The Cask of Marrakesh: Morocco's First Serial Killer

Zack There's a square in Marrakesh that you've probably seen, even if you've never been to Morocco. Every lane in the old Medina bends toward it eventually, under the shadow of the Ketubia Mosque's minaret. Gemma Elfnah. Come at dusk when the floodlights come on, and it reaches you before you can see it. Smoke from a hundred grills.

Zack Lamb fat, charcoal, cumin, mint, and diesel. Steam off the snail carts. The drums echo from the middle, and under them the reed flutes of the snake charmers, and the storyteller's crowd roaring in applause. Monkeys line the perimeter amongst juice carts calling out in a dozen languages. Horses and buggies wait for riders, and henna artists sit ready to design your hands.

Zack UNESCO calls it a masterpiece of human heritage. It is one of the most famous squares in the world, and it earns it because it isn't just a monument. It is chaos, a party that has been raging every single night for a thousand years. This square, this assembly of the dead, is where our first story begins.

Zack But we need to go back 120 years. It's a Monday morning, the 11th of June, 1906, and the square is fuller than anyone has ever seen it. Thousands upon thousands are packed so tight that men are jostling, fighting for a place in the front ranks. They've left their shops shut. They've traveled in from the surrounding towns and villages.

Zack On this day, business as usual can wait. An old man is being led out of the city jail. He's thin and he moves carefully because his back is four weeks deep in wounds that have been dressed every day with vinegar and oil. Dressed so they'd be ready for the next day. He thinks he knows what this morning is.

Zack Ten strokes of the acasia rod, the way it's been every morning since the middle of May. He's learned to take it quietly. Then he sees the crowd, and the crowd sees him, and they erupt.

Karima He was once a cobbler and a scribe, writing letters for people who couldn't write. And 36 of his customers, all young women, walked into his shop looking for help. But they never came out. The crowd isn't the only thing different on his hot June day. Cut into the thick wall at the edge of the square, there is a hole.

Karima Six feet high, two feet wide, two feet deep. The size of a standing man. Beside it, masons stand waiting with their mortar mixed and their stones already stacked. That's when he understands what the crowd has come to watch. He is going into a dark, closed space in the heart of the Medina, sealed into an ancient wall itself.

Karima And he's never coming out.

Zack The Masons will finish their work by nightfall, and when the last stone goes into place, the crowd will not go home. They came ready to stay. Word had gone around the city that a man sealed into a wall can last a week, so they brought provisions with them, and the inns filled up. Tonight, they'll light brassiers in the square and make coffee, and thousands of people will go quiet and hold still so they can hear him through the wall.

Karima This is Blood and Mint Tea, true crime from Morocco. I'm Karima.

Speaker And I'm Zach. Storytelling is Morocco's oldest art form, and we'll be looking at one case per episode, diving into the dark half of that tradition. This time, we're starting at the beginning with Morocco's first documented serial killer, Marrakesh 1906, Haj Mohamed Mesfabi.

Less than a generation after Whitechapel, 2,000 kilometers south of it, Marrakesh had its own ripper. Unlike London, the city caught him. A man so feared and so hated that the country brought back a punishment out of his oldest loss just for him.

Speaker Thank you so much for being here with us as we bring you the most fascinating cases we can unearth from across the kingdom. This season we'll be looking at some of the most infamous serial killers, murderers, and scandals that have rocked the country.

When looking at all the stories we could bring you, we knew from the start which case had to come first. Partly that's down to chronology. Ms. Fewi is where the documented record begins. But it also has some personal symmetry.

Speaker The idea for this podcast was born on a hot June day in Marrakesh, not so different from the one where the story began. We were swimming with a group of friends who also called the city home, trying to stay cool, and the conversation turned to true crime. The famous cases with 10 documentaries each, the most popular podcasts.

Speaker Then someone asked the obvious question: what about here? What are the best Moroccan cases?

And what came back was mostly fragments, a name, the strange case detail, a headline, a rumor. Everyone knew a piece of something. Nobody could tell the whole story. And the two of us just looked at each other. Between our interests and backgrounds, it felt like something we had to do together.

