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With a Canadian spin. Find and follow two blocks from the White House on your favorite podcast app, including YouTube. This is a CBC Podcast. The following episode contains difficult subject matter, including references to suicide. Please take care while listening. Good morning. Good morning. How are you? Good. Uh is Sebastian here? Yeah, yeah. Come on in. Oh, thanks.
It's around eight thirty AM, but the woman who has answered the door in bare feet, green tank top, dark blue shorts and paisley house dress seems well into her morning routine. Cheerful with shorter black hair, she's wary of me, now at least. I don't think I'm the person she was expecting. Sorry to come so early. Sorry, I got my shoes on here. I don't wanna get your I'm David. I'm from Canada, I'm from CBC. Oh just Lorraine goes into a back bedroom and I can hear low voices.
I've come here to speak to the man she lives with. Sebastian Furland. As the story goes, his wife Jackie disappeared from the house I'm standing in right now on August seventeenth, twenty twenty one. And since then Sebastian has been the subject of much intrigue and suspicion. As people in Jackie's family and the community try to make sense of what happened that night.
But trying to make things make sense in a cold case can be tricky. It can lead to a new truth, one perhaps more compelling or convenient, but also potentially unfactual. Sebastian, good morning. How are you? Okay. Sebastian has come around the corner, seeming to have just woken up. He's bald and lean in black shorts with colorful triangular patterns and a gray tank top. Tattoos visible on both arms. I'm from CBC in Toronto. Here's uh here's my card. Beautiful place.
Sebastian says nothing but beckons, then silently leads me, downcast and slow, back out the front door and then along the side of the house toward the back. Lorraine stays behind with a kind of polite but tense smile on her face. We arrive at a flourishingly overgrown backyard area, with an adobe red cement patio
Surrounded by painted yellow walls, and Sebastian drags over some lawn chairs across the concrete pad we're standing on. I got dragging dirt enough, and I know that if I say no to the interview, you're just gonna bullshit something. That's not the intention. Okay, like uh yeah, but it's not, but your intention's to make money, right? So obviously you're gonna make me look bad.
There's always a new person who gets in the picture and it's like, oh my god, what did happen? Did he investigate the husband and stuff? There is a lot of talk about Jackie's husband, now lawn-chaired in front of me, but not much real reporting about him or the case. I want to get past all that and the numbing hum of rumor. It's distracting and
Deflective and like a kind of propaganda that can shield what's actually underneath. What facts can Sebastian provide? Was he or the case investigated and by whom? What was his relationship with Jackie like? I'm David Ridgen and this is season 10 of Someone Knows Something: The Jacqueline Ferland Smith Case, Episode 2, Paper Mache. Technically, okay, like in that story, okay, a lot of like the aid that I got like from people is just because I said that she had like mental issues.
I've seen some of the stuff on Facebook. There's been a lot of accusations and a lot of a it's just that your wife like uh leave and stuff and it's not seen again. You you need to explain why she left. People just want to have like a a guilty person and they just want to accuse me because yes I'm the person who was with her.
We all heard those things, right? Like uh if you want to know the guilty person, look like for like the closest to them or look at the husband, right? Like all those stereotypes, right? And uh The people that I get the comments from are all people who never met me, never met a Which is kind of sad, but it's uh I guess that's the courageous people of Facebook.
It's not like uh oh the beautiful princess was walking in the park and uh left not to be seen again. Yes, she was beautiful, she was intelligent, but she was also mentally ill. It's diagnose and desproofs. Despite his misgivings, Sebastian is sitting more across his chair rather than in it, relaxed, and listening to his deep-voiced tone, I make careful note of not only what he says, but how he says it.
In the YouTube video Sebastian appears in just a couple of weeks after Jackie disappears, he starts off by talking about Jackie's mental state, and, here with me, he also starts the same way. I push further, asking for a bit of history between him and Jackie in the run-up to her disappearance. At the beginning, okay, uh eleven years uh'cause we've been together almost eleven years I think close to that.
