Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime

Ryan Dell
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I tell you the details and the story for interesting crimes from across Canada, with insights that only a retired RCMP officer can provide.  Finally, a Canadian true crime podcast that is interesting on more than one level. My podcasts are the best version of true crime, where you get the juicy details of the story, but also an understanding of what was happening in the minds of police investigators as they're working the case, and how certain pieces of evidence can solve the case.  I also do my best to paint a picture of the  day or life of the unsuspecting victim.   Just don't listen to a story of what happened, try and feel what it felt like for those involved.

  1. 4h ago

    Part 2: Peter Demeter - The Man Who Oozed Evil

    Peter Demeter was serving a life sentence for arranging his wife's murder when the system did something almost unthinkable: it let him out. By 1983 he was living on day parole in Peterborough, lecturing university students on morality and taking his daughter to the movies. He looked like a reformed man. He wasn't. Within months, Demeter hired an arsonist to torch the house where his wife died, then tried to recruit that same man to murder his own teenage cousin, dismember the body, and ransom the family. When the arsonist quietly walked away, Demeter simply found someone else, and police launched an undercover sting they codenamed Operation Dragon. What follows is one of the most astonishing runs of criminal behaviour in Canadian history: a whistleblowing strongman who spent five months in hiding, a mistrial triggered by a defence lawyer who showed up drunk for weeks, a suicide attempt in a solitary cell, and a devoted young girlfriend who would have done anything for him, right up until his next target was a 16-year-old girl. By the end, Peter Demeter carried five life sentences for four separate plots, and a judge told him to his face that he "oozed evil out of every pore." This is part 2 of our two-part deep dive into the Demeter case. If you haven't heard part 1, the 1973 murder of Christine Demeter that started it all, go back and listen there first. New episodes of Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime drop regularly. Subscribe and leave a 5-star review to help more listeners find these real Canadian stories. --- Sources: The Toronto Star (February 1983 to July 1989; April 28, 2006); The Globe and Mail. Trial coverage drawn from contemporaneous reporting on the 1984 to 1985 counselling murder proceedings and the 1988 conspiracy trial Send us Fan Mail www.canadiancrimecast.com

  2. Jul 20

    Part 1: Peter Demeter - The Man Who Oozed Evil

    A woman found beaten to death in her own garage. A husband who never once cried. And a killer nobody ever caught. On July 18, 1973, Peter Demeter came home from a shopping trip to find his wife, Christine, dead on the floor of their Mississauga garage, her skull broken open by repeated blows from something like a crowbar or a tire iron. There was no forced entry, nothing stolen, and no weapon left behind. What investigators found next was stranger still: a mistress in Vienna, a $1.1 million life insurance policy, a friend secretly wired for sound who says Demeter spent five years describing a dozen different ways to kill his wife, and a fabricated kidnapping threat against his own daughter that police caught on tape, because Demeter didn't know his own phone was already bugged. The trial that followed ran 11 weeks, the longest in Canadian history at the time, and produced testimony almost nobody could believe: a hooded witness testifying under a fake name, a convicted boxer's claim that Christine herself may have been plotting against her husband, and a jury that convicted Peter Demeter of murder without ever identifying the man who actually swung the weapon. This is part 1 of a 2-part series on one of the strangest, longest-running murder cases in Canadian history. Part 2 picks up nine years later, when a second chance at freedom turned into three more murder conspiracies. New episodes of Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime drop every week. Subscribe and leave a 5-star review if you want more real Canadian cases like this one. --------- Sources: The Toronto Star (July 1973 to December 1974; February to September 1983); The Toronto Sun (August 1973; September 1974); The Globe and Mail (January 1974; July 1974); Niagara Falls Review (June 1974). Trial coverage drawn from contemporaneous reporting on R. v. Demeter (Ontario Supreme Court, 1974). Appeal decisions: R. v. Demeter, 1975 CanLII 50 (ON CA); Demeter v. R., [1978] 1 S.C.R. 538, 1977 CanLII 25 (SCC). Send us Fan Mail www.canadiancrimecast.com

  3. Jun 25

    The Purest Truth Convicts a Human Trafficker

    A woman runs out of a roadside motel in Mississauga, Ontario, wearing only a T-shirt. She has no phone, no money, no car, and barely any English. She borrows a phone, dials 911, and over twenty-six terrifying minutes she unknowingly lays out the entire architecture of a human trafficking operation. This is the case of R. v. Laguerre — one of the hardest kinds of crime to prosecute, and one of the most quietly extraordinary convictions in recent Canadian court history. Two women, brought from Montreal and controlled by one man through money, drugs, violence, isolation, and the oldest trick in the book: making someone believe he loved her. Here's what makes this case almost impossible to forget. Both victims were subpoenaed. Neither one came to court. One of them tried to retract everything. The accused's confession was thrown out for a Charter breach. By the ordinary logic of a criminal trial, this case should have collapsed. He was convicted of every single count. In this episode, host Ryan Dell walks through the trap phone, the Swiss gold bar, the $4,100 in cash, and the body-worn camera footage that built the case piece by piece — and answers the question everyone asks but few understand: why do trafficking victims refuse to testify, even after they've told police everything? Drawing entirely from the court's own written reasons, this is a detailed, respectful, and unflinching look at how coercive control really works, the challenges police face, and the harm done to the women caught inside it. Listen now to Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime — and discover how a desperate phone call from a gas station convicted a human trafficker. Victim identities are protected by a publication ban and have been changed. Contains descriptions of human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and violence. Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline: 1-833-900-1010. Send us Fan Mail www.canadiancrimecast.com

