Episodes
Episode 234: On March 26, 1997, police found the bodies of 39 members of a religious UFO cult known as Heaven’s Gate in an 830 square-metre (9,000 square foot) home in Rancho Santa Fe, California, a San Diego suburb. All, including the group’s leader, Marshall Applewhite Jr., had died in a ritualistic act of mass suicide. The headline on the cult’s website, which remains online today, stated, “Hale-Bopp brings closure to Heaven’s Gate.” Over the following weeks, as investigators probed what happened in the home, the story of the Heaven’s Gate cult emerged, each detail weirder than the next....
Episode 233: During the harsh winter of 1941, as World War II raged elsewhere, closer to home, a tragedy occurred on the remote, ice-covered island archipelago in Hudson Bay called the Belcher Islands. After witnessing a dramatic meteor shower, a tribal group of Inuit people believed the world was ending. Inspired by a copy of the New Testament Bible translated into Inuit syllabics by Anglican missionaries, 27-year-old Charlie Ouyerack, self-professed shaman of the tribe, claimed he was the second coming of Jesus Christ. Charlie determined his friend, Peter Sala, a skilled hunter and naviga...
Epidsode 232: The strongest earthquake ever recorded in eastern Canada, measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale, occurred at 5:02pm Newfoundland time on the 18 of November in 1929. It was felt as far west as Ottawa and as far south as New York City. The quake, centred around 250 km south of Newfoundland along the southern edge of the Grand Banks caused a massive sub-ocean landslide. Two and a half hours after the quake a series of tsunami waves smashed into Newfoundland’s isolated Burin Peninsula devastating property, upending the fishery and causing 28 deaths.
Sources:
The Tsunami of 1929
The 1...
Episode 231: Gerald Vincent Bull was a smart cookie from North Bay, Ontario. He graduated from the University of Toronto at 20, got a master’s degree at age 21, and at 22 earned a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering from the University of Toronto’s newly created Institute of Aerodynamics.
Magazines touted him the ‘boy rocket scientist’. Nations sought him for his innovative ideas regarding long range artillery, ballistics and other military related endeavours. He was charged several times with breaching arms embargoes, even spending time in prison, a sore spot for the proud scientist. Eventua...
Episode 230: Over a period of 22 months, between January 1969 and January 1971, 3 women in Southwestern Ontario were brutally murdered in 3 different towns. These women’s names were Isobella “Belva” Russell, Edith Authier, and Jane Wooley.
Police solved the case of the third victim, Belva Russell, a matter of weeks after the crime. The perpetrator, Gerald Thomas Archer was convicted and imprisoned. There were obvious similarities between all three crimes. For several reasons the initial investigators on the cases missed them. Gerald Thomas Archer got his freedom in 1985, when he was 65. He...
Episode 229: In our last episode we learned about the life and first two murders of British serial murderer Dennis Andrew Nilsen. He was arrested after police discovered human remains he’d flushed down the toilet at 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, a Suburb of North London. In this episode we’ll learn about Nilsen’s next twelve murders, what happened after his arrest and the aftermath of his crimes. A number of Nilsen’s victims remain unidentified to this day.
As Dennis Nilsen was a necrophile, some of the information we are about to share are intense and may be very disturbing to some. ...
Episode 228: In our last episode we learned about the final killing and capture of British serial murderer Dennis Andrew Nilsen after police discovered human remains he’d flushed down the toilet at 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, a Suburb of North London, England. After his capture, the enigmatic Muswell Hill Murderer, or Kindly Killer, as he would come to be called, was more than happy to discuss his crimes. In this episode we’ll learn more about the killer’s life, his other crimes and what possibly led to the murders of 15 young men and boys, one of them a young Canadian student, Kenn...
