Gildo was very frustrated.
Frisson left the hospital not long after he'd arrived.
And while Gildo's actual answers had not been very helpful, Frisson did still leave that meeting with some useful information.
And that was not only was it fairly obvious that Gildo simply could not have been the one pulling the trigger just physically, but also it was clear he wasn't in any shape to be planning a hired hit.
I mean, he could barely communicate with Frisson.
However, Frisson thought that it was still possible that maybe Gildo had begun preparations before his stroke, which had only happened two months earlier in March.
And Frisson realized the amateurish quality of the hit itself could have been a product of Gildo's illness.
He hadn't had the chance to fully make sure everything was perfect and ready to go.
So far, to Frisson, this case was full of contradictions.
One of the single richest people on the planet had almost been assassinated by shockingly unprofessional hitmen.
Both of the victim's children clearly stood to inherit an enormous amount of money and were therefore the most obvious suspects.
But one of the children Sylvia, did not seem to need the money, based on how much she was getting every month from Helene, and the other child Gildo, was so physically ill that he couldn't even speak.
And so Frisson began to wonder about Sylvia's boyfriend, Wojciech.
Maybe he could have planned the hit.
Because he, and not Sylvia, wanted access to Helene's money.
Frisson pulled out his phone and called the other detective, the very skilled detective named Catherine Messinio.
And he told her about all the issues surrounding Sylvia and Gildo as suspects.
Messinio agreed with Frisson, and then she also shared something with him that she had learned during her own interviews about Wojciech.
She said that one of Helene's friends told her that Sylvia had been with Wojciech for so long without getting married because Sylvia wanted to make sure her inheritance went to her own bloodline, not an outsider.
Frisson considered what this meant.
It told him that Sylvia did not completely trust Wojciech.
But it also tanked his theory that Boychuk might have planned the hit, since he had zero claim to the Pastore estate, whether Helene was alive or not.
But then Messinio said something else that made Frisson stop thinking about the Pastores completely.
Messinio said she had found something out about Helene's driver, Mohamed.
Mohamed was apparently involved in a love triangle and had been for years.
He was from Egypt and had a family there, but he also had a mistress here.
And Messinio had gotten the number for Mohamed's adult son who lived with him in France, so they could speak to him about it.
As Frisson hung up the phone, his mind reeled.
This whole time, he had thought it was so obvious who the target of the hit was, Helene.
But now, he was wondering if maybe he had been wrong.
That afternoon, Frisson was back at the station with Massinio.
It had been 24 hours since the shooting, and still, neither of the detectives had slept.
But Frisson didn't think they'd be able to do that anytime soon because the CCTV footage had just arrived.
And Frisson was putting a lot of hope into this footage because it felt like every lead he'd tried to follow in this case so far had hit some kind of a dead end.
Frisson had just gotten off the phone with Mohammed's son Wissam, who he had hoped might shed some light on the possibility that Mohammed was the intended target of the attack.
But Wissam had been skeptical.
He didn't think his father's love triangle lead meant much.
He said the mistress had actually been a part of Mohammed's life for a long time and, believe it or not, nobody was particularly upset about it.
Now, Wissam was a young and healthy man, so theoretically he could have been one of the shooters, but Frisson hadn't heard anything in their call that made him think Wissam would want to kill his father, or Helene for that matter.
And so Frisson and Massinio began scrolling through the CCTV footage, looking for any clue that could point them in some new direction.
And when they got to the point in the recording where the actual shooting happened, they were relieved to see that they had a clear view.
They watched the shooting play out on the screen, just like all the witnesses had described.
Helene's car turned out of the hospital parking lot, then a man with a shotgun approached her window and fired twice.
Frisson also could see.
There was a second man who watched the whole thing from across the street at a snack bar, who most likely was acting as a lookout.
Both of these men ran away on foot, and their faces were not visible in the footage.
And so Frisson rewound the tape to see when the men arrived, which he found was about 20 minutes before the shooting.
But when he saw how these men arrived, his jaw dropped because finally he'd found a really good lead that he could follow.
Both men were separately driven to the scene in taxis.
Frisson paused the tape and turned to Massinio in total shock.
