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This is exactly right. Listen up. I'm Lisa Traeger. And I'm Cara Clank. And we're the hosts of the true crime comedy podcast, That's Messed Up, an SVU podcast. Every Tuesday, we break down an episode of Law & Order SVU, the true crime it's based on, and we chat with an actor from the episode.
Over the past few years, we've chatted with series icons like BD Wong, Kelly Giddish, Danny Pino, and guest stars like Padgett Brewster and Matthew Lillard. And just like an SVU marathon, you can jump in anywhere. Don't miss new episodes every Tuesday. Follow That's Messed Up, an SVU podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. Dun-dun! A crisp winter's night in the grounds of Verona Palace, mid-1950s. Two burly men in thick overcoats trudge through the long grass.
Their breath creates huge clouds of vapour in the sharp cold air. Their flashlights pick out a small stone building hidden among the trees. Vrana's a wild place now. The beautiful tree-lined avenues planted by the king are straggly and overgrown. The flower beds choked with weeds and garbage. The men take spades from the toolshed
and start to dig. There's a large stone slab set in the grass. They lever it up and with some difficulty, they haul it to one side. The light from their flashlights flickers, but you can just about make out the inscription chiseled into the weathered stone. It reads: "King Boris III".
This is the grave of the last crowned king of Bulgaria, a victim of poisoning. And these men? They're grave robbers. They work for the new residents of Vrana Palace, the new rulers of Bulgaria, the communists, under Russian-Soviet control. Grave robbers usually look for gold or jewels.
Not these grave robbers though. They're after something much more precious. The body. Why steal a corpse unless you're afraid it's got something to hide? Did the Soviets fear they were about to be exposed for the murder of King Boris? From Blanchard House and Exactly Right Media, this is The Butterfly King. I'm Becky Milligan.
Oh yes, what do you want? Do you want... Well, I think we've finally discovered a nice biscuit. Yeah.
Yeah, the eagle has landed. Here we are. I'll take one you haven't fingered, if that's okay. Oh! Just all this talk of poison, I'm afraid. I need to take my own biscuit. So we're back in Sofia, Bulgaria's capital, in my producer E.J.'s hotel room, and we're taking stock of our day over tea and biscuits. It's a British custom, of course.
though not necessarily one the Bulgarians have mastered. These biscuits taste of air. I like them. It's like, oh, sorry, it's like flour. It's my carpet. Well, they taste... They are a bit floury. I'll give you that. They're a bit floury. Oh my God, they're just coating the inside of my mouth. As well as the biscuits, we're also trying to chew over what we know about the case so far.
You can sort of cross countries off as you're going along. You know, I was convinced that it was Nazis, without a doubt, you know, on the plane with oxygen masks, "Ooh, bit of poison," or, you know, snake venom. And as we've gone along, we've just crossed off each theory, and then there's been another twist and another twist. But now we have a fresh lead on who may have killed the king, thanks to a top-secret decoded telegram we unearthed in the archives.
It points the finger of blame, fairly and squarely, at Stalin's Soviet Union, the communists who occupied Bulgaria in 1944, a year after Boris's death, and promptly turned the country red. So I think it narrows it. Do you know where the communist embassy was? Russia. Don't tell me. Next to the palace. Spot on. Yeah. Yeah.
So you could have dug a tunnel under... Well, you just popped in. Yeah. There'll be more twists, more twists and turns to come. So was it the Soviets who killed Boris? And if so, why? To help us investigate this case, we have the best witnesses you could hope for, King Boris's children...
I mean, I don't say this lightly, but it does feel quite a privilege to have actually sat down with them. They agreed to do it and to talk about it.
so candidly about how the hell their father died. I agree. I mean, and was he murdered? And, you know, it's obviously they've been consumed with it for years and years and years. Both of them think it wasn't normal. He didn't die a natural death. You can just tell. Their faces tell you that and they want to know what happened. And they're so with it. I mean, more with it than I was, actually. But anyway. Well, not very much. Have another biscuit. But anyway, it's all very intriguing.
