Dark Poutine - True Crime and Dark History

Episode 389: On a rain-soaked evening on June 13th, 1833, two young law students faced each other across a muddy field near Perth, Ontario, pistols in hand. John Wilson, a 20-year-old from humble farming stock, gripped his weapon with trembling fingers as rain dripped from his dark hair. Sixty feet away, 22-year-old Robert Lyon, handsome, aristocratic, and the son of a British officer, stood with...

Episode 388: On the morning of August 5, 2013, Campbellton, New Brunswick, faced an unthinkable tragedy. Police and first responders were called to an apartment above Reptile Ocean, the town’s reptile and fish shop, where they found Connor and Noah Barthe, brothers aged six and four, dead after a sleepover with their friend Jayce Savoie. Sometime in the night, a 12-foot, 53-pound African rock...

Episode 387: On December 26, 2005, around 5:15 p.m., there was a gunfight outside the Foot Locker store on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto. Unfortunately, a fifteen-year-old girl named Jane Creba was shot and killed. She was an innocent bystander among hundreds of Boxing Day shoppers who were in the area at the time of the shooting. Sadly, she was caught in the middle of the gunfire and died...

Episode 386: In the last episode, we explored the origins of Herbert Baumeister and the early days at Fox Hollow, tracing the stories of early disappearances of gay men around Indiana. The disappearances beginning in the late 1980s and into the 1990s signalled the start of a wave of heartbreak that swept through Indianapolis’s gay community, leaving families and friends desperate for answers. In...

Episode 385: The killings at Fox Hollow Farm are one of Indiana’s darkest chapters. In the early 1990s, Herb Baumeister, a husband, father, and thrift store owner, lived a double life in the upscale suburb of Westfield. Behind the facade of Fox Hollow Farm, he is believed to have lured young men, mostly from local gay bars, to his home, where police later uncovered the remains of at least 25...

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...