The Creepy & Chilling Historical True Crime Case of ÉMILE DUBOIS in Valparaíso

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Three men, three bodies, seven months.

[00:00:04]The port city of Valpareiso had begun to understand that something was hunting it. Not at random, not the violence of the desperate or the drunk, something patient, something that watched and waited and knew the habits of wealthy men before it moved against them. The constabularary had no suspect. The newspapers had a name for the killer, but it was not a real name. Nothing about this man was real. Hello everyone and welcome. Before we begin, please do take a moment to like this video and subscribe to the channel. It genuinely helps us continue bringing these stories to you. Drop a comment below and tell us where in the world you're watching from.

[00:00:51]Now, let us go to Val Pariso. It is the 4th of April, 196.

[00:00:59]The port city of Valpareiso, known across the shipping lanes of a dozen nations as the jewel of the Pacific, has just discovered its third body in 7 months. The victim's name is Isidor Chalet. He is a French merchant described in the records of the time as a man of advanced age found near the entrance to his own shop with six stab wounds. The money in his safe is gone.

[00:01:29]His keys are gone. He has not been robbed carelessly in the manner of a desperate man who grabs what he can and runs. He has been robbed by someone who knew exactly what he was looking for and exactly where it was kept. The civil guard of Valpariso has seen this before.

[00:01:51]On the 4th of September 195, a German merchant named Rainald Tilman's stabbed in his premises. On the 4th of October, Gustaf Tittius, another German businessman, stabbed in his office. the wages for his mine workers taken from his person. And now this, the fourth of the month, a European merchant, a blade every time the city is watching its doors. The merchant community has changed its safe combinations. Men of commerce are now reluctant to be alone in their offices. And somewhere in Valpariso in perfectly comfortable lodgings, a man who goes by the name of Emile Dubois is reading the morning newspaper.

[00:02:44]The man named Emil Dubois had been in Valpariso for a little over a year when the third murder occurred. He had arrived, as far as the neighbors and acquaintances who later recalled him could determine, sometime in 1900, and five traveling, he said, from Santiago, where he had spent a period conducting some vaguely described commercial affairs. He was quiet in his manner, educated in his speech. He could discuss the state of the copper markets and the difficulties of coastal shipping with the fluency of a man who had spent years in those trades. He read, "He dressed well, without extravagance. He paid his bills. He had a woman who stayed with him. Her name was Ursula Morales.

[00:03:36]Dark-haired, loyal, the kind of woman who asked few questions and answered fewer. There was a child, too. A boy born three years prior, the household was unremarkable.

[00:03:50]He had a gift for conversation and an instinct for the concerns of men of business. In the social clubs and commercial establishments of the port, where European merchants gathered to discuss their affairs over coffee and tobacco, Dubois was welcome company, attentive, curious about the details of other men's lives, their routines, their offices, their arrangements for carrying wages or keeping cash. Not conspicuously so, just interested. the kind of man you enjoyed talking to and thought nothing of afterward. What no one who spoke with him knew what the civil guard did not yet know was that Dubois kept a notebook in it written in a careful hand were the daily movements of a number of the most prosperous men in Valpariso.

[00:04:46]their roots to their offices, the days they visited the bank, the names of their employees, the hours they worked late and alone. The notebook was not a diary. It was not a journal of impressions or reflections. It was a ledger of vulnerability, but the civil guard did not have the notebook yet.

[00:05:08]They had three dead men, three crime scenes that bore the same signature, and no suspect they could name. The city continued its commerce. The ships came in and out of the harbor. The finicular carriages groaned up the steep iron rails to the residential hills above the bay. And Emil Dubois continued his social calls. It was the 26th of June 196, and the man had made a miscalculation.

