Uncover - S19: "Run, Hide, Repeat" E3: The Weird World

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

Based on her mother and Stan’s stunning revelations, Pauline and her brother Ted start sifting through their childhood memories and matching them to the once unexplained events. Stan and Ruth, now openly a couple, are going deep undercover — and they want Pauline to join them. Pauline must choose between joining her mother in the unknown and leaving behind everyone else she loves in the world she knows. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/run-hide-repeat-transcripts-listen-1.6682766

I distinctly remember hearing someone yell, stop that van. From CBC Podcasts, an investigation into how young men are being recruited and radicalized on the internet. And she asked me if I was friends with a guy named Alec Manassian. By a new supercharged form of hate. On Facebook, police say he wrote the incel rebellion has already begun. A dark online subculture that's spilling over into the real world. Boys Like Me, available now on CBC Listen and everywhere you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast.

That night at the Bluebird Motel turned into a weekend. It was 1988. I was 23. I'd been told that my father, Warren Dakin, was a powerful figure in the world of organized crime, that my brother, my mom, and I were in grave danger. I learned that the man I had believed for most of my life to be a close family friend, my mother's confidant, the Reverend Stan Sears, he was working for the government, part of an anti-organized crime task force. anti-organized crime task force.

It was just this unrelenting deluge of information that kind of upended the world. I can't imagine, like, what... My producer Michael is visiting me at my home in Halifax. I'm trying to describe that weekend at the Bluebird Motel, how it was revelation after revelation. And I remember at some point Stan said, okay, I think that's a whole lot for tonight and we're going to go to bed now. And I remember lying in this motel room and, you know, just completely overwhelmed,

but also so aware that Stan and my mom are in the next room together. And this was the first time I thought of them as a couple. And that just seemed really strange and uncomfortable to me. So there was just so much. And then the next day, Stan said, you know, that was a lot of heavy stuff. Why don't we just have a nice drive? And we went into Fundy National Park and drove around, and we stopped for a coffee.

And at some point he said that there were people protecting us that were around. And what was that day like? It must have just, like, I can't imagine, like, even remembering any of it, just being in shock. I remember I was driving for at least some of it, and I put my Walkman on because I just wanted to shut them out. And so I'm driving along with the Walkman playing.

I remember Stan telling me at one point, the guys say you're a good driver. I looked back and I couldn't see anyone following us, but Stan assured me that was their job, to be there, always unseen, watching over us. It was meant to reassure me, let me know that I was safe, but to me, it was unnerving. reassure me, let me know that I was safe, but to me, it was unnerving.

How would he explain, the guys say you're a good driver, like how, were they communicating with him in that moment? How were they doing that? Well, he had this little transponder thing in his wallet that was hidden behind the lining of his wallet, and he could receive code, and they would send him short messages. But if there were longer messages, he would always have a notebook, and he'd start writing down all this stuff, and then he'd figure it out, cipher it out. When the weekend was ending, and I was getting ready to go, Stan asked me if I'd be okay with letting the guys hide a tracking device on my car, just in case. I agreed to it. The next morning when I was getting ready to leave, Stan took one more safety precaution.

He handed me what looked like a small transistor radio, something made of cheap plastic that you'd pick up at any electronics store. He told me it had been modified, and he showed me how to set the dials and adjust the antenna so that I could use it as an SOS beacon, to let the guys know I was in danger. But, he said, only use it in extreme emergencies, because people will come, and that means putting themselves in harm's way. So I drove off from Sussex back to St. John, and my head was just swimming.

And then I had to go back to my life and, you know, I had been told you can't tell anybody any of this. You know, it's a matter of security. Don't tell anybody. And so I went home with this terrible secret, kind of trying to figure out how real is this? Like, what does this mean? I found the possibility of it horrifying. You know, either organized crime was coming for us or my mother and Stan, essentially my parents, have lost their minds and I suddenly feel rootless. I suddenly feel rootless. I'm Pauline Dakin, and this is Run, Hide, Repeat.

Episode 3, The Weird World. These are the letters. This is them. This is them. These are some of them. You know, these are a small number of them. And all the envelopes with all the initials of approval and so on to come to me. So, yeah. There's some from my half-sister.

