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 seventy armed and disguised men crossed the international boundary from Washington Territory into British Columbia, took Sam from his cell, and hanged him from a roadside tree 169 paces north of the border. No one else was ever charged for Louie Sam’s lynching, and the investigation into Bell’s death seems to have stopped with Sam’s death.

Sources:

• Deadly Neighbours — Chad Reimer (Caitlin Press, 2022)
• The Lynching of Louie Sam — Keith Thor Carlson, BC Studies No. 109, Spring 1996
• The Lynching of Louie Sam — John Vaillant, The Walrus, December 2008
• Lynching Information — Tuskegee University Archives
• An American Mob Crosses the Canadian Border and Lynches Louie Sam — HistoryLink.org
• Our Territory — Sumas First Nation
• Sq'éwlets: A Stó:lō–Coast Salish Community in the Fraser River Valley
• Daily Colonist (Victoria, BC), February–March 1884 — britishcolonist.ca
• BC Historical Newspapers — British Columbian (New Westminster) 1884, UBC Open Collections
• Whatcom Reveille, February–March 1884 — Jeffcott Collection, Western Washington University Archives
• Mesachie and Louie Sam — Chilliwack Progress, October 8, 1958 — Newspapers.com
• Washington State Expresses Regret Over 1884 Lynching of Canadian Teen — CBC News, 2006
• Plain Injustice — Literary Review of Canada, 2022
• Louie Sam — Wikipedia
• PDF of The Lynching of Louie Sam by Keith Thor Carlson
  

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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 when the final woman disappeared. This is the story of Tanya Nepinak, Carolyn Sinclair, and Lorna Blacksmith.

Sources:

• Shawn Lamb coverage index — CBC News
• Tanya Jane Nepinak — CBC News
• Shawn Lamb sentenced to 20 years for two slayings — CBC News
• Police paid killer Shawn Lamb $1,500 for information — CBC News
• Winnipegger speaks about life on streets, alleged assault by convicted killer Shawn Lamb — CBC News
• Shawn Lamb gets statutory release — CBC News
• Convicted killer Shawn Lamb must stay at halfway house — CBC News
• Shawn Lamb pleads guilty to killing 2 women — Global News
• Landfill search progressing for Ashlee Shingoose; Tanya Nepinak family hopeful — Global News
• Parole Board grants Indigenous Winnipeg killer Shawn Lamb statutory release — APTN News
• Statement on Brady Road Landfill Search for Ashlee Shingoose and Planning for Tanya Nepinak — Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs
• NFSC Calls for Justice and Accountability Following Statutory Release of Shawn Lamb — National Family and Survivors Circle

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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 friend's house and confessed. By the time police arrived, she was back in the bedroom. She never came out.

Phil Hartman was 49 years old and born in Brantford, Ontario. He had just wrapped his fourth season of NewsRadio. He had a film opening in July. Behind the public face of a thriving career was a marriage under years of sustained pressure — addiction, relapse, escalating volatility, and a final argument that ended in the worst possible way. The motive was listed as unknown. It remains unknown.

Sources:

• Los Angeles County Coroner Case Report, Investigator's Report, Autopsy Report & Toxicology — Case No. 98-03785
• Hartman's Death: The Police Version — Time, June 3, 1998
• Reaction & Sanctions — NPR, May 28, 1998
• Disturbing Details Found In Phil Hartman's Autopsy Report — Grunge, 2024
• The Last Days of Phil Hartman — ABC News / 20/20, 2019
• Phil Hartman — People Magazine, 1998
• Jon Lovitz Blames Andy Dick for Hartman's Death — CBS News, 2007
• Phil Hartman Wrongful Death Lawsuit / Zoloft — Salon, 1999
• Birgen Hartman on her father's Simpsons legacy — The Hollywood Reporter, 2022
• Brantford to honour Phil Hartman with mural — CBC News, 2024
• Phil Hartman — Canada's Walk of Fame
• Phil Hartman — Brantford Walk of Fame
• You Might Remember Me: The Life and Times of Phil Hartman — Mike Thomas
  

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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 innocent man had been convicted twice. It produced 1,380 pages and 119 recommendations. The real killer remained unnamed for another twenty-five years — until a detective named Steve Smith, a Texas laboratory, and a forensic genealogist pulled a family tree apart and found a killer at the end of it.