Episode 227: On the 8th of February, 1983, complaints about the plumbing at 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, a suburb in London, England led to the discovery of human remains. The remains were traced to the flat of a tenant in the home named Dennis Andrew Nilsen, 37, a civil servant, former police officer and veteran of the British military. In Nilsen’s home police found grisly evidence of many more murders. The enigmatic Muswell Hill Murderer, or Kindly Killer, as he would come to be called, is believed to have killed 15 young men and boys, one of them a Canadian named Kenneth Ockendon ...
On a hot, sunny Saturday afternoon on the 15th of August 1914, in a house near Spring Green, Wisconsin one of the worst mass killings in the state’s history occurred when 7 people were axed to death, immolated, and the house they were in burnt down.
It was a case that on its own would have made headlines - but it wasn’t just any house that was burnt - it was the world-famous architectural treasure named Taliesin that was left in rubble, a house created by the internationally renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The victims were Wright’s partner Martha Borthwick, and two children, her 9-ye...
Episode 225: In our last episode we learned that in Saskatoon, on the morning of January 31, 1969, a 12-year-old girl on the way to school stumbled upon the body of Gail Miller, a 20-year-old nurse’s aide, lying in the snow in an alley. Gail had been raped, murdered and discarded in the snow by her killer. As there had been a number of sexual assaults in the city, police were under enormous pressure to solve the murder and soon their attention turned to 16-year-old David Edgar Milgaard. He’d been in the neighbourhood and at a home nearby the alley where Gail’s body lay on the morning of the...
Episode 224: In Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on the morning of January 31, 1969, a 12-year-old girl on the way to school stumbled upon the body of Gail Miller, a 20-year-old nurse’s aide, lying in the snow in an alley. Gail had been raped, murdered and discarded in the snow by her killer. As there had been a number of sexual assaults in the city, police were under enormous pressure to solve the murder and soon their attention turned to 16-year-old David Edgar Milgaard. He’d been in the neighbourhood and at a home nearby the alley where Gail’s body lay on the morning of the murder. Witnesses lat...
Episode 223: On Friday, February 20, 1976, while on vacation in Florida OPP Corporal Donald R. Irwin, 39, a father of three from Kitchener, Ontario, went on a ride along with his good friend Florida State Trooper, Philip Black, also 39-years-old. Irwin was in civilian clothing and unarmed. At around 7:15 a.m. they checked an old Camaro parked in a rest area on I-95, north of Pompano Beach, Florida. Moments later, both officers were dead, and the five people who’d been in the Camaro had fled in Black’s cruiser.
Walter Norman Rhodes Jr., 26, 29-year-old, Jesse Joseph Tafero, Sonia “Sunny” Ja...
Episode 222: On Sunday, November 12,1988 beloved 36-year-old high school teacher named Byron Carr was found by his family dead in the bedroom of his home in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. He’d been strangled to death and stabbed. Byron’s wallet had been stolen, and ominously on his wall, written in pen, were the words “I will kill again.” Investigators revealed that Byron was a closeted gay man, and had been involved in a consensual sexual encounter with an as yet unidentified man prior to his death. It is presumed that it was this man who killed Byron. No one has ever been brought to...
Episode 221: On the morning of December 31, 1888, in Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, friends found 61-year-old fisherman François Coupard dead in his fishing shack. Someone had brutally slain Coupard and had mutilated his body horribly after his murder. A quick investigation led to two men, Auguste Neel and Louis Ollivier, trying to flee to Newfoundland on a stolen fishing boat. The pair later admitted their roles in the murder and were tried and convicted. Ollivier was sentenced to 10 years at hard labour, while Neel, against whom the evidence was more solid, received a death sentence, which wa...
Episode 220:
The attention grabbing headline of the the article in The Province newspaper on the morning of July 3, 2013 screamed, “RCMP foil Canada Day bomb plot”, the subheading read, “VICTORIA: Two British Columbians allegedly hatch scheme to blow up legislature.” Since March of that year, RCMP had been engaged in what they called Project Souvenir, a complex and expensive sting operation to gather evidence against two Surrey residents, John Stuart Nuttall, 38, and his common-law wife, Amanda Marie Korody, 29. The RCMP alleged that the pair were Islamist extremist bent on blowing up BC’s...