Michael and I are in my dining room. Spread out over the table is a stack of letters. Yeah, there are dozens of them. Yeah, and they're all quite distinctive in terms of their style and their writing and the paper and the pens. It's quite amazing. They're a physical reminder of the time in my life when my world had been completely upended, when the line between truth and fiction was just so blurred. When did you start getting the letters?

They started coming almost right away after the revelation at the Bluebird Motel. And one of the first ones was from Stan, actually. Do you have that one here? I have that here. March 19th, 1988, so just about three weeks, just over three weeks after the Bluebird Motel. Dear Pauline, just a wee note before I travel to my next destination. As always, these few days with your mother have meant much. The last one enriched by having you with us. To know and appreciate your understanding of the whole

complicated world we find ourselves in and also your acceptance of our relationship, which has become so deep and real and vital over many years, adds real joy to life for me and us. I once told you that if I had a daughter, I'd like her to be like you. A blood-related daughter your mom and I can't have, but in you I find that which is very close. Sincerely, with love, Papa. When did you start calling him Papa? Oh, yeah.

Well, it was after everything was revealed about, you know, what had been going on through our lives. And at some point, you know, he said to me that, you know, he had always felt very close to me. And I said, well, I always felt like you were a dad. And he asked me to call him Papa. And that was just sometime after the Bluebird Motel. How did you feel about that? time after the Bluebird Motel. How did you feel about that? It felt as though it should be the right thing. I never felt 100% comfortable with it, maybe just because it was Papa. I mean, it's a very, like, Papa is like what a small child would say, and you were well in your 20s at that point. Mm-hmm. He was looking for alternatives to Dad because I associated Dad with Warren, and he wanted something that I wouldn't associate or would never have associated with Warren. As much as I was reeling from everything Stan and my mom had told me about my family

I was also grappling with the way our relationships were shifting had you ever suspected that your mom and Stan had a romantic relationship before they told you that was the case so you know as a kid I used to think oh Stan is such a great guy I wish he was my dad you know because he was always there in a dad role and very supportive and then when as a teenager you know he'd be around the house you know a few evenings a week he would drop by for tea on his way home from a church meeting. And when I would come in, they would be in two separate chairs in the living room. And it just felt like, it didn't feel like anything romantic to me. The thing was that mom was crying and there were these letters. And so it felt like they had some secret between them about whatever those papers were. I didn't think that looked romantic

because mom was crying. Did you make the connection, like when you started getting those, these letters that we're looking at, when you started getting these letters, did you make that connection between the documents, the letters that you had seen your mom and Stan looking at all those years before? Oh, absolutely. Well, she used to get buckets of letters every time that she saw Stan. So yeah, I immediately realized what all those papers had been. And in fact, I remember at some point when I was a teenager, she had a cabinet built in her bedroom with a lock on it. And then I realized what that had always been about. It was all the letters.

And every once in a while, Stan would say, you have to burn them. It's not safe to keep them. But that's what they were. It's hard to remember just how many letters came to me over the years. The few dozen I have left are just a fraction. I responded to most of them. I wrote almost as many letters as I received, sometimes just a quick note, sometimes pages long.

It all added up to a near-constant chorus of voices, my own included, that didn't just repeat the story that Stan and Mom had told me, but expanded on it too. It was overwhelming. Many of the letters were from people I knew, often relatives or family friends, and they described how the O's network had extended to other members of my family, in particular those connected to my dad. This one came from my godfather. October 5th. Dear P, finally your godfather can write and be honest with you. Hard to realize you are an adult and no longer a little blonde girl, lost, in a sense sense because of your dad.

Others came from my half-sister Linda, my dad's daughter from his first marriage. Her distinctive, loopy, backslanted script is instantly recognizable to me. October 1st, 1989. Dear Sister P, how utterly wonderful to receive your letter. To know that there is a chance of us being part of a real family and sharing that, at least by letter and maybe one day face to face. In Linda's letter and in others, there was often the sense of atonement for some wrongdoing in the past.

Once, I was a very poor and miserable half-sister. Would have used you in whatever way I could get from you. Now, in a more deep sense, we can be more than half-sisters. Linda's brother Tom also wrote to me. December 26th, 1989. Dear P, I was really pleased to receive your letter. Each day we keep hoping to hear that you three are safely in. I am sure that every day that it is prolonged adds to the frustration for all. Those words, safely in. Safely in where?

