Front Burner - How a B.C. man's healing journey ended in two murders

Episode Date: October 31, 2018

Sebastian Woodroffe's life unraveled after multiple trips to Peru to take the drug ayahuasca. What prompted his killing, and that of a Peruvian shaman? Mark Kelley from CBC's The Fifth Estate went to Peru to investigate.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. I'm Jamie Poisson.

In April of this year, a young father from British Columbia was drawn to the jungles of Peru by the promise that a psychedelic drug could give his life meaning and direction. Instead, it may have led to his psychological unraveling and two killings, including his own. Sebastian Woodruff's death has been shrouded in mystery. But today, we know way more. After months of investigating, powerful details have emerged about how Sebastian came apart at the seams and about the people who were hurt in the process. Whatever he was doing that day, he was taking his life into his own hands,

and you could get a feeling just being in that village that this was not going to end well. That's today on FrontBurner. I'm Mark Kelly. I'm a co-host of The Fifth Estate, and I was following this story for several months this summer, looking into the life and death of Sebastian Woodruff. And that took me in my investigation to the jungles of Peru

and the forests of Vancouver Island as to try to piece together Sebastian's life. Mark, what got you into this story in the first place? What was it that made you want to dig into this? I was captivated the minute I saw this video that surfaced. And this was a video of Sebastian Woodruff in the last moments of his life. by villagers and then eventually he is approached by somebody with what looks like a seat belt from a car wrapped around his neck and then he's dragged, as he pleads for his life, dragged to his death. And the minute we saw that story, I wanted to know the story of what happened in the hours and days leading up to that moment. And then what happened afterwards?

How did he end up in that situation? I remember this video. It was so difficult to watch. I had to actually turn off my computer the first time I watched it. I didn't even finish it. I went back later and watched it. computer the first time I watched it. I didn't even finish it. I went back later and watched it. And I was really struck, especially by all of the bystanders around him.

There was nobody doing anything. And also just to watch another Canadian citizen pleading for their life. It was really, really hard to watch. And it was hard to unsee. So what do you know now about Sebastian Woodruff? We spoke to family members, we spoke to friends of his, and they all gave us a very consistent portrait of Sebastian as being a dreamer, a seeker, as somebody, you know, didn't quite fit into mainstream society, was growing up on Vancouver Island, always looking for a new experience. Was working on fishing boats, was a diver for sea urchins, loved to forage for mushrooms. And a man, we were told, with intense compassion.

He's always been a very outgoing, loving, caring individual. He would give whatever he could to help you in any way, shape, or form. Give you a shirt off his back. And he was a father too, right? He was a father. He had a young son. So then if he has a family, at least a child in Vancouver, what brings him to Peru? Enlightenment brought him to Peru as he was seeking something more.

I mean, he recorded what we refer to as a bit of a manifesto online. Hello, my name's Sebastian. That he posted was part of a GoFundMe campaign where he was looking for some money. I just decided to just drop what I was doing and I'm going to make a career change to become an addictions counsellor. Everything that I've ever done has been trying to achieve this normalcy that doesn't exist. In his family there were some addiction issues that he mentioned, that there was somebody who had a drinking problem. He had heard about ayahuasca,

and ayahuasca being a potential way to treat people with addictions. So what he wanted to do was raise this money, go down to Peru, go down to the jungle, and learn about this jungle medicine, and bring that back with him to Vancouver Island to see if he could not only help those close to him but become a healer himself i'm gonna end this with just saying that i have a lot of uh love and gratitude for the process of life things could have went sideways for me a lot in my life and

they didn't i'd like to just thank the universe or the spirits or God or whoever is looking out for me and just say that I thank you and that I'm going to pay you back and I'm going to try to help people. Thanks a lot. One thing I'm trying to wrap my head around is what exactly is ayahuasca and what does it do to a person? So ayahuasca is the combination of taking a specific plant and a specific vine. You chop them down, you put them into a big pot, you add some water. And then you boil it for about three days. And what comes out of this is sort of almost like a molasses type gooey mixture um some people say it tastes like the jungle it's a it's kind of a bitter brew but when you then reheat that brew

it activates um a naturally occurring hallucinogen called DMT. So first, when you consume the tea, it will purge you. It's nasty to be around. Like you throw up? Yeah, it'll come out top and bottom. You will be cleared out. Okay. And that's being seen as a way of purging the bad things that are inside you. So the purging process is a release of some of the bad things that you have inside you.

