6: An Inside Job
45:45 Share

This is exactly right. Hello. Karen and George are here with breaking news. In addition to our regular weekly podcasts,

My Favorite Murder is now doing a new third episode and it's called Rewind with Karen and Georgia. We re-listen to our earliest episodes and share favorite moments, talk about the lessons we've learned along the way and give important case updates. So whether you're a day one listener or a brand new murderino, join us as we rewind to the very beginning. Rewind with Karen and Georgia is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Goodbye.

A note before we start: this episode deals with the topic of suicide. Please listen with caution. The Western Balkan Mountains, April 1925. And the Royal car navigates the narrow winding road that snakes through the valley. Rabbits and rockfall litter the route. On one side of the pass there's a sheer drop of a hundred feet

The chauffeur needs his wits about him to keep the tyres from flirting with the edge. On the back seat of the car are two men, King Boris III of Bulgaria and his friend, a fellow insect enthusiast. Each time the car swerves, the king rolls into him. They're giddy with excitement.

They've been out walking and have found some rare flowers and an exquisite new species of butterfly. They've high hopes for today's hike. The king's gamekeeper is up front. He's swapped places with the king so Boris can chat with his friend. An old bus, labouring and puffing up the steep pass, forces the chauffeur to slow his speed.

The king glances out of the window, squinting into the early morning sun. He sees something glinting in the undergrowth. Then, a flash, and he instinctively ducks. It's an ambush. The first bullet is aimed at the front seat, the king's usual seat. It kills the gamekeeper instantly.

The next one kills the king's friend and the chauffeur, blinded by his shattered windscreen, loses control of the car. It starts veering towards the cliff edge as the bullets keep coming. Boris seizes the steering wheel and yanks the car back from the edge, just in time.

Under a shower of gunfire, King Boris leaps from the car and races towards the bus. He jumps in, pushes the driver aside and screeches off in the direction of a military garrison. A few minutes later and the king is back with the bus now full of armed soldiers.

The soldiers chase the assailants deep into the mountains. It's clear these aren't ordinary robbers. They're far too skilled. These men are organised terrorists with one very specific and very royal target.

Tomorrow's newspaper headlines will rave about the King's cool head, about his gallantry, his lucky escape from the murderous plot of communist revolutionaries. He'll be hailed across the world as a hero. But kneeling beside his friend's dead bodies, King Boris doesn't feel heroic. The attempt on his life might have failed this time, but the King knows they'll get him in the end. Because this...

This is only the very beginning of the plot to kill him. From Blanshard House and Exactly Right Media, this is The Butterfly King. I'm Becky Milligan. Chapter 6. An Inside Job

What I really like is the really old gramophone. Gramophone. Yes. It's a wind-up one, isn't it? I'm back at Rana Palace, not in the plush drawing room where I usually meet King Simeon and Princess Maria Luisa. I'm in the building next door, where one of Simeon's aides is proudly showing me around what was once the palace powerhouse.

King Boris's office, complete with gramophone. Can we play it? Yeah, absolutely. Oh, yes, let's play a bit of music. With the Bulgarian Royal National Anthem. Oh, I thought it was a bit of jazz. No. Oh. Just a second. It's OK, here we go. Now... MUSIC PLAYS

You can imagine Boris sitting at the big desk in his office, listening to his gramophone, head in hands, the weight of the world on his shoulders. It wasn't an easy job being Bulgaria's king. It's a beautiful desk, isn't it? And are these all his uniforms here? Yes, absolutely. Military uniforms, aren't they? Military uniforms with his decorations and medals. Yeah. You can see the white cross here.

Boris's courage was legendary, but it was also very necessary.

In the interwar period when Boris was on the throne, Bulgaria was a brutal place. Political assassinations and targeted killings were commonplace. Rival factions fought and murdered each other in the race for power. Ruling over such a viper's nest was no picnic.

The King's governments were more or less democratically elected, but few politicians really respected the wishes of the ballot box. Rival parties often tried their luck by force. They weren't trying to oust Boris, they just wanted to unseat his cabinet. Poor Boris had only been in the job five years before the first coup d'état happened.

