93: Part 1 – Murder Most Pointless – Lynn Duggan & Patti Ducharme (BC)

Episode 093 – Part 1 of 2: On the evening of June 17, 1993, after a day of worry, Cheryl Duggan, went to her 34-year-old twin sister Lynn’s apartment in North Vancouver, BC. Cheryl soon discovered a grisly crime scene, and Lynn Duggan was never again seen alive again. The prime suspect, an ex-VPD officer, named Brock Graham who Lynn had dated only 3 times, was the main suspect  from day one in the minds of the Duggan. Eventually the police came to agree, but Graham was not talking. In 1996, before the Duggan family could find justice for Lynn, Brock Graham, would kill again. This time in Campbell River, BC, where a mother of four named Patti Ducharme, who happened to be Brock’s live in girlfriend was found brutally murdered in her home in much the same way authorities believed Lynn Duggan had been.

Sources:
Cheryl Duggan Interviews – © Dark Poutine 2019
The Duggan family files and archives on the case
R. v. Graham, 1998 CanLII 5116 (BC CA), <http://canlii.ca/t/1dxnc>
Newpapers.com
Cop: Forty-Three Years In The Royal Canadian Mounted Police by Bill Sharp

Photo © Mike Browne

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92: Collateral Damage – The Bombing of Flight 108 (QC)

Episode 092 – On the morning of September 9, 1949, a DC-3 Canadian Pacific passenger plane, CP Flight 108, on a routine small hop flight up the St. Lawrence River crashed into the remote forest of Sault-au-Cochon, Quebec. All 23 aboard, 19 passengers and 4 crew, were killed instantly. Thanks to eyewitness reports of an explosion and first responders reporting the odour of dynamite, it was quickly determined that the crash was the result of sabotage. A Quebec City jeweller, J. Albert Guay quickly became the main suspect, his wife, Rita Morel, had been on the plane and determined to be the sole target. She’d recently discovered his affair with the teenage beauty Marie-Ange Robitaille. Guay also took a $10,000 travellers insurance policy out on his wife the day he bought her plane ticket to the ill fated flight. The other 22 killed were merely collateral damage so one man could get what he wanted.

Guay was quickly picked up with his two unlikely accomplices, a wheelchair bound watchmaker and his 44 year old sister, who’d been smitten with Guay. They were charged with multiple counts of murder. As the three were tried a story of betrayal, infidelity and greed emerged shocking the nation. All three were hanged for their participation in what was, up to that point, the third worst air disaster in Canadian history.

Sources:
Crash of a Douglas C-47-DL near Saint Joachim: 23 killed
CBC: To murder his wife, he killed 22 more: The Sault-au-Cochon plane crash of 1949
Roger Lemelin in MacLeans Magazine – My Friend Guay 1951
Douglas DC-3C (CF-CUA c/n 4518) Canadian Pacific Airlines
VICE She Was the Last Woman Executed In Canada. She May Have Been Innocent
New Yorker 1953 article by EJ Kahn – It Has No Name
Newpapers.com search for Albert Guay

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91: The .410 Murders – Denean Worms & Brenda Hughes (BC)

Episode 091 – In early October 1984, Denean Worms, 19, went missing after a night out with friends. Denean’s nude body was found 6 different ays later in a nearby gravel pit. She’d been raped, shot twice in the head with a .410 shotgun and tossed aside. There were no real suspects until late December 1984. Brenda Hughes, just 16, was found raped and murdered in her own home by her family returning from church. She too had been shot twice in the head by a .410 shotgun. A 22-year-old local man, Terrance Wayne Burlingham, was arrested and tried for the heinous crimes. Convicting him was not a straight forward undertaking.

Sources:
R. v. Burlingham, 1990 CanLII 484 (BC CA), <http://canlii.ca/t/1d7bf>
R. v. Burlingham, 1991 CanLII 2146 (BC CA), <http://canlii.ca/t/1d8wb>
R. v. Burlingham, 1993 CanLII 6884 (BC CA), <http://canlii.ca/t/23288>
R. v. Burlingham, 1995 2 SCR 206, 1995 CanLII 88 (SCC), <http://canlii.ca/t/1frk6>
Sinclair and the Scope of the Right to Counsel
Robert D. Keppel’s Signature Murders: A Report of the 1984 Cranbrook, British Columbia Cases
VicNews.com – article
AbbyNews.com – article
newspapers.com – search for Terrance Wayne Burlingham

Contest Giveaway thanks to Eve Lazarus

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90: Miscarried Justice – The Murder of Sandy Seale & Conviction of Donald Marshall Jr. (NS)

Episode 090 – On evening in late May of 1971 police responded to reports of a young black male, Sandy Seale, having been stabbed in Sydney, Nova Scotia‘s Wentworth Park. A 17-year-old indigenous man, named Donald Marshall Jr., son of the Mi’kmaq Grand Chief who’d been at the scene, and injured himself, was later charged with the crime. After spending almost 12 years in prison Marshall was exonerated by a fresh RCMP investigation after new evidence was presented to Marshall by a friend. Donald Marshall Jr. was freed and the real killer, Roy Ebsary, was eventually convicted, and one of the largest inquiries into a wrongful conviction in Canadian history was launched.