Speaker So we went to the record. Old newspapers, archives, the documents that still survive. And the record begins with this case, which happened as it happens at the height of June in Marrakesh, exactly where this podcast journey started for us only 120 years earlier.

And that brings us to Morocco's first documentary serial killer. But before we start, a quick word about what's in this episode. We won't linger anywhere we don't have to, but at the end of the day, this is the story of the murders of 36 women. It's also the story of an execution designed to be as slow as possible.

So listeners be advised.

Speaker Marrakesh, 1906. Before we get to the cobbler shop, you need to know what kind of city this was and what kind of year it was having.

In 1906, Morocco is ruled by the Alawit dynasty that has been in power since the 17th century. But this is a time of upheaval and invasive colonial powers are circling. While our dark tale is already quietly underway in Marrakesh, the important men of Europe are putting on their suits and traveling to Algeciras, a resort town on the southern coast of Spain.

It's all the usual suspects. Britain is there. France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, even the United States sent someone.

Speaker The subject of the conference is Morocco. The question on the table is which of the men in the room should get it. Morocco is also present, invited, you could say, as a courtesy.

They deliberate for three months. And that April they produce a treaty, the Act of Alchisiris, which opens by solemnly affirming the independence of Morocco and the sovereignty of its Sultan. Before then spending the rest of its pages handing France to ports, the police of the coastal cities, and the state bank.

Both of those things in the same document. This is what European diplomacy meant in 1906.

Speaker At the time, the Sultan himself, Abdel Aziz, is over 500 kilometers from any of it. He was crowned as a teenager, and by 1906 he's a young man buried in foreign debt, servicing old French loans by taking out new French loans, a financial perpetual motion machine that ends with France owning the machine.

The French even had a name for this whole approach, La Penetration Pacifique, peaceful penetration. They were, by all accounts, very pleased with the phrase, which would predictably lead from peace to military intervention within the year, and nearly 50 years of occupation.

Speaker Hundreds of kilometers south of the Sultan's palace, past the plains, at the feet of the Atlas Mountains, sits the capital of the South, Marrakesh, the Red City, a walled labyrinth of gates and gardens, the last great market before the Sahara Desert begins, where the caravans come in and everything is bought and sold.

But the Sultan doesn't run it. His Khalifa does. His deputy in the South, who happens to be his own older brother, Mule Hafid. And Mule Hafid is not what you'd call a loyal deputy. Within two years, he will ride out of the city at the head of a revolt, overthrow his brother, and take the throne of Morocco for himself.

Speaker In 1906, though, that revolt doesn't exist yet, but the ambition already does. So this is the Marrakesh that our story lives in. The country is being divided at a table in Spain, the Sultan is weak and far away and broke, and the man governing the city is quietly measuring his brother's throne. Everyone with power is watching the horizon.

Speaker Nobody is watching the streets. But it is a different system, far from today's modern police force. There are no patrols, no precincts, no detectives. These institutions are just beginning across the country, but they start at the ports, far from the dusty city of Marrakesh, 200 kilometers inland. What Marrakesh runs on instead is an older system, the one most of the world used for most of its history.

Speaker Justice begins with a complaint. Report a crime, and a judge can be assigned and an investigation can happen. But nothing moves until someone brings a case.

So if your loved one goes out one afternoon and doesn't come home, you handle it first. You knock on doors, your family searches, your neighbors search, and if you find something, you bring it to the authorities. You bring the case, you bring the evidence. Sometimes, as we'll see, you bring the suspect.

That system explains almost everything about how this story unfolds and how long it takes.

Speaker One more thing about the city that we need to establish. It would have been uncommon for people in Marrakesh in 1906 to read or write. However, daily life still ran on paper. Contracts, deeds, marriage terms, a letter to a son working up north. So for anyone who's Arabic couldn't get the job done, there's a profession for that.

Speaker The public letter writer. You sit down across from him, you speak, and he turns your words into script.

And that makes him more than a service. These men are counted on for their discretion. Because a scribe has a window into everything. What people owe, what they're owed, who they're fighting with, who they love. The scribe hears what people won't say anywhere else. Debts, disputes, family business, romance, loss.