Sources

• Report of the Kaufman Commission on Proceedings Involving Guy Paul Morin — Full text (netk.net.au)
• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Guy Paul Morin Case
• Innocence Canada — Guy Paul Morin case file
• Toronto Life — "Inside the Hunt for Christine Jessop's Real Killer" (January 2022)
• CBC News — "Toronto police identify killer in cold case of 9-year-old Christine Jessop" (October 15, 2020)
• CBC News — "Calvin Hoover's family 'devastated' to learn police believe he killed Christine Jessop" (October 22, 2020)
• CBC News — "The answer to the mystery of Christine Jessop's murder leaves killer's ex-wife with painful questions" (February 2021)
• CBC News — "The science behind why police now believe they have the right suspect in Christine Jessop's murder" (October 2020)
• Global News — "Who was Calvin Hoover? The man Toronto police say killed 9-year-old Christine Jessop in 1984" (October 2020)
• Blue Line Magazine — "Out of the Cold: Toronto Police Solve 1984 Jessop Murder With New Science" (January 2021)
• RCMP — National DNA Data Bank of Canada: 20 Years and Growing
• Game of Crimes Podcast — "Detective Steve Smith Cracks a 36-Year Old Cold Case" (March 2022)
  

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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 a man who lived next door.

This is Part One of a two-part series.

Sources:

• Kirk Makin, Redrum the Innocent (1992) — Viking Canada.
• Report of the Kaufman Commission on Proceedings Involving Guy Paul Morin — Full text (netk.net.au)
• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Guy Paul Morin Case
• Innocence Canada — Guy Paul Morin case file
• Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions — Guy Paul Morin
• Library of Parliament — Wrongful Convictions in Canada (2020)
• Bruce MacFarlane — "Wrongful Convictions: The Effect of Tunnel Vision and Predisposing Circumstances in the Criminal Justice System" (2006)
• Federal Prosecution Service — Chapter 5: Jailhouse Informers
• Federal Prosecution Service — Chapter 8: DNA Evidence
• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Morin Inquiry Report
• Kaufman Report — Wikipedia summary
• Globe and Mail — "Morin Informant Named Dangerous Offender" (2007)
• CBC Digital Archives — Guy Paul Morin acquitted
• Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation
• Williams Treaties — Government of Canada
  

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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 both. On the morning of August 14, he left his Lake Huron summer home running late for a meeting and took a shortcut through the forest on a little-used dirt road outside Sarnia. What happened on that road set off the largest manhunt in Canadian history, triggered Canada's first kidnapping trial, and sent an innocent man to prison for a crime he had nothing to do with.

Sources:
John Sackville Labatt | The Canadian Encyclopedia
John Labatt’s 1934 kidnap | The Star
John Sackville Labatt | Wikipedia
Labatt Brewing Company | Wikipedia
Prohibition in Canada | Wikipedia
Labatt Brewing | Company Site
Lambton County's Infamous Abduction: The John S. Labatt Kidnapping - Archived
Lambton County's Infamous Abduction: The John S. Labatt Kidnapping - New
Snatched! by Susan Goldenberg - Ebook | Scribd
The Courier-News • Fri, Aug 17, 1934 • Page 10 • (Bridgewater, New Jersey)
The Courier-News • Fri, Aug 17, 1934 • Page 1 • (Bridgewater, New Jersey)
The Windsor Star • Fri, Aug 17, 1934 • Page 1 • (Windsor, Ontario, Canada)
The Windsor Star • Sat, Sep 08, 1934 • Page 9 • (Windsor, Ontario, Canada)
The Windsor Star • Sat, Feb 01, 1936 • Page 11 • (Windsor, Ontario, Canada)
The Hamilton Spectator • Tue, Sep 11, 1906 • Page 9 • (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada)
The Molsons, The Labatts and The St.Johns | StJohnsWort.ca

