Uncover - S1, S3 & S5 BONUS: The Story I Didn’t Tell

Episode Date: December 20, 2019

Join Ian Hanomansing and the hosts of Uncover, Missing and Murdered and Hunting Warhead as they share never-before-told stories from their podcasts in front of a live audience at the Hot Docs Podcast Festival. Josh Bloch asks if he was duped by his friend and subject of Uncover: Escaping NXIVM, Sarah Edmondson. Connie Walker reveals why she became a journalist and her hidden motivation behind her true crime podcast Missing and Murdered. Justin Ling, host of Uncover: The Village dives deep into Hollywood's connection to so-called "homosexual murders." Uncover: Sharmini host Michelle Shephard shares her approach for getting subjects to talk, and Daemon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead questions if we should show sympathy to pedophiles.

Hi there, I'm Gavin Crawford. I'm a writer, an actor, and a comedian. And for the last eight or nine years, I have been navigating life with my mother's increasing dementia. Has it been sad? Yeah. Has it been funny? Also, yeah. That's what my podcast series, Let's Not Be Kidding, is about. It's the true story of my life as a comedian, my mom, and dementia. Let's not be kidding. With me, Gavin Crawford.

Available now. This is a CBC Podcast. I'm Ian Hanneman, co-host of The National and Uncover Bomb On Board. Recently, at the Hot Docs podcast festival in Toronto, I had the chance to share the stage with five incredible journalists from CBC podcasts. Josh Block, host of Uncover Escaping NXIVM. Connie Walker, the host of Missing and Murdered. Justin Ling, host of Uncover The Village.

Michelle Shepard, host of Uncover Charmony. And Damon Fairless, host of Uncover the Village, Michelle Shepard, host of Uncover Charmony, and Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. Now, if you haven't listened to these, check them out. I have heard all of them and they are riveting. These five journalists spent months, sometimes even years, digging, investigating, trying to uncover the truth. In this bonus episode, you're going to hear brand new stories from some of the best investigative journalists and podcasters, and those moments that still keep them up at night. Whether it's trying to understand how a childhood friend found herself recruiting for a cult, bearing witness to the life and death of a young Cree girl, or shining light on the darkest corners of the internet. First up, Josh Bloch and uncover Escaping NXIVM. So one night in the middle of our investigation into NXIVM,

I lay awake in bed with this terrifying feeling that I had been duped. If you haven't heard the podcast, I first learned about NXIVM from a childhood friend of mine, Sarah Edmondson, when I ran into her two years ago. The group calls themselves a self-help group, but the FBI calls them a cult. It was just weeks after she had made this dramatic exit from the group, and at that time little was known about NXIVM. They were notorious for going after people who would speak out about them. But Sarah wanted to talk and I started recording our conversations. So how are you holding up? I don't even have words. It's just a lot of embarrassment, a lot of regret for not following my gut instinct from the beginning.

A lot of shame that I missed the red flags, and then I brought so many people into it. So Sarah told me how she was a part of this group for 12 years. She was one of their star recruiters. She recruited 2,000 people into the organization. She described how she opened up a NXIVM center in Vancouver, which at one point was the largest center for NXIVM outside of its headquarters in Albany, New York. And eventually how she was recruited into this secret women's group called DOS, where she was branded on her body with the initials of the group's leader, Keith Raniere, who everyone called Vanguard. In October of 2017, Sarah was on the front page of the New York Times. Her jeans were flapped

down to reveal the brand on her pelvis. And the story that she told me and the story that she told the New York Times was about a woman who was deceived. She was manipulated and coerced and had finally come forward as a whistleblower. But the night that I lay awake in bed, I wondered if there was a different story. It was a question that our team had asked ourselves before, but today was different. So that morning we had received an anonymous encrypted letter that was sent to the CBC Dropbox, and my producer Kathleen Goldhar read it out to the team. So it said, Hi, Ms. Sarah Edmondson, a Vancouver actress, has been in the news recently and featured by the New York Times for her role in the sex and mind control cult NXIVM.

