Canadian True Crime - The Murder of Robin Greene [1]

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

A two-part series — In 2003, the day after Canada Day, a 33 year old man walked through the front door of the Winnipeg Remand Centre. He said he’d woken up in his hotel room and there was a dead, dismembered body in the bathtub. He insisted he blanked out and couldn’t remember committing the murder.The circumstances of the case were shocking and unbelievable enough, but within a few days a hollywood angle involving a stolen celebrity necklace ended up being the main headline. Eventually, the case caught the attention of amateur writer Dan Zupansky, who would land an opportunity that he couldn’t refuse. An opportunity to get the truth from Sydney, and get justice for Robin Greene—no matter what it took.Look out for early, ad-free release on CTC premium feeds: available on Amazon Music (included with Prime), Apple Podcasts, Patreon and Supercast. Full list of resources, information sources, credits and music credits:See the page for this episode at www.canadiantruecrime.ca/episodes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi there. This is part one of a two-part series. You'll have part two in 24 hours, and if you're a supporter on Patreon and Supercast, you'll see it in your feed right now. If you've been listening to True Crime Podcast for a while, you'll likely know about True Murder, hosted by Dan Zippansky. Today, I'm covering the case that he wrote his book about and inspired him to start his podcast, and you'll also hear from him in this series. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't worry, you will learn everything in this episode. Now, this series requires an additional content warning. It's an extremely graphic case and contains descriptions of a gruesome murder and dismemberment

that may be distressing to hear. Only the necessary details are given, and it won't be gratuitous, but please take care when listening. And lastly, please note that the views expressed in this series, particularly in part two, do not necessarily reflect my views. And with that, it's on with the show. Canadian True Crime is a completely independent production, funded through advertising and direct donations.

The podcast contains coarse language, adult themes, and content of a violent and disturbing nature. Listener discretion is advised. The morning of July 2, 2003, the day after Canada Day, a 33-year-old man walked through the door of the Winnipeg Romand Centre. At 5'8, 220 pounds,

a boyish and dimpled face wearing wire-rimmed glasses, he didn't appear to be any kind of threat. He walked up to the shift supervisor and told him that he had just woken up in his hotel room and there was a dead body in the bathtub. The supervisor of the romance centre picked up the phone, dialed the police and handed it to him. The man grabbed the phone and told the operator his name was Sydney Tierhuse,

and he thinks he may have killed someone the day before. Quote, I chopped up the guy, I blacked out, and when I woke up, I found the body in the bathtub. He said the knife he must have used was still on the floor of the bathroom. The details were so outrageous that police initially believed it must have been a prank call. But they dispatched investigators to the romance centre anyway to double check in person. Sydney told them that the remains was still in the room he'd been renting at a low-end hotel and live music venue called the Royal Albert Arms Hotel. Once police arrived at the room, they saw that this was no prank. There were beer bottles and multiple pairs of blood-stained underwear.

There was a bed sheet on the floor which was covered in blood. So was the mattress which had visible knife slashes all over it. and there was blood spatter all over the wall next to the bed. Officers saw a button-down shirt stuffed into the air vent, most likely in an attempt to stop any odour from leaving Sydney's room. It was 38 or 39 degrees Celsius in the room, about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, so very hot. One officer entered the bathroom and there lay one of the most horrific sights he'd ever seen.

a sight he'd never forget, even with his years of experience. There in the clawfoot bathtub lay the body of a man who had been decapitated, dismembered, and crudely reassembled, and next to it lay a pile of the victim's clothes which had been neatly folded. The autopsy would determine that the man had been stabbed to death, 68 times in the chest, neck and upper arms, and there were no defensive wounds whatsoever. The body had been completely drained of blood.

Every single one of his internal organs were missing and what remained had been cut, dissected or mutilated and repositioned. The police searched the hotel room, the garbage dumpsters and even the plumbing, but did not locate those organs. And while it would have taken some time to perform all of these acts, Sydney claimed that he couldn't remember any of it. In the bathroom, police found the butcher knife that Sydney said would be there under the sink. They also found a pairing knife on top of the medicine cabinet.