So the envelopes are just addressed to usually Miss P or P, P.F. at one point, Sister P, and on the back and various places, you can see different initials, OK via LTGGFPH. That means that Stan is bringing them to me from PH. Some of them don't actually have all that. They just have initials across the back, which say they've been approved. via ACS PH AV. I'm not sure what that means. So it's keeping track of what is coming in and out of Place of Hope. PH, Place of Hope. That was the source of all these letters. That night at the Bluebird Motel, Stan had told me Place of Hope was hidden deep in the wilderness of British Columbia. The people who lived there jokingly called it the weird world. They talked about being inside or outside. The letters were coming from inside to me and mom. We were on the outside.

I first heard about Place of Hope when Stan and mom were answering the big question of why. Why had we disappeared and moved and slunk away from our lives? And why was everything such a secret all the time? And that was part of the explanation. such a secret all the time. And that was part of the explanation. My mom and Stan had described a world full of good guys and bad guys, and PH was run by the good guys, including Stan. The safety of the people working and living there

depended on absolute, unwavering secrecy. It was kind of like a protective custody community where people like my family who had been targeted could go inside, go into this place where they'd be protected and safe. But it was also a penal colony essentially for people who were caught up with organized crime and arrested and they were brought inside and tried by military tribunal and imprisoned there. The bad guys, they were my dad's associates and others involved in organized crime. When they were arrested and brought into PH, they were treated humanely, and some, Stan said, were rehabilitated. If that happened, they were given the chance to work with the good guys and trade their prison cells for living quarters, slowly earning the

trust of the people who'd once hunted them. The most trusted sometimes even worked as double agents or were part of the security details that protected people like my family. And then there was, you know, it was also a military base with all of the infrastructure to, you know, run the prison and take care of the people and also do the work of trying to find out what organized crime was up to and trying to, you know, all of that business of a task force on organized crime.

Stan told me that my godfather and half-siblings had been drawn into organized crime by my dad, but they were among those who'd been rehabilitated and taken on new roles inside the weird world. It seemed unbelievable, but I'd never been close with my half-siblings. We hadn't been in touch much for years. It might have been improbable, but it wasn't impossible. July 16th, 1988. Dear P, I've just been recalling the time when you and your brother were small and I sent you moccasins made by my people.

How quickly the seasons pass. Now both you and your brother are adults in an adult world that holds some very evil things, as well as much that is good. Other letters came from people I'd never met. This one was signed Lieutenant Y. I remember getting those moccasins. I was eight or nine. At the time, my mom wouldn't say who they were from, just that they came from a friend who cared about us. They were one of many small, mysterious gifts that my brother Ted and I received when we were kids.

Do you remember how we used to, every year, come home at some point at Christmastime and there'd be a box of oranges on the front porch or the front step and you remember we always got presents from people we didn't know those were always from the people protecting us from people inside or protecting us the oranges were from the guys protecting us yeah but remember you had these two little Christmas bells and I had the little set of angels, and they were from... I forget the name of the people.

You don't remember the name? No, I don't. But the people that probably tried to kill us at some point, that felt guilty, and now they're sending us presents? Yes, because they were saved, and they found new life. They were lifers. Yeah. When Stan and Mom told us everything, Ted was in

Vancouver. He'd moved back after university. But we quickly found ourselves living in a strange space that existed somewhere between inside and outside Place of Hope. We started to sort through our shared memories, re-examining events from the past in light of everything we'd been told, trying to make sense of what was happening. I mean, obviously, the things that happened when we were younger that were then later explained, obviously, the furnace apparently going out and us having to jump in a car and go to Stan and Sybil's to stay overnight. So with that one, what was the story later about that?

Well, the story was that it was an excuse to get us out of the house without scaring us, because the O was on their way to come and get us. And they decided to put us all in one place because they didn't have enough people available to cover both our houses. Was anything really the way that we remembered it? Was there something sinister behind all of our childhood memories? Everything felt uncertain, murky. We started remembering details from the past, like the moccasins that Lieutenant Y had sent us,

or a camping trip where Stan had acted bizarrely. And I just remember he spent most of the day sitting in a chair, a folding chair or one of these, whatever. Camp chairs? Camp chairs. Out of fire? Just couldn't remember anything. He couldn't make sense of anything.

