Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime

A woman runs out of a roadside motel in Mississauga, Ontario, wearing only a T-shirt. She has no phone, no money, no car, and barely any English. She borrows a phone, dials 911, and over twenty-six terrifying minutes she unknowingly lays out the entire architecture of a human trafficking operation. This is the case of R. v. Laguerre — one of the hardest kinds of crime to prosecute, and one of the...

It is just past 8:30 pm on a Friday evening in May 1977. A young mother named Glenna Fox is walking back to her car on the upper parking level of a shopping mall in Bramalea, Ontario. She is 27 years old. She has an 8-month-old daughter at home named Lauralee. She and her husband are building their dream house. By every measure, her life is just beginning. She is one hundred and fifty feet from th...

It was a Saturday night November 2, 2002. The kind of night when Yorkville, one of Toronto's most fashionable neighbourhoods, a place of boutiques and galleries and quiet, tree-lined streets,  empties out by ten o'clock. Inside a 9-storey office building at 94 Cumberland Street, a 38year-old woman was still at her desk. She'd been there most of the day. She had a lawsuit to worry ab...

On the morning of May 9th, 2022, Raymond Hoogland drove out to Arcadian Way in east Abbotsford, British Columbia. It’s a rural road, the kind of road where you can’t see your neighbours, where raspberry fields back up against stands of trees, and the Fraser Valley stretches out flat and quiet in every direction. Raymond’s wife, Heather, had called him in a panic. Her aunt Betty had been trying to...

It was a Thursday morning in December. The kind of morning when St. Anthony, Newfoundland,  a fishing village of 2500 people, clinging to the northern tip of the island, is still pitch black at a quarter to seven. Inside the house at 8 Husky Drive, fifteen-year-old Deana Penney woke to a persistent noise. It was her mother's phone alarm, ringing from the kitchen. She banged on the bedroom doo...

It was a Monday night in November. The kind of night when the streets of Markham, Ontario — a quiet suburb northeast of Toronto, full of tidy homes and minivans and families who came from somewhere else to build something better — are dark and still by ten o'clock. Inside the house at Helen Avenue, Bich Ha Pan had just come home from her weekly line-dancing class. She was soaking her feet in...

It was a Monday morning in October. The kind of morning when Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, is still dark at six a.m. — the streets empty, the courthouse locked, the judges still at home in bed. The kind of morning when nothing is supposed to happen. Just after six o’clock on October 10th, 1988, a homemade pipe bomb detonated outside the Sir Louis Henry Davies Law Courts in downtown Charlott...

Imagine waking up at two in the morning to the sound of fists pounding on your front door. You stumble out of bed, pull back the curtain — and the entire sky is orange. Sixty feet of flame, roaring out of your barn, so close you can feel the heat through the glass. That's what happened to Marilyn and Earl Snedden on the night of July 3rd, 2002. A pair of truck drivers had spotted the glow fro...

It's just after midnight on March 19th, 1998. Two Brink's guards push through the south entrance of Calgary's North Hill Shopping Centre, bags heavy with cash — $385,000 bound for the CIBC branch inside. They don't know it yet, but two men are already waiting for them inside the darkened bank. Men dressed in fake security uniforms. Men armed with AK-47 assault rifles, military-...

It was a warm Wednesday evening in August. The kind of evening that makes people on Prince Edward Island linger outside a little longer, tending their gardens, watching the light settle over the fields, and itting on porches as the day fades into dusk. The kind of evening where the doors stay unlocked. In a brown bungalow on a hill along St. Mary’s Road, about ten kilometres east of the town of Mo...

It was a warm Saturday in May. The kind of afternoon that feels like summer, even though summer hasn't officially arrived yet. The kind of afternoon that makes a twelve-year-old girl feel safe pedalling her bicycle along a familiar highway, heading home. Her name was Monica Jack. And on May 6th, 1978, she left Merritt, British Columbia, and began riding north on Highway 5A — a two-lane road t...

It's 3:13 in the afternoon on March 11, 2022.  A security camera on Victoria Street in downtown Kamloops, British Columbia captures a man walking along the sidewalk. He's wearing a green hooded jacket, a jade-coloured toque, and heavy hiking boots. Slung over one shoulder is a brown leather satchel. In his right hand, a black cloth shopping bag. He is not rushing. His pace is described l...