Dark Poutine - True Crime and Dark History

Episode 257: In Victoria, B.C., on the rainy evening of Friday, September 29, 1899, on her way home from work alone, forty-four-year-old Agnes Bings walked across a railroad bridge, cutting through the Songhees Reserve as she did every other night without incident. This night, however, would be her last. Someone took her life somewhere during the 20-minute walk between her bakery on Store Street a...

Episode 256: Colten Boushie was a 22-year-old Indigenous man from the Red Pheasant First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, who was shot and killed on a farm near Biggar, Saskatchewan, on August 9, 2016. His death received widespread attention and led to a national conversation in Canada about systemic racism and the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the criminal justice system. The trial and acquit...

Episode 255: On September 28, 2016, a police dog discovered the nude and decomposing body of a young woman on the grounds of Gabriola House, a famous and, at that time, abandoned mansion on Davie Street in Vancouver’s West End. The body was that of Natsumi Kogawa, 30, a Japanese woman who’d been in Canada on a Visa to study English since May that year. Natsumi’s friends and family had not heard fr...

Episode 254: On Saturday, June 23, 1990, three teenagers, Brigitte Grenier, 16, Kyle Unger, 19, and Timothy Houlahan, 17, all separately attended a music festival at a ski resort near Roseisle, Manitoba. The following morning, Brigette was discovered dead in a creek in a heavily forested area within the resort. She’d been sexually assaulted, beaten, tortured and strangled to death. As both had bee...

Episode 253: At 12:53 am on the morning of October 15, 2018, a frantic, garbled 911 came in from the Closs Family just west of the City of Barron, Wisconsin, U.S.A. There is screaming throughout the 45 seconds of the call from what seems to be two different females. Police arrived shortly after 911 was placed. Inside the home were the bodies of James and Denise Closs. They’d both been shot to deat...

Episode 252: Starting when Amanda Michelle Todd was just 11 years old, a person began a campaign of sexual extortion, relentless harassment and cyberbullying. Over the next three years, Amanda endured constant pressure from the man who used 22 online aliases on four different social media platforms to coerce and lure her into performing pornographic cam shows for him. On September 7, 2012, Amanda...

Episode 251: In the rural area known as Drummond Township, near Perth, Ontario, about a mile north of the village of Balderson’s Corners, in the early morning hours of December 10, 1828, what appeared to be an accidental fire resulted in the deaths of Thomas Easby’s wife and four eldest children. Only a month later, it was the word of Thomas’s only surviving son that painted a different, more sini...

Episode 250: At 8:00 PM on the evening of March 21, 2006, the B.C. Ferries-operated motor vessel Queen of the North departed Prince Rupert, British Columbia. The long-haul passenger and vehicle ferry, making the 18-hour overnight trip to *Port Hardy* on the Northern end of Vancouver Island, was carrying 22 vehicles, 101 people, 59 passengers and 42 crew. Many passengers were asleep when, at 12:21...

Episode 249: As this is our special Christmas episode. It is our tradition to tell a Yuletide-themed yarn. This one is about a duo of bandits who burglarized various shopping malls across the United States and Canada year after year during the holidays. Their insidious M.O. was to work from the inside. The group’s leader, a safe cracker named Willie Thomas Soke and his sidekick, a little person of...

Episode 248: In New York City on the 8th of December, 1980, the world was rocked by the murder of influential rock and roll icon, artist, sometimes controversial activist and dad John Lennon. After an evening recording session at the Record Plant, John Lennon and his wife, artist Yoko Ono returned to their Central Park West apartment building, The Dakota. As John and Yoko approached the entrance t...

Episode 247: In January of 1922, the first of a series of fires broke out on a farm in the small rural community of Caledonia Mills in Antigonish County, Nova Scotia. The family who lived at the farm, Alexander, 70, and sixty-nine-year-old Janet MacDonald, 69, and their 15-year-old adopted daughter Mary-Ellen, claimed the unexplained blazes, 30 in all, had begun in rapid succession in places not c...

Episode 246: John Ruffolo, 36, an employee of Brinks Canada at Butler Crescent location in Saanichton, British Columbia, was due to start a night shift at 10:30 PM on October 19, 2003. He was an ATM technician and an armoured car driver. When John didn’t show up, the rest of the armoured car crew waited 30 minutes before calling John’s home. A woman answered the phone, telling John’s co-worker, Ja...