The person dictating a letter is trusting this man with things their own household might not know. It's a job built entirely on trust.

Speaker And in the Medina, there's a small shop belonging to a man who holds exactly that job. He mends shoes and he writes letters. He's older, established. People call him Haj, the honorific of a man who's made the pilgrimage to Mecca, a respectable man.

And within that indebted, distracted, and watched city, young women who are vanishing.

Speaker It's late morning. A woman is walking through the Medina. She's young, she's beautiful. She's dressed for an errand, not a journey. She's not even going far, not leaving her neighborhood, and she's coming back before anyone needs to wander. Maybe she's carrying a little money for the fee, maybe a bracelet, earrings, the small portable wealth that could be bartered when she got there.

Speaker And she's carrying something else, the thing that actually is bringing her out, her words. Something that needs to be said to someone who isn't there with her in Marrakesh.

And that's worth pausing on, because it tells you who she probably is. You go to a public letter writer because someone you care about is somewhere else. A partner working in Casablanca, a child studying in FES, a friend up north in 10 years, a sibling married into another town. Every woman who made this walk was in the middle of a story, made conversation with someone who was waiting to hear from her.

Speaker Call him 60, call him 70. The record, ever lacking in these kind of specifics, just says old. He's tidy, established, again, a man people call Haj. And he's not alone. There's an old woman in the shop, in her 70s, older than him. No one knows if it's his sister, cousin, lover, friend, but she's always there.

Speaker And her name as we know it is Anna, part of the furniture of the place. Sweeping, sitting, serving.

And notice what her presence does to the scene. The young woman alone in a closed shop with a man. Well, that's one situation. And in Marrakesh, it's a situation with clear rules. But a shop with a grandmother in it? Could there be a safer room in the entire Medina?

Speaker The young woman enters, sits down across from him, and she does the thing the whole profession is built on. She opens her life to a stranger. To write her letter, he needs to know her business, who it's going to, what's owed, what's wrong, what she misses. He dips the pen. He listens intently, waiting for his real work to begin once the writing's ended, waiting to act on his darkest impulses.

Before we go further, you should know how we know what happens next. There were two confessions made, both taken under torture from Anna, the old woman, and Hajj himself. That, along with what was eventually found buried underneath the floor and in the back garden. That's the entirety when it comes to first hand accounts or evidence.

So what we're telling you is the shape of it.

Speaker Once the writing task begins to wind down at some point, and this is in the confessions, there's a drink offered. Perhaps a glass of wine, maybe some mint tea. Hospitality, one of the most ordinary gestures in Moroccan culture. You enter, you sit, and your drink is poured. She has no reason to refuse and every reason to accept because refusing would be strange, and nothing here in the shop seems strange.

Speaker Except the drinks served in Hajmasfawi's shop are drugged.

The room goes soft, and whatever happens in her last minutes, she isn't awake to the word anymore, which is the only small mercy in this entire story. But Hajj wasn't thinking about mercy. He was thinking logistics. Silence isn't kindness.

Speaker Now, fully pacified and silenced, Anna's testimony records that Haj would then behead the woman with a dagger, not a sword, not an executioner's blade, a short knife, a tool, the kind of blade a shop like this would already own. With a blade like that, this is not one stroke we're talking about, it's close work, deliberate work, done by hands that spent decades on precision, and all through leather, a reed pen through a curl of script.

Speaker And that isn't resting on a tortured woman's word. When the pit under the shop is eventually opened, a June cable out of Tangier that broke the story to the world describes the 20 bodies inside the pit with one word, decapitated. Whatever Anna did or didn't truthfully confess, the ground agreed with her on this point.

Then comes the robbery. Whatever the victim carries is tripped and kept. Three outcoins for the fee, the bracelet, the earrings, a fine garment if she wore one. Anything that could be spent or sold. When the story finally broke, this is what the papers printed as the motive. The women, they reported, had been murdered for money.