In her statements about her involvement with NXIVM, Ms. Edmondson mostly claims to be a victim. But the truth is she and several of her colleagues were ruthless recruiters for Mr. Ranieri and NXIVM for many years. They used bullying tactics, high-pressured sales pitches, defamation, and trickery. That's interesting. Why, what prompted it? Who knows? They're wanting us to see another side of this. So the letter claimed that Sarah was reframing her story to make herself look innocent.

It claimed that Sarah was far more culpable than she was letting on. I didn't know who the letter came from or to what extent it was true, but I lay awake in bed that night wondering about the story Sarah had been telling me, and was her version of events the entire truth? Is it possible that my connection to Sarah was making me miss something that other people could see? As the FBI released more information about NXIVM, this feeling persisted. We learned that Keith Raniere maintained a harem of 15 to 20 women, all female leaders in the group. And I thought, how is it possible that Sarah is not aware that this was going on? She'd been part of NXIVM for a decade. She ran their NXIVM center. She was one of the leaders in the organization. Could Sarah have been one of these

secret lovers? Was she involved in grooming women to become Keith's partner? I was worried that the upcoming trial was going to reveal that we got the story totally wrong, that I'd been misled, that this would be the first and the last podcast that I ever did. Then in May of this year, Keith's trial began in a federal courthouse in Brooklyn. Finally, the most secret inner workings of this group were going to be exposed. A former NXIVM member from Mexico told the court how she was

confined to a room for two years. Another former member of NXIVM testified how she was instructed to seduce Keith Raniere and threatened that if she didn't follow through on that order, damaging information would be released to the public about her. We learned about how Keith Raniere groomed underage girls and kept nude photos of them on his computer. And the prosecution played audio and video recordings showing just how manipulative Keith Raniere was. In one particular conversation he had with actress Alison Mack,

who was also a high-level member of the group, he instructed her exactly how he wanted women like Sarah to be branded on their bodies. He'd also, of course, videoing it and videoing it from different angles or whatever gives collateral. It probably should be a more vulnerable position. It probably should be a more vulnerable position. Hang on the back.

Legs spread straight, feet being held to the side of the table. Hands probably above the head being held. Almost like tied down, like a sacrificial whatever. And the person should ask to be branded. Should say, please brand me, it would be an honor, or something like that. An honor I want to wear for the rest of my life. And they should probably say that before they're held down, so it doesn't seem like they're being coerced. So sitting in that packed courtroom, a few things became quickly clear.

One, Keith Raniere used secrecy and information to control and manipulate people in the group. Two, what was actually going on inside this group was far worse than anything Sarah had ever told me. And three, it wasn't just Sarah that was in the dark. It was astonishing to hear how other high-ranking members of NXIVM, people who had actually given up their lives and moved to Albany to be close to Keith Raniere, even them, they were in the dark about what was going on inside this group. So my anxiety about Sarah, you know, whether Sarah knew more than she was letting on, shifted. I left that trial with a new question. How could it be that an entire

organization could be duped this way? All these people who lived and worked around Keith Raniere all day in this little suburb in Albany, how could they not have known about the sex trafficking and the forcible confinement and the manipulation and the underage girls? Secrecy and information control is an essential ingredient to how these kinds of groups operate. That is why people who aren't Keith Raniere or part of his inner circle has such limited insight into what was going on inside this group. This explains a lot about what was going on with Sarah, and perhaps I would have slept better having known this earlier on in our process.

For 12 years, my childhood friend, Sarah Edmondson, had been sold and was selling a version of Keith Raniere that just never existed. It's only when a group like this collapses that the secrets are revealed and members like Sarah have to really reckon with how they were deceived. Sarah Edmondson, Ph.D.: Do not know anything, not be told anything, and then this child just disappeared into thin air? No. Something's amok. I've done a lot of reporting on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls,

but I've never heard a story like this before. What do you do when a complete stranger's come and grab you, throw you in a car and push your grandma out of the way and they take you away? She was yelling, she was crying. She tried to hitchhike back to Little Pine, back home to the reserve, but was picked up, raped, and murdered, and left by the side of the road. She grabbed her brother's jacket, and the jacket was found floating in a creek. Cleo's spirit is very much alive.