And, on a desk in the hotel room, police found a necklace that looked like it might be expensive. It was. This necklace had a celebrity angle that would come out later. 33-year-old Sydney Teah Hughes was taken back to the station, arrested and charged with second-degree murder. Sydney told the police that he'd met the man the day before at a bar, and they'd gone back to his hotel room for drinks and consensual sex. Sydney said that he got so drunk that he eventually passed out and woke up to find the body just like that. He admitted that he must have been the one who killed the man, but he said he was. he couldn't remember any of it. The police didn't know the real story of what had happened here,

but, by Sydney's own admission, the perpetrator was now in custody, so the investigation could begin. I'm Christy, an Australian who's called Canada home for more than a decade, and this is my passion project. Join me to hear about some of the most thought-provoking and often heartbreaking true crime cases in Canada. Using court documents and news archives, I take you through each story from beginning to end

with a look at the way the media covered the crime and the impact it had on the community. This is Canadian True Crime. The man who lost his life was identified as 38-year-old Robin Robert Green. Robin was born in 1965 and had lived all his life in Shoal Lake First Nation, an Ojibwe Soto Reserve about 150 kilometres east of Winnipeg. His father, Robin Sr., was an elder there. Not much else is publicly known about Robin Jr., and the awful circumstances of this case have been sensationalised by certain media outlets

in ways that have greatly upset his family. All that's publicly known is this. It was Canada Day weekend 2003 and Robin Green traveled to Winnipeg to meet up with his sister and enjoy the festivities. Tragically, he was killed. Sydney Tierhuis told investigators that all he could remember was this. He'd met Robin on Canada Day. They went back to his hotel room for drinks and consensual sex.

He said he was so intoxicated that he must have blacked out because when he woke up, he had no memory of what had happened. The story seemed unbelievable, so police looked for others at the hotel who may have interacted with Sydney. According to the shocked hotel owner, Sydney had arrived about three weeks beforehand and had paid $290 to book the room for a month. So far, his stay had been incident-free.

Sydney had been seen drinking at the hotel's bar on Canada Day the day before he turned himself in. Investigators spoke to the bartender, a woman, called Diane. According to court documents, she said she saw Sydney two times that day. The first time was at about 2.30 in the afternoon when he came in by himself and ordered one beer. About 30 minutes later, Diane said that the night bartender and his girlfriend arrived and Sydney went to sit with them for a while before taking off. Investigators tracked down that night bartender and asked if Sydney appeared intoxicated at this point,

and he replied that while he obviously couldn't say for sure, Sydney didn't appear to be drunk and had no trouble walking and talking at that time. Diane said that an hour or so later, Sydney returned to the bar, but this time he was accompanied by an indigenous man with long straight jet black hair, who he introduced as his cousin.

It was, of course, 38-year-old Robin Nguyen. Green. Sydney asked Diane to watch his cousin while he went to get ice, and she noticed that Robin was clearly intoxicated and could barely stand up. But Sydney, on the other hand, seemed completely fine, walking and talking as though he was sober. She watched as Sydney and Robin headed to the elevator to return upstairs. Only one of them would still be alive in the morning. Investigators also spoke to the remand centre supervisor where Sydney turned himself in. He did not appear drunk to him, and the police phone operator said the exact same thing. Something didn't seem to be adding up here. Here's where the celebrity angle comes in, an angle that the police say was pretty inconsequential

to the case, yet ended up becoming a main feature of it. The city of Toronto is a popular place for shooting movies. And in 2003, a Miramax movie was scheduled to be shooting there. But at the time, there was an outbreak of SARS, a coronavirus like the one that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic. One patient brought it to Toronto early on and it caused a public health emergency that lasted for four months, with all hospitals creating units to care for SARS patients. There were lockdowns and quarantines and the World Health Organizations. And the World Health organization issued a travel advisory urging people to avoid traveling to Toronto. Vacations were cancelled, large conventions were postponed and movie shoots were relocated.

One of those movies was Shall We Dance, a big budget remake of a 1966 Japanese film about a bored businessman who finds a new passion for dancing. When Toronto became a no-go because of SARS, Muromax decided to relocate. the film to Winnipeg, Manitoba for filming over the summer of 2003. Locals in the know were super excited to hear that several big-name stars would be in town filming. Richard Gere would be playing the board businessman. Susan Sarandon had taken the role of his wife, and Jennifer Lopez was cast as a ballroom dance instructor. Now Susan Sarandon's character had to wear some expensive jewelry, including an in

antique gold necklace with an amber pendant that was reportedly worth around $4,000. The necklace, as well as some of Susan's other jewelry, had been put into a Ziploc bag that was stolen from the movie set. And that necklace was found near Robin Green's remains in the hotel room, but that's all the police would say about it. It didn't take long before the entertainment press started to jump on the case, with Hollywood.com declaring that, quote, a strange connection has been uncovered between Susan Sarandon and a grisly murder in Canada. The New York Post announced Gay Slay tied to film heist. There were reports that Robin Green had snuck onto the set of Shall We Dance and stolen the

