Have you been dying for a new story from Lorna Poplak? Well, here it is!
“Off With His Head” is the true crime tale of German serial killer Eugen Weidmann, the last person to be publicly executed in ‘La Belle’ France, eighty years ago.
Recorded for a “Murder Was The Case” podcast, the radio play features Lorna Poplak, Lee Mellor, Nate Hendley, and Jacqueline Rendell.
Off With His Head
Written by: Lorna Poplak
Produced by: Lee Mellor
Read an excerpt:
Lorna: Summer 1939. As the clouds of war roiled over Europe, its citizens shimmied and jitterbugged and made whoopee. Life Magazine called it the most brilliant social season since 1914. People danced to “Deep Purple” in London, flocked to midnight concerts in Stockholm, and ogled “undressed” Czech refugee girls in Warsaw nightclubs. In the early morning of June 17, a crowd gathered outside the green door of St. Pierre Prison in the French city of Versailles to watch a different type of show, growing increasingly impatient when the performance was delayed — they “whistled and stamped and jeered like an ill-behaved movie audience.” As Life put it:
Newscaster voice: “Hundreds of Frenchmen and women had come fresh from late-closing cafes of Montmartre and Montparnasse to experience the exquisite excitement of seeing a man have his head cut off.”
Lorna: The man of the moment was thirty-one-year-old German serial murderer Eugen (Eugène to the French) Weidmann, who looked pale and haggard as he was hustled out by prison officials to the guillotine rigged up on the sidewalk.
By 4:30, as dawn lit up the now-silent spectators, it was all over…..