She stares at me across time asking to come up. I'm Connie Walker and this is Missing and Murdered Finding Cleo. Thank you. Thank you all so much for coming out tonight. It's such a pleasure to be here to get a chance to talk to you all, but also to talk a little bit about how we got here and how I got here specifically. Our podcast, Missing and Murdered, is a podcast about the violence that Indigenous women and girls face in Canada. Our first two seasons dive into the unsolved cases of Alberta Williams and Cleo Simaginus, but today I want to tell you about the first woman who made me aware of not only the violence that Indigenous women and girls face in Canada, but also the issues in the media when covering these stories.

I was 16 years old in grade 12, living on reserve in Treaty 4 territory in southern Saskatchewan, and going to school in Belcaris, a nearby small town, when I first heard about Pamela George. when I first heard about Pamela George. Pamela was a young SOTO woman, a mother of two, a daughter and a sister. She was from the Sacamay First Nation, not far from where I grew up in Saskatchewan, but she lived in Regina with her young children. She was killed in 1995, but the two men who were charged with her murder did not go on trial until late the next year. Now, I wasn't a teenager who paid much attention to the news, usually, but I knew about Pamela George. It was a very high-profile trial that dominated headlines in Saskatchewan and even

made the national news. And as a young First Nations woman in Saskatchewan, I was keenly aware of how Pamela was spoken about in the media and how it differed from the way that the two white men who were charged in her death were described. Here's a clip from a story on The National on December 19, 1996. The accused are young and clean cut. Steve Comerfield, a basketball star.

Alex Ternowetsky, a hockey standout. They come from middle class families. The victim was aboriginal and a prostitute. The two men admit they were cruising Regina's streets one night last year looking for a hooker. In this area known for prostitutes, they admitted picking up Pamela George. 1996. Steve Comerfield, the basketball star, and Alex Ternowitzky, the hockey standout, were acquitted of first-degree murder and sentenced to manslaughter in Pamela's death. At the time, I remember wondering if there were any First Nations journalists

in any of the newsrooms that were covering the trial. And it was the first time that I thought about becoming a journalist. I wanted to help people better understand our people and our communities, to create space so that people could have empathy for Pamela, a young single mother who struggled and occasionally worked in the sex trade to help pay the bills. Ternowitzky and Comerfield both served around four years of jail time and were released on bail around the time I started at CBC.

As an intern, I was excited about the impact that I could have in my future in journalism, but I quickly realized that having just one Indigenous voice in a newsroom might not be enough. Back then, it seemed the only time Indigenous stories made the news was when there was some kind of crisis or conflict. The summer I was an intern, the fisheries dispute between the Mi'kmaq people on the east coast and the non-indigenous fishermen in Burnt Church, New Brunswick were making national headlines. My job as a Chase producer was to book guests to come on the CBC morning show and I had booked the chief of the Indian Brook First Nation to come on the show the following Monday to talk about the latest development in the dispute.

I was a pretty green producer at that point, so I remember my senior producer at the time grilling me about the details. Did I tell them where to go, she asked. Yes, I said. It was an early morning show, so did I double check with them about the time? Yes, I said, he knows. And then she said to me, because you know those Indians, they'll go out drinking all weekend and they won't show up on a Monday morning.

