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You are now listening to True Murder The most Shocking Killers in True crime History and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Good evening. This is your host Dan Zupanski for the program True Murder, The most shocking Killers in True crime History and the authors that have written about them. There are more than sixty serial murderers in Canadian history. For too long, awareness serial murder and Canada has been confined to West Coast child killer Clifford Olson and the schoolgirl murderers Paul Bernardo and Carla Hamalka, along with one of
the most prolific serial killers in history, Robert Picton. Unlike America, Canada has been viewed as a nation untouched by the shadow of serial murder. Then came Colonel Russell Williams and his bizarre homicides in serial home invasions, which were sensational news worldwide on the Internet, television, and in newspapers and magazines. The reasons for Canada's serial killer blackout is clear. Until now, such information has never been compiled and presented in a single,
concise work. Cold North Killers is a wake up call. This detailed and haunting account of Canada's worst monsters analyzes their crimes, childhoods, and inevitable downfalls. The book that was featured this evening is Cold North Killers Canadian Serial Murder with my special guest, journalist and author Lee mellar A. Welcome to the program, and thank you for a Green dis interview, Lee.
Melar Hey, thanks for having me on them.
Thank you very much for coming on. This is very interesting, as you know, maybe the audience knows as well. I'm living in Winnipeg and born in Ontario, so this is even more interesting to me. Serial killers I had no idea about so. First off, a question that I often asked many of the authors is what brought you to this idea of writing a book about Canada's serial killers. You've got at least sixty serial killers profiled in this book.
What brought you to this project? What compelled you to want to do a book about Canada's worst monsters?
Originally I was going to write a fiction book, a series of detective stories, and I was going to have an RCMP profiler who went all over Canada solving these various murders. And I started thinking about the murderers that I was familiar with in Canada, the serial murders that is, and I could only come up with like Bernardo Olsen and Pickton at the time. So I didn't want to duplicate something that had been done in real life. So
I decided to do a little bit of digging. And what I onearthed, I on earthed so many interesting cases that I've actually became more interested in writing a book on the non fiction the actual hidden story of serial murder in Canada, rather than my fictional mystery story.
Sure, now, how did you? How did you start this? Because being in Canada myself too, not that I'm a serial killer expert, but I often have what can be considered serial killer experts on this program from America, you know, thet the really hard of true crime and people that are very experienced there, so they can be considered experts. Now, what where was your source of information and was there any Were you surprised that you didn't know this? But
were you surprised at the lack of information? And where? What were your sources of information to find out all the lists of serial killers in Canada and the information behind their crimes and their convictions.
Well, I started with the Internet, which is the perfect tool for searching. I went into newspaper archives pretty much every major newspaper all over Canada, looked at some court documents, looked at books that had been written on some of the cases specifically, and even watched a few television programs just trying to glean all the information I could on it. As you probably know, our court system is much more closed than the US as far as getting information goes, so as really scavenging.
We seem to have a technical difficulty. Let me see what's going on here? Yeah still, oh there yo go Lee. Well we just lost you for about a few minutes so or a minute or so, so let's go back. You were talking about how Canadian system versus the American system much more closed, and you were scavenging, You were really scrounging for information, and then we lost you in the signal.
That was That was pretty much it. You know, I was a scavenger. I took any available sources I could. As I got lucky, I was able to get psychiatrist reports or court documents, things like that. But a lot of the time I was going through newspapers or the books that have been published, say on some of these cases. A lot of the books are out of print too, so that'd track them down. That was yeah, that was my main source. I wasn't able to speak with any any of the killers or anything like that.
Well, you don't have room in if you're talking about sixty cases or sixty murderers with multiple at least three, so you're talking about a lot of murders. If you went through that, no one knowing could put up that's incredible. That would be you know, real manifesto. So what I found interesting for you know, again we're talking to a world audience here, and a lot of people aren't so
familiar with Clifford Olsen. They must be familiar with Paul Bernardo and Carlo Jamalka and Robert Picton, and then there are some other interesting Colonel Russell Williams. But but we'll talk later in the program, if we've got a little bit of time, I think we will just about the latest developments. How Canadians are really competing in this serial killer sweepstakes or at least bizarre killer sweepstakes. Anyway, we're
trying to get noticed. So let's go back and talk about the lesser known serial killers in Canada that have a really I mean, I've found this fascinating just doing some of the research and looking through your book some of the very interesting cases that are unique, regardless of whether they're Canada or American, and tell us about tell us about Paul Jordan or the alcohol killer.
Let me see Gilbert Paul Jordan. Yeah, he also he had a number of aliases. I think there was a he was Gilbert Paul Elsie, kept changing his name and every time he come out of prison. But this guy started in Vancouver in the sixties. He was a kind of a geeky looking guy, balding, with glasses and had absolutely no self confidence and I had a number of
child molestation and rape charges. I believe his thing, aside from being a sexual predator, was that he was also a complete alcoholic and would often polish off forty ounces
of sixty ounces of liquor in a day. So he kind of combined the two into this really bizarre signature where he would get the sex workers from the Vancouver's infamous downtown area, and he would take them to hotels or back to his barber shop, and he would play drinking games with them, which he would always win because he had kind of an iron liver by that point.
And then when they passed that unconscious, he would pour the rest of the contents down their throats and they would die of alcohol poisoning, and then he would rape them as they were dying, and I imagine probably was still raping them after they were dead. So it's probably one of the most unique signatures that a serial killer has ever employed. And it also has the handy side effect of being able to pass off your victims as just you know, alcohol overdoses.
There was some controversy in court though, because again he got eight to ten women died by this way, so by the time people had heard about this, there was some controversy in court as to whether they could ever ever prove that what he was doing was actually murdered
that you're speaking about. Tell us just a little bit about that, because there's a little bit about that that this guy was known for a little while, and then finally tell us how he was actually convicted and what was his inevitable faith himself.
Oh well, I can tell you it was an inevitable fate right off the bat, and it's quite startling. Actually, we have the dangerous offender law in Canada, where if you're somebody that's convicted of multiple heinous crimes, you can get this designation where you're not allowed to be let
out of prison. But amazingly they kept even after he was convicted of these serial murders, they kept letting him out of prison, and he'd reoffend again, not necessarily with a murder, but with preaching, you know, his parole, or just as minor crimes or sex crimes, and so essentially he kept offending until the day he eventually died, and they never really figured out that they should just keep them in prison. It's strange to me.
Yeah, well it was. Again. I think it's the controversy was that there was you know, I mean, it's a hard thing to prove that what he did other than people willingly drinking alcohol together. So unless you have this reliable eyewitness, and we won't board American audience or world
audience with what's ronwa Canada. In terms of regarding intoxication as a major excuse for murder, but you know, our friends across the border don't have a similar device where alcohol actually can diminish murder or reduce murder to something
like manslaughter. So and I'm not sure about every other country, but I'm pretty sure that they there are few countries, if any, have that same sort of as you know by reading being a student of the media, that that it's almost routine to drop murdered of manslaughter because of intoxication.
So mm hmm, yeah, I mean that, go ahead, no, go ahead. I was just gonna say that could have been a factor. There's some things that are interesting to me. For instance that when they did an autopsy on one of the uh, one of the victims, Ivory Rose Oswald, they found that she had a blood alcohol level of zero point five to one, and death by alcohol poisoning normally occurs at point four. So to me that, I mean, that's very suspicious. How does she keep drinking after?
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She would be that plus they have They also had audio recordings with him saying strange things to them like come on, one more, drink baby down the hatch, you know, basically egging them on to drink themselves into unconsciousness. So there's to me, there was a lot of proof.
