Dark Poutine - True Crime and Dark History

Episode 198: If you’ve had any interest in the Wild West, you’ve no doubt heard of a many of the storied gunmen and bandits from the era like Butch Cassidy, Jesse James and Billy the Kid. You probably also think of the United States, but Canada has its own legends and colourful characters from the era on both sides of the border. For example, legendary gunslinger and lawman, Bat Masterson, was was...

Episode 197: In our last episode we learned a bit about the life and depraved, early crimes of David Russell Williams, a 46-year-old decorated colonel and commander of the Canadian Forces Base (CFB) in Trenton, Ontario - one of the largest and busiest air force bases in Canada. The Canadian military’s rising star also had some dark secrets. Williams had been involved in dozens of instances of brea...

Episode 196 - In September of 2009, in Cosy Cove, a quiet, rural neighbourhood near Tweed, Ontario, an anonymous young woman sleeping in her home was brutally sexually assaulted by an unknown assailant who’d broken into her home. During the violent, two-hour sexual assault, as her 8 week old daughter slept in another room, the rapist snapped photos of the woman, before escaping into the night. Two...

Episode 195: Hannah Buxbaum was found dead July 5, 1984 on a highway near London, Ontario after having been shot by roadside bandits three times in the head as her husband Helmuth Buxbaum and their young nephew, Roy, in town from Vancouver for a visit watched helplessly. The bandits sped off with Hanna’s purse and police were called. No one could figure out why anyone would want to murder Hanna Bu...

Episode 194: On June 25, 1950, after months of increasing tension, the Korean War or what has been called Canada’s forgotten war, began when North Korean troops invaded South Korea. Countries, including Canada, belonging to the newly formed United Nations jumped in quickly to defend democratic South Korea from the the communist forces from the north. Canada contributed the third largest number of...

Episode 193: On September 5, 2009, Hilary Bonnell, 16, disappeared from Esgenoopetitj formerly known as, Burnt Church, in the Miramichi region of New Brunswick. Over the next several months her mother, stepfather, family and friends pulled out all the stops searching for the teen. Despite their tireless efforts, during which they utilized the media and a widespread poster campaign, they could not...

Episode 192: If you’re willing to look you’ll see that human culture and all other endeavors are shot through with one predominant and frightening idea, that one day everything, including us, must come to an end. One day we will die. Human beings are, as far as we know, the only animal capable of understanding that inevitably every one of us, good eggs and bad apples alike, will expire. Hopefully,...

Episode 191: On the evening of July 30, 2008, Tim McLean, a 22-year-old Canadian carnival barker was returning home to Winnipeg riding a Greyhound bus when he was viciously stabbed, beheaded, and cannibalized by another passenger about 18 km west of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. After arriving on scene, RCMP watched for hours as the perpetrator, Vince Li, 40, desecrated Tim’s body inside the bus a...

Episode 190: Old Mike Todor’s body was found in his east end Regina home in the spring of 1955. He’d lain there for more than 14 months and had been beaten to death. Someone had killed him, but who? Elizabeth “Tootsie” LaFleche, Mike’s 30-something-year-old wife, who’d been living with a friend for months, was telling a lot of stories about what had become of Mike. None of the tales made a lot of...

Episode 189: Starting in 1963 and stretching over the next seven years, a militant French separatist group called the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorized La Belle Province. Their aim was to overthrow the Quebec government and leave Canada creating an independent Marxist- Leninist Quebec state. By 1970 the group had committed more than 200 violent criminal and terroristic acts including,...

Episode 188: In early October of 1994, during a bizarre, nearly simultaneous sequence of murder / suicides, in Quebec, and across the Atlantic in Switzerland, 53 members of the Order of the Solar Temple were found dead in burned out buildings. The deaths fulfilled what the cult’s leaders claimed was the group’s “final transit” or return to Unity with God required before the impending end of the wo...

Episode 187: Between 1974 and 1976, a series of rapes and murders took place in and around the small town of Strathroy, in South Western Ontario, perpetrated by Christian Herbert Harold Magee. He sexually assaulted and murdered 3 women, and raped two others. Written by: Mathew Stockton Sources: R. v. Magee, 1997 CanLII 2431 (ON CA), Mental Health Centre, Penetanguishene v. Magee, 2006 CanLII 16077...

Episode 186: Twenty years ago, on the morning of September 11, 2001, as the world watched in horror, 19 radical Islamist al-Qaeda terrorists launched a group of coordinated attacks using four commuter planes as weapons, hitting several preplanned targets in the eastern United States. Two of the airliners were flown deliberately into each of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York Cit...