And it was a busy, crowded newsroom. And I remember looking around to see if anyone else had heard what she said, but no one was paying attention to our conversation. So I just froze. I didn't know what to say. So I said nothing. So I just froze. I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. I still think about Pamela George. What could we have better understood about her if we had looked beyond her being a sex worker, if we approached her story with empathy? In the last season of Missing and Murdered, Finding Cleo,

we used the central mystery of Cleo's disappearance to help people better understand the Sixty Scoop and how the over-representation of Indigenous kids in the child welfare system is linked to the legacy of residential schools. And we knew that part of understanding Clio's story would also be understanding her mother, Lillian's story. Lillian was a woman who had all six of her children taken by child welfare authorities, a woman who was also taken away from her family and community as a child and sent to a residential school. Lillian was a woman who struggled with addiction and to cope with the trauma that she experienced in her life. And she struggled to care for her children.

And so when we started the podcast, we knew that to do justice to Cleo's story and to her mother's, we needed to create space for our audience to have empathy for Lillian, to help people fully understand her story. And it worked. By using the popularity of the true crime genre, we were able to reach people who didn't even know that they were interested in Indigenous issues, to attract people who came for the mystery, but who stayed to learn about Canadian history.

People who went on to have empathy for Cleo and Lillian, and people who, I believe, if they heard Pamela's story now, would demand the same for her. Thank you very much. Thank you. I will be providing with an update where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going. There was a real thoughtfulness, a tenderness about him. We miss you and we love you. Come home safe, please. I feel terrorized.

People just don't disappear. This morning at approximately 10.25 a.m., police arrested 66-year-old Bruce MacArthur. He has been charged with eight counts of first-degree murder. We're still looking at cold cases. There are a rash of murders from the 70s and 80s that remain unsolved. This is like a, it's like a 41-year-old circle. It's crazy. We're fed up with the lack of basic respect, you all human beings. The police in general did care about sexuality, and they cared about it in a way that they wanted to victimize the community. I'm Justin Lane. This season on Uncover, The Village. When I began working on The Village, I had no idea what a homosexual murder was.

I, of course, knew that queer people face discrimination and disproportionate levels of violence, and I knew that police didn't always solve those cases. But it wasn't until I started working on this podcast that I discovered that a homosexual murder was something very, very specific. In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, dozens of gay men and trans women were murdered in Toronto. Many of those cases looked eerily similar. Most of those victims were stabbed. Most died in their bedroom. Many of those cases went unsolved.

I started talking to some cops. That's when I started hearing the phrase. You could identify that it was a homosexual murder from the brutality, the overkill. If they were stabbed, they weren't stabbed once. It might be a hundred times. And that was one of the things that made it pretty sure it was a homosexual murder. So you would go into some of these rooms and look at the scene and know just by looking at the crime scene? Yeah. Yeah.

And it wasn't just the Toronto cops. The more I started talking to people in other cities, the more I started to realize that the idea of a homosexual murder was common in cities across Canada and the United States. I spent months leafing through old newspapers and watching old newsreel about those cases. It seemed like everybody, not just the cops, just somehow knew what a homosexual murder was, like it was some innate knowledge. I kept wondering how? How is it that if someone like me got murdered in, say, 1978, that the cops would walk in the room, take a few looks around and just immediately know the score. They would seem to conclude almost immediately that it was a crime of passion, that this

is how homosexuals settle things. So I'm looking through old copies of The Body Politic, a queer liberation newspaper that was arguably one of the most important publications for the Canadian LGBTQ community. It's the March 1980 edition. for the Canadian LGBTQ community. It's the March 1980 edition. The issue investigated how the Toronto police were aggressively surveilling and arresting gay men for cruising public washroom and parks.

This, even as they were supposed to be solving murders that plagued the community. Inside the paper, one particular item catches my eye. The headline reads, Crowd Leafleted at Opening of Cruising. Released in 1980, starring Al Pacino, Cruising from the Get-Go was despised by the community. A New York City detective in search of a killer

is about to disappear. Into the night. Activists actually try to disrupt the filming. Parts of the movie are overdubbed because there was so much heckling going on during the outdoor shots. Pacino plays a young cop and he tries to catch a killer that had been targeting gay men and dumping their body parts in the Hudson River. He gets tasked with infiltrating this seedy world of gay nightlife in order to catch a serial killer. The film mostly boils down the community to just two things, public sex and murder. Turns out that Cruising was in fact

inspired by many real cases from New York City. Unfortunately, the film also borrows many of the same assumptions and preconceptions and biases and homophobia that also plagued the police investigations. They started at these cases with the idea that gay men lead inherently risky lifestyles, for one, and also that the killers were almost always themselves gay. Cruising was informed by real cases, but while I was looking through some old newspapers, I found something that came along long before there was any public understanding of this idea of homosexual murder. It's a TV listing, from back when there were still TV listings in the newspaper.