OK, so let's talk about the Soviet Union and the tyrannical Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. Stalin dreamt of spreading communism across Eastern Europe and of creating a buffer of territory there to protect the motherland, the Soviet Union. Little Bulgaria was right at that crossroads between East and West, sandwiched between Romania and Greece.
a vital foothold for anyone trying to consolidate their power in the region. So Stalin really wanted to control it. The only problem was that there was a king in the way. A very popular king. That's why Boris has been killed. Hang on. Let's hear that again. That's why Boris has been killed. OK. Deep breath.
Before we unpick this bombshell, let me remind you that's George Bozdeganov, Bulgaria's leading historian. You might remember he's the academic who sometimes gets a little frustrated with me when I can't keep up with the minutiae of Balkan politics. But you heard him as well as I did. He believes the Soviets needed King Boris out of the way.
to fulfil an age-old Russian dream of empire expansion. And Boris was the annoying sort of obstacle who was blocking the route, so... Listen, listen to me a little bit. Sorry, I'll let Mr Bozdeganov tell you himself. King Boris, the only one buffer to Stalin's ambitions to take Bulgaria...
It's a very old Russian ambition, from the time of Catherine the Great in Russia to centuries before Stalin. I need this spelled out clearly. Who do you think murdered King Boris? My personal opinion is that the Russian special services killed King Boris. Russian special services. Stalin's special services killed him.
So if we believe Mr. Bozdikhanov, the power-hungry Soviets decided to get the king out of the way. And guess what happens a year after Boris is murdered? On the 5th of September 1944, the Soviet Union declares war on Bulgaria. Five days later, Stalin's Red Army rolls into Sofia. They meet with no resistance.
Many Bulgarians welcome the Soviets as liberators. Don't forget, Nazi troops have been stationed in Bulgaria because King Boris had made an alliance with Hitler. The Soviets team up with communist dissidents in Bulgaria. The new Red Regime wastes no time in securing power, and they sweep away their opponents. Ruthlessly, thousands are sentenced to death.
Not just those who'd supported the Nazis, but basically anyone who didn't support them. Like the royals. The remaining royals, that is. Now, after Boris dies, little Simeon is on the throne. But it goes without saying, a child can't really run a country. So there are three regents who rule for him. One of the regents is Boris's prime minister.
Another is a high-ranking general in the Bulgarian army. And the third is King Boris's brother, Prince Kirill. Yeah, get rid of him, because he's going to be a thorn in your side. Our historian Tessa Dunlop could see it coming, because a few months after occupying Bulgaria, the Communists rounded up the regents, then took them to a bomb crater in Sofia Cemetery.
and shot them all dead. Ruthless. And if the Soviets could shoot a king's brother in cold blood, doesn't it stand to reason that they could murder a king too? But despite their successful power grab, something was making the Reds uneasy. Or should I say some won?
because the Soviets felt haunted by a ghost from the past, a ghost who continued to make his presence felt from beyond the grave. We're at the place where King Boris was buried. After a memorial service in Sofia, the railway men carried his coffin to the station.
His body was then taken by train here, to the beautiful Rila Monastery high up in the Bulgarian mountains. The sound of the single bell is plain and modest, but the building is extraordinarily ornate. It's shaped in a sort of polygon with black and white archways, striped like candy.
And inside... It's just amazing, don't you think? Oh, blown away. I mean, it's just, it's really difficult to convey just how remarkable it is, how ornate every single bit of it is covered with frescoes, which are sort of a dirty pink and blue and... Oxblood. Yeah, beautiful. Absolutely.
That noise you can hear is the monastery being cleaned and polished. The huge gold chandelier gleams so brightly it actually makes you squint. It's like looking into the sun. Rila is a fitting resting place for a king.
But the Soviets didn't see it that way. They wanted to erase Boris from the collective memory, because even after the Soviet occupation, thousands of people still came to pray at Boris's tomb, as if it were a shrine. He was a hero to so many Bulgarians, and that didn't please the Communists. They wanted Bulgaria's regal past dead and buried, once and for all.
So in 1946, they exhumed King Boris and told his widow, Queen Giovanna, to rebury him somewhere else, somewhere private. Maria Luisa was 13 years old and Simeon IX when their father's body was returned again to Vrana Palace. It was deeply traumatic. Hideous, hideous. It was Holy Thursday and my mother was told they'll bring him back.
tomorrow morning. So mother called some of the gardeners, found a little spot and had the hole dug in the garden and at dawn a van arrived with a coffin. The royal children remember shivering in the half light, partly from the cold but partly from sheer terror. They were still living in Vrana but the Soviets had put them under house arrest, cut off from the outside world.