Episode 245: Between 1926 and 1928, a sinister darkness was afoot on a small chicken ranch in Wineville, California. When he was only 19, Gordon Stewart Northcott, a Canadian, had abducted, raped, tortured and murdered at least three and as many as 20 others. His victims were predominantly prepubescent boys. He sexually assaulted and released numerous others. When a portion of the truth came out,...

Episode 244: On the morning of the 8th of July 1917, thirty-nine-year-old Tom Thomson, a renowned Canadian painter and skilled outdoorsman, set off well-supplied for a day-long fishing excursion in his canoe on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park in Whitney, Ontario. A canoe, later identified as Thomson’s, was found floating upside down in the lake later on the same day. When Tom did not retur...

Episode 243: Eighty years ago, on August 19, 1942, in Operation Jubilee began as the Allies attacked the French port of Dieppe on the English Channel Coast. Of the more than 6100 troops involved, five thousand were soldiers of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division and a thousand British, many commandos, with a handful of others including Americans. The hope was to gain a foothold in Europe, breaching...

Episode 242: On March 3, 2005, a contingent of RCMP constables, attended the property of James Michael Roszko, 46 in Rochfort Bridge, near Mayerthorpe, Alberta. The members were there to serve a search warrant for stolen property and a marijuana-growing operation on the farm, discovered the day before. Roszko, knowing the police would be arriving soon, armed himself with the help of a couple frien...

Episode 241: On March 3, 2005, a contingent of RCMP constables attended the property of James Michael Roszko, 46, in Rochfort Bridge, near Mayerthorpe, Alberta. The members were there to serve a search warrant for stolen property and a marijuana-growing operation on the farm, discovered the day before. Roszko, knowing the police would be arriving soon, armed himself with the help of a couple of fr...

Episode 240: Canada has had a long and embarrassing history of race relations, starting with the indigenous peoples who’d lived here for thousands of years prior to the arrival of European colonizers.  Our nation has also facilitated the mass internment of people perceived as threats to our national security during war time. As World War I raged in Europe, internment camps were set up to house Ukr...

The episode you're about to hear is a sample of the "Driven By Her" series from the Ongoing History of New Music presented by Porsche Canada. On this 5 episode series host Alan Cross explores the amazing contributions some of the most talented women on the planet have made to Modern Music. From Women who made the 90's rock to guitar heroes to the stories of some of the most talented songwriters an...

In our last episode we heard of the murder of eleven-year-old Kathryn-Mary Herbert in Abbotsford, B.C. The 1975 murder went unsolved for nearly 40 years.  Less than a year after Kathryn-Mary was killed, another girl from Abbotsford, Theresa Hildebrandt, 15, also went missing. Her body turned up in 1980, she’d been murdered. Two years after that and more than 200 kilometres from Abbotsford, another...

Episode 238: In Abbotsford, B.C., on the evening of September 24, 1975, Kathryn-Mary Herbert, age 11, was abducted while on her way home from a friend’s home. Last seen The girl’s body was discovered almost two months later on the Matsqui Indian Reserve north of Abbotsford. Investigators determined that she was likely murdered on the day she’d disappeared. In May 1976, Theresa Hildebrandt, 15, van...

Episode 237: On a fall evening in 1991, police discovered the bodies of Alfred Critchley, 75, and Virginia Critchley, 73, in the Chatham, Ontario residence they shared with their son and his family. The couple had been brutally stabbed. Alfred was unconscious but alive and Virginia was barely alive. Virginia died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital and Alfred died later in the hospital hav...

Episode 236: In our last episode, we heard about the murder of 61-year-old retiree, and beloved mother, grandmother and recent great-grandmother, Diana Russell. On February 22, 2002, after her car was found abandoned, in out-of-the way Boston Bar, her family became concerned. Diana was not answering her phone and no one knew where she was. She was later found by police in the basement of Kelowna ,...

Episode 235: On February 22, 2002, a vehicle was found in the ditch off the Trans-Canada highway near Boston Bar, B.C. The car was registered to 61-year-old mother, grandmother and recent great-grandmother, Diana Russell, who was nowhere around the car. RCMP obtained a key to Diana’s Kelowna townhouse and went inside finding the woman partially clothed body underneath some mattresses and furniture...

Episode 234: On March 26, 1997, police found the bodies of 39 members of a religious UFO cult known as Heaven’s Gate in an 830 square-metre (9,000 square foot) home in Rancho Santa Fe, California, a San Diego suburb. All, including the group’s leader, Marshall Applewhite Jr., had died in a ritualistic act of mass suicide. The headline on the cult’s website, which remains online today, stated, “Hal...