The Detective, 1968, drama. You're Joe Leland, detective, prowling a city sick with violence, full of junkies, prostitutes, and perverts. Frank Sinatra, Lee Remick. A detective finds that the wrong man was electrocuted for the murder of a young homosexual. And I did a bit of a double take.

Sorry, there's a Frank Sinatra film about homosexual murder? What? The movie opens up on a crime scene where a man has been violently murdered. Well, I... Junior there was a homosexual. What killed him?

Right now it looks like the blows on the head, he was struck five, six times, maybe more. Much like cruising, the investigation brought the police to cruising areas. Again, reinforcing this idea that there was this unbreakable link between gay men hooking up in public places and violence. Both cruising and the detective reinforced, or maybe even helped create, the notion that murders of queer people were only ever committed by other queer people, and that they were crimes of passion, or lovers quarrels.

The reality is way more complicated. In the dozens of cases that I've looked at, yes, some were spur-of-the-moment killings, but many of the killers weren't gay at all. Some of the killings were committed by serial killers. Some murders targeted sex workers. But these films just built up the notion that homosexuality and murder were intrinsically linked. That killings were unavoidable if you hung around these kind of places. And both of these films played up the notion that gay bars or cruising spots needed police intervention.

Not to keep the gay community safe, but to uphold public morality. All of those assumptions and beliefs led to a society where queer people were over-policed and yet under-protected. Now, here's the interesting bit. While researching the movie, I found out that 20th Century Fox had actually planned a sequel starring Sinatra. It's based on another book in the series that the detective is based on. And there's a synopsis. It goes, retired NYPD detective Joe Leland stalks and kills the terrorists who seize the Claxon oil building in Los Angeles

during a Christmas party hosted by his daughter's employer. Sinatra turned down the sequel. So the plans sat on a shelf for a few years. They shopped around the story to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Richard Gere, Sylvester Stallone, Burt Reynolds. All of them said no. It would take more than 20 years for the sequel to get made. The studio changes the main character's name, and they at long last cast Bruce Willis. The movie? Die Hard.

Thank you. Thank you. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Sharmini stuck out because she was such a vivacious, intelligent, loving person. Sharmini is a top student at Woodbine Junior High, who everyone says never gave an ounce of trouble. The police fear the worst, but hope for the best. On the weekend, police found skeletal remains in a North York park. To me, justice was never served for her. I think we know who did it, and I'm in no position

to point the finger, but I don't have to be a detective to put the dots together. He was very manipulative. He was very deceptive. That's when they found duct tape and tie straps and all sorts of stuff that could be your abduction kit 101. There is evidence that supports my innocence. Michelle, shake your head, please. Come on now. Put yourself in that situation. It could happen to anybody. I don't recall making that comment. Okay, so I'm

telling you that you, that's fine if you don't recall it, but I'm telling you that's what you told me. I'm Michelle Shepard and this is Uncover, Charmaine. My very first assignment as a journalist was on my third day at the Toronto Star when I was a 22 year old intern and I was sent to cover the death of a newborn baby when the doctors had dropped the baby on the floor. And I remember I was so worked up and so upset staking out this mother's home that by the time she got there and I went to the door, I just started crying. And the poor woman had pity on me, invited me in,

and over tea told me the whole story. And I remember getting congratulated in the newsroom for my scoop and thinking, what the hell did I get myself into? But because I was able to make people care about that mother, Barbara, and her newborn, Michael, the hospital eventually changed procedures about how deliveries were done. And that story just made a small difference. And for most journalists, or the ones I respect anyway, this is why you get into the profession, hopefully to make big differences and often just respect anyway. This is why you get into the profession, hopefully to make big differences and often just small ones.