Obviously, communists did things always in the dark. That's part of their system, you know, so the people don't see it. So they brought the coffin and the coffin was, of course, with a little glass window. And so we children saw our papa three years after he had died. It wasn't easy. And then they buried him there. And Mama then asked a little chapel to be built on top of it.
Of course, it would have been easy for Stalin to order the assassination of the remaining royals. He'd done away with Boris's brother and quite possibly with Boris himself too. But the Soviets knew how popular the royals were. Murdering the royal children was just too risky. So they played it softly, softly.
When you're an occupying force, you want to take the hearts and minds with you to an extent. There's got to be a sort of air of respectability. Our historian, Tessa Dunlop. I mean, how much opposition do you get from a six-year-old? I get quite a lot of opposition from mine, actually. But, you know, in real political terms, Boris was a big hero.
So why would you butcher his son, his little delicate piece of progeny? Why wouldn't you just keep that politically emasculated as a fig leaf of respectability to smooth over your accession to power or takeover of power, which is what the communists did?
So once their takeover of power is secure, the Soviets find a better way of getting rid of Simeon and his mother and sister. They send them into exile in Egypt. And as soon as the royal family move out of Rana Palace, communist leaders move in. It'll be 50 years before Simeon and Maria Luisa see their home again. But even with the royal family now thousands of miles away,
The communists can't let their beef with royalty rest there. In fact, they can't let Boris rest at all. Let's nip back to Vrana Palace for a second. The king's charming aide, Yavor, has something to show us. A crime scene, but on the way, a little digression. Are you getting chilly? It is a bit chilly. Only my hair is cold.
How far is the cemetery? The cemetery is here. Oh, perfect. Yavor is taking us to a little clearing in the woodland. And in the long grass, there's a small collection of flagstone graves, the resting place of some other short-lived members of the royal household, four-legged ones. He is born in May 1923 and died in 1923.
in May 1926. This is quite common, isn't it, to have a dog's cemetery in royal palaces, actually. I think the queen definitely did have one and now King Charles. This is also in Bulgarian, but this is in Latin. Right. Bubi. Bubi. I like the name Bubi.
The communists clearly didn't have a problem with royal pets. Lovely. So there are four here, aren't there, all together? One, two, three, four, five. Five. And the big one? The big one is interesting. It's not a dog. Oh, right. Yeah. It's a horse of King Boris. King Boris's horse. Yes. Oh, how lovely. And King Simeon had one cat. It's Bubu. Oh, Bubu. The tradition continues. Yes, it does.
Moving on from the pet cemetery, we arrive at the crime scene I mentioned: King Boris's grave. And while all the pets have headstones, there's nothing now at Vrana to mark the grave of King Boris III, because the graves empty. In the 1950s, a few years after they'd ordered the king's body to be reburied from the Rila monastery to Vrana, the communists did something extraordinary.
They decided to exhume the king again. Remember where we started this episode? Sometime in the 1950s, in the dead of night, the Communists dug up Boris's body. They removed it from its resting place in the gardens of Vrana Palace and took it away. Where to is anyone's guess. Now, by the 1950s, Stalin's Red Army had long since left Bulgaria.
They marched back home in 1947. But the new communist leadership that was established in Sofia wasn't just loyal to Moscow. It was basically a satellite of the Soviet Union. When Stalin said jump, Bulgaria just asked how high. So did Stalin order the second exhumation because he was afraid the Soviet Union might be found out for the murder of the king?
Was he trying to destroy the evidence by stealing the king's corpse and disposing of it? And remember that little chapel? Maria Luisa told us it had been built over the grave to mark her father's tomb. At first, the communists used it as a toolshed. And then it was blown up. Over the years, Maria Luisa and Simeon have tried desperately to find out what happened to their beloved father's remains.