necklace himself before he met Sydney Tierhuse. But this story has never been verified. In the meantime, as Sydney Tierhus waited imprisoned for his court date to come around, he soon caught the attention of another inmate at the same facility. Dan Zippansky is widely considered the godfather of True Crime Podcasting, one of the originals who was recording before many of us even knew what a podcast was. The first episode of his podcast, True Murder, was released in 2010. You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history,

and the authors that have written about them. Originally from Thunder Bay, Ontario, Dan Zupansky relocated to Winnipeg, Manitoba in the 90s. And at the time Robin Green was murdered, Dan produced and hosted a talk radio program called Off the Cuff on the University of Manitoba radio station. He was also a vocal critic of the Canadian Justice. system not being tough enough on crime and had started working for a local law reform group called People for Justice. His main concern was the growing number of murder charges being reduced to manslaughter on a plea deal. In 2003, Dan Zupanski was following the news developments on the murder of Robin Green, collecting clippings as they came out. And based on what he was reading, he had a feeling that

the same thing would happen with Sydney Teerhuse. He'd have his second-degree murder charges reduced to manslaughter. Dan thought it was absurd that Sydney claimed he was so intoxicated he couldn't remember murdering and interfering with the remains of Robin Green. But Dan's bigger issue was this. Because Sydney was the only witness to the crime, Dan believed that the prosecution would not be able to successfully convict him of murder and would have to settle for manslaughter. And then Sydney would be out in just a few years. Dan had no plans to do anything about the case, but then, six months after the murder, something dropped into his lap.

In January of 2004, he received a phone call from an old high school friend called Don Abbott, who happened to be serving a prison sentence in Winnipe. and Abbott had some news he thought Dan might be interested in. Sidney Tierhus was in the same prison. Dan immediately saw an opportunity. He asked his friend to see if Sydney would be interested in being interviewed for a story on the case and the upcoming trial. After Sydney said yes, Dan got to thinking, there would be many people interested, so maybe he should write a book on the case.

Dan was an amateur writer but he'd never written a book before and while he was up to the challenge he knew that there was a lot of research that needed to be done so he was surprised but delighted when his friend Abbott suggested that he applied to share a cell with Sydney Tierhuis because it might help with the research for the book Abbott's request was approved and he and Sydney were paired together as cellmates

there was an understanding that Abbott would be given a share of the profits from the book sales in exchange for his help. The plan was that Abbott would make friends with Sydney, gain his trust, and then get him to open up to Dan Zippanski about his life, starting from his childhood, right up until he murdered Robin Green. And through sharing a cell, Abbott would get some extra insight into Sydney in case any of it turned out to be important. Dan wanted a carrot to dangle in front of Sydney that would inspire him to open up, and he had an idea.

He would say that he knew that the Manitoba government was drafting legislation that prevented criminals profiting from their crimes afterwards, and he could see a window of opportunity that was fast closing. He would offer Sydney 30% of the profits from the sale of the book he was going to write. Sydney jumped on it, and after a few weeks, invited Dan Zippanski to visit him in prison for the first time. Dan would say he was a bit nervous, but wanted to establish an in-person rapport, which they did. After that, Dan interviewed him by phone several times, but Sydney said he didn't like that their conversations were recorded,

so he preferred to write letters because they apparently weren't read. From that point on, letters would be their main point of correspondence. Dan would say that he did consider the ethics of what he had offered Sydney in exchange for his story, but he decided that he was okay with lying since his intentions were in the right place, and he knew the legislation that would make it illegal for Sydney to profit was close to being finalised. He had no intention of paying up. But regardless of intentions, what Dan didn't seem to consider at the time, the time was the potential impact that promise of money might have on the story that Sydney would

share. Sydney Tierhus also goes by the name Sydney Tierhus More, but he was not born with those names. He told Dan Zupanski that he was born Sydney Owens in 1969, in Little Grand Rapids First Nation, an Ojibwe Soto Reserve about 370 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg. According to Sydney, his biological mother was a teenager and as a baby he was taken from her by child welfare. It should be noted that this happened right in the middle of the 60th Scoop where the Canadian government enabled child welfare authorities to take indigenous children from their families

and place them with middle-class white families to be fostered and adopted. Many of them experienced documented physical, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse, all the while dealing with the trauma of being rounded up and taken from their families. Sydney was placed with the Teahue's family, a family of Dutch origin that had five children, four older biological children and one adopted. After fostering for a while, the family would also adopt Sydney when he was about three years old. According to Sydney, while on the surface they looked like a typical happy family, behind closed doors, things were very different. He had some shocking stories to tell about his childhood, stories that seemed too awful to be true.