This is also why telling crime stories can be really difficult. And at first I was a little reluctant to do this podcast. So many of the crime stories we consume really are sensational. And I always worry about turning a tragedy into entertainment. But the 1999 murder of Sharmini Anandaval was one

of my first big cases as a cub crime reporter, and it stayed with me for 20 years. And it was the hope to make that difference, to find the truth or find justice for her that led me back to her killing. Sharmini was a grade nine high school student whose family had fled Sri Lanka for Canada. And on June 12, 1999, she went missing on her way to a job that police later believed didn't exist. Four months later, her remains were found in a North York ravine. And as I said, it was really hard to forget her, and it was really hard to forget her family,

especially her father and his heartbreaking appeal to the media in the days after she disappeared. I had kept in touch with her dad over email over the years and would often write him during an anniversary. But seeing him again before we started our podcast, it was clear he hadn't changed in two decades. He's exactly as I remembered him. Kind, personable eyes that always seem to be just on the verge of tears. We met in Ottawa earlier this year, and he gave his blessing to do the podcast, even though he and his family had found some type of peace, whatever they could, with her death.

And part of the reason that they found peace was because the man they believe was responsible is behind bars today as a dangerous offender. He was convicted in the years after Sharmini's death of two criminal harassment cases and the sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl. That man, Stanley Tippett, had been the police's main suspect in the case in 1999, and I'd actually interviewed him back then. So a large part of our podcast was looking at him, his crimes since, putting all the pieces together just to try and determine if he really was guilty. We were surprised that Stanley Tippett agreed to our request for jailhouse interviews right away. And it's interesting, as I don't normally get nervous for interviews. I get nervous walking up here, but at this point in my career, I don't get nervous, and I've done a lot of interviews with a lot of bad people. But interviewing Tippett was somehow different. The stakes felt so high because we'd asked so

many people, including Sharmini's family, to revisit their darkest days for this podcast. I felt like I needed to get answers from him that nobody else had. The first interview was polite and cordial. It lasted about three hours. And even when I was challenging him about his conviction for the criminal harassment and the contents of what police found in his car, it remained polite. I had some rope. I had a hammer. I had some duct tape and I had some pylons and stuff. Now the police were looking at those items that I had some duct tape and I had some pylons and stuff. Now, the police were looking at those items that I had in my vehicle as suspicious, as something that you use for kidnapping. Stanley, I have to say, I look at that as suspicious.

I have a car and I don't have any of those things in my car. But I had pylons. But I had pylons. You know, I had pylons that I used, you know, for when my son played soccer. So this is pretty much my interview style, no matter who I'm talking to. Slow and steady, polite. And we actually did cover quite a lot of ground in that interview, and we caught him in a few inconsistencies.

But leaving the prison, we felt like we barely had anything. So for the second interview, the stakes felt higher, and our team talked about taking a bit of a different approach, convinced me to be a bit harder with him, more confrontational, and that really isn't my style. I actually probably am a terrible journalist for this reason, but I don't like confrontation, and I cringe listening to this now. Like I said before, um, I don't, you know, like, um, you're kind of amazing. If somebody said to me, I killed somebody, I'd be like, fuck you. Like, to me, it's just, I know the truth. And, um, um, but just look, look me in the eye. Reach deep down. Think about her family.

Think about your family. But just keep looking at me. Just keep looking at me. Okay? We all make mistakes. We all do things that are wrong. But I'm not going to... Keep looking at me.