He was delirious. But no one seemed, you know, no one was worried was worried you know we didn't rush him off the hospital or anything which would seem like the right thing to do if someone's lost their memory even in the short term you know it was later explained that he had been poisoned or something and that it made him lose his memory and just the stories were the strangest things and trying to explain how things happened, I mean, for me, you know, trying to deal with the thought that it might be real, and leading your life based on that, you know, being very careful, always looking over your shoulder. The letters, like the one from Lieutenant Y, those stories that Ted talks about,

they had another important function. They always served to remind me how serious the threats from the O were and how hard Stan and his men were working to protect my family. The next few weeks are going to be grim ones for many of us. We are glad you, your mom, and papa will be together, for some of that at least. The way they described the conflict, they sounded like letters from the front lines of a war. We expect many injuries and losses. To what extent, we cannot say. But they will be heavy.

I really started out to say that no matter how unreal a lot of things appear to be, they are not. And so, take them seriously. From the time Stan and Sybil left St. John, up until 1988, they'd been living and working in Maitland, a small village about an hour outside of Halifax, where Stan was ostensibly keeping up his cover as a church minister. He was getting older and had decided to retire. He and Sybil had moved back to BC. When he and my mom met me at the Bluebird, I thought that's where he still was,

happily retired, living with his wife on the West Coast. But Stan told me with preaching behind him, he'd devoted himself to the anti-crime task force. He'd moved to Place of Hope and both lived and worked there full-time. He was able to come out sometimes for visits but it was always fraught and dangerous. So when he went inside, Sybil decided not to go with him. Sybil said, nope I'm staying right here. They had a little place in Gibsons BC and so that was what was going to clear the way for mom to go inside with Stan. So that was the moment that they knew they had to tell me because they were waiting for the all clear for her to, you know, disappear one more time and go

there. They told me they'd been in love for a long time, but because of Stan's marriage to Sybil, they could never act on it. Stan was a minister, a man of faith, and that meant he was faithful to his wife. And my mother, she respected that. But now my mom and Stan could finally be together. All my mom had to do was walk away from her life and join him. It was disorienting. I could barely understand what they were telling me. But that wasn't all. Just now, I know that you are frustrated and hurting over the long delay in coming home. Believe me, that day will come.

May the three of you enjoy, as much as possible, your time together. Sincerely, Lieutenant Y. Stan and my mother wanted me to come with them, inside the weird world. 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. Mom had kept this secret from Ted and me for decades, and now she wanted me to take an unimaginable leap of faith. She wanted me to accept that everything she and Stan told me was true and follow them to a place I'd never seen, from which I might never be able to leave. When they told me all of this that night in Sussex, New Brunswick, I didn't know what to say. I was completely overwhelmed. I told Mom and Stan I'd think about it and went back to my life in St. John. Anger, fear, sadness, they all came in waves. I was at times furious at my mother for how she'd

uprooted my life over something that seemed unbelievable. But I was equally terrified by the prospect that it might be true. Mom was smart, competent. I trusted her. I couldn't imagine a world in which she'd have subjected us to all of this upheaval over a fantasy. But the strongest feeling of all was a sense of impending loss. Whether I believed her story or not, whether I was going to follow her and Stan into the unknown, either way, all I knew was that I needed to be closer to Mom. So I decided to leave St. John. I quit my job as a reporter at the local newspaper, a job I loved, and I ended my relationship with my partner at the time.

I packed up and moved to Halifax. No plan. I found a cheap one-bedroom apartment close to my mom. After I'd been in Halifax about a year, I met a man named Kevin. We fell in love and got engaged. But if we were going to be married, I knew I had to tell him all of it. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting his reaction to be. Maybe he'd look at me with terror, decide I'd lost my

mind and run for the hills. But he didn't. He was kind, accepting. He loved and trusted me, and for him, that was all that mattered. He said he'd follow me inside. We told Mom and Stan we'd both take the leap of faith. Stan visited from PH to meet him and warn him of the importance of secrecy. And then later, he gave me away at the wedding when Kevin and I were married. I was building a life with my husband. And then, when Stan gave us all the go-ahead, we moved to Place of Hope. And then, when Stan gave us all the go-ahead, we moved to Place of Hope. But for the time being, we were in a holding pattern, waiting.