Yeah, the thing is that that's what I Again, an American audience might find odd that this guy's you just said, this guy committed eight to ten murders and yet he's still he was not in prison for the rest of his life. One, two, three, four, five six. There are devices in other countries where this negligent behavior regardless, someone dies, then that someone has to be responsible and the sentences
are much stiffer. So you there wouldn't be a serial killer like this in other countries, I would think, and certainly, certainly, definitely, as far as my research is not a chance in America. Now, tell us about some other notorious murderers in Canada and you just you just name some and then we'll discuss those.
Okay, well, you said you're from Winnipeg. Let's start with Michael Veschio or you're aware of him.
A little bit. But tell us more about Michael Veshio and what you found out.
Okay, Well, let's go back to what you said before about the definition of the serial killer being three victims. Actually, after a conference by the FBI and various academic experts on the subject in San Antonio, they decided to drop it to two now, so that it's only two. And there is a lot of controversy over that. So my book does feature a lot of offenders that have only been convicted of two. But at the same time, it was a reasonable assumption. They defend again, and one of
them is Michael Veschio. He was in Winnipeg. He was after the right after World War two, and basically someone was raping these or sexually assaulting these boys in their early teens or children at gunpoint in Winnipeg, and whenever
they refused him, he would shoot them. And so he ended up killing two boys and actually caught him by by finding him in thunder Bay after he'd robbed the bank, and they linked the weapon through ballistics to the Winnipeg murders, and that's how Michael Veashio was brought to justice.
Wow. Well that's fascinating too because that's my hometown, thunder Bay. So yeah, yeah, and I grew up. I grew up with a guy named Vashio, so there's you know, Vatio family would be familiar with me too, So that was very interesting.
Yeah they could, Yeah, it could be related.
Now, what was the fate of Michael Vesho He was convicted of the two murders? Obviously, No, he.
Ended up at the end of the hangman's rope.
Yeah, swift justice.
They didn't nothing around back in those days. You had a couple of months.
Yeah, Now, tell us about tell us about maybe someone from another part of the country so we can get a little geographical idea that it's not just West Coast. Tell us about some of the other serial killers not known to the general public.
Okay, well there's a Probably Toronto's most interesting serial murderer was a seventeen year old boy by the name of Peter Woodcock, and he was operating in the late nineteen fifty six in early nineteen fifty seven, he was mobile, but on a highly mobile but he rode a bicycle around Toronto, and essentially he would lure these little children into parts of Toronto like ravines or down to Cherry Beach, which was then quite deserted, and he choked them and
beat them, bite them, and this kind of strangle and suffocate them into death.
These very sort of.
Spontaneous hand crimes to kill these children. And there was also a really immature sexual element to them too, like he would undress them, look at the bodies, and then redress them, but without actually sexually assaulting them. And the first two victims were young boys, like around nine years old. The third victim was a girl, I believe she was about four, and he killed her by thrusting a branch
into her vagina. So they finally catched this weird kid with glasses who was riding all over Toronto and acting quite suspiciously, and they put him in a mental health hospital and he stays there from nineteen fifty seven to nineteen ninety one, when they finally decide that he's been through enough rehabilitation that they can allow him out on a day pass and you know what, he doesn't even
get off the hospital grounds. As soon as he's out of the hospital, he murders a fellow patients, Dennis Kerr, sodomizes his corpse and then walks to the police station and turns himself in.
Yeah, yeah, amazing. Yeah, it's hard to beat something like that. Incredible. Now, what about.
Boden Wayne Boden. Okay, so when we're moving into Quebec, Wayne Boden was known as the vampire rapist or strangler Bill, and he kind of surfaced in nineteen sixty nine. Boden's signature, which is the kind of like a psychosexual expression which we use to link crimes, was biting into the breasts of his victims, hence the term the vampire rapist. So in nineteen sixty nine nineteen seventy that era, he killed
three women in Montreal. He'd go back to their apartments with them and then he'd sexually attack them and bite their breasts on two of those occasions, and the whole city was in a panic looking for this guy. And then it stopped. But he resurfaces in Calgary, Alberta, and he murders a woman there and they're able to link him to that crime through the bite marks.
So it was actually the first.
Time that I believe bite mark evidence was used in North America to convict any kind of offender. And it's important because later it would be used to apprehend ted Bundy started in Canada.
Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, it's a very interesting twist. Now, what about William Patrick Fife And then he says five, He's been convicted of five murders in Montreal, but he's a suspect and much many more. Tell us a little bit about William Fife.
The last number I think they pigged him at was nine. William Fife was known as the killer Handyman. He actually this first murder they believed was nineteen seventy nine. He wasn't apprehended till nineteen ninety nine, so he was killing over a twenty year period. His modus operandi was basically to go.
He would stalk.
These women that were living on their own about various ages, and when he was certain that they weren't living with a man, or that a man wasn't going to be home, he would often go and knock on the doors and say, well, you know, the landlord sent me around to fix the sink or something like that, like a ruse approach. Once he'd gain entry to the house, he'd attacked the women, often raping them, and he was a lot of anger
in that man. He would stab his victims forty four times, bludging them, beat them severely, and then towards the end of.
His career as a serial killer, he was actually.
Torturing them to get their ATM codes. So they've got the police goup a first look at him when he was caught on an ATM camera accessing one of the women's bank accounts. He was eventually caught by DNA. He was already on record and he left some DNA at one of the crime scenes, and so that was that, and they threw him in jail, and eventually he confessed to these other murders going back to nineteen seventy nine, which they hadn't linked them to.
So he's got nine nine under his belt.
In Yeah, that's a pretty safe bet.
Now we talked about Peter Woodcock, tell us about another interesting serial killer that people might not have heard about.
The one that people might not have heard about. Okay, Well, there's just there's so many of them.
There is a guy called.
Ronald Glenn West. He was known as the twenty two caliber killer. Lots of serial killers have had that moniker over history, but he was actually the first. And he was a policeman in Toronto, and he would drive to the sort of countryside just north of Toronto and he would knock on the doors of housewives while their husbands were away. Then we're not quite sure gain an entry to the house. He might have pulled the gun, he
might have tricked his way in the wants inside. He would rape them at gunpoint and then he'd shoot them to death, often in front of their children. And because he was a policeman, he was very forensically.
Aware, so he would collect a lot of.
The evidence in shellcasings. So he committed these two of these murders in nineteen seventy and then the trail just went cold, and it was cold for twenty five years, and then they actually catch him in thunder Bay committing an armed robbery, and they just threw good police work.
The guy who caught him for the armed robbery was at an opp conference with a guy who was investigating this cold case from nineteen seventy and he mentioned a specific type of gum that Ronald West used this pistol, and the police officer investigating the nineteen seventy murderers he realized that it was the same rare have done that they were looking for, So they eventually linked West those rape murders by a DNA sample.
Interesting the unique case. How about tell us about Leopold Dion.
Oh, Leopold Dion. Okay, so that's back in the sixties. He was known as the Monster of pont Rouge. That memory serves me correctly. Basically, yeah, he was a child killer and he worked around the Quebec city area.
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Well, Quebec's capital, and what you would do is, once again, he would use this ruse that we've seen with William Fife that Ron West might have used. It's essentially a way of approaching a victim. And his ruse was to approach these kids and say, you know, would you like me to take photographs of you to be in this magazine.
I'm a photographer, and I guess that those being more innocent times, the kids would go with him and he'd take some pictures of them, and they he'd put them at ease and then can I just drive you out to the country and take some pictures there, and once he had they degree and once he had them out in the country, he'd strangled them with He had like a studded gar out that he had made and he'd
strangle them with that and then bury the bodies. And he was eventually identified because he approached a number of kids that didn't go with him, and one of them picked him out from a group of photographs that police officers had of sex offenders in the area. So Leopold
Dion was brought to justice in that way. And the interesting thing about him actually was he had a kind of Jeffrey Dahmer type death in that he went to prison and he was originally supposed to hang but as he was in prison, a psychotic inmate who thought that he was Launce of Arabia. Yeah, he he killed Leopold Dion.