That one, backed by the military, toppled his leftist government and brought a block of bourgeois right-wingers to power. And to make it absolutely clear that they meant business, they chopped the fingers off the ex-prime minister, then allegedly sent his head in a biscuit tin to the palace. I did tell you those Bulgarians were brutal.

So Boris knew all too well that there was a biscuit tin somewhere out there with his name on it too. It was just a matter of time. Don't forget, kings were always being murdered. Boris didn't care for his new right-wing government, but he just had to suck it up. His job was to try to keep everyone sweet. Historian Tessa Dunlop.

He is a man who begins feeling anxious at the beginning of his reign. He's got partisans, murderers, discontent, army leaders, communists. It's all kicking off in the witch's cauldron that is the Balkans, Bulgaria. The bad boy of the Balkans, and there were quite a lot of bad boys, to be honest with you, in the Balkans. A few months after the right-wing coup, the Bulgarian Bolsheviks, the communists, had a go at seizing power themselves.

But their attempt at a power grab failed dismally. It was brutally repressed by Boris' right-wing government. Pushed underground, the Bolsheviks and Communists became bitter. If a Red Revolution was to succeed in Bulgaria, they realised they needed a major change of strategy. So they came up with a new plan of action, a targeted campaign of terror. And their bullseye was King Boris.

Boris would have known the communists had marked him out. And he must have felt so alone in that knowledge. In the early years of his reign, he was still unmarried. Plus, his brother and his sisters were in exile in Germany with their father, Foxy Ferdinand. Did the king fear his life was unravelling before it had really begun? He's pretty fearful. His hands tremble quite a lot to begin with. But he grows a bit of a second skin.

Tessa means he had to toughen up, and that would prove invaluable. But what he really needed was nine lives, because the next assassination attempt was already brewing. The podcast studio is here. Oh, wow, with a candle. Yeah, with a candle. Oh, brilliant. My producer EJ and I have come to Sofia to see Anna Blagova.

You'll remember she co-hosts the Bulgarian podcast The Urban Detective. We were talking to her in the last episode about how the Soviets and the Communists erased large parts of Bulgaria's history when they invaded Sofia. That was in 1944, just a year after King Boris was poisoned.

And it's that which makes the royal family, particularly Maria Luisa, deeply suspicious that the Soviets were behind her father's murder. But right now we want to talk to Anna about her dad. My father was an investigative journalist and in fact he wrote a book about famous coup d'etats and political assassinations in Bulgarian history.

He attempted to rank the political assassinations based on their influence. Now, Anna's dad was particularly interested in all the murders and acts of terrorism that took place during King Boris's reign, primarily because there were so many of them.

but also because King Boris was so often the target. One of the greatest terrorist acts, and actually the one that my father ranked number one, was the St. Nedelia Church, very close to where we are in the centre of Sofia. Let's look at the number one assassination on Anna's dad's list. Bear with me, because at first glance, it sounds rather obscure. In 1925, just hours after Boris had been ambushed on that mountain pass,

A retired high-ranking army general was suddenly gunned down in Sofia. Quite why, no one really knew. But this general was also a member of parliament and a political big shot. So, as befits a dignitary, his funeral was an all bells and whistles affair. It was held at the St. Nedalia Cathedral and it was attended by Bulgaria's great and good.

The priest opened the Gospel and began reading from St John: "He that heareth my word hath everlasting life." And at that exact moment, the bomb was so powerful it blew off the roof of the nave. Dismembered bodies and corpses littered the church. 213 men, women and children were murdered in that attack.

Over 400 others were wounded, but none of them were the intended target. They were just terrible collateral damage. The real target of that bombing escaped without a scratch. I imagine you can guess who the real target was. Yes, King Boris. But he survived unharmed because he wasn't there.

He'd been attending the funerals of his friends who died in that ambush in the mountains and was running late. And who were the bombers? Yes, the Reds. Again. The communists at the time, a wing of the Communist Party, bombed the church in the hopes to kill Boris.

It was one of the bloodiest terrorist acts in our history and it actually precipitated a response of persecution of those communists. It was bloodbath after bloodbath. But the communists were foiled again. And again, they were brutally punished by Boris's government. But the communists were determined. They kept trying and trying.