[00:05:40]The premises belonged to an English dentist named Charles Davies who maintained his practice and residence at what the records describe as number 1158 on a street in the upper residential district of the city. It was the kind of address that told you the tenant was a man of standing, a professional man, solvent, likely to keep something worth taking. What Dubois had not accounted for was that Mr. Davies was still inside. We do not know precisely what he observed when he forced entry, nor what he intended to take first. What we know is that Mr. Davies, who by the evidence of what followed, was a man of notable composure, heard the intruder, concealed himself, and waited. When the man entered the hallway, Davies confronted him. What followed was a violent struggle. The intruder struck the dentist about the head with a heavy object. Mr. Davies did not go down. He raised the alarm. The man ran. He came out onto Melgarjo Street and moved toward the waterfront at speed. Members of the civil guard, alerted by the commotion, gave chase. They were joined by passers by because in Val Pariso in 196 as in most cities of that era, the spectacle of a man running from a crime was considered a public invitation to participate in his capture. The pursuit spread through the narrow streets. The waterfront drew closer. He did not reach it. He was caught before he reached the harbor. He gave his name calmly as Emile Dubois. He was taken into custody. And then the civil guards searched his lodgings. What they found there was extraordinary. A notebook, the one he had been keeping so carefully, containing detailed entries on the daily movements of numerous prosperous men of the city, a set of master keys capable of opening a wide variety of locks, a knife of the type consistent with the wounds that had killed three men, and then among various articles of personal property, something that must have stopped the searching officer entirely.

[00:08:10]a gold watch subsequently identified as the property of a French merchant named Anesto La Fontaine who had been found mutilated at his desk in Santiago 18 months prior. A murder that had never been solved. The city at last had its man. Before we go any further into what was found in those lodgings and into what it revealed, please take a moment to like this video and subscribe to the channel. Your support makes this research possible, and we genuinely do read every comment below. Now, let us talk about who Emil Dubois really was.

[00:08:54]His real name was Lu Amadeo Breier Laqua. He had been born on the 29th of April 1867 in the coastal town of Ataples in the region of Pasta Calala in northern France. His father Joseph Brereier was a working man. His mother was known as Maria Lroy. A tapels as described by a contemporary guide book of the period was a decayed fishing port on a sandy plain. a place of boats, rope makers, and men for whom life offered few second chances. He had taken his first life before he was 16 years old. He had become attached at 15 to a young woman in his district. Her father, a retired police officer, accustomed to authority, resistant to unsuitable young men, disapproved. A confrontation took place between the two. The father ended it dead. The boy did not wait to face the consequences.

[00:10:02]He ran. He made his way to the mining town of Corier. He changed his name. He went underground, literally, finding work in the coal mines there. Long hours in the dark for wages that hardly sustained a man. He stayed approximately 2 years. A mine foreman was then found dead under circumstances that drew suspicion toward him. He was held briefly on a charge of theft, then released. He did not linger. He was 20 years old. He walked to a port, boarded a ship bound for Venezuela, and became Emil Dubois. The name he had invented for himself was the name he would carry to his grave. The years between France and Velp Pariso were ones of careful practiced reinvention. Venezuela, a mine near Maraco, brief service in the Venezuelan army, rising to the rank of captain. Peru, the coastal mining districts, and then the city of Auro in what is now Bolivia, where the pattern he had been refining over a decade was executed with coal deficiency. Together with Ursula Morales and a companion named Catalina, he lured a young Peruvian engineer to a house of illreute. The engineer was there to be robbed. He was murdered. His savings were taken. Dubois left the city.

[00:11:36]Santiago came next. He moved into an affluent neighborhood. secured the acquaintance of Ernesto Leaf Fontaine, first mayor of the municipality of Providencia, a man of civic standing and some means. On the 7th of January, 1900, and five, La Fontaine was found dead at his desk, mutilated. His gold watch was gone. The man questioning police that day, the man who had a satisfactory explanation for the blood on his person, left Santiago shortly afterward, heading northwest to the port, the port of Valpariso.

[00:12:18]The trial of Emil Dubois before the criminal court of Valpariso became in the weeks of its sitting something that the port city had not quite seen before. Part legal proceeding, part theater, and part referendum on who the city believed itself to be. The presiding judge was a man named Santa Cruz, and contemporary accounts suggest he approached the proceedings with the settled conviction of a man who considered the outcome established before the arguments began.

[00:12:54]He had reason for that confidence. The prosecution's case was formidable.