But here's the thing. The amount Hash would have gotten from any of his clients, trifling, is what the newspapers called him. Think about what a woman carries to dictate a letter tree trees from her own door. A few coins. Maybe some daily wear jewelry. That's the entire take. So I think we have strong reasons to doubt the reported motive.

Speaker Because he also isn't finished. He isn't done with the dagger. The bodies, when they were found, carried cuts beyond the killing and decapitation. All thirty-six of the women. The killing is finished, the robbery is finished, but he keeps working, mutilating the bodies, carving them up without exception.

Speaker The record won't tell us what was in his mind, and we won't pretend to know. But a thing like this done 36 times that makes him no richer and no safer? This is a thing being done for its own deranged sake.

And then the question that should have ended this years earlier, where do the thirty-six women disappear to? The walled city. Gates with eyes on them. Neighbors hands with away through the plaster. Thirty-six women walk into the busiest kind of shop in the Medina and are never seen again. And in all those years, nobody finds any trace of the bodies, no remains dropped outside the walls, nothing floated in the canals.

Nothing, because there was never anything to find. They never left the property.

Speaker Instead, they were dumped into a pit under the floor of the shop. Hodge had lifted that floor. He had dug in secret in a building that shares walls and carried the earth out basket by basket and then put the floor back. Before a single woman ever sat down to dictate a letter, he had already prepared the place to put her.

Speaker The pit was deep, deep enough that it eventually held twenty bodies, and no one above ever knew when they walked across the floor whether they were testing out a new pair of sandals or pacing nervously while dictating a letter. And when, years or months later, the pit was full, he didn't stop. He dug another pit in the garden of his house.

And each morning, the shop opens. The pens are out, the old woman sweeps. A man comes in to have a sandal restitched. Someone else comes to dictate a letter and sits down in the same chair over the same floor and tells the old man her business. And pays and leaves, and nothing happens to her. Because it didn't happen every time.

It couldn't have. Most customers walked out. That's what kept the shop safe. It really was most days exactly what it looked like.

Speaker And on the days it wasn't, who notices? Her letter never arrives. But the person waiting for it is in another city, weeks away from worrying, and weeks more from doing anything about it. Her family searches the way the city searches, on foot, door to door, with no one noticing a pattern and no one whose job it is to see one.

Speaker A woman missing in Marrakesh in the early 1900s, that was a private tragedy.

That visit we just walked you through, we know that it happened at least 36 times. The sources at the time hatched themselves with the phrases at least 36, not fewer than.

Speaker Which means we can't even do the grim arithmetic. One a month, one a season, thirty-six private tragedies spread across an unknown number of years from different quarters of a walled city that contains a hundred thousand people, where nobody leaves without being seen at a gate. The women were disappearing into the city, and the city itself couldn't feel it.

We know his name, Hajj Muhammad Musfawi, and we know his title and how he earned it. We know his two traits, and we know roughly where his shop stood.

Speaker So what did the record keep about the 36 women? Uh simply a number. The papers counted the bodies, and that was the full extent of the world's curiosity.

People in Marrakesh's Medina, however, were growing increasingly curious in the last days of April 1906. In those weeks, his luck runs out. Or he got too ambitious because several women vanished close together. Too close. Families start talking to each other, and fear stops being private. And one young woman goes out on an errand and doesn't come home.

Except this time, her family knew where she was headed. And when she never returns, they start walking her out.

Speaker They start at their own door, they start where she started, and they ask the first person who would have seen her leave.

So they walk it. The neighbor who saw her pass, the fruit seller she greeted, the turn she took. Every step confirmed by somebody, one witness at a time until it stops. It stops at a small shop that meants shoes and writes letters.

Speaker They go in and they ask. And he tells them calmly that nobody of that description has been there. Nothing to tell. He's sorry. And that's the moment the case turns on. Not the pit, not the confession, that. Because look at who's standing in the shop. A man who's been to Mecca, an old man in his own established business, in his own quarter, who writes people's private letters for a living because he's known to.

Speaker Be discreet and trusted. Every instinct in that room says he's telling the truth.

And for however many years this had been going on, somebody had presumably stood roughly where this family was standing, and heard roughly what this family heard and gone home. This family didn't go home. Reports from the time don't tell us why. If there was the details somebody remembered or an answer that came a bit too slow.

