Dark Poutine - True Crime & Dark History

Episode 190: Old Mike Todor’s body was found in his east end Regina home in the spring of 1955. He’d lain there for more than 14 months and had been beaten to death. Someone had killed him, but who? Elizabeth “Tootsie” LaFleche, Mike’s 30-something-year-old wife, who’d been living with a friend for months, was telling a lot of stories about what had become of Mike. None of the tales made a lot of sense. After police found Mike’s body, a number of arrests were made, charges were laid and several trials held, but thanks to Tootsie’s lies, the real facts of the case may never be known.

Read more190: Anything But the Truth: The Murder of Mike Todor

Episode 189: Starting in 1963 and stretching over the next seven years, a militant French separatist group called the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorized La Belle Province. Their aim was to overthrow the Quebec government and leave Canada creating an independent Marxist- Leninist Quebec state. By 1970 the group had committed more than 200 violent criminal and terroristic acts including, bombings and high-profile kidnappings. The group’s activities ultimately claimed the lives of eight people, including a Quebec provincial cabinet minister, and injured many more, before then Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, finding himself out of options, enacted the 1914 War Measures act to stem the violence of the October Crisis of 1970.

Read more189: The FLQ: Seven Years of Terror and the October Crisis

Episode 188: In early October of 1994, during a bizarre, nearly simultaneous sequence of murder / suicides, in Quebec, and across the Atlantic in Switzerland, 53 members of the Order of the Solar Temple were found dead in burned out buildings. The deaths fulfilled what the cult’s leaders claimed was the group’s “final transit” or return to Unity with God required before the impending end of the world. Even though it appeared to be over, more cult members were yet to die. Over a year later, in December of 1995, sixteen members of the cult died in France. More than a year after that, in march 1997, another five cult members died in Quebec bringing the death toll to 74. The cult’s two founders, Luc Jouret and Joseph Di Mambro, were among the dead in 1994, however, some fear there may be future related mass murder / suicides by followers still practicing in secret.

Read more188: Order of the Solar Temple

Episode 187: Between 1974 and 1976, a series of rapes and murders took place in and around the small town of Strathroy, in South Western Ontario, perpetrated by Christian Herbert Harold Magee. He sexually assaulted and murdered 3 women, and raped two others.

Written by: Mathew Stockton

Read more187: The Mad Slasher of Strathroy

Episode 186: Twenty years ago, on the morning of September 11, 2001, as the world watched in horror, 19 radical Islamist al-Qaeda terrorists launched a group of coordinated attacks using four commuter planes as weapons, hitting several preplanned targets in the eastern United States. Two of the airliners were flown deliberately into each of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, a third plane smashed into the U.S. Pentagon. A fourth plane believed to have been bound for the U.S. Capitol building crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers aboard the flight fought back against the terrorists who’d taken over the flight.

Among the 2977 people who died as a direct result of the attacks, 24 of those were Canadian. As with many other countries, Canada stepped up to help in the immediate aftermath. What follows are details of the initial attacks and then some of the stories from that day and its aftermath.

Read more186: Canadians and the September 11, 2001 Attacks

Episode 185: RCMP officers arrived at the Blackman family residence on Spuraway Avenue in Coquitlam, B.C.’s Ranch Park subdivision in the early morning hours of January 18th, 1983. A neighbour had called 911after hearing screams and then witnessing what appeared to be a domestic argument next door that escalated into a shooting. Inside the eerily silent home as the cold winter rain fell, the responding officers found a horrific and bloody scene; six members of the Blackman family were dead.

The deceased were Richard Blackman, 50, his wife, Irene Blackman, 49, their daughter, Roberta Lynn Davies, 28, Roberta’s husband, John Iowerth Davies, 39, Karen Dale Rhodes, 25, another of the Blackman’s daughters, and the youngest of the Blackman children, 16-year-old son, Rick Blackman. Just outside the home, police had detained a young man, 22-year-old, Bruce Alfred Blackman, another of Irene and Richard’s sons. Bruce, who’d been picked up as police arrived, was acting bizarrely, telling the RCMP officers that he was the Antichrist and that the world was going to end on January 31.

Read more185: She Told Me To: The Blackman Family Tragedy

Episode 184: In Mississauga, Ontario in 1973 and early 1974, the discoveries of the murdered bodies of two young women, Constance Dickey, 19, and Neda Novak, 18, only months apart, left the community shaken. Both women, it appeared, had been abducted, sexually assaulted, then murdered and dumped by a yet unknown killer. On August 19, 1974, after being sexually assaulted and left for dead, a sixteen-year-old girl, Julia Sheldon, identified a twenty-four-year-old, married father of two named Henry Robert Williams as the man who’d brutally assaulted her. It soon became clear that Williams had also committed the two previous murders.

Read more184 – Monster in Mississauga: The Murders of Candace Dickey and Neda Novak

Early on a cold morning on January 7, 1922, two Montreal city Public Works Department employees, on their way to their works shed, discovered the body of a man laying on the frozen ground near the corners of Coolbrook and Snowden Street. The man, who’d been shot was later identified by a Catholic Priest named Adélard Delorme as his half-brother, Raoul Delorme. When police investigated they were surprised that their evidence pointed to one, very unusual suspect. This case would become important, not only for the oddity of its perpetrator and the groundbreaking forensics used to break the case but also for its shocking outcome.

Read more183 – Sins of the Father — The Delorme Affair

This is a story of two talented people whose final interaction would lead to the death of one of comedy’s rising stars and a notorious place in Hollywood history for the other.

On March 5, 1982, after an all too brief but stellar career in film and television, actor and comedian John Belushi, 33, was found dead in his bungalow at the infamous Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. Investigators soon discovered that a Canadian woman, Catherine Evelyn or Cathy Smith, was the last person with the star and had been the person who had supplied and shot him up with the fatal overdose that killed him.

Read more182 – Sundown — The Death of John Belushi

The region in the South Nahanni River played host to several unexplained and disturbing occurrences in the first half of the twentieth century. Between1905 and 1945, in the remote and rugged wilderness in the lower west corner of Mackenzie Mountains in the Northwest Territories and other unexplained events, there were at least 44 people who went missing under mysterious circumstances.

Most unsettling of all were the four bodies that were found during that time in three separate incidents. All of the corpses had been decapitated, and their heads were never recovered, earning the area the ominous nickname, the Valley of the Headless Men. No one knows who was responsible for these horrific mutilations or what became of the other missing people.

Read more181 – The Headless Men of the Nahanni Valley