Dark Poutine - True Crime and Dark History

Episode 233: During the harsh winter of 1941, as World War II raged elsewhere, closer to home, a tragedy occurred on the remote, ice-covered island archipelago in Hudson Bay called the Belcher Islands. After witnessing a dramatic meteor shower, a tribal group of Inuit people believed the world was ending. Inspired by a copy of the New Testament Bible translated into Inuit syllabics by Anglican mis...

Epidsode 232: The strongest earthquake ever recorded in eastern Canada, measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale, occurred at 5:02pm Newfoundland time on the 18 of November in 1929. It was felt as far west as Ottawa and as far south as New York City. The quake, centred around 250 km south of Newfoundland along the southern edge of the Grand Banks caused a massive sub-ocean landslide. Two and a half hour...

Episode 231: Gerald Vincent Bull was a smart cookie from North Bay, Ontario. He graduated from the University of Toronto at 20, got a master’s degree at age 21, and at 22 earned a Ph. D. in aeronautical engineering from the University of Toronto’s newly created Institute of Aerodynamics. Magazines touted him the ‘boy rocket scientist’. Nations sought him for his innovative ideas regarding long ran...

Episode 230: Over a period of 22 months, between January 1969 and January 1971, 3 women in Southwestern Ontario were brutally murdered in 3 different towns. These women’s names were Isobella “Belva” Russell, Edith Authier, and Jane Wooley. Police solved the case of the third victim, Belva Russell, a matter of weeks after the crime. The perpetrator, Gerald Thomas Archer was convicted and imprisoned...

Episode 229: In our last episode we learned about the life and first two murders of British serial murderer Dennis Andrew Nilsen. He was arrested after police discovered human remains he’d flushed down the toilet at 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, a Suburb of North London. In this episode we’ll learn about Nilsen’s next twelve murders, what happened after his arrest and the aftermath of his cr...

Episode 228: In our last episode we learned about the final killing and capture of British serial murderer Dennis Andrew Nilsen after police discovered human remains he’d flushed down the toilet at 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, a Suburb of North London, England. After his capture, the enigmatic Muswell Hill Murderer, or Kindly Killer, as he would come to be called, was more than happy to dis...

Episode 227: On the 8th of February, 1983, complaints about the plumbing at 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, a suburb in London, England led to the discovery of human remains. The remains were traced to the flat of a tenant in the home named Dennis Andrew Nilsen, 37, a civil servant, former police officer and veteran of the British military. In Nilsen’s home police found grisly evidence of many...

On a hot, sunny Saturday afternoon on the 15th of August 1914, in a house near Spring Green, Wisconsin one of the worst mass killings in the state’s history occurred when 7 people were axed to death, immolated, and the house they were in burnt down. It was a case that on its own would have made headlines - but it wasn’t just any house that was burnt - it was the world-famous architectural treasure...

Episode 225: In our last episode we learned that in Saskatoon, on the morning of January 31, 1969, a 12-year-old girl on the way to school stumbled upon the body of Gail Miller, a 20-year-old nurse’s aide, lying in the snow in an alley. Gail had been raped, murdered and discarded in the snow by her killer. As there had been a number of sexual assaults in the city, police were under enormous pressu...

Episode 224: In Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on the morning of January 31, 1969, a 12-year-old girl on the way to school stumbled upon the body of Gail Miller, a 20-year-old nurse’s aide, lying in the snow in an alley. Gail had been raped, murdered and discarded in the snow by her killer. As there had been a number of sexual assaults in the city, police were under enormous pressure to solve the murder...

Episode 223: On Friday, February 20, 1976, while on vacation in Florida OPP Corporal Donald R. Irwin, 39, a father of three from Kitchener, Ontario, went on a ride along with his good friend Florida State Trooper, Philip Black, also 39-years-old. Irwin was in civilian clothing and unarmed. At around 7:15 a.m. they checked an old Camaro parked in a rest area on I-95, north of Pompano Beach, Florida...

Episode 222: On Sunday, November 12,1988 beloved 36-year-old high school teacher named Byron Carr was found by his family dead in the bedroom of his home in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. He’d been strangled to death and stabbed. Byron’s wallet had been stolen, and ominously on his wall, written in pen, were the words “I will kill again.” Investigators revealed that Byron was a closeted gay...