[00:13:00]The gold watch, La Fontaine's watch, recovered from the lodgings of a man who had known Laafontaine in Santiago, was placed before the court. The notebook was exhibited page after methodical page recording the movements of wealthy men, their hours, their habits, their routines of carrying cash, the master keys, the blade consistent with three sets of wounds. Witnesses who had socialized with Dubois gave testimony as to where he had been and when and in whose company. The trail of association between the accused and the dead across three years and two cities was laid out with patience and precision. The appointed defense council calculated that the best available strategy was an insanity argument, not to win, but to preserve their client's life by keeping him from the firing squad. It was a reasonable calculation. It was also one that Dubois rejected with absolute contempt. He dismissed his legal representatives.

[00:14:11]He would conduct his own defense. What happened next was by every account that survives remarkable. He stood before the court of Valpariso, a man of no legal training, a man who had spent his adult life as a fugitive and a killer, and he performed. He spoke with precision and with wit. He constructed elaborate alternative explanations for each piece of evidence.

[00:14:38]The watch had been purchased. The notebook was a habit of a curious mind.

[00:14:43]The keys were a tradesman's tools. He argued with the fluency of an educated man and the instinct of a born storyteller.

[00:14:52]And he aimed his argument not just at the judge, but at the gallery, and through the gallery at the city beyond.

[00:15:01]His argument was this. The wealthy foreign merchant class of Val Pariso had conspired against a humble French immigrant who had dared to move among them. He was not a murderer. He was a threat to their comfort and they were destroying him for it. The city listened and the city to a significant degree believed him or wanted to. His defense council, Sister Sternas, went so far as to organize public assemblies in the Plaza de Armas of Val Pariso, asking the citizens of the port to pronounce on the guilt or innocence of the accused. When Dubois was informed of this, he offered his response in Latin, "Voxuli, Vox day, the voice of the people is the voice of God." The victims had been wealthy foreign merchants. The accused was poor and foreign, too, but of a class that the working people of the port recognized and did not fear. He was spoken of in the taverns and the side streets as a man of a rough kind of justice, a figure who had struck at those who prayed upon the poor. The newspapers had already begun calling him the Chilean Robin Hood. He wore the title well. The jury withdrew. The verdict when it came was guilty on all charges. He was sentenced to death by firing squad. He heard the sentence. He showed nothing. There is one episode in the story of Emil Dubois that stands apart from all the others. Not because of what it tells us about his guilt that had been established, but because of what it tells us about the man himself and about the mythology that was already forming around his name before he had been put to death. On the 16th of August 196, 6 weeks after his arrest, several months before his execution, the city of Valpariso was struck by an earthquake.

[00:17:11]This is not a metaphor or a flourish.

[00:17:14]The earthquake of August 1906 was among the most destructive seismic events in the recorded history of South America.

[00:17:24]It struck in the early morning hours.

[00:17:27]Buildings collapsed throughout the city.

[00:17:30]Fire broke out in the wreckage.

[00:17:32]Thousands died. The port, the warves, the warehouses, the elegant residential districts on the hills was reduced in significant portions to rubble and ash.

[00:17:45]It was a catastrophe of a scale that the city would spend a decade recovering from. The prison walls crumbled in the chaos of the immediate aftermath. Many prisoners were unaccounted for. Some had fled. Some were buried. Some simply walked out through the gaps in walls that no longer existed and were not seen again. When the guards came to search the rubble of the cell block, they found a meal Dubois eventually not buried, not fled, not crushed beneath a fallen wall.

[00:18:21]He was discovered underneath a stack of tinned goods in what remained of the prison stores. He was unshackled.

[00:18:29]He was clean shaven, more closely shaved, the guards noted, than a man who had been trapped in earthquake rubble for any length of time had any reasonable right to be. He was wearing a poncho. It had not been issued to him by the prison. No one could account for where it had come from. He was asked if he had attempted to escape. He said no.

[00:18:54]He was asked to explain the poncho. He offered no explanation. He was asked to explain the shaving. He said nothing further. The authorities deliberated.

[00:19:06]They returned him to confinement, accepting no more of an account than he had given them. The charges against him remained. The execution would proceed.