A couple of years later, a communist activist broke into the palace at first light with a pistol, ready to kill the king as he slept in his bedchamber. Foiled again. The king was already up and about. Boris was an early riser. He was probably out catching butterflies.

And these assassination attempts just keep coming. In the winter of 1934, the King was on a train to the Bulgarian coast when a bomb went off in the engine. Boris was again unhurt. In fact, he even dressed the engine driver's burns before leaping into his seat and driving the burning train to safety.

Nothing was proved, but that assassination attempt had all the markings of a communist attack. He survived ambushes. He was the original James Bond of Bulgaria in many respects. But he just didn't have the dashing good looks and the charisma to go with it. I think he was quite dashing actually. So Bulgaria's own communists had been trying for years to get Boris out of the picture. They were seriously persistent.

But in the end, someone succeeded, as we know. After all those attempts on his life, the King finally died on the 28th of August 1943. Was it the Communists? Did they finally pull it off? The Communists certainly had a motive. They were politically weakened and brutally repressed under King Boris. And what about the means?

The Soviet Union would surely have been happy to help out their Bulgarian comrades by handing over a phial of their very best poison, anything for another Red Revolution. And the Communists had form too. They bombed trains, cathedrals and mountain passes. They made sure they were never short of opportunity. But let's not jump to conclusions. Because there is another possibility.

I want to take you somewhere quite different. I want to try and take you inside King Boris's head." Boris often sought solace in the mountains, looking for rare plant species or just hiking. It was a passion he shared with his uncle, King Albert of Belgium. But in 1934, King Albert died in a mountaineering accident. He'd leant against a boulder which had given way under his weight.

That was the official story anyway. But in his excellent book, Crown of Thorns, the author Stefan Gruef tells us that Boris wasn't convinced by that story. Boris believed his uncle had deliberately leapt to his death.

And what's more, according to Gruev, the king told many friends that his uncle had the right idea, that he somehow envied him. Tsar Boris was really under big pressure, really big pressure. This pressure, pressure for Boris, was not easy. Our Bulgarian historians, Vladimir Zlatarsky and George Bozduganov, put it delicately.

because this is a very sensitive subject. But I do think we have to examine whether King Boris may have wanted to take his own life. The pressure he was under during the Second World War was phenomenal, and on a number of occasions the King mentioned to his staff that he wished someone would just shoot him dead, or that he felt like shooting himself. Could you imagine what kind of pressure?

during a war with everything, and you are alone on the top of the power pyramid. In fact, on the way back from that dreadful meeting with Hitler at the Wolf's Lair in 1943, he reportedly told his aide he wished the plane would crash. He was constantly saying he'd had enough of being king, that it would be better if he were dead.

After he flew back to Bulgaria from the Wolf's Lair, Boris went hiking in the mountains with his brother Kirill and some close aides. And at a certain point he broke away from the rest of the party and disappeared. He was eventually spotted by his secretary. He was standing very still on the precipice of a huge rock, just staring into the abyss.

So the rumour was? What was the rumour from that? Well, that he had suicidal thoughts because of this last meeting, which was so dramatic and with no way out.

But Simeon doesn't believe his father was planning to jump, or for that matter, to poison himself with pills and toxins, for one very simple reason. King Boris was an extremely religious man. My father was far too believing, I think, to have considered suicide. Do you think so? Not only I think, I'm sorry to say it's nonsense, I think that this is...

Really? It's ridiculous? Yes. OK, so Boris was indeed a man pushed to his limits. But his children are absolutely certain he wasn't serious about taking his own life. MUSIC PLAYS

He was very serious about his faith, though. Boris believed in the power of prayer. He prayed constantly for guidance and for protection, which is probably why he became so interested in a Christian group called the White Brotherhood. Now, despite the name, this is not a white supremacist group. Far from it. The White Brotherhood was all about finding universal kinship in a fracturing world.

Think meditation, music. And the white in their name referred only to the ceremonial robes they wore. They just wanted a better future for everyone. And Boris certainly feared what the future held in store for him. And that's ultimately what drew him to the White Brotherhood. They claimed they knew the answers. The White Brotherhood is still going strong today. In fact, eight members of the group are putting on a concert for us in Sofia.