In 30 years of working in law enforcement he had never seen or heard of a criminal arriving at a crime scene just very casually in a taxi, like they were meeting somebody for lunch.
And there was a reason for this.
Because on the CCTV footage there was a huge piece of evidence that was now clearly visible to the detectives.
One of the taxi's license plates.
And so Frison smiled and told Messinio they needed to make a phone call.
That evening, Frison Messinio and a group of officers rushed into the lobby of the Hotel Azur in Nice.
In Frison's hands was a photo of both of the shooters.
After calling the taxi company, everything had moved really fast.
The taxi dispatch had a record of the rides and gave detectives the mobile numbers used to book each cab.
It hadn't taken long for Frisson's team to connect those numbers to two burner phones that were purchased just hours before the shooting at a store about two hours away from the hospital in a French city called Marseille.
The police were able to access the CCTVs near that store and literally watch the shooters leave with their phones and catch a train to Nice.
And, best of all, one of the cameras at the train station gave the police a very clear shot of the shooters' faces.
Neither of them were Helene's or Mohamed's relatives, which didn't surprise Frisson, since he was sure this had to be a hired hit, even if it was sloppy.
But in order to find out who masterminded this attack, he needed to ID these two shooters, which was why he was now at this hotel.
CCTV footage had shown that once the shooters got to Nice, they stopped at the Hotel Azur before getting taxis to the hospital.
So Frisson approached the reception desk with the picture and asked the person manning it if they had seen the men in the photo.
The person seemed confused, but he said yes, those men had rented two separate rooms the day before, but they had already left.
Frisson wrote down the names the receptionist gave him, but neither were familiar.
Then he and Massinio split up to go search the rooms.
Moments later, Frisson and some officers hurried into a very clean hotel room.
The teller at the front desk had told him that this would be the case.
The maids had already been in and out of these rooms.
But actually seeing it cleaned up was still very disappointing for Frisson.
If there had been any evidence here, it likely had been thrown out with the cleaning service.
But just then, he heard an officer call out from the bathroom.
Frisson went in there and he found one of his officers pointing to the shower where a used bottle of shower gel was sitting on the side of the tub.
Frisson couldn't believe it.
He knew no other guests had been in these rooms, since the shooters had been, which meant that gel was one of theirs.
The maid must have just missed it during the cleaning.
Frisson told the officer to bag it.
It was a long shot, but he wanted to get it sent to a lab and tested right away for DNA.
Maybe it could lead them to one of their shooters.
They left the hotel soon after, at which point Frisson decided it was time to finally get some sleep.
On May 16, 2014, investigators Frisson and Massinio paced around Frisson's office.
Every now and then, they would glance over at a document that was laying on his desk.
It had only been 10 days since Helene and her driver Mohamed, were shot outside a hospital in Nice, France.
Helene was still alive and in a coma, but Mohamed had died, which made Frisson the official lead of a murder investigation, which was daunting.
But Friesan felt like they were close to breaking this case because the document sitting on his desk right now told him that the shower gel they collected during a search of the shooter's hotel rooms actually did have DNA on it and it had matched to somebody in their system a 24-year-old man named Samin Saeed Ahmed.
And then, through a series of phone taps, they'd managed to figure out the name of Samin's accomplice, a 31-year-old man named Al-Hayir Hamadi.
The names were different from the ones the hotel had given Frisson, so the men must have used pseudonyms when they checked in.
Both of them had prior criminal records and, like Frisson had suspected, they were not professional killers, just petty criminals and drug dealers from a neighborhood in Marseille that had the highest crime rate in the country.
So it made sense that these two men from that area might have agreed to carry out a hit for money.
But what didn't make sense to Frisson or Massinio was how Samin, Syed Ahmed or Al-Hayr Hamadi could possibly be connected to anyone in Helene's life.
The pastors in their inner circle were literally some of the richest people in the world.
If any of them were planning a hit, Frisson would have expected them to hire more experienced and professional assassins, because they just had the means to do it.
And so now Frisson wondered if maybe they needed to look deeper into other areas of Helene's life, like her tenants, to see if anyone had obvious connections to Marseille.