  4. Jun 18

    A Hole Where His Conscience Should Be: The Violence of Donald Armstrong

    It is just past 8:30 pm on a Friday evening in May 1977. A young mother named Glenna Fox is walking back to her car on the upper parking level of a shopping mall in Bramalea, Ontario. She is 27 years old. She has an 8-month-old daughter at home named Lauralee. She and her husband are building their dream house. By every measure, her life is just beginning. She is one hundred and fifty feet from the bright windows and weekend shoppers of the Bramalea City Centre. Close enough to call out. Close enough that someone, surely, would have heard. There is a struggle beside her brown Ford Pinto. She is stabbed several times in the chest. The final blow is driven into her heart, and she dies almost instantly, slumped over the wheel of her own car. No one sees who did it. No one hears a thing. And for the next three years, the man who killed her will keep moving, from Bramalea to Mississauga, from Winnipeg to Kingston, pulling the same quiet trick in parking lot after parking lot. A friendly young man. A disabled car. An offer to help. By the time it ends, at least two women will be dead, another will be permanently scarred, and the murder of 16-year-old girl from London, Ontario, will have sparked the largest manhunt eastern Ontario had ever seen. I'm your host, Ryan Dell. This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime. Today's story moves across the country, through three provinces and a string of shopping centres, following a drifter named Donald Eric Armstrong. A man with no fixed address, no steady job, and a criminal record stretching back to childhood. A man that two separate teams of psychiatrists would describe, in open court, as having a hole in his mind where his conscience should have been. This is the story of the women he targeted, the families he shattered, and the three-year hunt to stop him. This is the story of Glenna Fox, Bonnie Leiman, Rita Bayer, and Linda Bright. bzGwLmAVAjPfWMFVPIGN Send us Fan Mail www.canadiancrimecast.com

  5. Jun 11

    The Cleaner Who Watched Her: The Murder of Lisa Posluns

    It was a Saturday night November 2, 2002. The kind of night when Yorkville, one of Toronto's most fashionable neighbourhoods, a place of boutiques and galleries and quiet, tree-lined streets,  empties out by ten o'clock. Inside a 9-storey office building at 94 Cumberland Street, a 38year-old woman was still at her desk. She'd been there most of the day. She had a lawsuit to worry about, a client she'd lost, and a deal she wasn't going to give up on. That was Lisa Posluns. She worked like that. Evenings, weekends, early mornings. The building was mostly quiet. She was used to that. At 7:49 that evening, she called her mother. It was a quick call. She said she'd be leaving soon. She promised to call when she got home. It was the last call she ever made. Seven hours later, a police officer discovered Lisa Posluns' crumpled body in a remote ground-floor equipment room. Her green coat was draped over her face. She had been sexually assaulted, stabbed seven times in the torso, and her throat had been slit. Send us Fan Mail www.canadiancrimecast.com

  6. Jun 4

    The Last Mothers Day: The De Jong Murders

    On the morning of May 9th, 2022, Raymond Hoogland drove out to Arcadian Way in east Abbotsford, British Columbia. It’s a rural road, the kind of road where you can’t see your neighbours, where raspberry fields back up against stands of trees, and the Fraser Valley stretches out flat and quiet in every direction. Raymond’s wife, Heather, had called him in a panic. Her aunt Betty had been trying to reach her parents all morning. No one was answering the phone. This was unusual. Arnold and Joanne De Jong were creatures of habit. Early risers. Arnold read his paper. Joanne made breakfast. They always picked up the phone. Raymond found the front door locked and the newspaper still on the step. He knew the garage door wouldn’t be locked, so he entered through there. Inside, all the lights were off. He went to Joanne’s bedroom first. He pushed the door open and called hello. No response. He could see the shape of a body under the blankets. He started pulling the covers back from where the head would be. He recognized Joanne. She wasn’t moving. He saw blood, a significant amount of it, around her head and neck. And then he saw something else: a piece of duct tape, stuck to blankets that appeared to be pushed down her throat. He didn’t check on Arnold. He ran out of the house and called 911. Within the hour, police officers would confirm what Raymond already knew. Arnold De Jong, age 77, and Joanne De Jong, age 76, were dead. Both found in their beds. Both bound with rope. Both murdered in their own home on a quiet rural road, less than 24 hours after celebrating Mother’s Day with their three daughters and their grandchildren. It would take seven months, thousands of hours of investigation, and a trail of stolen credit cards, forged cheques, and a voicemail from a credit card company to lead police to three young men from Surrey. Three men who had been inside the De Jong home before, cleaning their roof and gutters. I’m your host Ryan Dell. This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime. Today’s story takes us to Abbotsford, British Columbia, where three men, motivated by debt, financial pressure and greed, planned and executed the robbery and murder of an elderly couple they had previously worked for. They killed for credit cards, cheques, and a pressure washer. The total value of what they stole was less than $20,000. This is the story of Arnold and Joanne De Jong, and the three men who murdered them: Abhijeet Singh, Khushveer Toor, and Gurkaran Singh. Send us Fan Mail www.canadiancrimecast.com

