The ten-week period between the theft and the arrests was not a static negotiation. The police operation expanded progressively. Wardas was changing telephone locations with each call, using public payphones in the Lausanne area and its surroundings and never calling from the same box twice. This made simple call tracing insufficient; investigators could identify that a call came from the Lausanne area, but the specific payphone changed every time.
The Vaud cantonal police — the cantonal police force responsible for the area — coordinated what they later described as the largest operation in their history. They placed approximately 200 public telephone boxes in Lausanne and the surrounding region under simultaneous surveillance. Each telephone box had an officer or group monitoring it, ready to move on a caller identified as “Monsieur Rochat.”
The operation required advance coordination. For the surveillance network to function, police needed to know approximately when Wardas would call. The SwissInfo account says that the thieves eventually set a specific date and time for a final call. This created the window the police needed: if the call was coming at a specific time, they could have officers in position at every monitored box before that moment arrived.
On May 16, 1978, at approximately 9:30 in the morning, Roman Wardas picked up a payphone on Avenue de la Dôle in Lausanne. It was his twenty-seventh blackmail call to the family. Plainclothes officers who had been watching that box moved in and arrested him.
Part Six: The Investigation’s Turning Points
The investigation that led to the arrest on May 16 did not proceed in a straight line. What the available sources allow is a reconstruction of the key documented developments; what remains unavailable is any access to the actual police file, which has not been made public.