They believe that respect for music and for nature bring peace and harmony to the world. You can't blame a stressed-out king for liking the sound of that. Now, just to be clear, I'm not lining up the White Brotherhood as a suspect in Boris's murder. I think they genuinely wanted to help him.

But I want to tell you about them because, well, they kind of guessed what was coming to Boris and they wanted to try to stop it. It's all a bit freaky, actually. The White Brotherhood was founded at the turn of the last century by a Bulgarian man called Peter Donov, better known as The Master. He was a masterful musician. The pieces you're listening to were actually written by him.

As I've said, it's a Christian movement, but members often dressed like druids in white flowing robes. They danced barefoot in the mountains. Rumours circulated around Bulgaria that the king had joined the White Brotherhood, that he'd become a disciple. Which is not the case. That's part of one of the very sweet mythologies.

Okay, so King Boris may not have been a fully signed up member of the White Brotherhood, but Simeon does admit that his father was a big fan of their ecological ideas and ideals, as is Simeon himself. It's true, they were pretty revolutionary for the 1920s. It was a mixture of Christianity, of Eastern thought, but everything very, I would say,

peace-loving, nature-loving, God-fearing, what have you. Actually very advanced on their time. They're a very prayerful group. But it wasn't just the Master's prayers which attracted Boris. It was the Master's predictions.

because it was claimed that Peter Donov was a prophet. He was like a man who can see in the future. He was knowing what is going to happen. That's Momchil Kurametev. He's a Bulgarian filmmaker and a member of the White Brotherhood. Now, the White Brotherhood, they love their prophecies. Remember when the king was ambushed on that road high up in the mountains in 1925?

Well, a couple of days before, a disciple who worked in the palace predicted that the king's life was in danger somewhere in the highest peaks. The White Brotherhood calls it. But the prophecies didn't end there. Fast forward to World War II. The master warned King Boris to stay safe, he'd need to stay out of the war. He would need Bulgaria to stay neutral. The master...

said to King Boris, "Don't go to Germany," because he was invited by Hitler to go there. And he didn't follow this advice, and he met Hitler, and very soon after his return in Bulgaria, he was dead. But the king did change the date of his last meeting with Hitler, because the original date Hitler had summoned him to the Wolf's Lair, it was August the 13th,

which in 1943 happened to fall on a Friday.

And Boris had a very bad feeling about the whole Friday the 13th thing. The fact that he was summoned on the 13th of August by Hitler, he delayed it by a day, which upset the other man, obviously, because of fearing the 13th. He was a superstitious man. There was something irrational in my father's behaviour.

The White Brotherhood believed the King should have paid more attention to the Master's prophecies. If King Boris had followed the advice, the stories told to him, he would have survived. He wouldn't have been killed. I say maybe. I think this. Does everyone sort of agree with that? I mean, you know, if he'd just taken that advice, if he'd just listened to the person you call the Master,

he would have survived. Probably. Make of that what you will. But that's not all. Here's the really spooky bit. He may not have taken their advice about Hitler, but according to the historian Stefan Grueth in his book Crown of Thorns, it sounds like Boris had also been warned of the exact date of his own demise. ♪

Remember how the King lay dying in his chamber in the late summer of 1943, covered in those strange spots with all his organs failing? He was barely conscious. Yet very suddenly, the day before his death, he opened his eyes and demanded to know the time. When he was told it was twenty past four, he shook his head. "Tomorrow at the same time," he said.

tomorrow at the same time. The next day, on the 28th of August, at precisely 22 minutes past four, the king was pronounced dead.

Now, as this podcast is about the murder of King Boris, inevitably we focus a lot on the sad stuff, on the times when things for Boris were fraught and difficult, when he was stressed and scared and felt torn in every direction. But there were happier times too, when he was in a situation where he could not be happy.

Did the White Brotherhood predict the Lonely King would one day find a soulmate? We don't know. But we do know he did fall in love.