What it tells us is who they fixed on. And it wasn't the old man initially. It was Anna, the old woman. The one who was always there, sweeping, sitting, serving. Seventy years old. They're living proof for every woman who ever sat down in that shop that the room was safe.

Speaker What happens to her next is how we know most of the truth. The June cable from Tangier simply states that Anna was put to torture. And local papers clarify that it wasn't the authorities but the family who took possession of her. They seized her themselves and tortured her until she talked.

And talked she did. The letters, the drugged whine, the beheadings, the pit under the floor, and the garden. And before she died, sick combined under torture. Anna said she never took part in the crimes, that it was all him. The confession and the denial come out of the same dying woman, hours apart.

And there is no way from here to know if she was speaking the truth. Tortured confessions are notoriously unreliable.

Speaker But whatever she was, her words were enough for authorities to be called in. They came to the little shop with tools in front of the neighbors and they lifted the floor. After digging the shop, they moved to search the garden. The first report out of Marrakesh said twenty bodies were dug up under the shop and sixteen more in the garden.

Speaker The ground indeed held what Anna said it held. And with that, Mesfowie is arrested and put to the same questioning. Under torture, he confesses.

And he says one more thing. He says three other men instructed him to do it. He doesn't give any names, and when investigators looked for any trace of these three mysterious men, they came up empty handed. Maybe it was a tortured man saying anything to make it stop. Maybe it wasn't. The city was about to get its master, and one monster was enough.

The son put it this way when breaking the case. So extraordinary was the extent of his crime that news of it penetrated all parts of the country. Marrakesh had spent years enable to feel thirty six women vanish, and then felt all of them at once. The city that never noticed became a city that could think about nothing else.

Crowds in the streets, fury at the shop, at the man, and the years it took. And out of that fury, the demand started rising from every corner of society, from the residents to the authorities, until it reached the very top of the justice system. Not just to punish him. That word was too small now.

Speaker The question Marrakesh put to his judges was one no one had asked in a generation. What is the worst thing we're still allowed to do to a man?

You have to understand what Marrakesh had to work with. There is no trial in the story. Not in the sense you're picturing. No courtroom, no defense. What Morocco had in 1906 was Mazan, the state. The word means storehouse, a treasury, and that tells you what it was built to do. Collect taxes, keep order, project the Sultan's authority outward from wherever the Sultan happened to be.

Alongside it ran the Sharia courts, handling the business of ordinary life. Marriage, inheritance, contracts, debt. The letters Musferi wrote for a living fed straight into that system. And for crimes, there was the Pasha, a governor with armed men and the authority to punish.

Speaker What there wasn't anywhere in the country was a police force. There was a bureaucracy, and it was more modern than you'd guess. Over the second half of the 1800s, Morocco had reorganized its government through a series of reforms, ministries with defined portfolios, salaried officials, a school and rabat for training administrators.

Speaker One of those new offices was the Wazir al-Shikayet, the Minister for Complaints. He took grievances mostly from provincial governors and tribal leaders and routed them to whoever was supposed to deal with them. So there was a channel, it ran through officials, it just was not a desk the family could simply walk up to.

Nothing in the surviving record shows anyone bringing these disappearances to the state before April of 1906. No complaint, no investigation, no judge assigned. That isn't proof that nobody tried. It's the shape of what survived.

Speaker Either way, it comes to the same thing. Whatever was or wasn't said to the Machazan, nothing moved. The case that finally broke this open was not brought by the state. It was brought by the family on foot, knocking on doors.

So when the pit was opened in April and the city turned, the question didn't go to an investigator. It went up to the Pasha and passed him to the Sultan. And the answer came back crucifixion. Crucifixion is in the Quran as one of the prescribed punishments for Hirabah, a specific offense usually rendered as waging war against God and spreading corruption in the land.

Historically, that meant highway robbery, the terrorizing of travelers, violence that breaks the basic safety of moving through a country. It was not. Whatever the American papers wrote that summer, the general penalty for terrible crimes. What happened to Misfaiu was extraordinary by Morocco's own standards at the time.