Episode 219 BONUS: In this episode we hear from several Dark Poutine listeners, and in one case, a family member of a listener, who are sharing their experiences and feelings around their own UFO encounters. Mike also shares his own experience as a youth, and at the end of the show Mike and Mathew talk about their recent visit to The Extraterrestrial Highway, Rachel, Nevada and the back Gate of Area 51.
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Episode 219: In the first of two episodes released this week, Mike interviews Chris Rutkowski. Chris A. Rutkowski is a science writer who has devoted much time to investigating and studying reports of UFOs, writing about case investigations, and offering his insights into the broad UFO phenomenon publishing the annual Canadian UFO Report. Chris has authored numerous books on UFOs and two of his previous books, Abductions and Aliens and The Canadian UFO Report, were national bestsellers. He was recently referred to in a 2021 report to the Canadian Minister of Defense on UFOs in Canada as the...
Episode 218: The history of humanity is rife with stories of unexplained things in the skies above us. Handed down first verbally and pictographically by way of depictions painted on cave walls and then in written accounts, there are scores of stories about strange lights and objects in the sky. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, as human technology has improved, we have been able to better document and disseminate information about these sightings. Over the next two episodes, we have a look at unidentified flying objects, more commonly called UFOs. In this first ep...
Episode 217: In the early hours of March 27, 2010, Holly Bartlett, 31, was found unconscious and badly injured under the A. Murray MacKay bridge in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 350 metres away from her home. She died the next day in a Halifax Hospital.
Holly, a grad student at Dalhousie University, was fiercely independent despite her disability. She had been completely blind since she was thirteen years old. Holly’s autopsy indicated she’d imbibed alcohol and that she had sustained “blunt force injury to the head (…) attributable to a fall” and that the manner of death was accidental. Police did...
Episode 216: In Quebec, on April 15, 1763, after a supposed confession and hasty trial by an English military tribunal, 30-year-old Marie-Josephte Corriveau was convicted of murdering in brutal fashion her second husband, Louis-Étienne Dodier, and was sentenced to death. She was hanged with haste, three days later. Her body was then put on display in a form-fitting metal cage and placed at a crossroad where for the next five weeks, she stood as a warning to others considering domestic homicide as an answer to an unhappy marriage. When her cage disappeared locals believed that the Devil hims...
Episode 215: Mary Celeste, formerly Amazon, was an American registered, Nova Scotia built brigantine that was found abandoned on December 4, 1872, some 740 km off the Azores, Portugal. The fate of the 10 people aboard remains a mystery almost 150 years later.
Sources:
Fisherman’s Memorial | Lunenburg NS
Sable Island | Maritime Museum of the Atlantic
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834) by… | Poetry Foundation
The Mystery of the Mary Celeste. Part One: The Facts - Daily Nautica
The Mystery of the Mary Celeste. Part Two: Theories - Daily Nautica
The Mystery of the Mary Celeste. Part...
Episode 214: On November 25, 2011, neighbours around the four-plex at 51st Avenue and 47th Street in the town of Innisfail, Alberta heard a bang which shook their homes. Some said sounded like a gunshot, others said it sounded like someone dropping a heavy pile of wood. The dining room window of one the corner suites had been blown outward, glass was strewn throughout the yard. Police were called to the scene by a bystander inside the home and found a horrific scene. The home was full of smoke and debris. There at the dining room table, still in her wheelchair, first responders discovered t...
Episode 213: Toronto theatre magnate and enigmatic millionaire Ambrose J. Small disappeared without a trace on December 2, 1919, only a day after having made a lucrative deal to sell his ownership interests in his chain of theatres including the Grand Opera House in Toronto. People interested in the case suspected one of two theories were the most likely for the tycoon’s abrupt disappearance — either Small had run off and had into hiding under his own steam, or someone had abducted and very likely killed him. This case has become one of Canada’s oldest mysteries as more than 100 years later...
