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At 12:53 am on the morning of October 15, 2018, a frantic, garbled 911 came in from the Closs Family just west of the City of Barron, Wisconsin, U.S.A. There is screaming throughout the 45 seconds of the call from what seems to be two different females. Police arrived shortly after 911 was placed. Inside the home were the bodies of James and Denise Closs. They’d both been shot to death. It was soon discovered that the Closs couple’s 13-year-old daughter, Jayme Lynn, was missing.

Starting when Amanda Michelle Todd was just 11 years old, a person began a campaign of sexual extortion, relentless harassment and cyberbullying. Over the next three years, Amanda endured constant pressure from the man who used 22 online aliases on four different social media platforms to coerce and lure her into performing pornographic cam shows for him. On September 7, 2012, Amanda posted a now-famous video on YouTube in which she used a series of flashcards to tell her experience of being blackmailed into exposing her breasts via webcam, which later led to her being bullied and physically assaulted. The video gained global attention when it went viral after Amanda completed suicide at her family home in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, a month before her 16th birthday on October 10th, 2012. In 2014, a Dutch-Turkish man, Aydin Coban, in his 30s when the abuse of Amanda Todd began, was identified as the man who’d been harassing her and at least 39 other young girls and young gay males in the Netherlands, U.K., and Canada. After legal proceedings in the Netherlands wrapped up, Coban was imprisoned there. Although charged with five offences related to Amanda Todd here in Canada, Amanda’s family would have to wait for justice for her.

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.

At 8:00 PM on the evening of March 21, 2006, the B.C. Ferries-operated motor vessel Queen of the North departed Prince Rupert, British Columbia. The long-haul passenger and vehicle ferry, making the 18-hour overnight trip to *Port Hardy* on the Northern end of Vancouver Island, was carrying 22 vehicles, 101 people, 59 passengers and 42 crew. Many passengers were asleep when, at 12:21 A.M., at 17.5 knots, the ferry struck an underwater ledge on the northeast side of Gil Island in Wright Sound. The damage to the hull was catastrophic; it tore holes in the starboard side and took out the propellers. The ferry lost propulsion and began drifting and taking on water. Upon realizing the ferry was lost, the crew and passengers loaded into lifeboats to take them safely away from the foundering vessel, which sank in 430 m of water only 80 Minutes later. Sadly, two of the passengers, Shirley Rosette and Gerald Foisy, both of 100 Mile House, British Columbia, were unaccounted for and, as they’ve never been found, they have since been declared dead.

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.

In January of 1922, the first of a series of fires broke out on a farm in the small rural community of Caledonia Mills in Antigonish County, Nova Scotia. The family who lived at the farm, Alexander, 70, and sixty-nine-year-old Janet MacDonald, 69, and their 15-year-old adopted daughter Mary-Ellen, claimed the unexplained blazes, 30 in all, had begun in rapid succession in places not close to either wood stove. The fires and other terrifying occurrences that drove them out of the home, they believed, were caused by a malicious poltergeist bent on their destruction and focused around Mary-Ellen. News of the events brought renowned international investigators of things paranormal, even catching the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories.

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.