We'll go through some of them here to give an overview and some context, but we have to remember that many of the things that Sydney told Dan Zupanski about his family and childhood are unable to be verified. But it should also be noted that Sydney would later give testimony. testimony about the same stories while under oath. He said his adoptive father Garrett was physically and mentally abusive and proud of it, referring to the behaviour as the Teahue's religion. He reportedly ran the house like a concentration camp.

Sydney said that he never felt like he fitted in and he felt ashamed of being adopted. He was jealous of schoolmates who had loving fathers and wanted his own adopted. of father dead. He tried to poison him several times but said he was caught by his mom. In another story he told, when he was 14, he tampered with the brakes on his father's car in the hope of him dying in a car accident, but that didn't work either. And Sydney's problems with his family didn't end with his father. He had some more horrible stories to tell that included being made to drink urine by one of his siblings and being beaten so bad by his father that he couldn't sit for a week. And Sydney stated that he'd been sexually abused by several different people in his

adopted family, including his older brother and his mother, Mariette. Sydney said that she often gave him special attention and time that his father was resentful about. From his letters, it's clear that Sydney has confused feelings about his mother, at some points describing how much he loved her and in others how much he hated her. And while he said that Mariette was overprotective of him, in other letters he told stories that portray her as just as strict a disciplinarian as his father.

For stepping on his sister's finger and breaking her fingernail, his mother locked him naked in a broom closet for three days and fed him from a dog dish. On another occasion, Sydney said he pushed the same sister down the stairs and he was put in a burlap sack and locked in the trunk of a car overnight. Sydney said that when he was seven,

he was molested by an older boy at a Cub Scout sleepover at church. At 11, his music teacher allegedly asked him to stay behind after class and he was molested there. According to Sydney, he wasn't the only victim and the teacher was later convicted. At just 13, he began letting men sexually abuse him in exchange for money.

He attempted suicide. He says he was also assaulted by two friends of the family for years up until he was 17 years old. And for all of this and the crime that he would go to jail for, Sydney didn't have much of a criminal history. At age 19 and 21, he was, was arrested for public intoxication. The next year, he flashed a newspaper delivery boy and was given two years probation, although he gave the excuse that he'd only gone to retrieve the paper in his underwear. And that was it. When Sydney was about 20, his adopted mother Mariette died of breast

cancer. At around this time, he decided to move away from Winnipeg and spent time living and working in Vancouver and Edmonton over the next 10 years. He told Dan Zupanski that he found more liberal-minded people there, especially in Vancouver, and described living there as a kind of utopia. But obviously, still struggling to deal with his past trauma and complicated feelings, he developed a dependency on crack cocaine. He said he overdosed seven or eight times and attended rehab on multiple occasions. Now this is when his writing started to take a dark turn of a different kind. He also told Dan Zippansky at this time he discovered BDSM, particularly the SM part.

Sotomasochism is where one person enjoys inflicting physical or mental suffering on another person who derives pleasure from experiencing that pain. Sydney said he was happy to be in either position, whether it be submissive or dominant, and told Dan that he would often pick up drunk indigenous men, coerce them to come home with him, drug them, and then, quote, have my way with them. Sydney characterised this behaviour as BDSM, but it's obviously plain rape. Informed consent is required in any relationship, especially the BDSM or Kink community, and responsible participants have strict rules and guidelines around consent and boundaries

to prevent situations like this. In any event, Sydney decided to try and get his life together at this time, in between bouts at rehab. He completed his high school education and then earned a hospitality qualification from the Native Education Centre. He also told Dan Zupansky that around this time he got a woman pregnant, But when the baby boy was born, she took him to live in the Seattle, Washington area. Sydney decided to become a chef. He went back to school and earned his culinary arts degree in 1996 when he was 27. Over the next few years, he worked as an executive chef in fine restaurants around Canada,

claiming to have cooked meals for Cher, Richard Gere, and Margaret Trudeau, the wife of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and of course the mother of current Prime Minister Justin. But Sydney said he was also fascinated with death and claimed in 2001 he decided he wanted to be murdered, cooked and cannibalised. He said he managed to find someone who agreed to do it and said they selected a date, purchased a large pressure cooker and were prepared with sleeping pills.