That is precisely why it made news.

Speaker The cables disagree with each other. Either way, work had already begun on the cross in the square. At the time, Marrakesh had a small foreign community. Mostly they were consular officials and traders setting up businesses in the city. Worried by the optics, they lodged an objection with the Sultan.

Speaker Not to the sentence, but to the method. They wanted this crucifixion called off. They got it.

The primary account is blunt about the strategy. Masfairi was held in the Marrakesh jail, in its words, until outside attention was dulled. Weeks went by. The foreign officials had their answer and moved on to the next thing. On the 15th of May, they brought him out of his cell and into the market.

Speaker He was stripped to the waist, two assistants held his arms out straight, and the city executioner beat him with switches cut from the thorn tree that grows all over the region, and one whose spines will go through a shoe sole. Ten strokes, every stroke drew blood. Ten is not very many, and that was the point.

Speaker The Times and Democrat explains the number was kept down because Masfowie was an old man, and the people of Marrakesh had no idea of letting him die too easily. Afterward his back was dressed with vinegar and oil, not to heal it, but to toughen it, so there would be something to hit tomorrow. Then they did it again the next morning, and the morning after that, for roughly four weeks, at least from the 15th of May to the 11th of June, 27 mornings in public with an audience that kept coming back.

A public flogging every morning for four weeks in an open market. Once the cross came down, diplomatic interest in how Hajj Muhammad Musfawi died appears to have ended. By early June he was failing, and the men running this had a problem, because the entire design depended on him surviving long enough to be killed properly.

So they moved to the final sentence, and that one needed a signature.

Speaker A dahir, a royal decree, the instrument through which the Moroccan states spoke, which means Abdelaziz signed this. In a year when he was losing control of his ports, his police, his treasury, and eventually his throne, this order was carried out precisely as written. And the sun printed the reasoning.

Speaker It isn't coded or hidden, it's administrative. In order that the punishment should make a deep impression and strike terror to other evildoers, it was decided to wall him up alive instead of merely crucifying him. Crucifixion was seen as an ordinary penalty now, the ceiling for everyone else. What they built for Misfowie was a deliberate step past it all.

So let's talk about what they'd actually chosen. Immurment isn't improvised. First, what it is precisely. Immuurement isn't burial alive. Someone buried alive suffocates, and it's fast. Someone immured is sealed into a space that still has air in it. They die of thirst, and it takes days. Every decision made about that wall in Merrakesh, the extra inches, the gap of air, the bread, the water.

That was a decision to stay on the slow side of that line.

Speaker Rome had a lengthy history of the same. They executed unchased vestal virgins by sealing them into an underground chamber furnished with a couch, lamp, and a little food. Christian monasteries did it for centuries. A nun or a monk who broke their vows could be walled into a niche cut to the size of their body and left with bread and water.

Speaker The means of execution is shocking in the modern day, but it has a long history.

Which brings us to the reason most of you already have a picture in your head. In 1946, Edgar Allan Poe published the cask of a Montato about an Italian man, chained into a niche in a wine cellar, and breaked in one course at a time while he screams. It's the most famous amurement in the English language, and it's fiction.

But Poe didn't invent the mechanics. Walter Scott had described the same thing decades earlier in a note to one of his poems. A niche cut just big enough for the body, a little food and water set aside in the wall of a convent.

Speaker If you look up amurement today, you'll find sections running centuries deep for Europe and for Asia. The vestals, the convents, the Persian highways, Assyria, the Mughal court, and you'll find a section headed North Africa. And it has one entry in it: the execution of the monster that was Hajj Mohammed Masfawi.

Speaker The 11th of June was chosen to be his demise because it was market day.

Two masons cut the niche into the thick outer wall of the chief bazaar, just outside the jail facing the Open Square, six feet high, two feet wide, and two feet deep. Masfahwi was thin, and that was accounted for. Sources from the time are explicit that the space was cut to be just larger than his body.