He knew from speaking to Helene's friends that she had handled many of her tenants personally and it was possible there was a feud or dispute that they didn't know about.
But thousands of people lived in Helene's buildings.
Going through that list would be nearly impossible, which was why Frisson and Massinio had decided that the best way to approach this whole thing was with a method Frisson called the fishing rod.
Instead of arresting the shooters Samin and Al-Hayr, they would watch them and keep their phones tapped and see if they led police to whoever hired them.
And while they were figuring all this out, Friesan's phone rang.
And when he picked it up, the news on the other end changed their case yet again.
It was the hospital.
Helene had woken up from her coma.
First thing the next morning, Frisson sent Messinio to the hospital to interview Helene, then waited anxiously at the station for her to return.
He was hoping Helene could simply tell Messinio who it was that shot her and then they could close out the case.
But when Messinio came back that afternoon, she didn't have good news.
Apparently, Helene had told Messinio that she was terrified and had lots of things she wanted to say to the police, and she seemed to be on the verge of actually giving Messinio a name, but then she started struggling to breathe and literally couldn't finish her sentence.
Messinio said that at that moment the medical staff rushed in and they were able to stabilize Helene, but they weren't able to continue the interview.
Frisson was so disappointed.
They'd been so close to maybe hearing the truth directly from the victim, and now they might never know.
And he was right, because four days later, on May 21st, still without having finished that interview, Helene Pastore died.
Two weeks later, in early June, Frisson parked his car and walked inside the station to start his day.
He was incredibly anxious because Helene and Mohamed's case had stagnated and Helene's death only made the pressure on him and his team even more intense.
The public in both France and Monaco were demanding answers, and so too were Helene's family and also members of the royal family.
Frisson still had his team watching the shooters and tracing their phone calls, but so far they hadn't gotten any more leads from that.
They were also working down that huge list of Helene's tenants, but hadn't found anyone with the kind of motive they were looking for.
Now that didn't mean they wouldn't, but right now none of the people they were seeing fit as suspects.
Now, Frisson had not totally eliminated his very first suspects Gildo, Silvia and Wojciech, but Frisson just didn't feel like any of them stood out above the rest.
Now Gildo potentially needed some big windfall because of alleged money problems, although Frison had not actually confirmed that with bank records.
But Gildo's very poor health made it basically impossible for him to have been one of the shooters and also made it extremely unlikely he could have orchestrated the hit.
There was Silvia, who also got a big inheritance from Helene's death, but she already had a massive monthly allowance when her mother was alive and it just didn't seem like she was desperate for cash.
As for Wojciech, he wasn't married to Silvia, so he had no legal claim to the pastor estate.
So Helene's death didn't do him any good.
Plus, he also benefited from the massive allowance that Silvia got because they were a couple.
Now, all of this would be cleared up if Frisson could look at the pastor's finances and see who actually needed a payday.
But Helene's inner circle lived by different rules than the average person.
They were some of the richest people in the world, and their status and money insulated them from almost everything, even the law.
Basically because of their status, they didn't have to share their personal information with the police.
And all of this was swirling around Frisson's head as he stepped inside the station.
But as soon as he did, he saw Messinio hurrying towards him with a piece of paper in her hand.
It was covered in lines of numbers that Frisson right away recognized as a call log.
And Messinio explained that they had traced one of Al-Hayr's recent calls and finally found a link to Monaco.
The guy he called was somebody named Pascal Doriac and, unlike the shooters, Pascal had direct ties to Monaco.
He was a personal trainer and some of his clients were elite families who lived there, and a few of those clients were also people that Frisson and his team had examined in connection with the murders.
Brisson grabbed a piece of paper and read and re-read its contents before he looked back up at Massinio.
They needed Pascal's phone records right now.
Because if they could see who Pascal regularly called and when, they might be able to figure out who ordered the hit.
Later that day, Frisson sat at his desk staring at a name written on a piece of paper.
He had gotten access to Pascal's phone records and discovered that every time there had been a significant event in this case, like the actual shooting or the days of Mohamed or Helene's death Pascal had texted the same number.