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Episode 426: On June 29th, 2021, Lytton, British Columbia, recorded the highest air temperature in Canadian history: 49.6 degrees Celsius. The next day, the town burned to the ground in under two hours, killing two people and destroying more than 150 homes and businesses across the Village of Lytton and the neighbouring Lytton First Nation reserves. Nearly four years later, the cause of the fire remains officially undetermined, the recovery has become its own bureaucratic disaster, and a class-action lawsuit against Canada's two largest railways is still working its way through the BC Supreme Court. This episode tells the story of the heat, the fire, the two people who didn't make it out, and the years-long collapse of the rebuild that followed. Later in the episode, Mike sits down with Tim Conrad of Butterfly Effect Communications to talk crisis communications — what the first hours of a disaster like Lytton demand, and what it takes to keep a fractured, grieving community informed years into a recovery that never seems to end.

Sources:

• An Examination of the Lytton, British Columbia Wildland-Urban Fire Destruction
• Provincial Support for the Village of Lytton's Wildfire Recovery
• Lytton Wildfire | Wikipedia
• B.C. Man Says He Watched in Horror as Lytton Wildfire Claimed the Lives of His Parents | CBC News
• BC Coroners Service Confirms 2 Deaths in Lytton Wildfire | CBC News
• Man Who Lost His Parents in Lytton, B.C., Fire Wants to Go Home | CTV News
• RCMP Investigation Unable to Determine Cause of 2021 Wildfire That Destroyed Most of Lytton, B.C. | CBC News
• Track Cleared for Class-Action Suit 4.5 Years After Wildfire Swallows Most of Lytton | Williams Lake Tribune
• Remembering Lytton, the Town Wiped Out by Wildfire | The Walrus

⠀Guest:

• Butterfly Effect Communications Company Website
• Wildfires, Floods, and Chaos Communications Tim’s Podcast
• Inside an Emergency Operations Centre | Butterfly Effect Communications Video

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Episode 425: In May 1934, five identical girls were born in a farmhouse outside Corbeil, Ontario. They were the first quintuplets known to survive infancy anywhere in the world. Within weeks, the Province of Ontario had taken them from their parents. What followed was nine years inside a government-run compound called Quintland, where millions of tourists paid to watch the Dionne sisters play through one-way glass, twice a day, while their faces sold soap, cereal, and corn syrup across North America. The girls went home in 1943. The horror of what happened next took decades to come to light.

Sources:

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Dionne Quintuplets | (Canadian Encyclopedia)
• Dionne Quintuplets: The Miracle Babies | (Canadian Encyclopedia)
• Dionne quintuplets | (Wikipedia)
• Dionne quintuplets | Deaths, Parents, Names, & Facts | (Britannica)
• The Birth of the Dionne Quintuplets | (Government of Canada)
• The Dionne Quintuplets National Historic Event | (Parks Canada)
• Dionne Quintuplets (1934—) | (Encyclopedia.com)
• Dionne Quintuplets (b. 1934) | (Encyclopedia.com)
• The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets by Sarah Miller (Scholastic Focus, 2017) | (Book)
• We Were Five: The Dionne Quintuplets' Story from Birth through Girlhood to Womanhood by James Brough with Annette, Cécile, Marie, and Yvonne Dionne (1965) | (Book)
• Family Secrets: The Dionne Quintuplets' Own Story by Jean-Yves Soucy with Annette, Cécile, and Yvonne Dionne (1997) | (Book)
• The Dionne Years: A Thirties Melodrama by Pierre Berton (1977) | (Book)

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Episode 424: Between 1928 and 1972, the Alberta government authorized the forced sterilization of nearly 3,000 Albertans deemed "unfit" to reproduce. They were told they were having their appendix removed. Many were children. Most had no idea what was being done to them. The targets were the poor, the mentally ill, Indigenous people, immigrants — anyone who didn't fit the province's vision of a productive society. This wasn't a fringe movement. It was backed by doctors, politicians, newspapers, and some of the most celebrated figures in Canadian history.