And that guy's name was Norman Champagne. And I found out, actually after I coold North Killers, that Champagne was in prison for killing somebody too, so technically under the new classifications, that would make him.
A serial killer.
So the serial killer Leopaul Dion was killed by another serial killer, Norman Champagne, who I guess happened to be a little tougher than he was or more psycho or yeah.
Yeah, interesting, yeah, very interesting. How about Edward the is it bulf or Roof?
Edward Edward Rolloff? Yes, he was Canada's first serial killer, and he actually committed all of his crimes in the United States. But Roloff was born in New Brunswick and raised there, and he was an absolute genius to the man. In fact, they've still got his brain in some university somewhere, and apparently it weighs. It's one of the densest brains as far as weight goes in the world. And Roloff was kind of one of those nineteenth century serial killers that prayed a lot on his family. He was a
very jealous man and domineering. So when he moved to the United States, it was to New York and he took a wife there who he beat regularly. The rest of the family didn't like real Loff for this reason, so Roloff decides to get even. He passes himself off as a doctor.
So when.
The wife and child of one of his wife's brothers got sick, he asked him to go intend to her. He poisons her and the child to death. He then kills his own wife child and he makes off with their bodies, and he's jailed for that. He escapes from jail and goes back to New York and attempts to join some kind of criminal ring where he's the leader
and he's got these underlings under him. They rob a shop and they shoot a clerk dead in the process, and then so that his accomplices won't tell on him or take his cut of the loot, he kills both of his accomplices, so he didn't There wasn't really the sexual component to his crimes that we've seen with the other ones. He was more.
Motivated by just his ego is jealousy.
And his desire for material comfort and to and to see himself as an ingenious criminal, which he wasn't naturally he was. Rather, he was a rather poor criminal. If he would have stuck to his straints, which was in languages, et cetera, who it probably would have done a lot better in life.
Yeah, serial killing probably doesn't pay that well.
No, well, yeah, it's amazing that you bring him up because him being so known for his intelligence yet being such a dismal success as a serial killer. He's completely incompetent. Yet then we get someone on the West Coast like Robert Picton who has an eighty seven IQ and looks just like a serial killer. You know, it runs a big farm. All signs are going, you know that this is a guy that should be caught right away. Well, he's killed from thirty one to forty nine plus women.
So one of the interesting things I noted while resttering serial killers is that IQ doesn't necessarily equate to success in this and freer American listeners consider guys like Gary Ridgway who had an eighty two IQ, but he was forty eight women. I think he holds the current record in the United States.
Yeah, and then the thing is then you get a person like Ted Bundy, which was he was an intelligent guy. He was politically involved. He could have been a lawyer and he could have been a politician, or he could have been very seriously politically involved. He was charismatic. But then again, we'll talk about this a little bit after we go through a few more murderers. But some of
these people, it overcomes them. Their narcissism overcomes them, their need for infamy, you know, the dark side overcomes them. In terms of any kind of control, and a lot of these guys go from being a little bit more calculated to getting not so calculated. There is so in a downward spiral, but we'll talk about that a little bit later. Tell us about another kind of unique killer in Canada. Just name one another one in your book and let's talk about them.
Okay, Well, we got another guy in Montreal called Angelo Colaillo. He was never actually convicted because he hung himself for his trial. But unfortunately that doesn't get you out of my book.
Those tactics.
So Cola Lilo, they actually caught him. He was already had convictions as a rapist, but they caught him because I guess while he was inside prison he made friends with a guy called Nick Pachioni, who was also of the same kind of statistic bent. And when Cola Lilo got out of prison, he was murdering these teenage Well he murdered a twenty year old and a twelve year old girl, but he did it in a way that was extremely organized, and he covered it up by lighting fires.
I believe he'd get into the house, raped them, torture them, strangle them to death with a folded towel, which he called the mister Spock method. And we only know this about him because he wrote about it in letters to Pacioni in prison, but he disguised that. He didn't say I did it. He said, imagine there was this character
called Bob who did this. And then as the prison officials were intercepting these letters, they realized that he was speaking about actual murders that were unsolved or in some cases,
things that had been deemed accidents. So when he killed his third victim, Jessica Grimard, who was fourteen, he dragged her into the woods and stabbed her to death and raped her, he sent a letter to Patchioni and this is the one that they intercepted and tipped them off, and they linked them back through his letters to these previous murders. So he's an interesting serial killer. And that he managed to commit two murders that one of them was deemed an accident and one was a suicide, so
incredibly organized. Kind of relating back to what you said about Bundy a second ago. He would have got away with it if he didn't sure to brag about it, but he's like he couldn't keep his mouth shut. He had to tell someone his narcissism got got the better of him, and it often does with these guys. That's what trips them out.
Yeah, well sometimes it trips them up. But we'll talk about this a little bit later on. It's a little bit different when you look at a guy like Twitchell, the guy I was involved with, Sidney Tierhughes, and you look at Luca Magnata and you start looking at Wow, it's different. I think there is some evolution from because
we're looking at the better known cases. The sixties and seventies, even the turn of the century had some savages and some really diabolical killer So there is no reason to think that based on what's going on in popular society, and the Luca magnat is very much a reflection of that,
is that there is something else going on. I think in you see the front page of the Winnipeg Sun today, kid eighteen years old involved in serious torture and home invasion talking about his allegiance to Lucifer and his serial killer aspirations.
So going only yeah, you can bet too. Just to clear something up. This whole idea that there are these satanic cults murdering people. It really is a myth. This allegiance to Lucifer is probably some He probably has no understanding of Satanism, might not even fully believe in it, or just be completely whacked out on some kind of really hard drug or schizophrenic or something. But that I imagine kind of like Richard Ramirez, I think it's a
big part of his image. You know, he knows that by saying I'm alive with Lucifer, that it's going to make headlines, which it did. We're talking about it right now. You know, these guys look for angles. Luca Magnauta. I think he was all about that. He was looking for as many angles as he possibly could. Like, did we actually see him eat that piece of flesh that he cut out of the guy's buttocks? We didn't. He placed it on a fork and showed it to the camera.
You know, he's got a kitten in there, just to show us how depraved he is, or he wants us
to think he is. So yeah, there's there's certainly this kind of generation coming up of serial killers that are out to impress us, or or just general murders that are out to impress us with their depravity and if yeah, I think that would be a reflection of this cult of celebrity kind of civilization that we live in right now, where it's better to be infamous or famous for something terrible than to be a nobody, you know, to not exist in the media eye is like the worst possible
fate that we can imagine in their modern age.
Yeah, and it really, I mean, it's not a new phenomenon. I say, well, it's an evolution, but really it's just a Canon's just a little bit behind America. It just seems, you know, we're definitely affected by their culture. So Richard Ramirez doing the Satan thing or Charles Manson doing the Nazi thing again, aligning yourself with Hitler's pretty good too, to get to you know, upset Marvel's dad. You know. So the thing is Richard mmire is it used it
to his advantage. He got married, He had all kinds of women proposing to him and pledging allegiance to them. And really it's just like these guys are just like rock stars, and their trials are just their big moment on stage and they'll be remembered and and you know, they'll live on in infamy forever because of the books and the photos, and so really their wish really does come true, and some people have a little bit of
a problem with that. But but what I think is now is that because there are the Gary Ridgeways and the Robert Picton's where they've got forty nine or forty eight, well, you know, these guys are in a rush to get famous, so they're gonna have to one up each other by trying to do as much multi media as possible and
as shocking as absolutely possible. And you know that's why I see Twitchell, tear Hues and Mgnauta and Colonel Williams all sort of influencing each other because really a lot of these stories don't play that far or that deep into the US. They have a lot of their own serial killers and all kinds of breaking, interesting and bizarre news that you're not they're not likely to cover that
much from Canada except the bigger, high profile cases. But I think that we have is of one upping each other, and I think that is is especially prevalent in the last few years in Canada. It just seems odd.