Maria Luisa even managed to trace the Bulgarian soldiers who dug up the grave. I was told that there were some soldiers that were taken out of the body from the tomb here in the garden. And I definitely didn't ask to see these poor wretches, because they are not the ones who did it, you know. They were ordered. And God knows what could have happened to their families if I ever...
confronted them. You know, don't forget that in Bulgaria, until a few years, there were still some of the old people around, some of the old communists, you know. And I would never have anybody disappear or get punished. And it is a total mystery what they did with my father's body. But the story didn't end there. Many years later, it took an even more sinister turn.
In 1991, after the fall of communism, a dirty glass jar was found in a medical institute in Sofia. Inside it was a human heart, preserved
A royal human heart. It survived because it was checked and it is Papa's heart. I mean, there's no doubt about it. So when it was found, of course, some people had to parade it. Heart of the King. And my poor mother saw it on the newspaper, which is totally unnecessary. Why did the Soviets preserve the King's heart? As a trophy? A souvenir of their heinous crime?
It's not altogether unknown for a monarch to have his mortal remains divided. Louis XIV of France had his body buried in one Parisian church, while his heart was interred at Notre Dame Cathedral. But Queen Giovanna certainly didn't ask for this to happen to her husband, King Boris. So who removed his heart? And why then hide that heart? Unless you fear it contains proof of a poisonous secret.
Now, when I began this investigation, everyone I spoke to told me to listen closely to Maria Luisa. Because while King Simeon has to toe the line of diplomacy, she can speak her mind more freely about who she believes killed her father. So I'm going to test that theory now and put Maria Luisa on the spot. Do you have any gut feeling of who it was?
I think I can leave that to you by deduction. Who had the greatest advantage to get rid of him? It's a nail-biting moment. I desperately want Maria Luisa to tell me who she thinks murdered her father. So I say nothing and wait. And then... In my soul, I see the only people who had really an advantage of getting rid of him because they were there a year later. The Soviet Union.
There we have it. Maria Luisa is convinced the Soviets killed her father. And not only that, she's sure they spent the next 50 years rewriting history and covering up the evidence. Don't forget that when they occupied us, they took the whole entire Bulgarian archives, state archives, and they're still in Moscow. They were never returned. Bulgaria has asked for them. They never came back.
Could the proof lie in Moscow, in the archives of the Russian secret services, the KGB? Nobody can get to those. Because that could be quite interesting. Yes. I can't rule out anything. I think we've now established the Soviets had a very clear motive for killing Boris. As for the means, well, Russian assassins have long had a love affair with poison.
They have no morals or scruples. They have no limits. Colonel Hamish de Breton-Gordon is our chemical weapons expert. He told us about the nerve agents that the Nazis were developing in the war. But it turns out that the Germans were novices compared to the Soviets. You know, most of the poisons that we're talking about, the most knowledge we have about assassination is, again, coming from the Russians, the Russian secret service.
In the last few decades, there have been several high-profile poisoning cases involving the Russian secret services. Russian dissidents have been attacked with deadly nerve agents and chemical weapons like ricin, polonium and Novichok, and with chilling success. And unlike snake venom, which has to be injected to kill someone, nerve agents can work their way through the skin.
Some are so powerful, you just need to brush against them to suffer serious consequences. As the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, found out in 2020. With Navalny, there's a view actually that the nerve agent was putting his pants, his underpants, and that's how it got into him.
Now, King Boris was a canny politician. So despite Bulgaria officially being an enemy of the Soviet Union, remember Bulgaria was allied with Germany, Boris had managed to keep up diplomatic relations with Stalin. And that meant the Russian embassy stayed open throughout the war, right next door to the royal palace.
It wouldn't have been difficult for the Russians to sneak in poison on a door handle, perhaps in food, maybe even in documents or letters. And before you remind me that nerve agents like Novichok weren't invented until much later, believe me, their predecessors were equally terrifying.
How do we know that? Well, the Soviets might have hidden all of Bulgaria's archives, but some of their own intelligence surfaced in the 1990s. Basically, after the fall of communism, top secret documents from Russia were very briefly declassified. And in those papers? The proof that by 1943, the year of King Boris's death,
Two poison laboratories were up and running in the Soviet Union. And guess who saw those papers about the poison factories? I saw them in the 90s. Our very own favourite Bulgarian historian, George Bozdeganov. And there's something I haven't told you yet about George Bozdeganov, something that will make you really pay attention to what he's saying here.