Sydney wrote that part of the agreement was that his new friend would keep his bones in a trunk under the bed afterwards. But as the date they'd chosen drew closer, the friend abruptly changed his mind and pulled out. But Sydney claimed it was still something he wanted to do. Quote, I will wait to find the right man or men who'd be willing to have me on their dinner table. In another letter, he wrote that he liked to look up oboeuvre. to find young men who had recently died and would go to their graves. He said, quote, Only once did I dig a grave and open a coffin. During this time, he was still trying to deal with his drug dependency issues, which were ruining his life as he tried to hold down employment as a chef.

He last got out of rehab in early 2003, just months before he would murder Robin Green. He had a chef job lined up in Canora, a small city in northwestern Ontario, close to the Manitoba border. But it didn't take long before he relapsed into his addiction and ended up in poverty. He scraped up what money he had left and used it to return to Winnipeg where he'd grown up. He applied for financial assistance and when it was approved, he booked a room for a month at the Royal Albert Arms Hotel. Finally, Sydney said he was ready to talk about what happened that It was the moment Dan Zupansky had been waiting for that would perhaps change everything. The police had already established that Robin Green arrived in Winnipeg the day before Canada Day to visit his sister.

It's not known what Robin did his first night in Winnipeg, but Sydney told Dan that he spent his evening doing crack cocaine and drinking alcohol. The next morning when he got up, he went straight to a bar called the Woodbine to continue. Now, somehow, Robin ended up in possession of Susan Sarandon's $4,000 necklace. Some have speculated that he wandered on set and stole it, but all that's known is that the absence of the necklace was soon noticed by an assistant on set, who reported it to police. By that time, Robin had made his way up to the woodbine, and according to Sydney, tried to sell him the necklace for $15.

Sidney thought Robin was attractive and asked him to sit while he examined the necklace. While he said he didn't want to buy it, Sydney suggested that Robin stay and have a drink. Robin seemed to pick up what Sydney was putting down and put his hand on Sydney's knee. They drank two pitches of beer and some shots of scotch, talked for a while, and then decided to go back to Sydney's hotel room. Over the next few hours, Sydney said he drank more alcohol, smoked crack and took Oxycontin, and the pair engaged in consensual sexual activity. Sydney said he took provocative photos of Robin in different poses using three disposable cameras.

At one point, Robin put the Susan Sarandon necklace around Sydney's neck, although Sydney said he had no idea it came from a movie set, because Robin never said where he got it from. At around 2.30 in the afternoon, Robin said he was tired and wanted to sleep. Sydney said he was fine to sleep there and went down to the downstairs bar. This is the point where Sydney got a beer

from the bartender Diane and then went to sit with the night bartender and his girlfriend. They apparently went outside to smoke some weed and then Sydney finished his beer and headed back to his room. He says Robin was awake and so they decided to go for a walk outside. According to Sydney, they ended up in a local park that just happened to be around the corner from the movie location shoot for Shall We Dance. He said he and Robin had some adventures in the park

before returning to the hotel at around 5pm. After getting some ice and beers, they returned upstairs to his room. Sydney wrote in his letters that when he saw that Diane was stool bartending, he told her that Robin was his cousin because he didn't want her to know his sexual orientation. When he got back with the ice, he took Robin up to his room, and the rest is history. Sydney maintained that he was so drunk that he blacked out and couldn't remember what happened. Dan Zippanski was of course disappointed that Sydney was doubling down on his story.

But as Sydney continued to write letters, he started to drop hints that he did have more to say. Dan had no idea what Sydney was going to tell him, but he waited with bated breath. It was clear to him that based on the evidence, the Crown was not going to be able to prosecute Sydney for second-degree murder, and maybe if he continued to wait, he would get some information that could change things. After nine months, Dan had managed to get a lot of information out of Sydney, but he knew there was more. Sydney had hinted at it several times. He explicitly promised to send a chapter on how Robin ended up in the tub. At this point, Dan told Sydney that if they wanted to get the book out, they needed to get going on finishing the story because the publisher

was asking. And that's exactly what happened. Sydney started to reveal slowly that he did remember what he'd done, and Dan kept pressing him for more information. And it came, like a snowball. Sydney would write more letters describing every phase of the murder of Robin Green and the aftermath in extensive detail. And it wasn't just graphic. It was over-the-top gratuitous and explicit, not to mention utterly disrespectful to Robin. Sydney said he used his chef's knives to stab Robin to death and the actual murder took less than three minutes, ending at 6.20pm, just 90 minutes after the two were last seen at the bar. According to Sydney, Robin's last words were, please don't kill me.

