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In the rural area known as Drummond Township, near Perth, Ontario, about a mile north of the village of Balderson’s Corners, in the early morning hours of December 10, 1928, what appeared to be an accidental fire resulted in the deaths of Thomas Easby’s wife and four eldest children. Only a month later, it was the word of Thomas’s only surviving son that painted a different, more sinister picture. Thomas was arrested, charged with the murders and tried. Easby’s trial was brief, he was convicted and sentenced to hang for what has been called Canada's first mass murder.

As this is our special Christmas episode. It is our tradition to tell a Yuletide-themed yarn. This one is about a duo of bandits who burglarized various shopping malls across the United States and Canada year after year during the holidays. Their insidious M.O. was to work from the inside. The group’s leader, a safe cracker named Willie Thomas Soke and his sidekick, a little person of colour called Marcus Skidmore, would acquire jobs inside the department store. Soke, a foul-mouthed, chronic alcoholic and sex addict, would play the store’s Santa Claus, and Skidmore, his evil sidekick, would be one of Santa’s elves. Finally, after the murder of the head of a mall security manager named Johnny ‘Gin’ Calhoun at a Phoenix, Arizona, shopping complex, the pair were brought to justice in 2003. This was thanks partly to the unwitting help of a Canadian-born 10-year-old boy, Thurman Merman, who was living in Phoenix with his grandmother.

In New York City on the 8th of December, 1980, the world was rocked by the murder of influential rock and roll icon, artist, sometimes controversial activist and dad John Lennon. After an evening recording session at the Record Plant, John Lennon and his wife, artist Yoko Ono returned to their Central Park West apartment building, The Dakota. As John and Yoko approached the entrance to the building, they passed a man for whom, only hours earlier, Lennon had signed an autograph. The man, Mark David Chapman, 25, watched the couple walk by and then pulled a .38 special from his coat and unloaded on John Lennon, shooting him in the back four times. The deadly hollow point bullets tore through the former Beatle, mortally wounding him. He was pronounced dead at Roosevelt Hospital later. When police arrived, they found Chapman patiently reading his book, Catcher in the Rye.

John Ruffolo, 36, an employee of Brinks Canada at Butler Crescent location in Saanichton, British Columbia, was due to start a night shift at 10:30 PM on October 19, 2003. He was an ATM technician and an armoured car driver. When John didn’t show up, the rest of the armoured car crew waited 30 minutes before calling John’s home. A woman answered the phone, telling John’s co-worker, Jason Amos, that John had left for work some time ago. The crew waited a few more minutes before calling in a replacement. John’s wife, Ruby Ann Ruffolo, reported her husband missing on October 20th. His car turned up outside a local pub in Victoria two days after that. On October 25, 2003, a hiker walking near Humpback Road in Langford, 15 kilometres from his Victoria home, found John Ruffolo’s body in a culvert and called the police. John’s body was uninjured except for puncture wounds, believed to be needle marks, on both arms. Six months after John Ruffolo died, police arrested Ruby Ann Ruffolo and charged her with first-degree murder in her husband’s death. John’s surviving family had to wait seven long years for justice in a case beset by numerous delays, some initiated by the defendant and her lawyers, but also included a judge’s death and a mistrial.

Between 1926 and 1928, a sinister darkness was afoot on a small chicken ranch in Wineville, California. When he was only 19, Gordon Stewart Northcott, a Canadian, had abducted, raped, tortured and murdered at least three and as many as 20 others. His victims were predominantly prepubescent boys. He sexually assaulted and released numerous others. When a portion of the truth came out, much of it was told by Northcott’s nephew, 13-year-old Sanford Clark. Northcott had brought Sanford with him from Canada two years before. Northcott viciously raped and beat Clark numerous times before tiring of him as he aged. Afterward, through fear and intimidation, Northcott coerced his nephew into assisting him in committing and covering up the murders of his victims. Even Northcott’s mother, Sarah Louise Northcott, helped in some of the crimes to keep her son out of jail.

On the morning of the 8th of July 1917, thirty-nine-year-old Tom Thomson, a renowned Canadian painter and skilled outdoorsman, set off well-supplied for a day-long fishing excursion in his canoe on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park in Whitney, Ontario. A canoe, later identified as Thomson’s, was found floating upside down in the lake later on the same day. When Tom did not return from his fishing trip the next day, his friends became concerned. Eight days after Thomson first set out, Dr. G. W. (Goldwyn) Howland, a cottager from Toronto, spotted Tom’s bloated and decomposed body floating in the lake. An examination of Thomson’s body uncovered a large bruise on the right side of his head, and blood had come out of his right ear. Thomson’s death was quickly ruled an accident, and no police investigation occurred. Thomson was laid to rest in Mowat Cemetery near Canoe Lake, where he’d died. However, Thomson’s older brother George demanded the body be exhumed. Two days later, Tom’s grave was re-opened, the casket removed, and he was re-interred on July 21 in the family plot beside the Leith Presbyterian Church in what is now the Municipality of Meaford, Ontario. Officially the matter was closed, but mythology has grown around Thomson’s death. In the intervening years since Thomson’s death, investigations by sleuths, amateur and professional, have come to various conflicting conclusions. Some agree with the initial findings that Thomson died due to accidental drowning. Others, however, suggest that Tom Thomson was murdered.