He was to have room for some air so they would not smother him too quickly. The suffocation would have taken minutes. They were building for days of cathartic relief for the city. Three feet up the back of the recess, they fixed two staples with chains and then two more. Not to stop him escaping. He was going behind a wall.

The chains were there to haul him upright so that he could not slink down out of the crowd's line of sight. Every element of it was engineered for two things duration and visibility.

Speaker What he knew that morning is one of the places our sources come apart a bit. The Times and Democrats say he was told nothing, and that when they brought him out, he assumed he was going to be whipped. The sun says his keepers then walked him out to watch the Masons work so he could see his own tomb going up and be jeered at while he watched it.

Speaker What every account from the time agrees on is the moment he understood. He saw the crowd, he heard the sound the crowd was making, and he saw the whole cut in the wall. He had taken four weeks of acasia quietly, hoping the thorns would finish him first. Now he fought his jailers, and he begged.

They chained him into the recess, and then they stopped and left him standing there a while. There was no hurry. The Mason stepped back, people shoved for positions at the front, and the crowd threw the felt of the market at him. Then the Masons came forward and laid the first courses. When the stormwork reached his knees, the chief jailer stepped up and handed him bread and water.

Which sounds like mercy as well, but this was far from a last meal. Bread and water is what gives a man the strength to keep going. Sealed and dry, he dies of thirst in a couple of days. Fed it takes longer. Stone by stone it continued, and between the layers, the Mason standing aside so the crowd could get at him again, and the jailer with the bread and the water.

Speaker He was still screaming, and the crowd was quiet to listen. They'd come provisioned, the inns were full. That night they lit breakers in the square and made coffee, and every time he screamed, they screamed back.

A week. That's the number that had gone around the city, and it's why the inns filled up. Nobody in that square had ever seen this done. But there were people alive in 1906 who could have told that crowd exactly what to expect.

Speaker In Persia, they were still doing it. Travelers documented it for three centuries. A French gem merchant in the 1600s, an English physician a few decades later, a British diplomat in the 1860s who was told that 14 robbers had just been walled up alive, two of them upside down. Thieves mostly, sealed into brick pillars along the highways with the head left sticking out so the weather and the birds could get at it.

Speaker The Englishman wrote down the reason, and it's the same reason Marrakesh gave. To terrorize others who might commit the same offense. An English woman wrote that men bricked up that way were heard groaning and calling for water at the end of three days. Three days.

He was still screaming on Tuesday at the 12th, with the square as crowded as it had been the day before. All that day and all that night, getting fainter. On Wednesday morning, the 13th of June, the people closest to the wall reported that he wasn't screaming anymore. He was only moaning. And then he stopped.

Speaker The crowd cursed him for dying too soon. It hadn't been enough. He put thirty-six women under a floor where nobody could see them. They put him in a wall at eye level on the busiest day of the week and left him there three days where a whole city could hear him. Then the delayed business of the market finally got underway two days late.

Anna was already dead. She died under torture in April in a private house at the hands of a family before the authorities were ever called. Which means the woman whose confession broke this entire case never saw a court. She was never charged with anything. She was never cleared of anything either. And we still don't know what she was.

Everything she said was in the ground, so we know she knew. What we don't know is whether she helped him, whether she was simply the reason that room felt safe, and never understood why. The only person who could have answered that was called before anyone with the authority to ask ever asked. What we do have is her name, Anna.

70 years old. Which is more than the record gave any of the 36.

Speaker The three men Mess Fowley named under torture were never found. He gave no names, investigators looked briefly but then stopped. Maybe there was nothing there. Maybe a man in that much pain will say anything at all. Either way, the city had its monster and it didn't want a second one. And the family who did the actual work, the ones who walked their daughter's route door to door and refused the respectable old man's answer?

Speaker The record does not say what became of them, and it doesn't give their names either.

The fight closed in 1906. The story did not. A case this thin has room in it, and for a hundred and twenty years, people have been feeling it. In some tellings, he isn't a letter writer at all. He invites the women to his house for dinner, a seduction rather than an errand, and the old woman is there as his cook.

In others, they aren't walking customers, but daughters of wealthy families chosen for their gold. The commuted sentence becomes hang-in in some accounts. The floggin runs two months instead of four weeks in others.