I'm not going to admit to something I didn't do. But you keep looking away. I'm sorry. I don't mean to make you stare at me, but I think sometimes it's easier when people are lying, they look away. Keep looking at me. And you stopped looking again. There were quite a few dark laughs from my colleagues, completely deserved at my performance of repeating, look at me like I'm some character on CSI. And actually, we didn't get much more from that second interview than the first, so it kind of proved my point. But I left the prison feeling deflated, wondering what did we achieve and was all of this worth it? It took us a few weeks after we started putting it together until I could really appreciate what we'd done and the podcast's worth. It allowed us to tell

the full story for the first time. This wasn't entertainment. No one was shouting, you can't handle the truth or breaking down because I made them keep eye contact. But most importantly, I reached out to all those involved after, including her family, and of course it wasn't easy for any of them to listen to this, but they were all grateful. And even without a final resolution, which in this case would be an arrest, it seemed to help a lot of people just move on a little.

The podcast actually did prompt some tips. Two possible witnesses who have never spoken to police have now come forward, and they claim that they saw Tippett and Sharmini together. But it's hard to know if it'll impact the case 20 years later. Whether or not it does, reflecting on this made me realize that most people, I was looking for a tidy epilogue too, the Hollywood conclusion.

But true crime, like everything else in life, most everything else, doesn't have these storybook endings. And that's the reality for the majority of cold cases. And those stories are worth telling too, especially if we reach people and made them remember or learn about a once forgotten, really, really special teenager named Sharmini. Thanks very much. You claim that we can't identify and we can't take you just because you're on the dark net. Let's see if we can do that. Did we create the environment that they're using?

No, we didn't. We didn't make it. They made it. Whatever that he was doing, he was very, very good at it. He told me about a forum he'd created. We've infiltrated it. We've taken it over. And we're now going to destroy it.

I'm David Fairless, and this is Hunting Warhead. Thank you so much for being here. Hunting Warhead is CBC's most recently launched podcast, and I'm extremely proud of the work our team did. It's the culmination of years of investigative reporting. And it's an incredible story. And I think it's really, really important. It's also unique. It's CBC podcast's first international co-production. Last year, we were approached by a Norwegian journalist, a guy named Håkon Høydal. And Håkon works for Norway's biggest newspaper. It's called VG. And his work is really at the core of this series. And that's how I ended up in an airport hotel room last winter outside Oslo.

Some of the men Håkon had written about, these are guys who had downloaded child abuse material, they'd gotten in touch with Håkon after he'd published. These men were actually quite troubled by what they were doing. And that's what we were doing in the airport hotel room. We were meeting with published, these men were actually quite troubled by what they were doing. And that's what we were doing in the airport hotel room. We were meeting with one of these men. I'm going to call him Ola. Ola Nordman is just the Norwegian equivalent of John Doe. So Ola had just returned from vacation with his family. They were in the hotel with him. He's got a wife and kids, and they have no idea about his online life. They were spending the night at the hotel,

and then they were going to go into their hometown. And he told his wife and kids that he was going out for a walk, but he was coming to meet with us. So before even meeting him, here's a guy I have some really complicated feelings about. His online life is absolutely reprehensible. But the fact that he was willing to meet with us, that was actually pretty compelling.

Because you've got to keep in mind, there are people out there who hunt down, who lure pedophiles into secluded places to dole out vigilante justice. So just meeting with us, that actually took some guts. I admire that, that you're willing to do that. Why are you talking to us? I mean, it's amazing.

Yeah, because I try to understand why this is happening to me, why I have these thoughts, and how can I get help? And I have tried several things, and I haven't found anyone to help me.

I think many men like me feel the same. Why? Why? Why? Why? What to do about it? And is it possible to get help when everybody's want to kill you and hang you and beat you up? So Ulla was there because he was desperate. It was actually clear. You could tell it just by looking at him. I think if I were to see him walking down the street, I wouldn't think, oh, there's a pedophile. There's a creep.