Because apart from being an eminent historian, Mr. Bozdeganov's also a doctor. A medical doctor, that is. From 1938 to 1953, the NKVD, that's the Russian Special Service, maintained two laboratories for the production of deadly poisons, toxicological one and bacteriological one. And these laboratories had a specific brief –
Not just to silence Stalin's enemies, but to do it... Without leaving any traces. In other words, to get away with it. And to make sure they did, the Soviets practised. On real people. On prisoners. And this is where it all starts to sound like some sort of gruesome parlour game. Once the prisoner died, external pathologists were brought in.
to play "Guess the Cause of Death". 250 people were killed during these experiments. The corpse of the persons
killed are taken to the morgues of medical institutes where unsuspecting doctors perform autopsy. So you're telling me that they were developing poisons, toxins that could be used to kill people and they tested them on prisoners mostly, didn't they? Yeah, yeah. And yet no doctor could ever tell that poison had been used?
The diagnosis is usually unequivocal: acute heart failure, heart attack. Acute heart failure, heart attack. Precisely the official cause of death given for King Boris III of Bulgaria. So is that how the Soviets got away with murder? Bulgaria's National Archives never resurfaced.
But we know the communists did mysteriously unearth Boris' heart, preserved in a jar from that medical institute in Sofia. And when the royal family was made aware that Boris' heart had been found, they asked for it to be re-buried again at the Rila Monastery, where it remains today. So, will you show us where the remains of King Boris are? Follow me on the right side.
What we see here is the grave of King Boris III. Let us go inside. This is amazing because we've heard so much about it, haven't we? Just amazing. And to be let into the private bit as well. I know. Is this where his son Simeon comes to pay his respects every year? Listen to Michael, the official tour guide at Rila, talk about the king. And you really get why the Soviets needed Boris out of the way.
King Boris III is the most prominent, respected and loved Bulgarian ruler from the modern Bulgarian history. He was famous for his deep concern for the life of the common people, his great care towards the poor and the sick. The Soviets could never have marched in and occupied Bulgaria if the adored king had still been on the throne.
the Bulgarian people just wouldn't have stood for it. People still venerated King Boris III as a saint. Did they? As a saint? Yes, they venerated him with great love. As for the communists' sacrilegious treatment to the king's body after his death, well, they nearly didn't get away with it. Remember the first time the communists decided to dig up the king at Rila and to dump him at Vrana?
When the abbot of Rila got wind of the plan, he refused the gravediggers' access. He reminded them that Rila was a holy place, but the communists had no truck with either monarchs or monks. Plus, they had a visit from a Soviet bigwig pending. And they couldn't afford for that Soviet bigwig to think the Bulgarians were still pining for their royals.
So that night they came with their spades. The monks were locked inside their rooms and they were warned that if anyone goes out, they would be killed immediately. The communists knew how to get their own way. And they knew that dead or alive, Boris still posed a threat to their regime.
So they did what our historian Tessa Dunlop says is standard communist practice. They erased him from history.
After the Iron Curtain comes down, and even before, you want to eradicate the memory of the individual monarch who gives the nation something nostalgic, romantic, and a world or a vision other than the communist vision. And it's one of the reasons why we haven't heard of some of these great personalities like Ferdinand, like Boris of Bulgaria, because the communists did a really good job of burying their legacy, their history.
So we know the Soviet speciality was rewriting history, but they could hardly write a new national story with an old protagonist in the starring role. So they needed to write King Boris clean out of the script. And once he was bumped off, they were free to write a brand new chapter of their own, one in which the communists were the heroes. Hello, you are with the first episode of the fourth season of City Tales.
Anna Blagova and Yana Punkina host a Bulgarian podcast called The Urban Detective. Their show explores all kinds of different cultural and social topics, but they've never dared tackle the death of King Boris. Because despite the fact they're highly educated,
Anna admits their own history is a bit of a mystery to them. Under the communists, any debate about Bulgaria's past was completely squashed. One of the reasons I guess we don't know much about it is that Bulgarian history is still very contested.
It was very contested when we were in school and to be honest, I only studied 20th century Bulgarian history in sixth grade. So this period has kind of, I feel, faded from memory. Both women were born around the time the communist regime collapsed in Bulgaria. That's almost 50 years after King Boris's death.