Speaker None of that is anyone lying. It's what a story does when it lives in people's mouths instead of in a file. It gets smoother, it gets worse, the gaps close up, because a gap is uncomfortable and a detail isn't. And it's still happening. In 2017, the British Moroccan novelist Saida Ruas published a novel about this case, which we highly recommend to anyone if you want to experience Marrakesh from this time period and spend more time with the story and themes.

Speaker It's titled, as we've mentioned, The Assembly of the Dead. And there's one thing about that book that tells you exactly how thin the record is. It's a detective novel. There's an investigator in it, sent down from the palace to work the case. She had to invent him. There wasn't one. She says so plainly in her historical notes at the back.

Speaker And some of what she invented, while brilliant, is already mistakenly circulating online as fact about this case.

Which brings us back to the wall. That execution was built to be permanent. That's the stated purpose in writing. A deep impression, terror to utter evildoers. The most public debt the city could siege, in the most public place it had. And nobody ever took him out of it. Mason sealed him in in front of thousands of people.

And that was his grave.

Speaker Unfortunately, Marrakesh has since lost track of which wall exactly it was. Writing about the case this year, the Jean Afrique journalist Nina Kozlovsky notes that the site is uncertain, that contradictory versions have circulated for decades, and that nothing in the city marks it. We've walked the area and looked for any possible sign countless times.

Speaker Your guess is as good as ours.

So somewhere in the oldest part of Marrakesh, there is a wall with a man inside it, and people walk past it every day without knowing. True groups stop and unwittingly take selfie with it in the background. It's said that the walls of the Medina hold secrets. This one holds more than most. And nobody alive can tell you which one it is.

Speaker What lasted instead was a story, told out loud in Jemalfna, The Assembly of the Dead. But an assembly gathers and then it goes home. Nobody was there to remember. They were there to watch. And when it was over, they cursed him for dying too early, and they went home.

This is the part of the episode where we say the victims' names, but we don't have them. Not one. No names, no ages, no faces, not whose friend, not whose daughter or sister, not which quarter of the city she walked in from. The record only kept the number, 36 lives. Twenty of them were under the floor of the shop, and sixteen were in the garden.

Speaker The square is open tonight. It's open every night. Same drums, same smoke, same storytellers, same crowd. A thousand years of people standing in one place telling each other stories. And there are 36 that no one will ever get to tell.

Thank you so much for coming out on this journey with us and checking out our brand new podcast. Looking at one Moroccan true crime case per episode. If this is the kind of thing you want more of, follow the show wherever you're listening. And you have 30 seconds, leave a review. That's the thing that helps a new show get found.

Speaker Next time, we're going to Casablanca in the year 2003. In 1906, while today's story was still unfolding, Casablanca was still a small port town. Within a generation, it would be the largest city in the country, and by the time our next story takes place, it's a metropolis of millions, with everything Marrakesh didn't have a hundred years earlier: a police force, a crime lab, medical examiners, newspapers that put a body on the front page the morning after it's found.

Speaker And still, for nine months, bodies turned up on its pavements, and plastic bags and cardboard boxes left on some of the busiest streets on the busiest city in the country. And at first, nobody could say who they were. We'll be taking a look at the man the papers called the Casablanca Dismember, Mohammed Zuita.

Speaker You can find us at Blood and Mint Tea on social media. Everything we use for this episode is also at bloodandmint.com. And if you'd like to support us, you can do so through our website or at Patreon.

Almost everything you just heard came from articles originally published in The Times, Democrat, and the Sun, as well as articles in Yabiladi, Liziko, and Nina Kozlovski's series for Janafi. From Morocco in 1906, we lean on Susan Gilson Miller's History of Modern Morocco, Gavin Maxwell's Boards of the Athletics.

And of course, Said Arwas's novel, The Assembly of the Dead, a fictionalized version of the story that includes some historical notes based on her research.

Speaker Until next time, thanks for coming to Blood and Minty, True Crime from Morocco.

The Cask of Marrakesh: Morocco's First Serial Killer

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