ABSTRACT
At one o’clock in the morning on 5 October 1994, investigating judge André Piller was serving a stint as night duty officer in the Judge’s Registry in Fribourg, Switzerland, when the telephone rang. “It was the police,” Piller told us later. “They said, ‘Your intervention is requested at Cheiry for a fire.’” Half an hour after the phone call, Piller arrived in Cheiry, a hamlet about thirty kilometers southwest of Fribourg. On a hill overlooking the village, the barn of La Rochette farm was completely engulfed in flames. While volunteer firemen tried to save the structure, Piller and his colleagues entered the farmhouse. They quickly found that this was no ordinary fire. Canisters of propane and garbage bags full of gasoline sat hooked up to detonation devices that hadn’t gone offyet. Then, Piller reported, “We saw this Monsieur with a plastic bag over his head. Albert Giacobino. We said to ourselves at first that this could be-could be! Conditional!—a suicide with a fire.” There were only two problems with this hypothesis: although Giacobino had apparently been killed by a bullet to the brain, there was no gun near the body, and no hole in the plastic bag.