Yeah, definitely, there is a guy caught in Toronto recently. It was after my book was published called Mark Moore, and he had these delusions that he was like this gangster rapper and that he was, you know, part of a policy and going around killing people, but he was just by himself.
He was a.
Total loaner, just driving around shooting people with a with a handgun from his car window.
You know, it's.
Once again a reflection of the whole celebrity thing. And I think what's interesting is.
That these.
Murderers that we're talking about, like Magnata and More and Twitchell, who were motivated by fame, if they tend to not kill very many people before they're caught, they're caught almost immediately because they're just screaming out for attention, where if you look at guys like Robert Picton and Gary Ridgeway, they didn't really want us to know what they were doing. They weren't big into the thought of being known as
serial killers. I mean, in fact, Pickton still hasn't even admitted to it, and Ridgeway talks about it, but he's somewhat reluctant too, and you can tell that it was not his point to be a star. These were guys motivated by deep seated inferiority and rage. And for that reason they kept it very much under wraps. They weren't they weren't trying to be in the public eye. Maybe they wanted the image of the Green River Killer. You know, Ridgeway wanted this whole Green River Killer to be in
the public eye. He might have got some satisfaction from that, but I don't think he ever wanted the name Gary Ridgeway linked to it. And because of that reason, I think the more egotistical and the more you use it as a vehicle for fame, that's likely you are to actually become a serial killer. In fact, like mcnaudia, will probably kill one person then get caught.
Well, I don't you know. All I know is the case that I was involved with, and the killer posed the question which serial killer that he most closely resembled. And when I first looked at the case, and when I obviously went real deep into research for the book, trying to get the book deal, but also just trying
to get as much background. And I interviewed the killer for a year, and in that year I learned as much as I could from you know, the authorities, the authors that have interviewed these people that have had the opportunities to interview these people, and then of course guys like Douglass and Wrestler who created the criminal profiles by interviewing thirty six of the worst serial killers, and you sort of get, you know, not that you're an expert after that, but you sort of get an idea of
the serial killer mind. And it makes no sense for the guy that I was involved with. That's why I consider him a serial killer. For him to have that this was his last crime, because we won't go into it, but certainly that it makes more sense that this was
his last crime. And when he had a spectacular opportunity having Susan Sarandon's stolen golden necklace, he knew that this would set off the paparazzi that were in town because Jennifer Lopez was going to be in town within a day or two, and so I think that's what his
motivation was. So I think there's also a phenomenon in Canada too, where this guy, at least that I was involved with one have his cake and eat it too, do a few years in jail because he knew that there was a good chance if you said I'm drunk and I can't remember that this intoxication would mean that he could have everything. He could have fame, a little stint in jail where he would be a celebrity in his mind, and then freedom and still having all his
incredible memories of the people that he did kill. So that's just my suspicion and my take on it from everything that I've researched. But I think some of the people that are arrested in Canada that there isn't in an immediate response by bringing an FBI trained criminal profilers to interview those people effectively.
No, it's a lot of it is done by psychiatrists or psychologists in the prison and it's funny because they still think that they can rehabilitate some of these people. I'm a colleague of mind doctor Eric Ticky in the US. He's a very well respected expert on serial murderers. He came out of the way to Kingston to interview Cliff Olsen and they told him in Kingston when he got there that he couldn't he can't interview Olson because they
thought it might disrupt Olsen's rehabilitation process. And it's just a complete disconnect from reality. You do not rehabilitate differd Olsen. This is a guy who's calling the parents of the kids he's murdered from prison and describing them, describing to them what he did to them. This is a guy who is it was able to get doctor Hickey's home phone number. He's a master manipulator, he was even before. He is a serial killer who was a terrible criminal.
He's rape this, breaking into houses, a complete and other psychopath. And it baffles me that the Canadian mental health will look at someone like Coovie Olsen and say, yeah, you know, we got to cure him. Why why would you cure him so that he can be cured and in prison? Because if you're thinking of letting him out, he probably shouldn't have your license to practice mental health.
Well, the thing is, Clifford Olson, I don't think was by definition insane. But we have and I won't bore the audience because but we have our unique case of Vincent Lee now out on day passes after three years after the bus beheading on the Greyhound, and it looks like he's going to be a sort of a poster boy for psychiatric rehabilitation in terms of that this guy can They're talking about is incredible, incredible, incredible cure from
schizophrenia on their medication. They wish all of their mentally ill patients would respond in such an effective, in such a profound way, and so you're just you can already see they've already spoken about it. Within five years this person will be free based on they rehabilitated him with
a drug. And I think our American neighbors and other people in the world, and that's why I think it's an interesting case, and I think that's why true true crime in Canada is just getting more and more interesting when this stuff goes to court. In America, of the states are still death penalty there, definitely is. Most states have a device of parole without any possibility or pardon me, life sentence wellout any possibility of parole. Here, it's not
a foregone conclusion. We have the doctor and have his kids to death, and it's amazing and it seems to be more as as precedent shows more and more that we're excusing murder. And like you say, we still think we can rehabilitate killers, and we routinely let them out before their life sentences on parole to see their safety. How safe they can be in the public, and then we routinely let them out, so very scary.
I have a whole chapter, I think it's the last chapter of the book devoted to that, just where the system has made errors in judgment and failing out letting dangerous offenders out of prison. And that's one of the reasons why I decided to write the book, because I thought that the true story of the history of Syria murder in Canada hadn't been told. And you know, to give you six to give people sixty cases to look at and to say how do you think things are
functioning here? You know, that was a big part of it. But also I'd like to get back to this idea of I mean, the saying that Lee is cured and then also doing mental health work on someone like a Clifford Olson or Paul Bernardo. Comparing Vince Lee to one of those guys, it's like comparing a banana to a grapefruit. I mean, the guy killed because he was extremely psychotic. And when I use the word psychotic, I mean his
proper sense that he was schizophrenic. He was literally probably having the equivalent of a massive acid trip, like he was completely flipping out, hallucinating. His whole sense of reality was distorted. So he's not killing out of vindictiveness. He's killing because it's like being in a nightmare and he wants to escape it. Oh, sure that is yeah, and that's definitely. Yeah, they can control it with medication. I don't think that they should be letting him out so soon. Definitely.
And because if he stops taking the pills, which a lot of paranoid getsophrenics do, because I think the pills are the problem, you know, then he can easily go back into that headspace. But I mean when you look at someone like that, yeah, you might be able to rehabilitate somebody who's killing just because of their psychotic But there's a difference between psychotic and psychopathic. Oh, and everyone knows you cannot rehabilitate a psychopath. It's it's just basic criminology.
One oh one. And so this is what made me laugh about the Olsen Oh we're working on his rehabilitation. It's like, what school did you graduate from?
Well, I think it's it's horrible, even though it's just an exercise. Really with Robert Picton that he has a parole date. Families will gather together. They will be anxious while he has a parole date, which I just don't understand why you can't have consecutive sentencing and get it and get it out.
I agree with you. I'm in complete agreement. It's almost like he's doing the same time as he would for killing one, one or two people. You know, it's there's no difference.
Really.
I think that in fact, I mean this dangerous offender of law. We use it for people who are you likely to commit brutal crimes but haven't actually killed. That's that's when it's usually used. I think that if you're a serial killer, you should qualify for sort of a modified dangerous offender where you just can never get out. To me, that's common sense.