But Anna says there's still a huge divide in her country between those who are royalists and those who are communist sympathisers. We're very polarised and there is a clash between those two kinds of nostalgia which is preventing any sort of normal discussion and truth to come out.
In fact, Jana wonders if the truth about who killed King Boris maybe needs to stay buried because it's still such a poisonous subject. I don't know if it would be good to know even. Maybe it would have a bad effect on people. It's just interesting when you say it might be bad for people to know the truth.
Why would it be bad? Because I think that there is this thing about Bulgaria, you know, that Bulgaria is such a small country that everything that could be a political question is not really a political question, it's a family question. Like everybody is everybody's relative. Everybody knows someone who knows someone who knows someone or who has seen something. And
Every political change or turbulence or argument in the country is somehow happening inside the families. It's very different from a big country with a century-long history of democracy because here everybody's related. Both Anna and Jana have seen fierce clashes within their own families over the interpretation of Bulgarian history. There are two conflicting narratives.
Those who believed the Soviets murdered the king so they could invade and occupy Bulgaria. And those who believed the communists heroically liberated their country from fascism, from Boris's alliance with Hitler. I don't know where to stand on this. And now it's very hard to come to an independent conclusion by yourself. We're still learning what was going on during the communist regime. Yeah. We don't know everything.
Anna and Jana both feel uncomfortable about this disputed history, particularly because through Bulgaria's past alliance with Nazi Germany, they feel their country was implicated in the deportation of those 11,000 Jews from Thrace and Macedonia. I feel some sort of guilt as a descendant, some sort of generational guilt.
And even though, of course, Bulgarian civil society in one of its greatest acts managed to prevent the Jewish people on the territory of Bulgaria from being sent off to concentration camps, the ones from our presumed old territories were deported. So I think it's impossible not to feel this sort of guilt. So it doesn't make me feel angry. It makes me feel sad, of course.
I don't think that I feel guilt. I definitely feel shame because we were on the wrong side of history. King Boris was probably, he was also against deportation, but I think King Boris was probably in an extremely delicate position during the Second World War. And I think he was walking on a very thin tightrope. And someone couldn't wait for Boris to fall off that tightrope. So someone gave him a shove.
I want you to hear just one more bit of evidence about the Soviets and their deep-seated hatred of royalty.
I will tell you something which I really haven't mentioned, but... Listen closely, because Simeon rarely bears his soul. And this story tells us a lot about the callousness of the Soviets, about what they were capable of and what they were prepared to do to make sure history went their way.
You'll remember that just a few months after the Red Army marched into Sofia, Boris's brother Prince Kirill and the other regents were rounded up to be executed. Queen Giovanna was distraught and she was terrified for her children's safety. What if they were next? So she wrote a letter. A begging letter, pleading for help.
It was smuggled out of the palace and addressed to King Boris's English cousins, to the Windsors, to King George VI of Great Britain. And she wrote, I would say, a desperate letter to His Majesty to say if something could be done. And there was never an answer or anything like it.
Poor Queen Giovanna went to her grave believing King Boris' British family had turned their backs on their Bulgarian relatives. But Simeon felt sure something was amiss. So one day in the 1980s, he was hanging out with Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret at Balmoral, the royal estate in Scotland, as one does, and perhaps emboldened by some good Scotch whisky,
OK, admittedly, that's just how I imagined the scene. He dared to ask them the question, why did your father ignore our plea for help? I was also looking if that letter had ever arrived. It didn't.
They had never received it. So it was intercepted from here where my mother gave it to somebody who gave it to somebody else who should have passed it on, although we were already occupied by the Soviets. Exactly. Bulgaria was already occupied by the Soviets, who certainly didn't want the royal family, a family they were intent on wiping out, being aided in any way at all.
So if we suspect it was the Soviets who intercepted that letter, can we also now conclude that it was also, very probably, the Soviets who murdered King Boris? They had their motive, they had the means, and they had the opportunity.
I'm not saying it wasn't possible. I'm not saying it didn't happen. But... That's the one problem with historian Tessa Dunlop. There's always a but. Sure, I'm not refuting the capacity of the Soviet Union to murder most foul. They had many ingenious ways of bopping people off.
and would go on and hone those faculties for many decades to come. Nor am I denying that Boris wasn't a potential target. I just think that it's unlikely. But even Maria Luisa has stuck her neck out to blame the Soviets. That's certainly what the family would want you to think, the royal family, because they lost their entire livelihood and their country to the communists.