Shortly thereafter... That sounds horrible. Yeah. Okay. And most people will tell you, you do not do ayahuasca for kicks. This isn't a recreational drug. There is very little fun about it. It's the hardest work that I've done in my life.

And every time I go to a ceremony I dread it in a way and if there was a way not to do it and still yield the same results I would totally go for it. And thereafter the visions as they call it, the visions set in and these are the hallucinations and these hallucinations can last for hours. And I've witnessed a few of these ceremonies and for some people, it can be something light. And they find themselves, you know, seeing incredible things and drifting through the clouds. Other people tell you it's terrifying. Let's talk about the village. What is the village like that he's in?

Well, the village where he would end his life, it's an indigenous community called Victoria Gracia. And that village is threadbare, a village without electricity, a village without running water. He said that the people are scared. Scared of what? Foreigners, was what he said. They're scared of foreigners. They have been practitioners of the ayahuasca ceremonies for, some will tell you, thousands of years.

This is where his life would end. He was staying in a village called Pakulpa, which is about a 15-minute motorcycle ride away from there. And that's where he landed and he started his voyage. Because in these communities around there, it's now become a hub for ayahuasca tourism. Okay. For Westerners who are going down there to go to these ayahuasca retreats. So that's what drew him down there to go to a retreat. And that was the

first of several trips that he would make to Peru to find out more about ayahuasca. And that's where Olivia Arabels. How did Sebastian Mudra come to meet this woman, this shaman? When he was down there, he really wanted to find the best person who could enlighten him and educate him about ayahuasca and all it is and all that it can do and really discover the power of the plant. Olivia is seen, she's very respected, was a very respected elder. She held a huge amount of plant knowledge. A shaman of her level would know 500, 600 plants that can address a wide range, a huge amount of maladies. What would this shaman take someone like Sebastian Woodruff through?

How would something like this unfold? Well, the ceremony itself, I mean, once you've got to do sort of, there's a series of steps you've got to go through, and you're supposed to do sort of, there's a series of steps you've got to go through. You're supposed to refrain from alcohol, refrain from any kind of drugs. You're supposed to refrain from sex. You're supposed to go through this whole sort of, it's almost a monastic experience where you're going down there and being cloistered in this environment that you're giving your body over to ayahuasca.

So you'd spend typically for a lot of people go down there you spend a week in a retreat and a lot of that is preparing for the sitting down to have try the ayahuasca and then it's the ayahuasca experience yourself where you actually sit down in a ceremony and then everything happens Everything happens. So Sebastian is having these ceremonies. And how is it affecting his life? After his first trip to Peru, his friends and family would say he did come back a changed person. If this actually occurred as indicated,

he was no longer himself. He was no longer the person that we knew here. And he seemed to be more enlightened. But what it did, and what people saw, is it took hold of his life. So now everything he was doing on Vancouver Island was just a prelude to going back to Peru. Right. It all becomes about him wanting to get back to Peru so that he could do more ayahuasca ceremonies.

I got to go back to the jungle. And part of it is the ayahuasca. But I think, you know, in speaking to people, there's a sense of connectedness. So remember, this is a guy who was sort of a bit of a drifter. He was having trouble finding meaning in his life. Yeah. And connections and relationships that everything seemed to be a bit temporal. And now he was feeling connected. I mean, obviously things got bad at some point. So is there any lead up to this awful culmination?

So what we would learn is he would start having incidents where he was, he was sneaking back into this, this indigenous community, Victoria Gracia and show up asking for more, for another ceremony, asking her for ayahuasca and people in the village started to get a little freaked out by this guy. You know,

he was like a, what they felt was a, as one woman said to me, we felt he was a danger to everyone. He wasn't a normal person. Some neighbors found him prowling around there in the darkness. What was he trying to do? He was to them a dark gringo who was a bit unhinged. What kind of stuff was he doing? He would be hiding in the trees.