Episode 212: On the afternoon of January 27, 1993, the day before her 20th birthday, Sian Simmonds, a student who was working he way through school, was found dead in her basement suite in the Guildford neighbourhood of Surrey, B.C. She had been shot and bludgeoned. Neighbours had heard screams coming from her suite. Only days later, a man named David Schlender was arrested. Already on bail for the attempted murder of one of his cocaine dealers the year before, Schlender told police he’d been hired by another man, Brian West, to commit the murder in exchange for wiping an outstanding drug d...
Episode 211: On January 27, 1896, in the tiny community of Bear River, Nova Scotia, popular fourteen-year-old Annie Kempton was brutally murdered in her home while her parents were out of town. The crime, papers said, was the worst ever seen in the province up to that point and there was an outcry for swift justice on the heels of the slaying. Two days after the crime, Peter David Wheeler, 26, an immigrant, was arrested and charged with the murder. In July of that year, Wheeler was found guilty of the crime and after his trial, made a confession that some have come to see as coerced. He was...
Episode 210: In the summer of 2003, Ardeth Wood, a 27-year-old PhD candidate studying philosophy at the University of Waterloo, was enjoying a well needed break at her parent’s home in the Orleans neighbourhood of Ottawa. In the early afternoon of August 6, 2003, wanting to take advantage of a beautiful, warm summer day Ardeth borrowed her brother’s bike to go for a ride. Ardeth never came home.
Ardeth’s disappearance triggered one of the largest searches in Ottawa’s history up to that point covering the almost 200 kilometres of bike paths around the capital city and its suburbs. Five days ...
Episode 209: Daleen Kay Bosse, was a 26-year-old, wife and mother of Cree heritage and member of the Onion Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan near Saskatoon. On May 18, 2004, after a night out with friends Daleen did not return home. Her family grew worried. When she still hadn’t come home the next day Jeremiah, Daleen’s husband, contacted police, who, initially did not respond with much enthusiasm, telling Jeremiah and Daleen’s concerned parents to wait; that she would probably either come home or check in soon. Daleen’s family organized searches themselves and two weeks later Daleen’s car ...
Episode 208: On Feb 4, 1880, just past midnight 5 members of the Donnelly family (A mother and father, two sons, and a niece) we brutally murdered by a mob in their homes just outside of Lucan, Ontario, in Biddolph township. A crime that happened 142 years ago this month, but it is one that had its roots in the distant past, and that has echoed into the future in Canada right up to today. The family and their story became legendary, and often shocks people into the realization of how dark, and unforgiving life in early Canada could be. Numerous books, songs, tv shows, plays, and films have ...
Episode 207: After World War II, Canada’s economy rose. Work was much easier to come by than during the depression. Even though he’d been able to secure decent employment, family man and world war veteran with movie star good looks, Edwin Alonzo Boyd, was bored. He’d had his share of trouble already and was feeling the itch again. In the fall of 1949, he robbed his first bank. This crime kicked off events that would lead to one of the most infamous Canadian criminal gangs of the era. Over just a few years, The Boyd Gang, named for their charismatic de facto leader, Edwin, robbed numerous ba...
Episode 206: Starting on the evening of June 29 and going into the early morning of June 30, 2002, Lisa Marie Young, a 21-year-old indigenous woman, was celebrating with friends in her hometown, Nanaimo, B.C. It was not only Canada Day long weekend, but also her friend Dallas’s birthday. The group went to several nightclubs and then attended a pair of house parties outside the city. Lisa left the party with a man the group had met just that evening. There were several frantic texts from Lisa shortly after her departure indicating she was afraid. Lisa Marie Young has not been heard from sinc...