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No, we're just necessary. Edi.
I lost in terms of conditions eighty plus you're the worst type of criminal.
Yeah, ironically that is the most dangerous of a fender. I mean, yeah, I hate to say it. Yeah, Now continue with a couple more cases that you found very very unique and probably bolstered some of the ideas that you like you talk about in the last chapter and then you talk about throughout the book sort of a you know, why is this why and why is it not known? Why is this information really kind of hard to find? Really?
You know, it's a question I'm asked a lot, and I don't know what the system's motive is. It just sort of exists, and so I only can really hazard guesses to you. I mean, we could say that it's, you know, in Canada that we don't sensationalize things like they do in the United States or maybe to or lesser extent in the United Kingdom. That's kind of the
positive way of looking at it. But I think that there might be this sort of ideas, you know, Canada as the peaceful counterpart of America, and and we don't want to. We don't want to own up to our problems with these type of offenders. And so I think I think even in the reactions of a lot of just every day Canadians I talk I talk to, they
don't want to know. And I think, if your everyday Canadian is like that, then there's no reason to think that people in higher position of authorities would really be much different. It could be a cultural thing, and then you know, you can justify laws like that make it really hard for journalists to get access to information about these cases. I mean, we we don't even have pictures of these people in court. I don't know what that's about.
Why we can't have a picture of Robert Pickton in court, Why we have to have a draw of them, I don't I'm not sure what the purpose of that is. I don't know. Maybe it's it's a cultural thing.
Well, I think that what we have is a mythology going on that the number two things going on and being Canadian. I've heard as many times if we're America is violent and we're not, Well.
We're not as violence as tho.
So we don't want to own up to our own violence and that that we have the same We don't have the same for capital murder rates, but we do have Again, we have many cases of incredible murder and incredible savagery. So we're not alone in that. But the thing is that what I what I think happens in
America is that it's not of owning up. It's is that the film industry and the documentary industry, and the newspaper industry and the paper industry is American and they're they're not going to shy away from history, current events or a good story because they're journalists. And here in some way, somehow we've lost our way. CBC has some kind of cock eyed notion of bias and and uh
telling Canadians Canadian stories. Look at if it's his, if it's historic, And Bernardo and Jilmalica trial was historic for what you could learn from it, I mean incredible missteps and bungles and chicanery and injustice. Incredible for for Canada to not uh talk about this and and not say endlessly, but to discuss the aspects, not the gore. People say, well, we don't want to discuss the gore. The gory aspects.
The gorrious aspects of that of that case were the trial and the and the injab this and Karla Hamalka being deemed a battered woman, and the chicanery there was from there, and a couple and one of the authors, Williams, who tried to just tell the truth. Really they tried to railroad the guy, not get the guy published. It's incredible and what we could have learned from the pict in case of anybody bothered to read the book, is amazing,
but we don't. So I think there's something inherently lazy about our first off, our journalists, because they don't demand at the courts there's transparency. There's no such thing. But at least we're not deriving enough information from trials. We're not learning anything from trials where the police bungled, missed opportunities,
the judiciary acted totally improper. We have all kinds of stories like that that, and there's not hundreds, but some of the pict in Bernardo Hamalka, the Clifford, those are stories that need to be told. And like your book with these sixty serial killers, incredible tales that hopefully Canadians will read. But I'm sure Americans because they're just interested in great stories, will be interested in this book as well. It's just incredible murders, all kinds of motivations. But it's
a phenomena. We've seen movies in the last few years. There's so many serial killer series and movies. So it is a subject that people are interested in, the criminal minds.
So yeah, it's interesting, so ubiquitous in our media and in our culture. Yet at the same time, there's studies showing that the serial murder rates are actually declined.
Yeah, but I like again, I think that we still see an escalation of barbarity. You know, we've had all kinds of cases. The guy that was torturing his roommate and wheeled him into the hospital a lot of eighty pounds, you know, this guy went from two around forty to eighty pounds. So we're still getting these bizarre cases. And again that was a high profile case. But there are
cases that most people don't hear about. They're just not aware of that they just miss, maybe because they're not looking, or maybe because also the cases in Canada stretch on for five, six, seven years sometimes, so it's hard to have a collective memory of what went on when you're talking about seven year span, So yeah, are the cases with Ford?
Me that reminds me when you're saying that there is a guy who murdered well, he was charged with murdering two prostitutes in no actually I think they were strippers in Niagara Falls in two thousand and six, and he still hasn't had his day in court. The guy's name was Michael Duram And I keep waiting for news. You know, did he just fall off the radard? And and then I looked into it and no, for some reason, he's still not on the trial. I mean, this was six years ago.
But what if he's.
Innocent, he just spent six years locked up waiting trial.
Well, you know you sorry, go ahead. None other and you know the other thing is too. We've saw so much fanfare over the Lucamanauta case, incredible amount of stuff online and dominating the news stories probably worldwide to a great extent for a week or two or three weeks. And now that the trial will be many well two and a half years, we won't hear anything till the preliminary.
Then we won't hear anything about the preliminary because of our process so we won't hear anything about that case for a good couple of years, if not three or four years.
Yeah, definitely. The only case that really moved along quickly was Russell Williams, and that's just because he confessed and he just wanted to get over and done with.
Yeah.
The minute they start, they start pleading not guilty, or there's any sort of complication, that's yeah, you're definitely right. It enters that long period. But what amazes me with Magnata is the amount of international attention that he gets because he puts it on the internet. He does everything he's supposed to to meet the qualifications of depraved murderers. So he commits acts of necrophilia, he tries to he may have cannibalized the guy, or at least tries to
show us. He puts them with a kitten, he dismembers them, all these different things to do that, and it works. It goes global, It becomes a viral thing that you know, the Canadian cannibal, the Canadian psycho. And then at the same time you've got something like the Highway of Tears going on in British Columbia, where between well nineteen sixteen nine to present. I think Amnesty International has estimated something like thirty five plus women have disappeared along the stretch
of highway in British Columbia. But because the details aren't released and you know, there's no story angle like cannibalism or necrophilia, nobody really knows about it, and so none of the cases get solved. And there's probably been multiple serial killers stalking that stretch of highway. The victims are mostly Aboriginal and poor, and there's no news angle, so you know, never gets resolved.
Yeah, I think we're the Colonel Williams and your book includes the Colonel Williams case. And what I found interesting about the Colonel Williams case is that one of the victims was bound and gagged hog tide. And of course, again a really great example. And I'm not beating up on police at all, because police solve murders at a really high rate here at murder capital of Canada, Winnipeg, but they also they salt murders, complex murders. They try as hard as they can. It's not an easy job.
It's one of the hardest jobs on earth, that's for sure. Definitely homicide cop. But there is some bungling, and there are cases of bungling, and with that, they thought that the victim, you know, might have tied herself up and faked it.
So that was one of the sexual assaults. Yeah, yeah, that's yeah. Unfortunately, I think that's just a insensitivity of some police who did not work in sex crimes. You know, it was kind of first respondence type thing, and I believe that that was the initial impression that that they got. I'm not I'm not sure if the actual sex crimes investigators came away with that impression.
Oh no, but that was the first initial But what I'm saying is that it's a good example of just the inexperience, that's all. And again I don't blame You're right, it's exactly what that is. Inexperience starts getting them suspicious of absolutely the wrong people. What did you find because I'm just interested what you thought about Russell Williams the Colonel. I've done a program about BTK and the trophy taking
that he does very similar to BTK. What did you find about what was your take on Russell Williams the Colonel? Very fascinating.