Episode 185: RCMP officers arrived at the Blackman family residence on Spuraway Avenue in Coquitlam, B.C.’s Ranch Park subdivision in the early morning hours of January 18th, 1983. A neighbour had called 911after hearing screams and then witnessing what appeared to be a domestic argument next door that escalated into a shooting. Inside the eerily silent home as the cold winter rain fell, the respo...

Episode 184: In Mississauga, Ontario in 1973 and early 1974, the discoveries of the murdered bodies of two young women, Constance Dickey, 19, and Neda Novak, 18, only months apart, left the community shaken. Both women, it appeared, had been abducted, sexually assaulted, then murdered and dumped by a yet unknown killer. On August 19, 1974, after being sexually assaulted and left for dead, a sixtee...

Episode 183 - Early on a cold morning on January 7, 1922, two Montreal city Public Works Department employees, on their way to their works shed, discovered the body of a man laying on the frozen ground near the corners of Coolbrook and Snowden Street. The man, who’d been shot was later identified by a Catholic Priest named Adélard Delorme as his half-brother, Raoul Delorme. When police investigate...

Episode 182: This is a story of two talented people whose final interaction would lead to the death of one of comedy’s rising stars and a notorious place in Hollywood history for the other. On March 5, 1982, after an all too brief but stellar career in film and television, actor and comedian John Belushi, 33, was found dead in his bungalow at the infamous Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard in Hol...

Episode 181 - The region in the South Nahanni River played host to several unexplained and disturbing occurrences in the first half of the twentieth century. Between1905 and 1945, in the remote and rugged wilderness in the lower west corner of Mackenzie Mountains in the Northwest Territories and other unexplained events, there were at least 44 people who went missing under mysterious circumstances...

Episode 180 - On September 22, 2015, in Renfrew County, Ontario, 66-year-old Carol Culleton was murdered in her home by her one-time handyman. The man, who’d become obsessed with the recent widow before killing her, then stole Culleton’s car and drove to the home of an ex-girlfriend, Anastasia Kuzyk, 36, and shot Anastasia there with a shotgun as her sister fled the home. However, the killer was n...

Episode 179 - On April 19, 2018, in the village of Victoria Gracia, a community close to Pucallpa in Peru’s central Amazon region of Ucayali, a man got off his motorcycle. He walked toward the home of Olivia Arevalo Lomas, an 81-year-old shaman and respected elder in her community. The man was irate over a debt owed to him by the woman’s son. After firing a warning shot that drew a crowd of neighb...

Episode 178: On the evening of January 29, 2017, a young man, armed with a pistol and a rifle concealed inside a guitar case, entered the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City, a mosque in the Sainte-Foy neighbourhood of the historic city. Just over 40 people were inside the mosque at the time. Just before 8:00 pm, the man entered the prayer hall and began firing and, within two minutes, had kill...

Episode 177: On July 3, 1979, a pair of typical Montreal teenagers, Chantal Dupont, 15 and her friend, Maurice Marcil, 14, went missing as they walked home from a concert. Their loved ones had no idea what had happened to them. A week later they heard the news they dreaded. The bodies of Chantal and Maurice were discovered in different spots along the banks of the St. Lawrence River. The details o...

Episode 176: On the night of November 13, 1974, In the sleepy community of Amityville on the coast of Long Island, New York, a 23-year-old man named Ronald (Butch) DeFeo Jr. came running into a local bar. He was distraught and claiming his whole family, his mother and father and 4 siblings, had been murdered in their home, a large Dutch Colonial house located at 112 Ocean Avenue. However, it was l...

Episode 175: Like any other region, Canada has its share of stories of fantastical creatures that may or may not exist. Dark Poutine has covered a few of them. In episode 25 we learned of Swift Runner, believed to be possessed by the cannibalistic spirit known as Wendigo, we talked about, Ogopogo, the giant serpent in Okanagan Lake in episode 113 and of course, in episode 131 we gave you a primer...

Episode 174 - Between 1974 and 1980, a group of three mask-wearing Canadian outlaws named Stephen Reid, Patrick (Paddy) Mitchell, and Lionel Wright, in well-planned, precisely timed and carefully executed heists, robbed at least 140 banks and armoured cars in Canada and the United States making off with a total of more than $15 million in cash, gold and other valuables. Sources:[The Life and Times...