She was like perfect them according to Sebastian. Jackie lost work in Canada, making their finances more reliant on his income. So uh she became more stressed and then uh had few bad experience at work, uh different jobs, right? Like in uh
she started to have like a bit more like uh episodes if you can call them, right? Like uh if she had no stress and were doing great, she was the best wife ever. Like she was nice to be around and everything. Like uh I I really enjoy like the years I spent with her. Except obviously when she was sick, like uh'cause it's difficult, right? She's someone who needed stability and uh my job could not really offer that to her right. I'm just honest about that.
Sebastian says he convinced Jackie to take basic training and join the Canadian military to access benefits and job security, but that again, with his own job in the military as a sergeant mechanic and frequent absences, even more stresses were caused in their relationship. Eventually they made the decision to live and basically retire early here in Costa Rica. Sebastian himself left the Canadian forces in twenty nineteen.
Yeah, I have PTSD, okay, and uh my PTSD is basically that the stuff that I seen basically and uh just the general stress related to the army is uh disturbing my sleep pattern basically. So I don't sleep like a normal person at all. I end up having a bit more like social anxieties and stuff like that. Example, uh, if I'm in public and there's too much noise or like a bit peep pushing around like I'm really not comfortable, I need to live.
leave or just being at the restaurant with people behind my back. I'm not comfortable. I still do it so uh I keep my comfort zone bigger because uh if you don't do that you end up like a an hermit. You're gonna You become agrophobic or something. Maybe my mistake, okay, but moving into a different country or it's more relaxed tropical, I thought would be less stressful and uh help her because the more she had stress, the worse she was, right?
But Sebastian says it didn't work out to be more relaxed, especially when they got out of their Playa del Coco condo and started building this house we're now sitting behind in the cacique development. So then we end up building the house here and uh building a house in a third world country with language barrier and stuff obviously ended up being stressful. basically like my plan to reduce her stress level completely backfired and like end up being much more stressful for yeah.
Sebastian says that stress often manifested itself in violent outbursts. But uh nobody speaks about like men who are abused and beat up. There's a lot of them, they just don't speak up, right? She used to smash my head on the ceramic tile and stuff like that. She was an athlete, she was strong. And as a man, what do you do? Like uh you can do anything. Right? You call the police because you get beat up and the police are gonna take you away. They don't take the wife.
It's the way it worked. You can't do anything. You just let yourself being beat up. So you never went to the hospital with any of the injuries? Uh no, but there's actually tons of people who saw me with huge bruises, like in my face, neck. and stuff. And even Gordon and Colleen, if they are honest, seen pictures of that. I press forward and Sebastian continues, telling me a bit about the time before Jackie disappeared.
After I called her dad to uh ask for help, that's basically when like everything really started to go downhill. It may be up to a few months before. I was like I really need your help, like it's going out of control. Sebastian says things got worse after he called Jackie's parents a few months before she disappeared. While Sebastian was paying for most of the house construction, documentation I've seen shows that Jackie was managing many aspects of it. Slowdowns and shoddy workmanship.
led to regular disputes between contractors and both Sebastian and Jackie. Sebastian says that Jackie's mental health worsened during this period to the extent that he decided to call her parents and ask for help. It was more okay like obviously Building a house in Canada is stressful, but it's still pretty straightforward, right? Like you expect people to do a good job. But here was like basically Stupid.
For example, uh you install uh ceramic tiles. Yeah. If there's one that has a chip on it or it's damaged, you don't install that. So you tell them hey like this is chip, like you need to replace that. So you get them to replace the tile, then you come back Back, they replace it again by another tile that's damaged. Another chip. Okay, that gets a bit annoying. Like basically spend my old days here.
supervising them'cause otherwise uh that's just mistakes after mistakes after mistakes. But But at some point like Jackie started like to lose her shit on those guys and it's bad and uh I obviously okay like taking care of with of someone like that is not a single person's job. And put that in a a foreign country where she don't speak the language makes it much difficult.