[00:19:18]But the city had taken note. A man condemned to death in a prison leveled by an earthquake, found clean shaven in a borrowed poncho in the stores, who declined to explain anything and was put back in his cell, was not, in the popular imagination of Val Parareiso, quite an ordinary criminal. The myth was growing faster than the sentence could contain. it. He spent several months further in confinement as his appeals were heard and in sequence rejected. He was not idle. He dictated letters. He received visitors. Ursula Morales came faithfully. He was, by accounts from the prison staff, who observed him in those final months, entirely unbroken, not in the manner of a man performing courage, but in the manner of a man who had simply made his peace with the outcome, and declined to give his captives the satisfaction of visible fear. When a priest was sent to his cell to hear his confession in the days before the execution, Dubois turned the man away with a sentence that has been preserved in every account of his story. You should be taking the judge's confession, not mine. The judge who ordered my murder. Go and inspire his repentance.

[00:20:40]On the 25th of March 197, the day before his death, he entered into a common law marriage with Ursula Morales, who had followed him across the greater part of a continent and remained beside him through more than 2 years of imprisonment. He also formally acknowledged his son, Luis, born in January of 193. Whatever he had been to the men he had killed and to the city he had terrorized, he was apparently determined to be something specific to these two people before he was gone. The following morning, in the pale cold light of dawn on the 26th of March, he was brought out before a detail of four riflemen. He declined the blindfold. He was observed to be completely composed, not rigid with the effort of composure, but genuinely, apparently calm. He produced a thin cigar and raised it to his lips. He drew on it with unhurried deliberation.

[00:21:46]He looked at the four men standing before him and at the assembled witnesses beyond them, and he gave a single spoken command. Ehutad, execute.

[00:21:58]He was 39 years old. The chronicers of Valpariso recorded that the popular feeling of the city was sharply almost evenly divided among the working people of the port, the dock workers, the mine laborers, the residents of the narrow streets climbing the hills. There was genuine grief and a genuine conviction that the man had been unjustly tried and unjustly killed. His victims in this telling had been usurers and exploiters, men who grew fat on the labor of the poor. The murders reframed in this way became acts not of predation but of rough violent justice. The newspapers had given him the name already. The streets confirmed it. The Chilean Robin Hood. The grave of Emile Dubois was established at the Ply Ana Cemetery in Valpariso, officially cementario numero trey on the hill above the bay. In the years and then the decades that followed, it was transformed by popular devotion into something that bore a closer resemblance to a shrine than to a burial plot. Gifts were brought. Petitions were placed against the stone. People came to ask him for favors the way they might ask a saint, though the church had never canonized a man with four murders on the record and a notebook full of victims movements in his lodgings. His story found its way into literature. The novelist Carlos Drogget took it up in his work toas as Muertes All Those Deaths published in 1971 for which he received the Alphaguara Prize. The Chilean singer and writer Patriceio Mans published his own reimagining of the life. Two biographies appeared in the very year of the execution. Both of them considered by later scholars to be of doubtful reliability, which may have mattered less than their existence, which confirmed that the story had already become something the city needed to tell itself. In academic circles, the figure of Dubois has been examined as a kind of projection, a surface onto which Chilean popular culture wrote its grievances against the economic elites of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the immigrant who had nothing, the charming man in the social clubs, the killer who chose his victims from among those who held the power. Whether any of that was true of him, whether his crimes were philosophy or simply predation is a question the record does not answer because the record reflects what he said about himself. And Emil Dubois was a man who had been constructing a version of himself since he was 20 years old. What is true is this. At the cemetery on the hill above the bay, the offerings are still brought. The salt wind comes in from the Pacific and moves among them.

[00:25:15]The ships still pass below. The city goes about its commerce, as it always has, and in the margins of that great indifferent prosperity. The name endures, not as the record preserves it, but as the stories have made it, in whispers passed down through the narrow streets of a port that has never quite decided what it saw in him. A murderer, a myth, a man who looked at four riflemen in the pale dawn light, raised a cigar to his lips, and gave one quiet command, and left the rest to the city to sort out.