Dark Poutine - True Crime and Dark History

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...

Episode 160 - Elena Tchoudakova was a beautiful, outgoing and vibrant 23-year-old Russian woman attending Interior Design at Toronto’s Ryerson University. In January of 1995 Elena was discovered in her apartment, she’d been brutally beaten to death and left in her bathub. There were a number of suspects with means and motive but only one with opportunity. Co-host: Carol BrowneSources:[The Russian...

Episode 159: In the early 1980s near the small town of Rulo, Nebraska a white-supremacist cult leader named Michael Wayne Ryan and his band of followers took over a local farm essentially stealing it from the property owner. They burglarized nearby businesses and residences to fund their survival after the upcoming battle of Armageddon prophesied in the Books of Revelations. Ryan, a proponent the...

Episode 158 - Twenty-three-year-old nurse and former beauty queen, Alexandra Wiwrachuk, thought the warm spring night in 1962 would be perfect for a walk down by the river before her midnight shift at Saskatoon’s City Hospital. Alexandra did not show up for work that night, and it was not until thirteen days later that children stumbled upon her broken body in a shallow grave. Someone had savagely...

Episode 157 - From the late 1920s until after the Second World War, Lila and William Young ran the Ideal Maternity Home and Sanitarium for Unwed Mothers at East Chester, Nova Scotia. The pair have been referred to as ‘baby farmers’ who sold healthy newborns to wealthy couples with the means to pay and left the less viable to die of starvation. Estimates are that more than 100 and as many as 400 to...

Episode 156 - In 2006, Thomas George Svekla, 38, a man who’d been in and out of trouble since 16, became the focus of a murder investigation lead by the Project KARE task force. Svekla was a suspect in as many as twelve murders. He was only ever charged with two slayings, that of Theresa Innes and Rachel Quinney, but was designated a dangerous offender for his long history of violent offences. Co-...

Episode 155: The holidays can be a notoriously hard time for people who either miss loved ones or have a hard time being around them so much. For those reasons, we take a break from all the murder and mayhem and try to bring you a little holiday cheer with a bit of a dark edge. This year, for our fourth Christmas, themed episode, we learn about the global depictions of Santa Claus, some dark Chris...

Episode 154 - Twenty-three year old Gordon Adrian Kralt had been the caretaker for a Bible camp on Vancouver Island when he went missing on Halloween in 1970. Gordon was found two weeks later, he had been brutally slain. Tracking down Gordie’s killer uncovered a career psychopath who was believed to have killed before. Co-host: Carol BrowneWritten by: Josina De BreeSources:Regina v. Stewart, 1972...

Episode 153 - Between 2002 and 2005, Charles Eli Kembo, a refugee from Malawi, murdered four people, his business partner, Arden Samuel, his stepdaughter, Rita Yeung, his girlfriend, Sui Yin Ma, and his wife, Margaret Kembo, whose body has never been found. He set up elaborate schemes to steal their identities, set up false bank accounts, insurance claims, and run up credit in his victims’ names. ...

Episode 152: In November of 1992, a twenty-four-year-old woman came forward to Kipling, Saskatchewan RCMP, accusing a respected local doctor, John Schneeberger, of sexual assault. After years of ridicule from other Kipling residents who refused to believe her claims, the young woman finally found some justice. When the truth saw the light, it uncovered one of the strangest and most devious crimina...

Episode 151 - On January at 10:30 p.m., a 911 operator took a call from a seemingly distraught sixteen-year-old girl. When Peel Police arrived at the Mississauga, Ontario home two teenage girls, Sandra, 16, and Beth, 15, led them upstairs to the bathroom where their mother, Linda Andersen, 43, lie face down, deceased in the tub. For almost a year the police believed Linda's death was a tragic acci...

Episode 150: Beginning at 7:19 pm Atlantic Daylight Time, on the evening of October 4, 1967, an airline pilot reported seeing an unidentified flying object heading east over Southern Quebec. About 30 minutes later, calls began coming into local authorities reporting strange lights in the sky over the Atlantic Ocean along Nova Scotia’s South Shore. The multiple sightings continued until 11:20 pm th...