Yeah, I think that you made the right connection there. Whenever I compare Russell Williams to a serial killer, another serial killer, I usually go to BTK, sometimes Jerry Brutos because of the whole the cross dressing angle and the idea of invading someone else's space. I think that's something that both of those guys share, is that with wasn't so much turned on by the idea that he was dressed as a woman in that kind of abstract sense.
He was more turned on by the idea that he was invading the personal clothing of his victims and maybe and maybe thinking of what it would be like to be them coming home and and finding that someone had been in their room and and by putting on their their clothing sort of psychologically making that connection to them. Yeah, they're both and interestingly they're both military. BTK I think was also in the Air Force, wasn't he.
Bt K was a reverend. I don't know if he did a stint in the military, but he was a he was a sex offender and then he was then he was a practicing reverend. So that's that's what that was bt K.
But air Force, I'm pretty sure of it could have been. Yeah, I think the guys.
Go ahead.
I think that the two of them almost look at look at as like a military operation, you know, a special ops. Like they're in their own fantasy where there's some kind of super cool commando who infiltrates an enemy stronghold and sneaks around and perfectly controls the situation. It's almost like part of this you had like kind of commando fantasy that they that they combined with their sex
offender uh status, sorry, sex offender of proclivities. And it's yeah, that would be the main comparison that I draw between the two is this sort of uh, this fantasy, this illusion of being on being on a mission like bt K would call his he could call his victims hits or the ones that he didn't kill, they would be potential hits. They put it in a pseudo military language, and so I think I think that influences their fantasy and their their thought process.
Well absolutely. And the thing is too, the colonel and then you have a reverend, you know, you have the Ted Bundy working at a suicide hotline and his friend is uh, you know, true crime super authored and rule. You know, it's it's it's interesting the and people. So you know, I couldn't tell. I mean what like you could. I don't know what they're looking for exactly. But there's a lot of people, a lot of military guys. Burl bar has been on the program with body Count serial Killer.
There was in the military. A lot of guys are next week Anthony soul he was really good soldier, you know, he enlisted, but he was in trouble before and it's certainly absolutely in trouble after. But the military is is uh is. Lot of these guys are pretty effective military people.
So yeah, they a lot of them will gravitate towards positions where they have authority or power. Like there's been a number of police officers. After BTK left the military, his job was actually as a compliance officer, you know, which is basically someone who goes around finding people because their lawns aren't cut to the right, the cut to the right to lane thor you know there. He catches
their dogs and puts their dogs to sleep kind of thing. Yeah, a lot of them gravitate towards these any places where they can have some measure of control. I think in the case of Williams though, it was more that he was trying and this is just my guess that he was trying to stave off these deep seated desires and deviant fantasy that he'd had all his life, and I think he became so sort of a workaholic to try
and compensate for that. And then he gets into middle age, he's sort of reached about as high as he can go. I mean, he's base commander of Canada's most important air force base. He's getting kind of near the end of his sex life. I mean, not the complete end, but he's starting to he's starting to think about it more. Apparently he hadn't had sex with his life for two
years before the crimes. So I think here was a guy who always had this sort of deviant fantasy side and had done everything he could to stave it off, and he got to this one point in his mid forties and he looks around and there's nowhere left to go. There's there's there's no other avenues to pursue, and at that point he's hit with a crisis and he just gives into it. That would that would be my way of analyzing that that case.
But I mean, you know, you talking about you know, a certain trigger and that the only issue you know, that sounds like a lot more reasonable than when I read in McLean's and some Canadian journalists, you know, editorialized about Colonel Russell Williams. And I think that they should read some books about serial killers, because I know what you're saying that that's probably I mean, obviously he wasn't killing when he was twenty or thirty or twenty five,
and he had to have concentrated on his studies. But from the book I read from David Gibb, I believe his name was is that he just wasn'tn oddball all the time, you know, throughout his life anyway, a loner sort of a guy that just really was awkward. And so yeah, I think these sexual fantasies, he acted upon them, and he escalated very very quickly. But you're very well,
maybe right. The only problem I have is trying to because he becomes a colonel, because somebody becomes something of importance that somehow or other they must have had some
kind of you know, twist to their character. They still could have been a great military officer, and they still could have been, like you say, had these deviant, murderous fantasies well early and all it was was obviously he suppressed them, and the way to suppress them, the only way to suppres them would be keep busy, and certainly that's what he was a very busy person.
So yeah, they compartmentalize, especially when we're talking about organized serial killers like Bundy, like BTK, like Russell Williams. They have sort of like their normal life, the kind of life that you and I would have, where they have their relationship and they have their job, and then there's
the secret life that they have two. And I think that in the case of Williams, he just managed to focus enough on that first normal life long enough he was able to use that to get him through and it worked until his mid forties, and then he got bored with it or frustrated with it, and when that collapsed, the deviant side that he'd been suppressing with the normal life that kind of eclipstead, and that would explain the rapid acceleration.
And the thing is though he really we really don't know the absolute truth because of the very interesting phenomenas that just because he confessed and just because he didn't, you know, say I plead not guilty, and dragged the judicial system through the you know through the muck. Well, actually he would have dragged his family in the military. I think he was very conscious of what he had done to the military and maybe what would happen to his wife and family. So he was not a stupid man.
And so even though his narcissism was, you know, was very strong, with these guys, he thought he was untouchable. That's why he made, you know, the big grand errors that he did do. The thing is I think that there's some other things going on there that he realized that the military was not going to have where he would plead not guilty and they would drag this out
for a couple of years. And so there's another part of every I think every serial killer, as you can attest to, is different, even though it does share some.
Characteristic certainly certainly very very good point. Often what I'm asked when I come on these sorts of programs, They'll say, so, tell me what are these guys all have in common? And usually I have to pull out an answer about you know that typically they have a strong fantasy life that you know, we're power and violence views with sexuality. But it's not true of all of them, maybe be true with most of them. But it's simply not true
of everyone who who commits serial murders. So sometimes I'm tempted to answer, and by no means facetiously, but just to answer, well, you know, they kill people, then they stop, and then they kill people. That's really what they have in common. If you want to take all serial killers and put them into a box, that's the one thing they have in common.
Yeah, and you know you're still what you're getting now is people trying to play ketchup. And as a sophisticated true crime audience that listens to this program and reads true crime books by the major true crime authors like yourself and other people, these people know that it just because you know this idea that all serial killers have
tortured animals when they're young. This other idea, and again it's a Canadian idea, and I cursed the development of this is that now that your boss can be psychopathic. So we take the word psychopathic and we take the teeth right out of it, because apparently your boss can be, and the guy your neighbor, and your husband and you can be. And so it takes any kind of magnitude or any kind of importance out of the term psychopathic killer.
And like you were talking before, there's a huge difference between Vincent Lee and Sidney Tearheues or Luca Magnauta or other serial killers or any of these other serial killers in Canada, because they're far more scary than the person that did not have an intent to kill. Certainly I can admit to that. And whether they can respond to medication or not, it's not. The other person is personification
of evil. That's what these serial wheelers are. Clifford Olson's and Bernardo's and the Pictons and the tear Hues and Twitchell's. These people are just evils and that's the scary part. They look and as we're seeing with Luca Magnauta and Twitchell and some of these other people, sometimes they look pretty handsome, pretty normal, pretty boy next door and that's disarming for people, you know.
Yeah, I mean it's kind of part of if we're getting back to serial killers, because I mean, not a it doesn't seem to have been one, at least he hasn't been linked to other murders. But we get back to the idea of serial killers. I mean, if they were walking around with fangs dripping blood, and you know, red eyes, they wouldn't be a serial killer because they wouldn't have gotten away with.
Their first murder.
It's that it's the very ability to wear that mask where people overlook you, which makes you successful as a serial murderer in the first place. So it's almost like a a Darwinistic process. If you don't have the proper facade, you will be weeded out after your first murder.