Colleen and Gordon say that Jackie did most of the project supervision and not Sebastian. And they also say that the framing of Sebastian's phone call for help Was around the difficulties of the construction project and how stressful it was. But Sebastian implies that it was about Jackie's mental state in particular. Regardless, Jackie, Sebastian says, became very upset that he had called her parents. Then, like she basically got furious
And she never cooled down from that. She was like literally enraged and she was so angry at me that I called her dad. And uh she basically had the feeling that I pretty much took her family away from her because like uh now her family was like oh our daughter is sick and stuff and like uh that kind of stuff
I want to keep moving deeper here. There is an obvious gulf between Jackie's parents and Sebastian in both directions that can tend towards what I will call an unhelpful bias against each other. And I don't want to dwell too much too soon on anything that might take me away from the central question on everyone's mind. So then the day of the seventeenth, what happened that day?
Uh that day, I'm not gonna say hours, okay, exactly, but just like the logical order where it's like stuff happened, okay. In the morning, she had the physiotherapist. Okay, I'm saying morning. It may be around noon, but like before lunch. She had a physiotherapist appointment in Tamarindo. Time Arendow's about what, an hour, fifteen minutes from here. Okay. Okay.
I myself normally go with her for appointments'cause most of the time uh everybody speaks Spanish. So it makes it easier and she had like a really big tendency to be uh anxious and stuff. So Normally if I'm with her, I can like avoid some of the triggers and stuff and get stuff to go like easier and smoother or so that specific day I checked my calendar before she leave and I had an appointment with my psychologist.
Sebastian is referring here to his own psychologist whom he would call in Toronto, Canada. Oh okay. At about the same time that she had hers. So uh that kind of started like right there actually. Because when I told her I have an appointment and I can go. She kinda became like a really like. jealous and she was like, Yeah, conveniently and stuff, like as if like uh had a fake appointment, like to cheat on her with like someone while she was gone or whatever.
So that was already a bad start. So uh she went to her appointment. And uh and you stayed here when you stayed here, like my appointment was on the phone. So while I was having my appointment. She started to uh send me text and stuff, okay? And uh the text uh that started if I'm right, it started uh oh the they got the physiotherapist. So I was like, Who's they? She's like, uh whoever's trying like to ruin my life. I was like, okay.
But like then I was like, what's going on? I was like, Across the day, Sebastian says he and Jackie texted each other. And the messages that Sebastian eventually shows me are screen captures from a phone he no longer has. From the screen caps, which do not show the sender's full name,
I'm still able to construct a rough timeline of the texting. I cannot confirm that Jackie or Sebastian wrote any of the messages, or on what device they were composed on, but my opinion is that the messages were likely written on Jackie's phone and on the phone Sebastian had at the time. I read the messages as I am shown them because Sebastian declines to give them to me as files, although he says he gave these exact text copies to Costa Rican investigators.
Cause this is a new iPad and it's when all my data transferred there because that that's not even the right year. Jackie's message is first, composed just after an appointment with her physiotherapist in Tamarindo, whose name is Tatiana. So I told you they got to this physiotherapist now, twelve thirteen, who they, that's you, who they, right? Whoever's destroying my life, it was not fine today, what happened? That's you.
No, they got her to put the needles in nerve spots and she said it was the same she always does, but it wasn't. She did one spot and it was severe pins and needles all over my foot twice. Sebastian tells her his appointment is now starting, and Jackie continues saying what happened during her appointment.
My appointment starts now, twelve nineteen. She said she was doing the same thing and if it was responding like that she can't do them then. I said I was not paying. Plus she had her assistant do everything else who answered the phone during the appointment without any explanation. I'm not coming back. I'm ready to die. Goodbye. That's twelve twenty. There is no help for me, twelve twenty one.
Please come back, is what you say here. This this per uh the green one says. I deserve to commit suicide. I'm a horrible person who needs to be punished with an E at the end severely for everything I ever did, twelve twenty one. No you are not. Y this the green says. This person is just leading me to the right answer. They are right. I don't deserve anything good to ever happen to me. I'm done. Sorry for wasting your life. They did this after I told And I can't live. They win. Everyone wins.
I'll be gone. Take care and enjoy your life. Don't look for me, twelve twenty four. No, you say. Do you want me to meet you somewhere? And then it's Fuck you, asshole. Keep all your shit and find someone else to torture. One forty one forty five, right? So it jumps from twelve twenty four, no, and then you say, Do you want me to meet you somewhere at one sixteen? She says, Fuck you asshole, at one forty four. Keep all your shit and find someone else to torture at one forty five.
