Dark Poutine - True Crime and Dark History

Episode 436: In June 1967, two of northern Saskatchewan's most respected bushmen, Métis political organizer James Brady and Cree band councillor Absolom Halkett, were dropped off by float plane to prospect for uranium near La Ronge. A week later, their employer found the camp standing, the beds slept in, the canoe still tied to shore. Both men were gone. The RCMP searched for three weeks, found a...

Episode 435: In November 1944, the Imperial Japanese Army began launching paper balloons from the coast of Honshu — each one carrying incendiary and anti-personnel bombs, designed to ride the jet stream across the Pacific and set fire to the forests of North America. They called the program Fu-Go. Canada called them White Paper. Over the following five months, more than sixty balloons came down...

Episode 434: On the morning of February 25th, 2005, Crystal Taman, a forty-year-old dental assistant, wife, and mother of three, left her home in East St. Paul, Manitoba on her way to work. She never arrived. Stopped at a red light on Highway 59 at the Perimeter Highway, her car was struck at highway speed by a blue Dodge Dakota truck driven by an off-duty Winnipeg Police Service constable named...

Episode 433: On August 16, 1995, Avis Ottey came home to her townhouse in Scarborough, Ontario, expecting to find her daughters packing for the future. Instead, she found nineteen-year-old Marsha Ottey and sixteen-year-old Tamara "Tami" Ottey murdered in the basement.Marsha was just two days away from leaving for Arkansas State University on an athletic scholarship she had worked years to earn....

Episode 432: In February 1884, a Scottish storekeeper named James Bell was shot dead in his cabin along Telegraph Road in Washington Territory, just south of the Canadian border. Within days, a fifteen-year-old Semá:th boy named Louie Sam was arrested on suspicion of murder and placed in lawful Canadian custody on Sumas Prairie. He never made it to trial. On the night of February 27, a mob of...

Episode 431: In the fall of 2011, the first of three indigenous women disappeared from a stretch of Winnipeg's West End that those who worked there called the Street of Tears. Their families searched, put up posters, and made phone calls that went nowhere. The man believed responsible had been known to police for decades. His criminal record ran to 109 convictions. He was already on their radar...

Episode 430: On the morning of May 28, 1998, police were called to a home on Encino Avenue in Encino, California. Inside the master bedroom, they found Phil Hartman — one of the most versatile performers in the history of North American television — shot three times at close range while he slept. His wife, Brynn, had pulled the trigger sometime around 2:30 in the morning, then driven to a...

Episode 429: In January 1995, DNA testing excluded Guy Paul Morin, the man convicted of the 1984 murder of Christine Jessop, from the crime. The Ontario Court of Appeal set aside his conviction, and Morin was released. The man whose semen was recovered from Christine Jessop's underwear in 1984 remained unidentified.A public inquiry led by Justice Fred Kaufman spent 10 months examining how an...

Episode 428: On October 3, 1984, nine-year-old Christine Jessop stepped off a school bus in Queensville, Ontario, and walked toward home. She was never seen alive again. Her body was found on New Year's Eve, fifty-six kilometres away. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed.What followed was one of the most consequential criminal proceedings in Canadian history — and the quiet destruction of...

Episode 427: In the summer of 1934, John Sackville Labatt was one of the most recognizable names in Canada. The fifty-three-year-old president of John Labatt Limited had spent nearly two decades running one of the country's largest and oldest breweries, a family business built across three generations and tested by Prohibition, the Depression, and the rum-running trade that kept it alive through...