I busied myself with a new job. In Halifax, Pauline Dakin, MITV. Do you remember the first time we met? Yes, I think one of us said to you, so have you won any beauty contests? And you looked at us and went, no. We said, okay, because we just find these days that a lot of the reporters coming in are former beauty pageant contestants,

and we don't have a lot of patience with them. Such snippy young women. Private television. Private television, yeah. But then I found out you had cats, and I thought, oh, maybe she's okay. Kelly Ryan was an animal lover, but she was also the station's star reporter,

a smart, fierce, determined investigator, an award winner. She'd go on to be a senior reporter for CBC National Radio News. We became fast friends, and we're still close to this day. We introduced our husbands, and they got along, and that was big. Yeah. And that was big. And then we used to spend every Saturday night watching Star Trek. My work at MITV gave me a sense of purpose. I was meeting new people, creating a good life on the outside. Time passed.

The wait to go inside dragged on. There was always something. The timing was never quite right. And that waiting, it led to doubts. I'd go up and down the mental list of reasons I should or shouldn't believe. Kevin lost faith in the story, and we stopped talking about that future in PH. I knew I needed to talk to someone with no emotional connection to the story. Over time, I'd come to trust my friend Kelly. So eventually, I decided to tell her. What do you remember about that day? I think it was on a Friday. I don't know why we weren't working, but we weren't.

Kelly and I took a road trip to Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley, an hour from Halifax. And on the drive back, we went into Tim Hortons, which is right on the highway there. And you said, let's get coffee. And it's such a nice day. Let's sit outside. I want to talk to you about something. Okay. And so we sat there, and you just, you looked so drained. It's the only word I can think of. You just looked like you had nothing left.

And it was a dramatic change from an hour earlier. You know, you said, I have to tell you about this. And you sat and told me this most bizarre story. And at first I thought, well, this is crazy. And then, of course, because my entire journalistic career, my motto was just because they're crazy doesn't mean they're wrong. And I thought, well, it could be. Maybe it could be. And then you went home and I went back to my house and was terrified all night because every noise I thought it's them. It's them. The car was bugged. They heard us talk on the drive back.

And now they're coming for me. And I was so scared. And it was such a crazy story. It was such a crazy story. So what made it believable to you? You, primarily. Because I knew you quite well. And you weren't a flake.

You weren't some easily led idiot. I think what was clear to me was the importance of your mother and Stan in your life and how devastating it would be if it wasn't true. It wasn't true. And you know me. Oh, my God, how many crazy people did I interview? Half of them turned out to have a story, and they were crazy because no one had listened to them for years. So that was sort of my thinking was, well, I've interviewed lots of people who everyone else said, don't waste your time. The crazy person calling the newsroom trying to get someone to tell their story.

Yeah. And I had spent a lot of time with a lot of those people. And 50% of them had great stories, like real honest to goodness stories. So just because it's crazy doesn't mean it's not true. And as a journalist, that's what we often do. We cover the craziest, most unlikely things. That's what makes them news. Yep. So that's what we're doing. And I remember you covering the Hells Angels and having RCMP protection. It was RCMP protection ordered by the Solicitor General. There you go.

Organized crime exists. Organized crime exists. And they're angry. But you were the main factor. And you were so downtrodden by it when you told me the story. And you just were oozing emotional pain. And I thought, well,

there must be a possibility here because she's not a lightweight. And she spent a lot of time thinking about this. And if it was just crazy, Pauline would have already come to that conclusion. Just as I was moving forward with my life, a new marriage, a new job, Ted was doing the same in Vancouver. He'd moved out west after university, partly out of a desire to have more of a relationship with our dad. Ted lived with dad for a while when he first got to BC, before he found a place of his own. But now, how could he continue rebuilding

his relationship with our father after all he'd been told. That dad wasn't only an organized crime boss, but was actively trying to harm him, his sister, his mother. I went to Vancouver and I started spending time with dad. And even after I found out of all this stuff, I mean, I would still see my dad once or twice or three times a week at least. Ted never said a word to dad about any of it. Stan and mom had made it clear that to do so would be disastrous. The stakes were too high.