The Jackie side of these messages. shows someone in obvious distress with signs of paranoia. Then Sebastian comes back and Two thirty one. Then Jackie replies. The answer at two hundred forty one. I'm not in Tamarindo. I told you not to look for me. two hundred forty two. What do you want me to do? This is not a solution. two hundred forty two. There is no solution, Sebastian. two hundred forty three. This
And then my phone will die, just forget about me. My phone will die, just forget about me, 244, 246, no, let me help. And then at 253, I got an email message that my Dymax cannot be No message from Jackie between 246 and 553. Dymex is a digital identification issued to foreigners by Costa Rica and is required for banking and other official expat activities.
numerous things to me over and over again while I'm the one punished six thirty five. So fuck you and your perfect mom and ex girlfriend, which is better than me and whooks never do or say anything that I do. Fuck you, fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck with a bunch of Fs and a bunch of U's. And then that's it. According to what I am shown, Jackie's text to Sebastian stop at 635 PM.
If these texts are from Jackie, we have a sense of her being extremely upset. She makes threats that she will kill herself and not to look for her, tells Sebastian to fuck off. But then what happened? I want to know more about what was going on while these messages were being exchanged, and of course, afterward. Across this period of messaging, Sebastian says he tried to call Jackie. She's like I told you not to like call me, you know blah blah like all that stuff.
So uh at some point after let's say an hour or whatever, like the time for her to drive back, she was not here. So I went to Tamarindo and uh check like all around like uh I know normally the place she likes to eat or like uh stuff so like I check all the around, right?
Tamarindo is a small tourist-developed town of around 6,000 people, about an hour and 20 minutes south of Playa Coco in good traffic. Sebastian took his scooter, and I estimate that the timing of this departure would have been around 1 p.m., with arrival Sometime around 2 or 2.30 p.m. I asked Sebastian if he went to the physiotherapist's clinic, since that was where Jackie had been when she went into town, it seemed an obvious place to start. But Sebastian says he didn't bother.
Oh physio, so do you ever speak to the person in Tamarindo and say did she come here? Those people are like doctors, right? So like uh unless you're the police, they're not gonna tell you stuff, right? They have like they have to respect people's privacy. I find Tatiana and call her to hear her perspective on what might have happened during this appointment with Jackie. Hi. Hi, Tatana. Can you hear me? It's David.
How are you, David? I am good. Thank you very much for doing this again. If you could just tell me what your memory is of that day when Jackie first of all, had Jackie had Jackie been to see you before? Yes, eh that was, I don't remember exactly, but was the fifth or sixth session eh did I saw her. That was the fifth or the sixth session. She comes to my office because she had in that time a plantar fasciatis. That's what she said?
And um and yeah, just we're we're uh working on on that issue for for the last three weeks before that day. Okay. And did when she came before, did Sebastian, her partner, come with her? Yes, uh don't remember how many times, but I remember once. She came alone and did he we'll circle back, but did did Sebastian come to see you that day? That day no. And do you remember did Sebastian come to see you any other day after that day? No, never again. He never came back to talk to you.
Yeah. No. Okay. And did police come and talk to you? Who? The police. OIJ. The police? No. Okay, like ever. Never ever. I asked Tatiana to describe specifically what happened during the appointment. I used the needle in the posterior tibial muscle and that hurts. her I remember and she told me stop doing that that hurts and and yes that that was uh and actually we finished the session after After that because she told me that hurts. We finish with a massage and then she goes.
When she told me that hurts Tatiana or whatever she told me, she just told me I want to finish the session. I don't feel well. Um please. And we're finished. And she just she she gone. Okay. So when she left, did you s n did she say she was leaving because of pain or did she did she tell you why she was leaving early? She was like be uh like very angry with me. Was was super uh surprised for me because she was super relaxed, always say hi always say hi with good mood and was I she she was upset
that day and just she's and she told me I don't pay you for the session, etcetera I I told her, no problem. So Jackie, when she was saying she was upset, did I mean what did she seem upset when she came into the office? Before you started, was she upset then? No no no, she she doesn't talk it she doesn't talk too much actually. Um just hello, good morning, that's it. And that morning, no, was normal like the other days. Okay. Was at the end.
