MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories
Sep 21, 2026 · 37 min · 18 segments
One morning in January 1990, a man walked into a police station in Marseille, France, clutching a newspaper. He went up to the desk, and said he’d seen a sketch of a murder suspect in the paper that…
At 5:00 PM on May 18th, 1988, a 71-year-old hospital director named Leon Smouha carried his briefcase through the halls of the medical clinic that he owned in the city of Marseille, France.
He was about to go home after a long, stressful day of business calls and paperwork.
As he walked, he passed by various doctors and nurses who were all hard at work, and they all, you know, when they saw Leonce, they would nod at him, and Leonce, he would nod back.
And, and at some point, Leonce turned a corner into the lobby, where he saw several security officers and guard dogs were stationed right by the entrance, and they were screening each person that came inside.
Now, Leonce knew that to some people, the security in this clinic might seem like overkill.
He was a businessman, and he'd gone into private healthcare because it was very lucrative.
There was now a lot of governmental red tape that made it nearly impossible to open new clinics in Marseille.
So existing clinic owners actually had to buy other already operational clinics if they wanted to expand their businesses.
And over the past few years, one of Leonce's primary competitors, a doctor named Jean Jarach, who owned a lot of other private clinics in Marseille, had become really, really aggressive about trying to buy Leonce.
And when he did retire, he'd considered leaving his clinic to his daughter, Catherine.
She was a doctor, and she had a head for business, so Leonce thought she might be interested in taking things over versus, you know, a private sale.
But despite expressing his intentions to Jarach, Jarach had continued to pressure Leonce and try to get him to sell, and Leonce was becoming afraid of just how far his fierce competitor would go to get what he wanted.
After all, Leonce knew that Jarach was really powerful and very well connected in town, and there were even rumors that he had ties to organized crime.
And so out of an abundance of caution that really came from this general tension/fear with Jarach, Leonce had installed all of these security measures, the cameras, the, the hired guards, the dogs.
He'd even replaced the windows in his office with a one-way mirror so nobody could spy on him.
And so even though Leonce, to some degree, believed he was, he was doing all this to, to protect the people that worked for him, it still caused a lot of tension between Leonce and his employees.
And because his staff clearly thought he was becoming paranoid and sort of wacky, it made him lash out at his staff, and he distrusted everybody around him.
He was sort of like this, this grumpy old man, and he knew that a lot of the doctors probably wished he would just retire already, that he was becoming sort of a nuisance, even though to him, he was just being a responsible business owner.
At 5:00 PM on May 18th, 1988, a 71-year-old hospital director named Leon Smouha carried his briefcase through the halls of the medical clinic that he owned in the city of Marseille, France.
He was about to go home after a long, stressful day of business calls and paperwork.
As he walked, he passed by various doctors and nurses who were all hard at work, and they all, you know, when they saw Leonce, they would nod at him, and Leonce, he would nod back.
And, and at some point, Leonce turned a corner into the lobby, where he saw several security officers and guard dogs were stationed right by the entrance, and they were screening each person that came inside.
Now, Leonce knew that to some people, the security in this clinic might seem like overkill.
He was a businessman, and he'd gone into private healthcare because it was very lucrative.
There was now a lot of governmental red tape that made it nearly impossible to open new clinics in Marseille.
So existing clinic owners actually had to buy other already operational clinics if they wanted to expand their businesses.
And over the past few years, one of Leonce's primary competitors, a doctor named Jean Jarach, who owned a lot of other private clinics in Marseille, had become really, really aggressive about trying to buy Leonce.
And when he did retire, he'd considered leaving his clinic to his daughter, Catherine.
She was a doctor, and she had a head for business, so Leonce thought she might be interested in taking things over versus, you know, a private sale.
But despite expressing his intentions to Jarach, Jarach had continued to pressure Leonce and try to get him to sell, and Leonce was becoming afraid of just how far his fierce competitor would go to get what he wanted.
After all, Leonce knew that Jarach was really powerful and very well connected in town, and there were even rumors that he had ties to organized crime.
And so out of an abundance of caution that really came from this general tension/fear with Jarach, Leonce had installed all of these security measures, the cameras, the, the hired guards, the dogs.
He'd even replaced the windows in his office with a one-way mirror so nobody could spy on him.
And so even though Leonce, to some degree, believed he was, he was doing all this to, to protect the people that worked for him, it still caused a lot of tension between Leonce and his employees.
And because his staff clearly thought he was becoming paranoid and sort of wacky, it made him lash out at his staff, and he distrusted everybody around him.
He was sort of like this, this grumpy old man, and he knew that a lot of the doctors probably wished he would just retire already, that he was becoming sort of a nuisance, even though to him, he was just being a responsible business owner.
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