And now that Frisson knew who that number belonged to, he realized he had been at least half right this whole time.
Because in Monaco, everything really was about money.
Based on the police investigation, multiple confessions, video surveillance and bank records.
Here is a reconstruction of what police believe happened to Helene Pastore and Mohamed Darwich on the evening of May 6 2014.
On that day, around 7 p.m., the hitman named Sameen Saeed Ahmed strode towards Helene's black van.
He could see her terrified face through the passenger side window as she screamed at her driver to drive.
But before the driver could hit the gas, Sameen raised a shotgun and fired twice into the passenger side door.
He watched as Helene and Mohammed convulsed from the force of the blasts.
He didn't know the people he had just shot, but he wasn't thinking about that.
Samin was thinking about the payday he was about to receive for having shot these people.
Once Helene and Mohammed slumped over in their seats, Samin turned and sprinted in the other direction as fast as he could, knowing that his accomplice al-Hayyir, would follow shortly after.
As Samin ran, he pulled his baseball hat down over his eyes, hoping that would be enough to avoid any cameras that might be in the area.
He ran through the streets of Nice, eventually slowing to a walk before getting to his hotel.
Once inside, he sat down on his bed to call the man who had hired him.
Somewhere across the city.
Pascal Doriak heard his phone ring and he told the client he was with that he'd be right back.
He then hurried out of the personal gym he had been in and stepped into a marble hallway before picking up the call.
Then, he listened as Samin told him the good news.
The job was done.
Pascal smiled and ended the call and noticed that, for the first time in months, his hands had stopped shaking.
Even though he originally had been hired to actually carry out the hit on Helene, he wasn't a killer.
He didn't have the kind of money his clients did, but he'd been part of their world for a long time, so he knew if you don't want to do something yourself, you get somebody else to do it.
And now it was all over, and it sounded like everything had gone according to plan.
So Pascal looked down at his phone and texted the real killer, that is, the person who'd actually ordered the hit in the first place.
Seconds later, the real killer heard their phone buzz as a text came in.
The sound made their heart pound.
They knew it was their trainer Pascal, and so they were incredibly nervous as they picked up the phone to read the message.
But when the real killer read what it said, they just smiled, feeling a sense of relief wash over them that they hadn't felt in years, because their plan had worked.
Then they sank back into their comfy, expensive couch and looked out their window at an amazing view of the Monaco Harbor.
It would turn out, Sylvia's boyfriend of 28 years, Wojciech Janowski, was lying about everything, because it was Wojciech, not Gildo, who was drowning in debt.
Wojciech claimed to be the successful businessman, but really all the companies he was involved in were failing and in deep financial trouble.
And this had been going on for years.
Wojciech had been swindling his girlfriend Silvia out of her assets and monthly allowance just to stay afloat.
And when Silvia was diagnosed with cancer two years ago, he panicked.
They weren't married, so if Silvia died, he'd lose everything.
He believed, if Sylvia inherited the family fortune all at once, he could steal it from her and wipe out his debts before she died.
Wojciech had also lied to investigators about his relationship with Helene.
In truth, they hated each other.
And Helene was very suspicious that Wojciech was after the Pastor family fortune.
That's why she had told the police she was afraid when she woke up from her coma.
She was afraid of Wojciech.
In 2018, Wojciech was found guilty of murdering both Helene and Mohamed and sentenced to life in prison.
The other accomplices, Pascal Doriak, Samin Saeed Ahmed and Al-Hayr Hamadi, all received between 22 years and life in prison.
Gildo eventually recovered from his stroke and moved to the United States, while Sylvia would give Mohamed's son a job and would let his family live in one of her properties.
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.
Our head of production is Zach Levitt, produced by Jeremy Bone.
This episode was written by Zeth Lundy.
Research and fact-checking by Shelley Hsu, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway and Camille Callahan.
Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear.
Audio editing and post-produced by Wit Lacascio and Cole Lacascio.
Additional audio editing by Jordan Stidham.
Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain.
Production coordination by Samantha Collins.
Production support by Antonio Minata and Delaina Corley.
Artwork by Jessica Clogston-Kiner.
Theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden.
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