  7. May 28

    Cold Water: Where is Jennifer, and the Trial of Dean Penney

    It was a Thursday morning in December. The kind of morning when St. Anthony, Newfoundland,  a fishing village of 2500 people, clinging to the northern tip of the island, is still pitch black at a quarter to seven. Inside the house at 8 Husky Drive, fifteen-year-old Deana Penney woke to a persistent noise. It was her mother's phone alarm, ringing from the kitchen. She banged on the bedroom door. No answer. She opened it. Nobody inside. She walked through the house. Her mother's phone was on the counter. Her purse was on the table. Her keys were still in the ignition of her car, parked in the driveway. Her shoes were at the door. Everything was set down, Deana would later tell a jury, as though her mother had just arrived home and left it all behind. Deana called her grandmother. Ruby Penney came over within 20 minutes. Ruby called her son, Deana’s father, Dean Penney, who drove in from his hunting cabin right away. But Jennifer Hillier-Penney was gone. She was thirty-eight years old. A mother of two. And she would never be seen again. For seven years, nobody was charged. For seven years, her family fought to keep her face in the public eye, plastering posters across town while the RCMP conducted searches over land and sea, coming up with nothing. And then, in December of 2023, Dean Penney was arrested at the Deer Lake airport. What the public didn't know, what almost nobody knew, was that the RCMP had spent the previous four years running one of the most elaborate undercover operations in Canadian history to get him to talk. They built an entire criminal empire around him. They gave him a best friend. They took him on heists, diamond runs, and gun deals from Newfoundland to Alberta to British Columbia. They paid him $27,000. And in the end, on a yacht in Vancouver harbour, exactly seven years to the day his wife disappeared, Dean Penney sat across from a man he believed was a mob boss, and told him what happened that night. Or did he? That is the question a jury of twelve spent four days deliberating, after an eight-week trial that gripped the province. Send us Fan Mail www.canadiancrimecast.com

  8. May 21

    The Perfect Daughter: A Lifetime of Lies

    It was a Monday night in November. The kind of night when the streets of Markham, Ontario — a quiet suburb northeast of Toronto, full of tidy homes and minivans and families who came from somewhere else to build something better — are dark and still by ten o'clock. Inside the house at Helen Avenue, Bich Ha Pan had just come home from her weekly line-dancing class. She was soaking her feet in the living room, watching television. Her husband, Hann Pan, had already gone to bed upstairs. Their twenty-four-year-old daughter, Jennifer, was in her bedroom. Their son, Felix, was not home. It was November 8th, 2010. Just after ten o'clock in the evening. Within the next twenty minutes, Bich Ha Pan would be dead — shot at point-blank range in the basement of her own home. Hann Pan would be shot twice — once in the back and once through the face — and left for dead on the floor beside his wife's body. And Jennifer Pan would call 911, her girlish voice hysterical, claiming that armed robbers had broken in and tied her up. "Help me, please I need help," she told the operator, while her father's screams echoed in the background. "I don't know what's happening." It was a terrifying story. And nearly every word of it was a lie. I'm your host Ryan Dell. This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime. Today's story takes us to Markham, Ontario, where a young woman who spent a decade building an elaborate double life arranged the murder of both her parents — disguised as a violent home invasion — using her on-and-off boyfriend's drug-dealing contacts to carry out the hit. The price tag was ten thousand dollars. This is the story of Jennifer Pan, her co-accused Daniel Wong, Lenford Crawford, Eric Carty, and David Mylvaganam — and the trial, the appeals, and the stunning guilty plea that unfolded over the next fifteen years. But before we get to the murder, we need to go back to the beginning. Because the roots of this crime weren't planted in a single moment of rage. They were sewn slowly, meticulously, over the course of a lifetime built on lies. Send us Fan Mail www.canadiancrimecast.com

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About

I tell you the details and the story for interesting crimes from across Canada, with insights that only a retired RCMP officer can provide.  Finally, a Canadian true crime podcast that is interesting on more than one level. My podcasts are the best version of true crime, where you get the juicy details of the story, but also an understanding of what was happening in the minds of police investigators as they're working the case, and how certain pieces of evidence can solve the case.  I also do my best to paint a picture of the  day or life of the unsuspecting victim.   Just don't listen to a story of what happened, try and feel what it felt like for those involved.

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