Dark Poutine - True Crime and Dark History

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...

Episode 173 - On July 6, 2013, in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, an unattended 73-car freight train carrying crude oil rolled down a grade and derailed downtown, multiple tank cars exploded, resulting in a massive fire. More than 30 buildings in the town's core were destroyed, and, sadly, forty-seven people lost their lives. Sources:[Ville Lac-Mégantic - Une ville à coeur ouvert][Déraillement mortel d’un t...

Episode 172 - To curtail social ills like alcoholism, family violence, and other unsavoury behaviours, religious and puritanical proponents of the Temperance Movement demonized alcohol throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. After numerous U.S. states had become ‘dry’ outlawing the production and sale of alcohol in the years prior, in 1919, the United States ratified the 18th amendment to th...

Episode 171 - Rosemary Podgis, 56, and her husband Alfred, 58, were found in a Pennsylvania Ravine. They had been fatally shot in their Loch Arbour, New Jersey home over the Fourth of July weekend in 1982. The apparent perpetrators arrested by police 5 days later were two 18-year-olds: Scott Robert Franz, Rosemary’s son from a previous marriage, and Scott’s Canadian friend Bruce Anthony Curtis, wh...

Episode 170 - In November of 1902, a rancher named Issac Belt from Haynes Creek near Red Deer, Alberta, had gone missing. Investigating officers had gone to Belt’s ranch to question a young man calling himself Bert Ellsworth, who was suspected of horse theft, who had been lending a hand there. That young man and Belt were both missing.  Police discovered the man claiming to be Ellsworth at a camp...

Episode 169: On the evening of Christmas Day in 2017, upon gaining access to an Oak Bay, British Columbia apartment, police discovered a bloody crime scene. In the suite were the bodies of six-year-old Chloe Berry and her four-year-old sister, Aubrey Berry. They had been murdered in their beds. First responders also discovered Andrew Berry, Chloe and Aubrey’s father, naked, seriously injured and b...

Episode 168 - On the evening of July 28, 2010, Nadine Anne Taylor, a 29-year-old woman in Halifax, Nova Scotia, left the Convoy Avenue apartment in Fairview she shared with her boyfriend, Gene. Nadine, who did not have a telephone, told Gene she needed to make a call, left her home and walked a nearby payphone to make a call. She was never seen alive again. Sources and Further Reading:[CANADA - Ca...

Episode 167: On July 13, 1994, just after 2:00 am, police responded to a 911 call from Sebastian Burns, 18. Sebastian and his friend, Atif Rafay, also 18, claimed they had discovered ‘some kind of break in’ and multiple deaths at  Atif’s family home in Bellevue, Washington. A bloody crime scene awaited the first responders. All three of the victims, Tariq and Sultana, Atif’s parents and his sister...

In the early morning hours of November 17, 2001, officers from the Vancouver Police were dispatched to the Second Beach area of Stanley Park. Several callers to 911 indicated that there had been some kind of  altercation and a group of man had badly beaten another man. Two VPD constables arrived at the Second Beach parking lot within minutes of being called to find a distraught man frantically pro...

It’s 2021. It’s been a hell of a year and Dark Poutine is still ticking along. That said, I need a quick break for my sanity and to do some behind the scenes work to freshen up some of the elements the show. Dark Poutine will be returning on April 19, 2021, with the same level of careful research and compassionate, personal story telling with new guest hosts, a shiny new logo and some new music. S...

Episode 165: On the afternoon of July 24, 2015, the RCMP were called by the residents of 192 Pleasant Grove Road, outside of Charlottetown in Prince Edward Island. They said that the night before there had been a fight between a man, Joel Lawrence Clow, 46, and a woman, Clow’s 40-year-old on an off-again girlfriend and mother of one, Traci Lynn Lynch. Responding officers knew they would be investi...

Episode 164: On July 12, 1997, in the town of Kitimat, British Columbia, after months of tension, tempers boiled over, and a violent altercation took place between a mad man and four young men. Three of the men, Michael Mauro and Mark Teves, both 20 and 21-year-old David Nunes were dead, and another, 20-year-old Donny Oliveira, was barely clinging to life after a local man named Kevin Louis Vermet...

Episode 163: In New Brunswick, in the fall of 1922 a convicted double murderer named Bennie Swim was hanged for the murder of the woman he loved, his first cousin Olive and her husband, Harvey Trenholm. Bennie didn’t die the first time, so the authorities hanged him again. Co-host: Carol BrownePromo: MurderishSources: The Ballad of Benny Swim (original) - Mike Q - YouTube Hanged Twice_Benny Swim B...

Episode 162: In July of 2013, on a busy summer night in downtown Toronto, police received several calls about a man on a streetcar brandishing a knife and threatening passengers and the transit operator. After an encounter with police lasting only 50 seconds, 18-year-old Sammy Yatim had been shot nine times and later died from his wounds. As videos of the incident surfaced, many people were outrag...

Episode 161 - On a warm July day in 1986, 11-year-old Alison Parrott was lured from her Toronto home by a man on the phone claiming to be a sports photographer who wanted to take photos of the young athlete. Two boys discovered Alison’s body in a heavily wooded section of Kings Mill Park two days later. She had been bound, raped and strangled to death. It would take a decade before science caught...