Okay. And at the end of the session when she started to feel pain and she said, Stop, that hurts, was she how what was her behavior like? Was she aggressive towards you or did she say things that you didn't understand to you? He was she was aggressive in the way she talked to me. She doesn't do any don't touch me or push me or whatever. That kinda no not kinda eh like behaviors but she she talking like never I hear before.
Okay. And when she left did she say something rude to you, like, you know, fuck off or was she mean to you? Or did she just say goodbye? I'll see ya next time or how how did it end? No, just no, just uh goodbye. I mean So uh that's what I did. And then, taking a breath, Sebastian prepares himself to get into the last crucial part of the day. The last time that he says he saw Jackie alive. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed?
In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss? First time. The History Bureau. Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
I kept messaging and checking if I had like message from her, like basically saying that she's back or whatever. And uh f. Not sure about what time I came back. By that time, yeah, I think I got back here about like dinner time maybe around that time. So dinner time. I'll map out the timings as I go and figure out when this dinner time might have been. So you came back and she was here. And then what happened after that? Okay, she was here again uh
But normally okay, like when people are like really like angry and stuff, it's not the right time to have a conversation. So uh since I didn't eat anything all day at that moment, I just went in town and ate, like just get her like a time bit like to cool down'cause like to be honest, like I I hate fighting, so I don't want any part in that. Like uh anybody who knows me know I don't like fighting and uh I don't want to fight. Like period.
So uh So you went alone into town down here in Coco and ate at a restaurant. Yeah. Okay. What Sebastian tells me is different from what others say he told them about what happened when he first got home from searching tamarindo. In this version of the story that he tells me, he comes home, sees Jackie, assesses she is still upset. leaves for town to eat around dinner time, he says, then returns again sometime after that, over an hour later. In a different arrival version,
Krista recalls hearing that Sebastian arrives and stays home to eat with Jackie. Gordon says he heard that when Sebastian returned home, nobody was there, so he went into town and picked up some food and brought it back, and Jackie was there.
There when he returned with it. In the version Sebastian tells me, where he goes to town to eat, Sebastian mentions the name of the restaurant he went to as being The Palms, but I haven't yet been able to find anyone who worked there at the time, or who was there. knew Jackie or Sebastian. In any version of the story I have heard so far, Jackie has returned home after texting Sebastian, her I'm ready to dies, her don't look for me's, her fuck offs, and her goodbyes.
When I came back, uh she was still in the same condition, basically, like pissed off, like uh to the point where like her green eyes were literally black. Like uh so and I seen that multiple times. Obviously okay again when she's like that, it's not the right time to talk. So I just went to shower. And uh while I was in the shower She came and uh started to take uh toilet paper like from because the toilet obviously is right beside the shower.
She started to take toilet paper and like throw it at me in the shower. Like throw like balls like paper mache basically, right? But like in a shower, like uh Toilet paper make quite the mess, right? So I was like, like what the fuck's going on? Like it's like uh nobody expects that, right? Yeah. So uh I just like took like a piece of paper and just throw uh through it away. Like stop doing that. It's like a it's a disaster. Damn shit, she will not stop.
She got towards me and punched me in the mouth and uh my floor like that. teeth like like went through my lip. Like uh so I was like uh stunned obviously right you don't Expect to be uh it in the mouth when you're in the shower and getting thrown toilet paper out. Was it like a fist punch or a fist punch, yeah. So and uh she's an athlete and she's almost tall like me, so she's
strong like that battle, right? After battles uh like by basically what the fuck happened? Like look there's nothing else uh to to say basically you're like like the this is bad. And uh Did you start to feel yourself getting angry at that time or just upset in a way that uh once you punched? Anybody who knows me, okay, like I spent 20 years in the army and I can't even scream at people even though I was paid to do it.