Well, the thing is, like I say, I don't think that always that there is a you know, there's all kinds of people that are suspected of other murders, and I think that's where it ends. And we know that. You know, in American law, there's some constraints to continually questioning somebody after they are convict. Did You'd still have to have reasonable amount of evidence, not just the assumption
that this guy must have killed. Before I spoke to the arresting lead homicide detective, he said, well, it's one thing to say it, and certainly we entertain the thought, but it's another thing to prove it. And unless he's going to confess where you get the information, you know, if there's no body, then what do you do? And we have to think that there are certainly serial killers
who were more than capable of disposing of bodies. We talk about Jeffrey Dahmer and Gaysey, there was certainly others that whether they were throwing them in rivers or burying them successfully or burning them in the back, there's a lot of people that least attempted to dispose of their victims completely.
So, well, there's how many guys like David Parker Ray. Probably I consider him to be the sickest serial killer that I'm aware of. I'm sure your listeners are familiar with him. They still haven't found any bodies from him, but they just have videotape it and showing that he committed at least one murder, and then evidence of the testimony of his colleagues saying, yeah, he said he killed about sixty people, but he was so good at hiding
bodies that they still haven't found any of them. It was really only the fact that one of his victims escaped that the world even have to know about him, because he was into his sixties when this was happening. So the question I then asked, is what about guys like David Parker Ray where the victim doesn't escape the serial killers who are that competent and we just never know the exist We all just have a bunch of
missing people. Are people who are the missing missing as a term that's been coined lately, where they're not even reported missing in the first place.
Yeah, well that's it, And I mean these serial killers are notorious for choosing the marginalized in society. As I put in my book as well, it's the it's not only the street prostitutes again, the people that have missed the least, but talk the homosexuals traveling on buses, the homosexual prostitute. So it's the homeless, the alcoholics, the people that have been separated from their families and overworked and somewhat skeptical police as well. So yeah, a lot of
people aren't even reported. So where have they gone and what has been their fate?
Certainly, and I do actually have a chapter on the book on that about high risk victims and give examples of offenders that have targeted them.
Yeah, absolutely, it's I mean, it's good that you've done that as well with this rather than just another endless report of this victim and that victim, there has to be some discussion there has to be something learned from this, and I'm sure that you have come to some conclusions after all of this as well. What would you think is your most profound conclusion after doing all this, you know, this disturbing research for this book.
I think that my most profound conclusion is that we have to analyze these people on many more levels than we're actually doing a lot of the times they're analyzed criminologically or psychologically, but I think that we also have to take a look at how they react and to to their society and how they're influenced by the society around them. So I think that that we need to look at them as sociological entities more too, which the
Canadian author Elliott Layton did. I mean, it's very easy to describe someone as a medical construct, you know that, oh, as part of their brain doesn't work, or they are they are borderline personality, or you know, they are a visionary type serial killer. And the tendency is to put them in these kind of boxes because it helps sell textbooks.
You know.
But at the end of the journey, I realized that these boxes, I mean, though they are they have some use in reality, what we're looking at is we are just like any other sector of humankind. We're looking at people who are highly individual. They just happen to share the same hobby of killing people.
But if you have.
People that all participate in gymnastics or making model aeroplanes, I mean they're going to share some things in common, there's gonna be overlaps, but they're still going to be vastly different. So in order to understand a serial killer, you don't do it by taking him and putting him into one of several frameworks. I think you have to almost dissect them and look at his individual components and understand.
Or her his or her.
You have to understand him as a as an individual. And then once we get to doing that, maybe we'll have some insight where boxes will kind of appear to us, you know, rather than forcing them into organized or disorganized or visionary missionary, hedonist power control these kind of typologies.
Yeah, those descriptions like you say, I have some value, but beyond just rudimentary, just very elementary. The person that I spoke with for a year was more than willing to talk to journalists, and lots of journalists refused because they didn't want to be I think they just didn't want to be involved in the case and it was very gruesome and this guy was like celebrity obsessed this character. But the thing is is that this person now still wants to talk. There's been no He had fanfare for
eight years in the media. Sometimes he would contact the media and they would print the story about this flesh eating disease and that he's still he's innocent. And this is before the trial, so he was used to getting that type of attention. Now, if they sent trained people from the opp and the RCMP were trained by FBI criminal profilers and students of criminology, then get a hands on on the worst offenders that they would be dealing
with and to be studying. And I really think that the serious crime is where Canada fails to recognize the patterns of the rapists and the people that will escalate in their behaviors so they're very violent, are sometimes considered not so violent, or in the Vincent Lee case, they're predicting a one percent chance of reoffending. This is ridiculous. You know, some kind of odds of reoffending.
Yeah, how do you determine that? But honestly, it sounds other arbitrary to.
Me, he's.
You know, yeah, I mean still, I don't see how they arrive at that. What it's like almost almost like I said, well, what's the lowest number we can we can put? You know, obviously they they must believe he's not a danger. They must believe it. And I think that as long as he stays on the pills, he probably isn't. But we all know that there are people who are mentally ill that because of their mental illness, at some point stopped taking the medication.
But you've got to admit of all the schizophrenics, all the people suffering from schizophrenia, and certainly there's been some insane killers, but they're very, very rare, even in Canada, where insanity is an easier thing, like we saw that. I don't know if his name is Turcott, the doctor that stabbed his kids to death, but it's a joke that that guys temporarily insane, right, you know, he was depressed, so he stabbed his kids to death. I don't buy it,
and American courts won't buy it. In most courts will not buy that stretching of the definition of insanity. Vincent Lee, Yes, definitely insane. There was another case in Winnipeg where this was a cannibal did not evade captures, so by definition his bizarre behavior, he didn't try to hide the fact. So that was the definition of insanity. But it's very rare for somebody to be designated as insane and then
not culpable or not responsible for the murders. But we routinely, which is the scary part, and we've spoken about it, is it routinely will let out double murderers or again murdered reduced to manslaughter. We don't know the details by the time it gets to the paper, by the time it survives of wader or the preliminary what information is withheld from the judge, what the information's with help from the pubb look about the true nature of these people.
So I think what's happening is that we need to understand as much, especially when the person's willing to talk. Clifford Olsen was willing to talk, even though he's a disgusting human being, he was willing to talk. So you have to get first off, those criminals, those serial killers, those people, those rapists that are willing to talk and listen to them. Number one to learn. I mean instead of listening to psychiatric evaluations from short interviews with people
who may not be maybe disingenuous. So I think when you really have somebody wants to talk endlessly, req speak, converse and try to learn something from these serial killers that can be some value when we're looking at other people that may be getting into this kind of behavior and becoming potential serial killers, I would think.
Yeah, there's a point that I like to bring up too. I mean, we've been doing a lot of bashing of the Canadian legal system, and I do definitely agree with the Americans having consecutive sentences. I think that's a very smart way to go about it. But I do find that sometimes that in the United States they'll go too far to the other extreme, where you'll have a serial
killer like Vince Lee who is psychotic. And I'm thinking specifically of Richard Trenton Chase, the Vampire of Sacramento, And here's a guy he believed that because the soap on a soap dish was gooey, that it meant that there were UFOs turning his blood into dust, and so therefore he had to drink blood to replenish his supply.
So that's exactly what he did.
He was completely schizophrenic, and he went out just in his own neighborhood, going into homes and killing people and cannibalizing them and drinking their blood. And he's given the debt penalty. And I think that's going.
To the other extreme. It's like you're taking a guy who is.
Clearly mentally ill and committing as crimes motivated by a complete, unwilling misunderstanding of reality. And this is a person that should probably be confined to a psychiatric institute for the rest of their life. Yes, But to execute them, it's too far in the other direction for me. So I'd like to find a happy medium between the two.