Episode 221: On the morning of December 31, 1888, in Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, friends found 61-year-old fisherman François Coupard dead in his fishing shack. Someone had brutally slain Coupard and had mutilated his body horribly after his murder. A quick investigation led to two men, Auguste Neel and Louis Ollivier, trying to flee to Newfoundland on a stolen fishing boat. The pair later admitted...

Episode 220:  The attention grabbing headline of the the article in The Province newspaper on the morning of July 3, 2013 screamed, “RCMP foil Canada Day bomb plot”, the subheading read, “VICTORIA: Two British Columbians allegedly hatch scheme to blow up legislature.” Since March of that year, RCMP had been engaged in what they called Project Souvenir, a complex and expensive sting operation to ga...

Episode 219 BONUS: In this episode we hear from several Dark Poutine listeners, and in one case, a family member of a listener, who are sharing their experiences and feelings around their own UFO encounters. Mike also shares his own experience as a youth, and at the end of the show Mike and Mathew talk about their recent visit to The Extraterrestrial Highway, Rachel, Nevada and the back Gate of Ar...

Episode 219: In the first of two episodes released this week, Mike interviews Chris Rutkowski. Chris A. Rutkowski is a science writer who has devoted much time to investigating and studying reports of UFOs, writing about case investigations, and offering his insights into the broad UFO phenomenon publishing the annual Canadian UFO Report. Chris has authored numerous books on UFOs and two of his pr...

Episode 218: The history of humanity is rife with stories of unexplained things in the skies above us. Handed down first verbally and pictographically by way of depictions painted on cave walls and then in written accounts, there are scores of stories about strange lights and objects in the sky. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, as human technology has improved, we have b...

Episode 217: In the early hours of March 27, 2010, Holly Bartlett, 31, was found unconscious and badly injured under the A. Murray MacKay bridge in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 350 metres away from her home. She died the next day in a Halifax Hospital. Holly, a grad student at Dalhousie University, was fiercely independent despite her disability. She had been completely blind since she was thirteen years...

Episode 216: In Quebec, on April 15, 1763, after a supposed confession and hasty trial by an English military tribunal, 30-year-old Marie-Josephte Corriveau was convicted of murdering in brutal fashion her second husband, Louis-Étienne Dodier, and was sentenced to death. She was hanged with haste, three days later. Her body was then put on display in a form-fitting metal cage and placed at a cross...

Episode 215: Mary Celeste, formerly Amazon, was an American registered, Nova Scotia built brigantine that was found abandoned on December 4, 1872, some 740 km off the Azores, Portugal. The fate of the 10 people aboard remains a mystery almost 150 years later. Sources: Fisherman’s Memorial | Lunenburg NS Sable Island | Maritime Museum of the Atlantic The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834) b...

Episode 214: On November 25, 2011, neighbours around the four-plex at 51st Avenue and 47th Street in the town of Innisfail, Alberta heard a bang which shook their homes. Some said sounded like a gunshot, others said it sounded like someone dropping a heavy pile of wood. The dining room window of one the corner suites had been blown outward, glass was strewn throughout the yard. Police were called...

Episode 213: Toronto theatre magnate and enigmatic millionaire Ambrose J. Small disappeared without a trace on December 2, 1919, only a day after having made a lucrative deal to sell his ownership interests in his chain of theatres including the Grand Opera House in Toronto. People interested in the case suspected one of two theories were the most likely for the tycoon’s abrupt disappearance — eit...

Episode 212: On the afternoon of January 27, 1993, the day before her 20th birthday, Sian Simmonds, a student who was working he way through school, was found dead in her basement suite in the Guildford neighbourhood of Surrey, B.C. She had been shot and bludgeoned. Neighbours had heard screams coming from her suite. Only days later, a man named David Schlender was arrested. Already on bail for th...

Episode 211: On January 27, 1896, in the tiny community of Bear River, Nova Scotia, popular fourteen-year-old Annie Kempton was brutally murdered in her home while her parents were out of town. The crime, papers said, was the worst ever seen in the province up to that point and there was an outcry for swift justice on the heels of the slaying. Two days after the crime, Peter David Wheeler, 26, an...

Episode 210: In the summer of 2003, Ardeth Wood, a 27-year-old PhD candidate studying philosophy at the University of Waterloo, was enjoying a well needed break at her parent’s home in the Orleans neighbourhood of Ottawa. In the early afternoon of August 6, 2003, wanting to take advantage of a beautiful, warm summer day Ardeth borrowed her brother’s bike to go for a ride. Ardeth never came home. A...