By the time I cleaned the mess, uh I came out of shower, dry myself and I look, she was not there. So uh next thing I notice is uh in front of the the couch. We have uh an Ottoman or whatever you call that like With your feet. Uh her engagement ring was there. And uh her phone. So I was like this like really weird, but like it's not the first time too that she get angry and leave and spend a day.
or two at the hotel, right? Like or just park herself like a kilometer from here and uh would she leave her phone and ring up on those occasions too or just this time? Uh she left her engagement ring before but not the phone. As far as I know. So uh So obviously there was no way I could contact her. She had no phone. I took my bike and uh went like everywhere like to look and stuff and uh It's about what time at night. This was I would say ki between seven or nine, like around that time.
A lot of different things are said to have happened in this afternoon to late evening window of Sebastian arriving home and Jackie arriving home and thereafter. I'll have to do more digging to see if I can figure out which, if any, version is a hundred percent true. I wonder again about the punch in the face. Sebastian has already said he would not be the type to escalate.
And you're not the type that would fight back in that situation, you say? No. Sebastian goes on to tell me that he made preparations for his own suicide immediately after Jackie disappeared. Okay, like right beside my bed I had uh two things of uh alien like to commit suicide. Oh. because I was okay, like I'm basically like uh hanging from that like like like before like like somebody say or do anything and push me over the edge. So I was like I might as well be ready. So
That's awful. So uh it's mostly Gordon and Colleen who pushed me there, basically. had that for like months before my bed uh beside my bed, like I was like Uh I was basically staying in life at that time. I staying alive because uh I think my parents deserve better and that story almost killed them, like basically even. So I was if they lose me on top of that, like they're bad.
Right. So that's if I did not have my parents and a few friends here, like I'm telling you, I would uh I would have used a propane tank uh probably before calling the cops. Right. That was at that point, right? At this point, Sebastian takes a few deliberate breaths and adjusts in his chair. It's a moment we all need, and I take it before continuing. Through speaking to Jackie's friends and family, I've discovered that when Jackie left on two or three occasions, she would return.
Sebastian himself has left before for periods of time and admits this to me. Some messages from Jackie to her sister Candice in october twenty nineteen Talk about Sebastian leaving and also are suggestive of an outburst he had. Jackie's version of the event reads as follows. October twenty fourth, twenty nineteen, eight oh two PM Sebastian left me at a restaurant in town tonight for a reason I have no idea about, without money, and so I got a ride with a local to our condo.
He left me with no money at night and didn't even care. Then when I came back and asked what happened, he lost it and threw his phone on the floor and then left on the Vespa without a helmet. WTF. Hopefully he returns okay. Geez, can we just have a normal life please? Sebastian has told me that this incident 100% happened. He threw his phone down so he couldn't be reached, he said, and he left because the situation with Jackie was escalating. Back to august seventeenth, twenty twenty one.
So she leaves here, what's the option here if you leave? What's what would happen like if he she walked out the door, she take her car? The car is a gray Nissan Micro four door registered to Jackie, but both she and Sebastian drove it. No, she did not take the car actually. So uh the thing, okay, that was again hidden in social media, and I'm gonna say it.
At the beginning, okay, like um that's where like people like were like like accusing me of bullshit and stuff. But it was confirmed by the neighbors there on that side. and she saw her leave the door with a small bag, like that looked like a small grossly bag or something. And uh the description she was dressed exactly like I said, and her hair were exactly the way I said So
Our neighbors saw leave the house. At that time, between seven and nine. So and this is confirmed. And uh even my former in laws are like a aware of that. So uh They won't say it online or anything, but obviously I did not like do anything. A few weeks later, when interviewed by Pepito Live, Sebastian provides an exact description of what he says Jackie was wearing that night, and now he says something similar to me.
Do you remember what she was wearing? I know that there's been descriptions of her. I just want to get it from you to know what the description is. Rare wearing a bun like uh always pretty much. She was wearing a tank top, like a sport tank top, like fast drying fabric, like basically right. About that colour, like teal or ayocagua like with short shorts and uh flip flop, like uh
Photos of the teal flip flops were circulated on Facebook around August 29th. I make a note to talk to the neighbors about what they might have seen. Sebastian also says there were sightings of Jackie over the following days in Playa Coco. The other thing okay like following that like in the next I believe three days She was seen by people in Coco Air, like people who know her for like years.