He would be spying to see where, you know, where was Olivia. On at least three occasions that we know that the villagers got together and corralled him and took him to the police. And corralled him and took him to the police. And so what do you know now, having gone there, about this last trip to Peru? He was looking to buy a gun. And did he tell anyone why he needed it? He said he needed it for protection. So on his last trip to Peru, he would walk into a police station and ask people around there, is anyone here? Can anyone here sell me a gun? In the police station? Right in the middle of the busy police

station. We then started to think, could this be true? We're looking for the PNP officer, Glauco Utia. Utia, Utia. This is the guy. This is him. Now, we had seen a bill of sale for the gun. In fact, he found a police officer who sold him his weapon, a 9mm Taurus pistol, sold him that weapon.

The deal was, he had a receipt, it was notarized, witnessed, and he told that police officer he was going into the jungle and he needed protection. The reality is, and I know he understands reality, two people are dead. Two people are dead because of his decision to sell this weapon. He has no sense of responsibility, culpability. Apparently not. Once he has the gun and he says he's heading into the jungle, what do we know about what happened?

He takes his gun. He goes the 15-minute motorcycle ride, borrowed a motorcycle from somebody in the village, and then rides into Victoria Gracia. He approaches Olivia's house, and Olivia walks out of the house. As he approached the house, he'd fired the pistol, a warning shot in the air. Okay. And at that point, the villagers start to come out and wondering what all this commotion

is about. Olivia, we're told, is berating him. He is desperately asking something from her. And for whatever reason, he points the pistol at her, according to witnesses, pulls the trigger twice and shoots her twice in the chest. And people say they saw this happen. Yes. That is where he killed her. That's where she was lying. She was standing right in front of her house. People saw this happen.

And then he jumped on his motorcycle to try to leave and could not get it started. That's when the villagers approached him, where he was pulled off his motorcycle. And then badly beaten. And then we know the rest from there. After they killed him, they buried his body in a very, very shallow grave. Two days later, after his death, the video of his death was posted online. I need your body. I need your body. And then that's when the police descended on the community of Victoria Gracia looking for him and they would eventually find his body. We spoke to several people in that village.

Not one person told us they were there that day. It was a very uncomfortable situation when we were there with people trying to open up to us, except for the current mayor. She was the one person. Before we could speak to her, the whole community had come out and they didn't want us there and they didn't want her talking to us. We had to go through a long negotiation. They don't want us to go to the house now and they'd rather that we come back tomorrow and take it from there. So it's a very hostile environment. It was an uncomfortable environment. Because at the end of the day, these are poor people living a very simple life.

And they feel that their world was turned upside down. And while they blame Sebastian, they blame the Aravalo family. They said, you know, they were bringing in these gringos, these Westerners for these ayahuasca experiences. And it had somehow tainted their lives prior, even prior to this terrible incident. What do you think explains Sebastian's unraveling? So he was taking at least two kinds of prescription drugs as well as taking some sleeping pills. And what we believe at the time was that he was definitely suffering from mental illness. Could have been schizophrenia, could have been depression.

And we don't know because even his family didn't know he was on prescription drugs when we told them that that was new news to them. And then we've spoken with several experts who've looked into ayahuasca and they're trying to see, you know, how can this be harnessed for therapeutic purposes? Because a lot of people are interested here in Canada, in the West, to see if there's something, if there's some power in the plant, of that plant that can be... Right, if it can fill in some of the holes for what traditional medicine is missed.

Yeah, and for people who don't want to take prescription drugs, is there something in nature that could help? But what we have been told repeatedly is that mixing these meds with ayahuasca can create psychotic experiences, can create severe paranoia, can create erratic behavior. So if we look at all those pieces together, and then we look at this bizarre behavior that Sebastian was exhibiting, I think we feel very safe that that we believe was the catalyst for all the bad that had happened. So he unearthed something within himself that could never really be contained. And I think it's the heartbreaker for the family because he went down there with all the best of intentions.

But what he found was something completely different. As of today, no one has been charged with killing Sebastian or Olivia Arevalo. And a toxicology test is being done to figure out what kind of drugs could have been in Sebastian's system. I'm Jamie Poisson. This is FrontBurner. See you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog.

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