Hey, it's Kaylee Cuoco for Priceline. Ready to go to your happy place for a happy price? Well, why didn't you say so? Just download the Priceline app right now and save up to 60% on hotels. So whether it's Cousin Kevin's kazoo concert in Kansas City, go Kevin! Or Becky's bachelorette bash in Bermuda, you never have to miss a trip ever again. So download the Priceline app today. Your savings are waiting. Go to your happy place for a happy price. Go to your happy price, Priceline.

We haven't really touched on the romantic side of Boris's personal story yet, and I think we need to. Because some people think that's where we'll find Boris's killer. Well, he did take a while to get married. I think he was, like, properly old.

Boris didn't stay a lonely bachelor forever. In October 1930, aged 36, Boris finally got lucky, so to speak. He married Princess Giovanna, the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Eleanor of Italy. Our historian Tessa Dunlop.

I think Boris, you know, had his interests in pulling levers and pinning butterflies onto boards, not in lots and lots and lots of sex. But back then, Boris's marriage had huge political significance. It certainly did. And by the time Boris died in 1943, when the war was raging, the marriage was a political hot potato.

Which is why quite a few rumours circulated that his murder was an Italian job. By August 1943 Mussolini had been deposed and Italy was just about to switch sides to join the Allies, the British and Americans. Now that would have put Italy on the opposite side to Bulgaria, made them enemies.

And it was Giovanna's father, the King of Italy, who'd been doing all the negotiating with the Americans because he knew if Germany invaded Italy, that would mean bye-bye to the Italian royal family. So could the Italian royals have thrown Boris under the bus to try to secure their own dynasty? I mean, they certainly had a motive. Their son-in-law Boris was an ally of Hitler.

And there's another thing that really got up the nose of the Italian royal family: Boris' baptism. King Boris was born to Catholic parents, so his father, Foxy Ferdinand, didn't hesitate to baptise Boris a Roman Catholic too. But Bulgaria is an Eastern Orthodox country, and as a Bulgarian, you'd kind of expect the heir to the throne to share the national faith.

Ferdinand clocked his mistake pretty quickly. You've married an Italian girl, a fervent Catholic. You've signed up and changed the constitution so that your firstborn will be a Catholic. And then you think, oh, now I'd better reverse that decision. Foxy Ferdinand booked Boris another baptism ceremony pronto. So Boris, having been christened a Catholic...

is then rechristened or baptised into the Orthodox Church. Hallelujah! He's certainly like covered both stumps as Boris. Covered both stumps is one of those quaint British sayings. It refers to cricket, but translate it into baseball and it would be like saying he was covering all the bases.

Anyway, Foxy's defensive play was enough to satisfy the Bulgarian people, but it didn't go down quite so well in Rome. The Pope excommunicated him. Poor old Foxy. Anyway, fast forward again, and here's now Orthodox Boris on his wedding day, marrying an Italian Catholic princess in the Catholic cathedral in Assisi. They also had a blessing in an Orthodox church.

Now, by all accounts, Boris really loved Giovanna, but he also had a royal duty to marry, to provide an heir to the throne. You need progeny. First of all, he had to acquire a womb that he considered suitable. The problem was the royal womb Boris had found belonged to a Catholic, and a Catholic is supposed to bring up her children as Catholics. Now, that put Boris, the king of an orthodox country, in a tricky situation.

But he didn't want to annoy his new in-laws or the Pope, so he promised his firstborn child would be baptised a Catholic. But when his daughter was born, Boris reneged on his promise. Maria Luisa was baptised into the Orthodox faith, and the church was so relieved it even bent the rules. Well, I'm called Maria Luisa, and that's it.

Because in the Orthodox Church you don't have more than one name. Except she does, of course. Because it's a double-barrelled name, they had to have a special permission with the church and they make it like one name, but it's Maria Luisa after my paternal grandmother. But when Simeon was born four years later, he was also baptised into the Orthodox faith. Queen Giovanna accepted this. But what about her family?