As soon as Sydney confirmed that Robin was dead, he said he washed the blood from his hands, poured himself a drink, and then sat by the open window smoking a cigarette while looking at Robin's body on the bed. He filled the bathtub with warm water, bathed with the body and then fell asleep. When he woke up, he said he got out of the bath and dried himself

and then sharpened his knife set with his sharpening stone. And then he wrote about how he dealt with Robin's body, including the dismemberment, disembalment, decapitation, castration, dissection and mutilation. If those words alone weren't enough to provoke a severe reaction, he went into shocking graphic detail about how he violated the body in a variety of ways throughout, including sexually, an experience that he described as intoxicating. He drew graphic pictures to accompany his letters that illustrated what he did,

including a floor plan of the hotel room. It showed an outline of Robin's dismembered body, with arrows pointing to areas around the room where he committed various parts of the crime, described in explicit and crude detail. Sydney drew one crude picture that he labelled the trophy, which showed Robin's body posed, accompanied by the tagline, Green as My Trophy, My Creation, A Work of Art.

Sydney told Dan that during the crime, he wanted to experience what Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Nilsson did during their crimes. Dharma from the US and Nilsson from the UK are two well-known serial killers and necrophiliacs, who were known for selecting young males as their victims, and the then committing atrocities on their remains afterwards for sexual gratification. And even with the gruesome details Sydney wrote, he said he was still keeping several things he did to himself, things he said he would never tell anyone because he wanted to respect the dead. But he also said he treated Robin's body like a dead animal or a side of beef, and he made

crude jokes about the murder, like, I guess you could say I'm a cut above the rest. Sydney claimed all kinds of other things. At one point, he told Dan that there was an additional person in the hotel room called George, someone that he and Robin had been drinking with that night. Dan said it was odd that no one else had mentioned a third person in the room and told him to tell his lawyer about it because that might be helpful information for his defense. This claim about a third person never went anywhere. As you'll remember, Robbins' remains had been drained of blood and his organs had been removed.

Sydney wrote that some of the organs were tossed in a vacant lot in some tall grass, and the rest were tossed in a bodily waste bin near the Health Sciences Centre. They would have been long gone by then, and to this day, the organs have never been found. But even with all this information, all these details, Sydney never once mentioned why he did those things. It was the one thing that Dan could never get him to answer, and it just didn't make sense. What was the motive for killing Robin Green?

After sharing a cell with Sydney, Dan's old friend Don Abbott passed on some observations. He told Dan Zippanski that Sydney was meticulous, sometimes to the point of seeming compulsive with his living space and his personal self. He was very emotional, with a quick temper that seemed to come out of nowhere, but had a lot of depth behind it. Abbott also spoke about Sydney's reputation while in prison, describing him as being very open about his sexuality and often offering sexual favours to other inmates.

Sydney instructed Dan Zupanski to publish his letters in full, but after the murder trial. and also told him that he wanted creative control of the book on the case. Sydney wanted his own photo to be on the front cover and brainstormed titles for it, including Room 309, which was his hotel room. He also suggested murder at 6.20pm and Please Don't Kill Me, which were of course Robin's last words. In the end, he settled on the title Trophy Kill,

the Shall We Dance Murder, in reference to that Susan Sarandon movie. In a continued bid for fame and celebrity, Sydney wanted to play up the Hollywood angle and was convinced that he could get Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon to comment publicly on the stolen necklace. Other ideas to drum up publicity for the book included getting Marilyn Manson to write a song about him, and he also proposed selling merchandise-like t-shirts at the trial. But throughout all of this, Dan couldn't help but feel as though he'd found himself involved in a modern-day murder mystery, but it wasn't the classic, whodunit, but rather, why?

Sydney had given him information in bits and pieces, turning the whole thing into what seemed to be an elaborate puzzle. But the crime didn't seem to make sense despite all Sydney had told him. He thought there might be more to the story. Dan decided to look at the evidence again. Sydney had mentioned that when he'd been interrogated at the police station, he'd been asked about other murder investigations in Vancouver and Edmonton, which involved several murdered and dismembered young males. Sydney had denied it and claimed he made the police officer extremely frustrated.