On March 3, 2005, a contingent of RCMP constables, attended the property of James Michael Roszko, 46 in Rochfort Bridge, near Mayerthorpe, Alberta. The members were there to serve a search warrant for stolen property and a marijuana-growing operation on the farm, discovered the day before. Roszko, knowing the police would be arriving soon, armed himself with the help of a couple friends, Shawn Hennessey and Dennis Cheeseman, and then he laid in wait for the RCMP. When four of the officers, *Anthony Gordon, Lionide “Leo” Johnston, Brock Myrol and Peter Schiemann*, walked into a quonset hut on the farm. Roszko, hidden inside the building, opened fire on the four members, killing them and then himself before the other RCMP members on site could come to their aid. In the last episode we learned of the life of the murderer leading up to the day of the slaying of the four RCMP members. In this episode you’ll hear about the crime and its aftermath.

On March 3, 2005, a contingent of RCMP constables attended the property of James Michael Roszko, 46, in Rochfort Bridge, near Mayerthorpe, Alberta. The members were there to serve a search warrant for stolen property and a marijuana-growing operation on the farm, discovered the day before. Roszko, knowing the police would be arriving soon, armed himself with the help of a couple of friends, Shawn Hennessey and Dennis Cheeseman, and then he lay in wait for the RCMP. When four of the officers, Anthony Gordon, Lionide “Leo” Johnston, Brock Myrol and Peter Schiemann, walked into a quonset hut on the farm. Roszko, hidden inside the building, opened fire on the four members, killing them and then himself before the other RCMP members on-site could come to their aid. This episode covers the life of the murderer and leads us up to the slaying of the four RCMP members. Next week in part 2, you’ll hear about the crime and its aftermath.

In our last episode we heard of the murder of eleven-year-old Kathryn-Mary Herbert in Abbotsford, B.C. The 1975 murder went unsolved for nearly 40 years. Less than a year after Kathryn-Mary was killed, another girl from Abbotsford, Theresa Hildebrandt, 15, also went missing. Her body turned up in 1980, she’d been murdered. Two years after that and more than 200 kilometres from Abbotsford, another girl, Monica Jack, 12, went bike riding near Merritt, B.C. and was never again seen alive. Her remains were not found until 1995 near Nicola Lake, she too had been murdered. Police believed that all three murders were connected. They had only circumstantial evidence on one suspect they presumed had committed all three killings.

In Abbotsford, B.C., on the evening of September 24, 1975, Kathryn-Mary Herbert, age 11, was abducted while on her way home from a friend’s home. Last seen The girl’s body was discovered almost two months later on the Matsqui Indian Reserve north of Abbotsford. Investigators determined that she was likely murdered on the day she’d disappeared. In May 1976, Theresa Hildebrandt, 15, vanished without a trace from her Aldergrove, B.C. home. F Police believed she might be a runaway, but her family felt otherwise. or nearly four years no one knew what had become of Theresa. In March of 1980, her skeletal remains were found in a shallow grave off Downes and Mt. Lehman roads. Almost exactly two years after Theresa’s disappearance, in early May 1976, 12-year-old Monica Jack was riding her bicycle near Merritt, B.C. when she disappeared. As Monica was of indigenous heritage, her disappearance fell under Project E-PANA, the RCMP’s initiative to solve the multitude of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls along B.C.’s infamous Highway of Tears. In June of 1995, Monica’s remains were discovered off a logging road on Swakum Mountain, to the west of Nicola Lake and several kilometres from where she was last seen. Families of the victims had their suspicions about suspects and worked hard to hold police on task, to solve the murders of their girls. Due to similarities in the cases, police believed them all, potentially, linked. After years of running down tip after tip, a man with a history of sexual assault convictions and had been living in B.C. during all three killings fell under suspicion of investigators. After a long operation which involved the employment pf their infamous Mr. Big technique to get their suspect to talk, RCMP arrested 67-year-old Garry Taylor Handlen, and charged him with the murders of Kathryn-Mary Herbert and Monica Jack in 2014, more than 36 years after the murder of Monica Jack. He was later convicted of first-degree murder�. Sadly, in regards to Theresa Hildebrant’s murder, no one has yet been charged in her killing, and 46 years later, her family has yet to receive any official answers about Theresa’s death.