Who took away Simeon's kingdom? Who rubbed out the royal family in Bulgaria? It was the Russians, wasn't it? So convenient in terms of that narrative if you're a monarchist in Bulgaria to blame the Russians. Well, OK, yes, I can see that. Obviously, Simeon and Maria Luisa are going to be resentful of the Soviets. They did abolish the monarchy after all and went on to steal all their palaces.
But what about the Soviet embassy in Sofia? Now, for me, the proximity of that embassy to the royal palace provided the Soviets with the perfect opportunity to kill the king. Why? But not for Tessa. Sure, the Soviets had much better intelligence going on in Bulgaria, Slav to Slav.
Bulgaria hadn't declared war on the Soviets. They'd never put boots on the ground in Russia. And given that he's revered in Bulgaria, he has the hearts and minds of the people, why would you pick him of all people to poison, to practice your poisoning on? Why?
I suppose Tessa has a point there. I mean, King Boris repeatedly refused Hitler's demands to send Bulgarian troops to fight the Russians on the Eastern Front. He also deliberately left Russia out of his symbolic declaration of war against the Allies. This is a man who held the door open. He said himself, "My people are pro-Russian. I am pro-Bulgaria."
But this still doesn't quite add up for me, I'm afraid. Because the fact is, we know King Boris hated communism. He feared, correctly as it turned out, that Bulgaria would be swallowed up by the Soviet Union. And we also know that loathing was mutual. The communists had beef with the king, certainly. They're not easy bedfellows. But if he was murdered at the command of a communist...
then it would have been done by, I think, a Bulgarian communist, someone with the know-how, with the wherewithal and with the contacts. Sorry, but we never look for the most obvious. Right. Let's just unpick that for a second. So Tessa is not saying I'm wrong to blame communist assassins for the King's murder. She's just saying I should perhaps focus on homegrown communist assassins rather than the Soviets themselves.
on Bulgarian communists. I'm not saying that any of these individual parties weren't capable of it. This was the Second World War. It was the biggest period of mass murder known to humankind ever. I'm just saying don't rule out the communists on the ground. Now that's interesting because I happen to know that the Bulgarian Communist Party had a really rocky relationship with the king.
In fact, Boris banned the Communist Party altogether in the 1930s. So the Bulgarian communists had a major grudge against him. Does this mean the killer was one of the king's own subjects? It's certainly a theory that chimes with podcaster Jana Punkina, even if it is rather difficult to admit out loud. The Bulgarians. An inside job. Yeah, because we...
don't like each other very much. I don't think that our political life is so civilised as to, you know, spare a person. Well, here's the thing. Political life during Boris's reign was anything but civilised. Whoever hated the king certainly got him in the end. But the fatal poisoning wasn't a one-off attempt.
Boris was a marked man from the minute he took the throne. The king had already dodged several serious assassination attempts, and all of them on his own soil. Was the murder of the Bulgarian king an inside job?
Coming up in The Butterfly King, the stress of war catches up with Boris. He had suicidal thoughts because of the dramatic meeting with Hitler, with no issue or way out. And we learn how the leader of a Christian sect prophesied the king's impending death. If King Boris had followed the advice, if he'd just listened,
To the person you call the master, he would have survived. Probably. He wouldn't have been killed. I say maybe. I think this. The Butterfly King is a production of Blanchard House and Exactly Right Media. Hosted by me, Becky Milligan. It's written and produced by Emma Jane Kirby. Original music is by Daniel Lloyd-Evans, Louis Nankmanel and Toby Matamon.
Sound design and engineering by Toby Matamon and Daniel Lloyd-Evans. Artwork by Vanessa Lilac. The managing producer is Amika Shortino-Nolan. The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pye. The executive producer and head of content at Blanchard House is Lawrence Grizzell.
For Exactly Right Media, the executive producers are Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark and Daniel Kramer, with consulting producer Kyle Ryan. The Butterfly King is inspired by the book Hitler and the King by John Hall Spencer.
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