So it was obviously her. It was not like uh some random uh person who's like oh I seen her. It was people who known her. But uh that's why like the three person who known her personally Obviously no it's her because they were no no we're not talking about that girl who's drunk on the beach. We're talking about your wife. Yeah. One of them, okay, was uh his name was uh Keith. I don't know his uh second name.
He used to be the chef at the coconuts and then the other was a waitress at the restaurant Santorini. Her name is Carol. Bueno, para empezar, eh estamos aquí buscando información acerca de la desaparición de una cadena de playa Coco y ella se llama Jackie Ferland Smith. My questions for Sebastian will continue. So far I found him open and motivated, but also deeply frustrated, with his points often emerging from a place of anger.
But to get some clarity on Jackie's disappearance from another perspective, I reach out to the Costa Rican version of the FBI or OIJ OIJOTA. After several attempts, an officer named Ulysses Guevara answers his phone. He's one of the men in the room, Jackie's parents say, when they were told that Sebastian was a viable suspect. No, mira es que eh, y yo soy, yo soy el investigador, bueno fui el investigador que llevó la causa.
I was the investigator who handled the case, he tells me and CBC producer Mandy Sham. We ask if he's able to talk to us about it. no, no nos tienen permitido porque es política Ulysses says that the No, we're not allowed because of politics, and that I need to contact the director of the OIJ in Costa Rica, a fellow named Randall Zuniga. So I make plans to do that and also to contact Canadian police, including the RCMP.
But until police can talk to me about Jackie and what might have happened to her, it's family, friends, eyewitnesses, and Sebastian. There's also something else in Jackie's timeline. It was ninety nine dollars or a hundred dollars at both places. Some receipts on Jackie's credit account late on the day she disappeared. Do they offer something?
One at Walmart for about seventeen US dollars around four thirty three PM and the other two receipts for a total of about sixty five US dollars at Tienda La Nueva, a popular surf shop about forty five minutes from Cocoa. The first receipt there comes, according to the OIJ, at around six PM, and then another around six fifty. But the RCMP review of Jackie's credit card statement shows only one charge at the surf shop at six thirty-three p.m.
Regardless, Jackie's card was used at the shop in the same approximate window. Hola, hola. Vieras que esta ocupada y ya luego se me olvidó contestarlo. Bueno, vean. No, in realidad lo único que recordamos fue como cuando empezaron a pegar We call down and talk to salespeople who say they worked in the surf shop in twenty twenty one.
They remember seeing Jackie in their store. We ask if they remember anyone else in the store with Jackie, and they do remember seeing her there with a man, but cannot be sure what he looked like or the exact date. I asked Sebastian whether he and Jackie had ever been to the store, and he said they had visited it together about four or five times.
It's difficult to say for sure that it was Jackie using her card on the 17th of August, but they did know her as a customer and recognized her when they saw her missing person flyers. They say that police never spoke to any of them. Jackie's parents, Gordon and Colleen, believed that Jackie wasn't the one using the credit card. Because it used to be a credit card credit card at Walmart and another store. Do you know what was purchased there at on those at that time?
Apparently it was it they asked us if this was her signature on the receipt. They had that. But it wasn't her signature. It was just scribble and she took a sign like that. Jackie's phone would have been texting Sebastian about Dymex at the time the six p.m. and six fifty p.m. receipts were documented at the surf shop. I'll need to check into this carefully.
It's unclear from the receipts what was purchased, and if we assume Jackie used the card, what does shopping on the way home, probably for upscale clothing, mean for her state of mind? Also, where is Jackie's phone that was left behind, and what might it reveal? Pings off towers. her locations across the day. Sebastian's version of events shows Jackie to be the aggressor and he the victim. But was that always the case?
My investigation has surfaced that this dynamic may at times have been two sided. In a text from Jack. To Candace, her sister, dated December two thousand nineteen. Jackie describes a pushing incident and says Sebastian also grabbed my breast and twisted it and pushed me tonight after I asked him about the towel, and he denied that it smelled.