Now Sydney had been moving between those locations, and he'd also made it clear that he was a big fan of serial killers and true crime. He was a movie buff, and he'd just moved back to Winnipeg, the town that was the home of so much of his childhood trauma. He'd ruined his career and was living in a low-rent hotel. While Dan pondered all these pieces of information, these puzzle pieces and how they might fit together, the legislation making it illegal for criminals to profit off their crimes had just been finalized. In March of 2005, about a year after Sydney and Dan first started communicating, Dan called him to deliver the news that the law had passed,

making it illegal for him to share profits from the book sales. Sydney immediately hung up on Dan and then sent him an angry letter, saying that what Dan had told him was very convenient. He warned Dan not to make a fall of himself by publishing what he called a book of lies. Because the story he'd told just wasn't true. He still maintained that he blacked out, but said he'd gotten the inspiration for the gory details and graphic drawings in textbooks about human anatomy and biology, as well as books about serial killers by authors like Anne Rule. He said the information about necrophilia was completely made up. Quote,

If you put two and two together, I took excerpts from Dahmer, Gacy, Nielsen, and Warnos and put them together to give you a story that was fiction. That was the last letter Sydney ever wrote to Dan. After their visits, letters and phone calls, the relationship between admitted criminal and amateur writer was officially over. Dan Zupanski was reeling. There were so many questions. While Sydney was now claiming the details he gave were lies,

the facts of the case were still glaringly obvious. Robin Green's remains were horrifically interfered with, and Sydney Tierhus was the one responsible. And throughout all of the letters, Sydney had never mentioned a motive. Why did he do what he did? Dan studied the serial killers, particularly Dennis Nilsson, who Sydney seemed to put special emphasis on. The UK killer had murdered and dismembered at least 12 young men and boys in the 70s and 80s, and was known for observing rituals afterwards which included necrophilia and disposing of the organs by flushing them down the toilet.

While Dan did see some similarities, he found no evidence that Sidney had directly used that material to craft his own story. So regardless of lies that may have been found in the small details, there must have been at least some basic truth to what Sydney had told him. Dan was unsure of what to do, so he said he spoke to two CBC journalists in Winnipeg to see what they would have done. He said they advised him to wait until after the preliminary hearing to turn over the letters. But he thought about it, and if he did that, it would have delayed the trial itself.

And if he honoured his agreement with Sydney and waited until after the trial, then it would have been grounds for a retrial, which wasn't a good outcome either. In the meantime, Sydney Tierhus had hired high-profile Winnipeg defence lawyer Greg Brodsky to represent him, who you might remember from episodes 22 and 23 of this podcast. He represented Andrea Giesbrecht, the Winnipeg woman who concealed the remains of six infants in a storage locker, and he was also a key member of Paul Bernardo's defence team. Greg Brodsky is known as a very successful and experienced defence. defense lawyer and also a bit of a piece of work.

And Sydney soon told Dan something that shocked him. See, Dan was under the impression that he was the only one that Sydney had told those stories to, those details that Dan believe proved he hadn't blanked out that day and knew exactly what he did. But Sydney told Dan that now his lawyer knew too, as well as a psychologist. Dan thought, surely, if Sydney's lawyer had been told the same details that Dan had, then it was the lawyer's duty to turn that information over to the crown. Dan consulted with some legal professionals.

One thought that the lawyer definitely should have shared the information with the crown as it pertained to physical evidence. But at the same time, he stressed that Dan should take it to the crown immediately as it was crucial evidence. The other lawyer, a law professor, stated his legal opinion was that since the lawyer didn't see or possess the actual physical evidence, he did not necessarily have a legal obligation to disclose that information to the Crown lawyer. The professor acknowledged that the issue was not without controversy though and agreed that Dan needed to bring his evidence to the Crown as soon as possible.

So, Dan made a meeting with the police and the police. the Crown lawyer and turned the letters in immediately. After that, he started looking into Greg Brodsky and suspected that his team might use the legal defense of automatism, where they would argue that Sydney's actions were a set of brief unconscious behaviours for a limited time, where he was unaware of his actions. Basically, this legal unconsciousness transformed Sydney into a robot, and if first or second degree murder requires intent, the accused being on autopilot or legally unconscious, could be an obstacle. Getting way down into the legal weeds and picking things apart is what Greg Brodsky is known for.

