Dark Poutine - True Crime and Dark History

Episode 384: Driving the prairie roads south of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, your eyes adjust to an endless sea of grass and sky, where grain elevators rise like sentinels and ragged lines of poplar windbreaks whisper in the steady wind. It’s a landscape that makes you feel both small and free—until, in the middle of the wheat-coloured plains, you come upon a steel-hulled ship sitting high and dry on...

Episode 383: On June 18, 2023, five people boarded the experimental Titan submersible for what was meant to be a once-in-a-lifetime voyage to the wreck of the Titanic, resting nearly four kilometres beneath the North Atlantic. Less than two hours into the descent, all contact with the surface vessel was lost. Over the following days, searchers scoured the area, but hopes for a rescue faded...

Episode 382: On April 2, 1885, the tranquil settlement of Frog Lake in what is now Alberta became the scene of a devastating tragedy. Known as the Frog Lake Massacre, this violent episode unfolded during the North-West Rebellion. Nine settlers, among them government officials, two Roman Catholic priests, traders, and a clerk, lost their lives at the hands of a group of Cree warriors led by...

Episode 381: In December 1987, 12-year-old Trina Campbell, a Métis girl from Brampton, Ontario, was abducted and murdered by Douglas Robert Worth, a violent ex-convict known as the “Pictou Sadist.” Despite psychiatric warnings, Worth had been released months earlier. His relatives’ testimony helped lead police to her remains, and he was convicted of second-degree murder, receiving a life sentence...

Episode 380: The tragic saga of an indigenous man named Stephen Kiyoshk is one of Canada’s most haunting tales of crime, retribution, and the complexities of the justice system. Spanning nearly three decades, the case includes double murder, dramatic trials, passionate community involvement, and a final execution that left deep scars on Walpole Island and the greater Sarnia, Ontario area. The...

Episode 379: In the annals of Canadian folklore and unsolved mysteries, few stories have endured as hauntingly and stubbornly as that of Jerome, the silent, legless man who appeared from out of nowhere on the remote beach of Sandy Cove, Nova Scotia, in September 1863. To this day, no one knows for sure who he was, where he came from, or what chain of events led to his abandonment. What is known,...

Episode 378: Fredericton, New Brunswick, in the sultry summer of 1949, was a community caught between the relief of peacetime and the tensions of post-war hardship. Along the margins of this tidy city lived George Hamilton (25) and Rufus Hamilton (23), two young black brothers whose lives had been fraught with poverty, exclusion, and desperation. These would be factors in the horrific actions...

Episode 377: Joyce Carolyn Stevens, the daughter of a preacher from Houston, Texas, and Rose Marie Turford, a Canadian nurse and suburban mother, became infamous as the real-life “Thelma and Louise.” Their cross-border crime spree in the mid-1990s stunned communities from Houston to Toronto, as they lured, robbed, and humiliated unsuspecting men, all while eluding law enforcement. The case, with...

Episode 376: On June 6, 2021, Nathaniel Veltman, 20, deliberately drove his truck into the Afzaal family, Pakistani immigrants, as they walked along the road in London, Ontario. The attack killed four members of the Afzaal family: Talat Afzaal (74), Salman Afzaal (46), Madiha Salman (44), and Yumnah Afzaal (15), and severely injured 9-year-old Fayez Afzaal. Veltman admitted that he had targeted...

Episode 375: On a bleak November afternoon in 2003, Toronto’s east end became the unlikely stage for a crime so brutal and bizarre that, even years later, it defies belief. The victim was 12-year-old Johnathon Robert Madden, a boy remembered by teachers and friends as “kind and thoughtful,” the kind of child who would go out of his way to walk a younger classmate home just to ensure he was safe....