I asked Sebastian about this fight, but Uh she did not want like to let me go out of the bedroom, okay so Uh she always thought okay that the towels were like basically I don't know that people were coming when we're not there. And opening the door and stuff and like for whatever reason they manage never to be seen by anyone. And they would do stuff to her toothbrush or uh her clothes, making those in her clothes and stuff, or like wiping their ass with the
So uh yeah at some point like yeah, like uh she was arguing and like oh you're doing that to me, you're doing that to me, like always the same story, right? And uh I tried to see. And uh she was like getting all wound up and like aggressive and stuff. So uh she pushed me on uh the floor, like in that ceramic floor, like so and I was just falling from a dead, but it's not fun. So I came back on the death, she did that three times if I remember well.
And then like I gave her like a bit of a push, like I stopped that. And yes, like my aunt ended up where like her breast was. And Colleen and Gordon also have a similar story that they say they heard directly from Jackie. Well they had a night.
when they went out and were drinking and came back oh right he knocked knocked her down. She said they she said Sebastian knocked her down. He said no I pushed her and Jack. I said no he knocked her down that's the second time. And so though I talked to Sebastian um a few days later I said that better not happen again.
Um, you know. And um and so What was his explanation? What did he tell you at that incident when you say he'd he pushed her down or she told you that? What did he say to you? Did he as an explanation for that? Sebastian tells me that he only remembers one such incident. And that Jackie ended up falling down because he says she was screaming at him and in his words was out of control. He says Jackie at one point blocked the door and then she fell down when he opened it.
He says that he did not push Jackie. Um well he said, Oh yeah, okay, sorry, um you know, yeah, it won't happen or whatever, but you know, so And and uh one thing before I forget we he phoned us once or twice in the middle of the night there that he was gonna commit suicide too or something, you know. We had
The one night he called and he said he was gonna commit to And we had to talk him out of it so I just tell him it was You'll feel better in the morning. I said and I did say maybe you two have to go your separate ways. And then it was okay. Sebastian says he was suicidal because Jackie was, in his opinion, increasingly going nuts, and the call to her parents was a cry for their help more than anything. And it was fine, but that solved.
Jackie told us that basically that he was a narcissist and um gaslighting her and I didn't even know what gaslighting was. I had to look it up and try to figure out from the explanation, you know, of saying one thing and then changing it after and try gaffling her and trying to make her think she was losing her mind or something, you know. So and she was a pretty bright lady there and like I say, uh she had that struggle with um her anchor issues there sometimes.
When the OIJ told them to leave Sebastian's house, Colleen and Gordon searched for a place to stay. They found a condo for sale owned by a man who said he was a retired local investigator who promised to help them look for Jackie. They bought the condo, but I'm not sure how much investigation this fellow did, and I'll try to talk to him. In the back of their minds, Colleen and Gordon said was that if Jackie returned, they would be there to offer her some support and a place to stay.
I'll be trying to find and speak to the people who Sebastian says saw Jackie, and also to a person named Frank, Sebastian suggests who knew them well at the condo they used to have, to get his thoughts on what might have happened. Do you think she wants to be involved? Yeah, that's why she's there. Okay. So can I involve you in this?
And what about Lorraine, the woman who answered Sebastian's door? Over the course of my interview with Sebastian, she's appeared in the background, listening, patient, concerned. And I think she Wants to say something. Someone Knows Something is hosted, written, and produced by me, David Ridgen. The series is also produced by Maria Jose Burgos. Sound design by Evan Kelly. Natalia Ferguson is our transcriber. Emily Cannell is our digital producer. Chris Oak is our story editor.
Our executive producer is Cecil Fernandez. Tanya Springer is the senior manager, and Arif Nurani is the director of CBC Podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Someone Knows Something early on the CBC True Crime YouTube channel. channel or for early and ad-free listening, subscribe to the CBC True Crime Premium channel on Apple Podcasts. Just click on the link in the show description. If you're looking for another series to listen to, check out Understood
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