Sources:

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Eugenics
• History of Rights Canada — Eugenics
• Prairie History Journal, University of Alberta
• Gladue / University of Saskatchewan — Eugenics Resource
• Eugenics Archive Canada — Timeline
• Eugenics Archive Canada — Our Stories
• City Museum Edmonton — Leilani Muir and Eugenics in Alberta
• National Post — When Canada Lost Its Mind Over Eugenics
• CBC News — Leilani Muir, Advocate for Alberta's Sterilization Victims, Dies
• CBC News — Cash Settlement for Sterilized Women (BC)
• Alberta Law Review — Mikkel Dack
• Toronto Sun — The Controversial Beliefs of Canada's Famous Five
• Wired — CRISPR Babies and Human Genome Editing
• Scientific American — The Dark Side of CRISPR
• NFB — The Sterilization of Leilani Muir
• The Guardian — What Is Pronatalism?
  

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Episode 423: Francis Mawson Rattenbury designed the BC Parliament Buildings, the Empress Hotel, and the building that now houses the Vancouver Art Gallery, as well as many others. He was the most celebrated architect in the province for thirty years. In 1935, he was beaten to death in his armchair in a rented house in Bournemouth, England, by his wife Alma’s teenage lover, a chauffeur named George Percy Stoner. Both Alma Rattenbury and Stoner confessed. The trial at the Old Bailey gripped the English-speaking world. What happened after the trial was even more shocking than the murder.

Sources:
Sean O'Connor, The Fatal Passion of Alma Rattenbury (Simon & Schuster, 2019)
Anthony A. Barrett & Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, Francis Rattenbury and British Columbia: Architecture and Challenge in the Imperial Age (UBC Press, 1983)
Terry Reksten, Rattenbury (Sono Nis Press, 1978; revised 1998)
Francis Mawson Rattenbury — Dictionary of Canadian Biography
Francis Rattenbury — Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada
Francis Rattenbury — Wikipedia
Alma Rattenbury — Wikipedia
Newspapers.com | Search: Francis Rattenbury

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Episode 422: On St. Patrick's Day, 1960, five Italian immigrant construction workers — Pasquale Allegrezza, Giovanni Carriglio, Giovanni Fusillo, and brothers Alessandro and Guido Mantella — died beneath the Don River in Toronto's Hogg's Hollow neighbourhood. They were trapped in a tunnel less than two metres wide with no fire extinguishers, no hard hats, and no way out. The fire was preventable. The violations were known. A foreman had been fired for raising them. No one was ever charged. This is the story of five men whose names were nearly forgotten — and the laws that exist today because they died.

Sources:
The history of the Hoggs Hollow neighbourhood in Toronto
The Hoggs Hollow Disaster | definingmomentscanada.ca
The Hogg’s Hollow Disaster | Canadian Labour Congress
Hogg's Hollow Disaster National Historic Event
Hoggs Hollow | cobtrades.com
Remembering the Hoggs Hollow disaster | spacing.ca
Disaster at Hogg’s Hollow | jamiebradburnwriting.wordpress.com
The Hogg’s Hollow Disaster | unionsong.com
Breaking Ground The Hogg's Hollow Memorial 40 th Anniversary Project | costi.org
Hogg's Hollow Tragedy (1960) | Toronto Workers' History Project
BASTA! NO MORE FEAR! Remembering the Hoggs Hollow Disaster of 1960
The Hogg’s Hollow Disaster of 1960 | dresden1957.com
Hoggs Hollow Disaster | wikipedia
https://www.newspapers.com/image/1001301968/?match=1&terms=%22Hogg%27s%20Hollow%22%20tunnel
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https://www.newspapers.com/image/941541580/?match=1&terms=%22Hogg%27s%20Hollow%22%20tunnel

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