Photo: provided by Marshall Family to the Canadian Encyclopedia

Sources:
Regina v. Marshall, 1972 CanLII 1345 (NS CA), <http://canlii.ca/t/hv00k>
R. v. Ebsary, 1984 CanLII 3507 (NS CA), <http://canlii.ca/t/g9nx0>
R. v. Ebsary, 1986 CanLII 4648 (NS CA), <http://canlii.ca/t/gc47w>
Wikipedia – Donald Marshall Jr
Mi’Kmaw Culture – Overview
Justice Denied: The Law Versus Donald Marshall by Michael Harris
Real Justice: Convicted for Being Mi’kmaq: The story of Donald Marshall Jr.
Royal Commission on the Donald Marshall, Jr Prosecution – PDF
Global News: N.S. introduces policy ensuring fair treatment of Indigenous Peoples in courts
Documentary – The Donald Marshall Jr. Story

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89: Billionaire’s Daughter: The Kidnapping of Cynthia Kilburn (BC)

Episode 089 – Four days before Christmas in 1990 a North Vancouver woman named Cynthia Kilburn was kidnapped from her home. A threatening ransom note asking for $8.5 million was found pinned to the door of her home; her two children, 4-year-old twins, were found bound, but unharmed, in an upstairs bathroom. Unknown to most of her neighbours, Cynthia is the daughter of the philanthropic BC billionaire businessman and Canada’s fourth richest man, Jim Pattison. The kidnappers knew who they had, but their poorly thought out scheme did not go as planned.

Sources:
Dead Ends: BC Crime Stories by Paul Wilcocks
R. v. Mulvahill, 1992 CanLII 347 (BC SC)
Seven Arrested After Kidnapping
Kidnap victim picked for judges’ committee
What happened to Kataoka – Vancouver Sun
Newspapers.com
Jim Pattison Group

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88: Away Game: Burke and Hare – The Anatomy Murderers

Episode 088 – Over a ten month period, starting in late 1827, a pair of Irish born serial killers William Burke and William Hare killed 16 people, for fun and for profit in Edinburgh, Scotland. The corpses of their victims, twelve women, three men and one child, were taken to Surgeon’s Square and sold off to anatomist Dr. Robert Knox, for use in his anatomy classes.

Sources:
BurkeandHare.com
The Anatomy Murders by Lisa Rosner
Dr. Heinrich Von Staden’s The Discovery of the Body
Sanjib Kumar Ghosh’s Human Cadaveric Dissection
The Diary of a Resurrectionist – 1811-1812 by James Blake Bailey on Gutennburg.org
Mental Floss: The Era of the Body Snatchers
Mortsafes – The Vintage News
Burke and Hare: Serial Killing for Science (Ghastly Tales of Scotland) | Documentary
Broadside regarding the Burke and Hare trials
The History of Burke and Hare – 1884 by George MacGregor

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87: The Murder of Amber Kirwan (NS)

Episode 087 – On the morning of October 9, 2011, 19-year-old Amber Kirwan failed to show up for an arranged ride home after leaving a local billiards hall in New Glasgow, N.S. After a massive search for almost a month Amber’s body was found in a shallow grave in the nearby village of Heathbell. The man eventually charged and convicted of the crime had a surprising background. Should he have been in the community at all?

Sources:
R. v. Falconer, 2016 NSCA 22 (CanLII) http://canlii.ca/t/gp1bx
Pictou County Advocate – archives
Obituary of Amber Donna Kirwan
Timeline of Events in Amber Kirwan’s murder – Cape Breton Post
Surveillance Video at Dooly’s – The Advocate
Murder of Taxi Driver – Robert Gerald LeBlanc
The song Taxi Phone by Dave Gunning

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86: The Altona School Shooting of 1902 (MB)

Episode 086 – In October of 1902 the small, quiet Mennonite community of Altona, Manitoba was shaken by violent events at the hands of one of their own. The teacher at their one room school opened fire on three school trustees after an argument, wounding all three. He then returned to the school and shot three students, all daughters of the trustees he’d shot earlier.

Sources:
Spectator Tribune Article
Newspapers.com
School Shootings in Canada at Wikipedia
A Pictorial History of Altona
Winnipeg Free Press Article
Murder and Madness in a Mennonite Village

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85: Date with Death – The Murder of James Shannon (BC)

episode 085 – The day before Valentines Day in 2008, James Shannon, a nurse from Port Alberni, BC, met up with another man he’d met on the web site, Plenty of Fish. Although James was looking for love, the man he brought into his home brought something much more sinister. Days later, after not showing up for multiple shifts at work, James Shannon was found brutally murdered in his home. The man who committed the act, Kim Winslow Rothgordt, was claiming he’d been raped and was too intoxicated at the time to know what happened. The truth was nowhere near his claims.

Photo credit: Phil Smith on Flickr per CC licence

Sources:
R. v. Rothgordt, 2014 BCSC 1215 (CanLII)
Port Alberni on Wikipedia
MacLeans Magazine – Canada’s Most Dangerous Places 2018
Port Alberni ‘a safe place to be’ despite crime rate, says RCMP
Thunder Bay Podcast – CANADALAND
B.C. man convicted in second-degree murder of nurse in 2008 gets new trial
Gay Panic Defense on Wikipedia
BC judge says gay panic defence no longer valid

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84: Emanuel Jaques – The Shoeshine Boy Murder (ON)

Episode 084 – July 28, 1977 was a hot summer day on the corner of Yonge and Dundas streets in what was then Toronto’s seedier area. Three boys were shining shoes of passersby for change. After a day of work with little profit a tall, friendly stranger arrived with two pairs of shoes he needed shined. Claiming he had more lucrative work elsewhere he lured one to the younger boys, 12-year-old Emanuel Jaques, away. Emanuel was never seen alive again and the horrifying circumstances around his death divided the city.

Sources:
Book – OUTRAGED, by Robert J Hoshowsky
Newspaper.com
Wikipedia – Emanuel Jaques
Global News – 40 years Later
Court Case – R. v. Woods, 1980 CanLII 2928 (ON CA)
Court Case – Regina v. Betesh, 1975 CanLII 1451 (ON CJ)
Facts about child molestation

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