Now, at the time, Dan Zupansky was hosting his weekly radio show Off the Cuff at the University of Manitoba radio station, and he invited Greg Brodsky for an interview about being a criminal defense lawyer in Winnipeg. Greg accepted the invitation. Now Dan did not want to disclose his connection to Sydney Tierhus, and Sydney hadn't told his lawyer about it either. The topic of Sydney Tierhus was not brought up at all in the interview. Dan told Brodsky he wanted to know about criminal defense strategies he'd used, specifically automatism, and also how he determines the truthfulness of his client's story. Dan wanted to know how far does Greg Brodsky go in discerning whether his client is being untruthful concerning their guilt. Brodsky replied, quote,

First of all, a lawyer cannot put a defense forward that he knows to be false. Second, he can't put someone on the stand to tell a lie. He can't put a perjured defense before the court. After some conversation about defense strategies, Dan posed a question. If Brodsky's client shared information with him that he knew the prosecution did not have, was he obliged to turn it over? Brodsky said he had no obligation to do anything. Quote, I recognize that the issue to be tried is whether the Crown has sufficient evidence to satisfy a court beyond a reasonable doubt of the guilt of my client, and I am entitled to argue, no. they don't. Brodsky went on to say that the word innocent doesn't equate to he didn't do it.

The word innocent means there is insufficient proof. He added that it has nothing to do with what his client may or may not have told him. All that matters is challenging the quality of the Crown's evidence. In light of this new information, Dan said that he spoke with one of the law professors again. The professor told him that it's a lawyer's responsibility to determine the truthfulness of any story their client tells, and as long as the lawyer is not advancing a known lie, then what Brodsky said was essentially correct. And then, everyone waited for the trial. But there were delays. According to Dan Zupansky, while Sydney waited in jail for trial proceedings to begin, he had started studying his indigenous heritage. Before long, his legal team had a challenge to the court about jury selection.

His lawyer argued that indigenous people are unfairly discriminated against during jury selection, and because of that, Sydney wouldn't get the jury of his peers that he was entitled to, which amounted to a violation of his charter rights. Statistics were cited that showed the percentage of indigenous people incarcerated in Manitoba was far higher than their percentage of the overall population in the province. And because of the rule that prospective jurors cannot have criminal records, that made the likelihood of getting that jury of his peers even more unlikely, which was unfair.

Lawyer Greg Brodsky argued that the system's constraints meant that it was mainly the elderly and the unemployed who made it to a jury, and challenged the court to expand the criteria. If successful, this would have had a massive impact on the Manitoba jury selection process, but the complaint was dismissed. The decision stated that Sydney Tierhus was not entitled to request that of the court,

and he had not proven a breach of any constitutional right. And that's where we'll leave it for part one. part two, you'll hear about court testimony from both Dan Zupanski and Sydney Tierhuis, as the jury decides whether Sydney had intent to commit murder that day, among other things. And at the end of the episode, I'll chat with Dan Zupanski about the theories he's developed about the case. Part two will be in your inbox this time tomorrow, but until then, why not check out the newest season of Commons, a documentary podcast that proves Canada is end. anything but boring. I love Commons so much. Each season, host Archie Men guides you through

the country's dark underbelly, bringing you stories about crime, corruption and all manner of misdeeds. Commons brings you voices from every corner of Canada, from Toronto's most prolific bank robber to the whistleblower who took down Vancouver's most infamous slumlords. This season, Commons investigates Canada's current obsession, real estate, from crime to eruption to segregation, Canada's history of real estate is dark, dark, dark. Real estate is by far our biggest industry and often the only way in which Canadians can build any kind of wealth. And as the property mania of the last year has shown, people are willing to go to great lengths to get even a small piece of it. Commons this season explores how our obsession with land is also

the source of so many of our problems. Listen to the new season of Commons Real Estate, wherever you find your podcasts. Thank you to everyone who's told a friend or left a positive review wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps the show. If you don't like the ads, you can get early access to an ad-free version of every episode for just a couple of dollars a month.

There's also a few bonus episodes, as well as a monthly debrief episode where I take you behind the scenes. Visit Canadian True Crime.ca.ca.com slash support to learn more. A percentage of profits and all proceeds of merch sales are donated regularly to Canadian charitable organizations related to helping victims and survivors of injustice. Thanks to the host of True for voicing the disclaimer and also to We Talk of Dreams who compose the theme song.

I'll be back soon with another Canadian true crime story. See you then.