Were the Italian king and queen horrified that their grandchildren were not Catholics? I mean, they quite liked their son-in-law Boris, but he'd basically just hoodwinked them. Is this what they wanted for their daughter? And here's another thing. Remember Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister who kept a diary? He wrote that King Boris had been poisoned with snake venom.

but when we ran that theory past our snake expert marco shea he pretty much rubbished it turns out it's pretty impossible to get a snake to bite someone if it doesn't feel like it plus the snake has to bite in the right place with the right amount of venom so admittedly goebbels was a bit off the mark with the whole snake venom idea

But a few days after he penned that, Goebbels wrote one more entry about the murder. And this time, he pointed the finger of blame fairly and squarely at someone specific in the Italian royal family. Goebbels claims that it was my mother's sister, Princess Mafalda, that she had poisoned him.

Now, Princess Mafalda was married to the German prince, Philip of Hesse, who was disillusioned with the Nazi party and everything Hitler stood for. And Mafalda was absolutely on the same page as her husband and her parents. She wouldn't have been impressed that her brother-in-law, Boris, was in league with the Führer. So according to Goebbels, Mafalda paid a little visit to Bulgaria.

to the palace with a bottle of poison in her bag. Four weeks after her departure, the king was dead. Could Mafalda be the royal assassin? This is nonsense because I was at the station to receive my aunt after Mafalda was dead because she came to the funeral.

Let's not forget that Simeon was an eyewitness, and neither he nor Maria Luisa can recall Aunt Mafalda paying a visit before Boris's death. In fact, no one can remember Mafalda coming to visit her sister and brother-in-law before the funeral for one simple reason. She didn't come.

So there was no way that she could have poisoned him. So you know that for a fact because you were a witness to it. Definitely not the Italians because why, you know?

Italians had no advantage whatsoever. Goebbels was blaming the Italian court because the Nazis were very upset when Italy changed sides before my father's death. But that's why I say that sometimes documents which are supposed to be, what you call it, official, can also be misleading. Point taken. It's all propaganda. That's the very last time I cite the diary of Joseph Goebbels, promise.

I suppose there's something else I may have overlooked. Families, and particularly sisters, tend to talk. Mafalda would have known King Boris was unhappy with Hitler and that he was also in secret talks about switching sides. She'd have respected him. She wouldn't have wanted him dead. There's a postscript to Mafalda's story. It's not a happy ending.

The Nazis found out that she and her husband had been helping Jews get to safety. And while Mafalda was in Bulgaria supporting her sister at Boris's funeral, her husband was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. When Mafalda returned to Italy, the Nazis tricked her into visiting the German embassy in Rome, claiming they had a message for her from her husband.

But when she arrived, she was immediately arrested for subversive activities and sent to a concentration camp called Buchenwald. Mafalda grew very sick and thin at the camp, and then the Allies started to bomb. You see there was a munitions factory right next door, a prime target, and during one raid Princess Mafalda was badly wounded.

The SS doctors made a half-hearted attempt to operate, but she died of her injuries in the summer of 1944, exactly a year after her brother-in-law Boris. So where does that leave us? Suicide is off the list, Simeon's adamant about that, and despite their differences in faith and in politics, it can't have been the Italians,

They were too fond of Boris. But I cannot dismiss the communists. They tried to kill the king again and again. But I still don't have concrete proof. I don't even have a name for the poison that was used to kill the king.

You know, at a certain point in every investigation I've ever done, something unexpected always turns up. And in my experience, it most often comes at that exact moment I think I'm done. Just as I'm about to take stock of what I know and draw up my final conclusions, I receive an intriguing voicemail.

It's very cryptic. It suggests we meet up in Sofia to talk about the death of King Boris III. And who's the message from? Well, when he says his name, I'm honestly speechless. Because this voicemails from someone who has a microscopic knowledge of King Boris, a man who claims he knows exactly how the king died.

He almost never gives interviews, but now he's offering to tell us all he knows. He says it's time the world knows the whole truth about what killed the Butterfly King. That's next time, coming up on The Butterfly King. I simply regret, and now that you bring it up, I think of it again. It's disturbing.

You know, one has to make one's peace with these things. Painful revelations for the royal children. And we're dealt a brand new line of inquiry. Cocaine can cause the arteries to your heart to spasm, to close down. Are you saying King Boris may have been on cocaine? 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 Nankmanow 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. Follow The Butterfly King on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen so you don't miss an episode. If you like what you hear, leave us a rating and a review.