Well, I don't believe in the death tonally because I don't believe in making even one error where someone's dead, and they make too many errors of courts make errors. Here we have all these checks and balances and appeals, but you know what mistakes are made. And I think that if you can spend the rest of your life in prison, I think that has to be enough punishment. A cage all by yourself has to be enough punishment.
So I don't believe in that. So I do agree with you, and they once they have, even sometimes DNA evidence or a confession that's been retracted, they still sometimes are very very hesitant to let that person out. So it's almost the opposite of Canada. We're looking for the uses our latest serial killer in Winnipeg. They don't have much to talk about, so they're talking about his harsh upbringing already. I'm going, Wow. You know, it is a
different animal than America. I think the media there and the people there have seen that rehabilitation really doesn't work with these people, and that's why they keep seeing endless, vicious, senseless, random murder there. And hopefully we don't have to have an epidemic of that before we start changing things, because, as you know, it, when you get emotional and not very logical and reasonable, then you start making laws that hurt all kinds of people and gold the other way.
So yeah, I think there has to be a happy medium absolutely with insane. I think if you if you're the definition in a lot of American states are is that you're you're insane but guilty, so that they really don't I think that the vampire killer that you were talking about to Chase, I think that was the case, no matter what, that's what they didn't care. Or there are lots of states where it doesn't matter if you're insane. They'll clearly say yeah, insane, but still doesn't matter.
So but you get blood and that's evil, so you deserve to die. Uh, And a lot of people were saying that about Vince Lee. I remember there's being calls, Oh, if there's one person who have to die, it's this guy, because they're looking at well, he cut his head off and eight parts of his face. They're looking at the specifics, the details of the crime, and they're not looking at the motivation or what sparked it. That really determines the course,
you know, the core of a person's character. And in the case of this man, he deserved to die less than people who've committed far less barbarous murderers because he was extremely psychotic at the time that he did it. And although I do agree with you, I don't support the death Kinnelty either, and not necessarily just because of the whole idea of executing an innocent person, which is terrible, but I also think that it gives some of these
people an escape. There's lots of serial killers who I've read about and I can't name them off the top of my head, but it comes up all the time. They are perfectly fine with dying. They'd rather do that than spend their life in a cage, which is what Bernardo has to do here. You know, he's basically locked
in the closet for the rest of his life. And to me, you're taking away their control and you're making it last over a period of time, whereas if you're executing them, you're bringing it to an end for them.
But you do hear that call in Canada as well, and I think what it is is just it's an emotional response to the barbarity of the crime itself, and so they there's a knee jerk reaction, and the death penalty is being you know, lots of states are dropping it so because people it takes maybe fifteen years or seventeen years to actually execute somebody, and then the appeal process is so expensive that they really can't afford to
do it. So there's a couple confluence of things going on, two or three things going on that are making the death penalty less less appealing. So but yeah, I do agree though that, and I think that the Americans have done a good job. The FBI were the first people with, like I said, Robert K. Wrestler and John Douglas, and they went in and interviewed thirty six of the worst serial killers and that's how they create criminal profiling. I think it's time to not just take a look at
that criminal filing and just let it sit. I think it's time to expand upon, expound upon that because there are these unique characteristics and I think they can develop a bigger sort of description instead of such a narrow description of what a serial killer is. And I think there's overlapping. And again it's labels don't do much. But I think the idea that we have to be able to learn something by speaking with these people, because it's such an aberration. We can't you can't approach logic with
these people. It's they're not they're not like regular folks. It's not that we all have this potential in us to be like these people. There's no way. And you've done the research. These people are so far away from the regular Joe, you and I that that's why it's fascinating.
There is a logic, it's just not our logic when you were able when you're able to get into their heads, and I have I have been able to get there, and suddenly you can see their point of view. But it means taking a lot of the parts about yourself, a lot of your ideas, and a lot of your morality and the things that repel you, and you just remove them, and then you put yourself through that person's
life situation. And I have been able to get inside their heads and I can see the logic of why they're doing what they're doing, even if it's still ultimately I find it morally reprehensible. That's even the insane ones like Vince Lee. He saw the guy on the bus as a demon that had to be killed and he had to eat parts of them to stop him from regenerating. Now that's completely ridiculous if you're perceiving reality as it is.
But if you're perceiving reality as he is, which he believes is reality, then logically it does make sense that he would do what he did.
Well. The other thing I'm really worried about is that I'm not sure that we have any experience and there is any really good examples of taking somebody that was capable of what Vincent Lee was capable of doing in terms of going that far into his altered reality and then assuring the public, especially you know, especially the poor mother of the victim, to say, listen, you know, we're absolutely confident from our experience from the last time we
had a Vincent Lee, that this medication is absolutely fool proof. Nothing can happen. He could never get a resistance to it. He can't be playing us because we're so clever. I just hate to see this thing back far. And you know what, I'd hate to see it work because you know what will happen when Vincent Lee is cured. There's going to be a lot of people not going into the insane asylum for very long. And we already have people that are claiming or the least the psychiatric institution saying,
this person shouldn't be even in here. This person doesn't
belong here. There's nothing wrong with them. So that's what I just think that that you you look at the battered women syndrome, which was which is first in the US and then in a case is that I can agree with in Canada where you say, yes, the battered woman, she killed her her her husband or her boyfriend, because of and then you look in a short period of time at Carla Hamalka is a battered woman, never hap with you know, so you can see my point anyway
that you know, once the lawyers get it and twisted and twisted, we can have an altered state of reality again on what that law was intended to do, what it really should apply to. And then Carla Hamalkas you know, somehow rehabilitated.
I guess, yeah, definitely, I guess There's always going to be some slip in the system unfortunately, but we can always strive to make it better.
Absolutely well. You know, with books like yourself, we can get an idea of what's gone on in history in terms of serial killers in the Canada not really well known for serial killers, but after this it's really fascinating unique and as we said before, Canada really can compete sometimes. So your book is North Cold, North Killers, Canadian serial
Murder and Lee Mellarth. So thank you very much, Lee for a great interview and a great book, and I wish you all the best of luck with this and hope to talk to you again soon.
Yeah.
Thanks. It was less like an interview and more like a conversation. And I consider let us success. Thank you very much, thank you.
And now and where is this available? Obviously? It's Amazon, Barnes and Noble Chapters in Canada. And you have a website that people can go to as well.
Yeah, but you can't purchase my book through it. I would just go to Yeah, you're Amazon, Barnes and Nobles Chapters.
Uh, if you get.
In Canada, you'll probably find it on the bookshelves of Chapters and Indigo in the States. I'm not sure because I haven't been to bookstores. Lucky you might, you may get lucky, but I'd say Amazon's a pretty safe pat absolutely.
Now is it an ebook form as of yet or is that soon to come or it's already.
It is an ebook form? O?
Great?
And uh?
Do uh? You are you on Facebook? And do are you interested in followers on Facebook? So I will always tell people look them up on face follow them on Facebook.
Yeah, look for Cold North Killers. It has a page I'm actually working on right now, a follow up book called Rampage, which is about mass murders and mass murders and spree killers in Canada. I've got a page for that coming soon, so I'll be talking about that on the Cold North Killers page. So yeah, Facebook, Cold North Killers. And anytime there's there's an update involving crimes or serial killers in Canada, I usually do I post an update.
Right. Well, very good Lee, thank you very much for coming on the program, and definitely get a hold of me when your next project, Rampage is getting close or when it's going to be released, and we'll gab you back on. We'll have another good interview and talk about that.
Okay, can't wait.
Okay, thank you very much, Lee. Have a good night, you two then bye, thank you, good night.