There's a monster. I probably would have thought there's a guy who's just been diagnosed with a terminal illness. He looked broken. So on one hand, you have someone like Warhead, who's at the heart of our series. He's a pedophile, but he's also an active child molester and a major figure in the world of online child abuse, and someone ultimately without much remorse. But Warhead isn't representative of most pedophiles. Guys like Ola, he probably is. Now, pedophilia seems to be the way people are made, whether or not they ever act on those desires or not. Ola told us he's never touched a child and that he's confident

he never will. He says his predilection is limited to just looking at stuff on the internet, just, but only doing that. I didn't have any way of confirming that, but I tend to believe him. My point, though, is that pedophilia isn't something you can cure. You can't program it out of people. Ola, like other pedophiles, is stuck the way he is. It's hard to get an exact number, but researchers think that anywhere between 1% to 4% of the male population may have pedophilic interests. It's a big, big number.

We don't yet understand why, and we don't yet understand what to do about it, which is troubling. It's troubling for the general population. It's also troubling for a lot of pedophiles, including Ola. Ola's attempted suicide. He's seen a number of therapists, but none of them have been able to help him stay off child abuse sites. Now, there is some effective therapy out there, but the issue is that it's designated for men who have already committed crimes, already harmed kids. So the long and short of it is that Ola's on his own. He's caught between wanting to control his urges and having no idea how to do that. And in that respect, he's like a lot of men out there. I think many of these guys are like me.

are like me when they log on they get in that set of mind and when they are done finished and log off maybe they do like me and hate myself and and try to figure out ways to die or I have thrown away three or four computers in the ocean to get rid of and try to get rid of this. I'm really curious

to know how many men out there are like Ola. Men who are stuck in a cycle, they don't have the power to break. I don't have a number, I don't think anyone does. But I think it's probably a staggering figure. What I'm more certain of is that we need a way to help these men hold themselves accountable. And that's precisely what Ola wants too. So here's a guy I was expecting to hate. A guy who looks at child abuse material, who helps sustain a nightmarish market run by apex predators like Warhead, but also someone who's so desperate for help

that he's willing to put himself at risk by meeting strangers. I loathe what Ola does, but I do feel for him a bit. I found myself thinking how terrible it must be to live with this kind of affliction. This makes you paranoid. I live in a secluded area. Every time I hear a car, I think it's the police. I have a lot of pills, which, yeah.

So you've got a plan to kill yourself if you think you're going to be arrested? Yeah. Yes. I can't imagine living like that. Oh, it's hard. Until I spoke with Ola, I don't think I cared

that we didn't have much to offer him. Let him rot, right? Let him take that ampule of pills. I think we have to be honest and admit that that's how a lot of us, maybe most of us, think about pedophiles. It's a completely understandable response. But the reality is, if you have a problem you can't talk about, what do you do? You go to the internet.

And that's exactly part of the problem here. Because on the internet are all those dark corners populated by people who help normalize your desires, who welcome you into a subculture that encourages you to follow through on those desires. Forms that give explicit instructions on how to facilitate child abuse and sites that revel and celebrate in that abuse. That is precisely, precisely what happened to Warhead. So how do we stop men like Ola from becoming men like Warhead? Because ultimately that's a key goal in protecting kids. Now these men must hold themselves responsible. That's clear. They don't

get a pass. But it's also clear they can't do this on their own. They need help. They need our help. So here's the question I'm left with. Are we willing to see these people as flawed human beings as opposed to monsters? And are we willing to help them get the help they need? Thank you. Well, one of the things when I talk to people in various speeches across the country is about the cynicism about media. And it's hard to be cynical about media when I hear you guys talk about what you do and why you care about it and what you're going to be doing next.

It really is impressive. Some of you I never got a chance to speak to until today. And I've really, really enjoyed it. And I think we should all show our appreciation for these fine journalists. You can hear all of their shows online at cbc.ca

slash podcast. A big thank you to CBC Podcast and producer Andrew Friesen and allison broverman who did a lot of work on this they're over there and to the whole team at the hot dogs podcast festival thank you very much for coming out bye-bye for more cbc podcasts go to cbc.ca slash podcasts