Swiss Murder Mysteries · Playground Media Productions

A Day in June (2/6)

·34 min

Eugene Sigrist and his wife Elsa married in 1943 and lived in Basel with their two children, Esther and Robert. In 1976, Eugene was 63 and worked as a leading technical employee at one of Switzerland's major pharmaceutical companies, while Elsa, then 62, kept the household running. In 1965, Eugene acquired a patch of land in the countryside near Saven and, by himself, built a small wooden cabin of about 3 by 5 meters. He did it without the permit he should have had. Because the cabin was small and remote, nobody actively opposed the project, but rumors later spread that it might one day be torn down. Eugene answered that worry with a sign painted with four skulls and crossbones and a warning to think twice before demolishing the house. That cabin later became the setting for a massacre. The episode puts Eugene at the center of the inquiry. After the crime, several women came forward and described inappropriate behavior from him, raising the possibility of a sexual motive. Police also suspected that he had been involved in numerous affairs, perhaps before and maybe also during his marriage. Whether Elsa knew about any of that remains unclear. The evidence never gives a clean answer. Eugene was said to leave home for periods of one or two hours at a time, and the details of those absences remain a mystery. That leaves room for speculation about a secret relationship or some other hidden routine. The episode does not treat that secrecy as proof, but it presents it as an important thread. If Eugene was the intended target, the case likely turns on something hidden in his life. Elsa is described through the recollection of her surviving son as a loving, faithful housewife and caring mother. She seems to have kept the household in order and not asked too many questions. That portrait matters because it sharpens the contrast between the public family and the private unknowns. The account then moves from background into reconstruction. It argues that the murders probably happened in two separate sequences. That point is crucial. Five people could hardly be killed in the same place at the same moment without at least one victim trying to escape or intervene. The episode therefore suggests that Eugene and Elsa were likely shot before the Westhorser family arrived at the cabin. The three later victims then walked into an already unfolding crime scene. This is presented as the most plausible reading rather than a settled fact. The result is a story built from absence as much as evidence. There are gaps in Eugene's movements. There are unanswered questions about the telephone call and the letter. There is also a possible envelope with money, though the episode leaves room for doubt about what it was meant to do. Each detail is handled as something to test, not something to overstate. By the end, the cabin is no longer just a private building in the countryside. It has become the site of a crime scene so severe that it lodged in Switzerland's collective memory. The episode closes by pointing toward the investigation itself. It prepares the listener for the questioning and arrest of two suspects, including the murdered couple's twenty-year-old son, Robert.

As heard by us

A grim reconstruction of a notorious Swiss case, told with discipline and care.

The episode follows a small cabin, a family with a guarded past, and the slow reconstruction of how five people ended up dead in one of Switzerland's most infamous murder cases.

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Why you'd press play

A cabin murder case that circles a possible secret in Eugene Sigrist's life.

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