People's lives were at risk. And besides, the person that Ted was seeing two or three times a week, he wasn't really our dad. So did they tell you he was a devil? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, he wasn't real. Stan and Mom told us that our father had been captured in a raid

and that the real Warren Dakin was now imprisoned at Place of Hope. They couldn't completely take him away because they needed somebody there to maintain the role or whatever, you know, be too suspicious and all those kinds. So a government agent with a similar build replaced him. Stan described how prosthetics and special training allowed the agent to pass as my dad in day-to-day life and to gather intelligence on organized crime, the O. You know, when they told me that, I mean, I'm like, of course you're nuts. But then I went and the next time I saw him and I looked at him

and I knew it was, you know, you know it's him. It seems crazy to even say you know it's him. Of course you know it's him. That was freaky, though, sitting there with him sometimes. You know, you're watching every move. You're watching every, you know, listening to every word. Trying to think, okay, would dad ever say that? You know, when you do that, is that his gesture? You know, like, what's he going to do? I mean, is the door going to bust open and they're going to tell me I need to join the organized crime or not? I learned from the letters I got that dad wasn't the only prisoner

inside PH who'd been replaced by a double on the outside. My half-sister Linda was another. You likely know the story of why I am here. It is not a pretty story, but I thank my God I am a new person and wouldn't trade life in this world for anything out there. I learned she'd been involved in human trafficking and prostitution. She told me she'd found a new and better life inside, thanks in part to Stan. Acting Colonel Sears tells me you call him Papa. Do you mind if I do also? I'd like to get away from all the dad recalls and all the hurt it brings to mind. If you don't want me to call him Papa, don't be afraid to say so.

I don't want to infringe on what is yours. Linda's brother, Tom, had also been taken into custody and replaced. Each day we keep hoping to hear that you three are safely in and that we can really go ahead and plan our party. I'm sure that every day it is prolonged adds to the frustration for all. We had a slight problem of violence here a little while ago. A few minor injuries, but thankfully that is all. My godfather? Another double. You

likely have more friends and relatives in here than out there. It is here for many of us that real life has been found. The days you once knew me, I was one horrible person deserving of the most severe punishment that could be given out. Now I am forgiven. Even my godfather's wife had been replaced. Tell your mom I often think of the time out there when I wanted to come clean with her and tell her the truth about certain people. But I was afraid to. And also worried she wouldn't believe me.

I'm sorry. There were others, too, all imprisoned within PH, a carefully orchestrated cast of doubles standing in for them on the outside. I could have picked up the phone and called any of them. Maybe I would have heard something slightly off in their voices, but what good would it have done? Either way, they'd deny the story. If they were doubles, then denying it was part of their job. And if they weren't, well,

what would it achieve other than to convince a few near strangers that I was a lunatic? With every letter that arrived, there were new stories about this incredible, unseen and unheard battle between good and evil. With my family in the middle of it all. Ted and I were being asked to keep all of this a secret. We were told we couldn't trust anyone. My father's influence was wide-reaching, and betrayal of Stan and Mom's trust could be disastrous. I've always been a little bit of a penny-pencher, and I refused to buy a TV, So my roommate said, well, we can

rent one from Granada. And I said, okay. So we went down there and there's this tall, blonde, handsome man renting and selling TVs at Granada. And it happened to be your brother. And that's how our relationship started. our relationship started. Just as I'd met and married Kevin, Ted had found Elaine Hewson. They're divorced now, but she and Ted had been together for about a year when Stan

and my mom came to visit. That's when they told Ted the same story I'd heard at the Bluebird. I think your mom had come to Vancouver and Ted came back from visiting his mom. And, you know, I was told this story. My reaction would have been like,

oh my goodness, this is unbelievable, right? Oh my goodness, there's... And, you know, how could this happen? Like, how could this happen without everybody knowing, you know? But then at the same time, I think it's so unbelievable that you kind of, and you're getting to know a family. So it's sort of like, well, this is obviously something. Well, Elaine and I were married, and she was pregnant with Tessa. And we were living in West Point Gray with my roommates.

We were driving back from somewhere and a car behind us got really close behind us. And of course, I was always looking in the mirror and started flashing its lights and I thought well this seems kind of peculiar so I sped up a bit to see if if they would back off or you know fall back or whatever and they didn't and you know of course I was pretty freaked out thinking here we go you know something's going to happen maybe you know maybe this is real and I kept going faster and they kept going faster and before I knew it I don't know how fast we're going it felt like a million miles an hour but we're going way too fast for a city road for sure and I just all I could think of was get to somewhere where there was people lights you know there was a dark road

and and it was nighttime of course and I thought well I got to get somewhere so I managed to get drive into a gas station and I kind of wheeled in there doing 80 and the car that was following us kind of went to the end of the block past the gas station and stopped at a set of lights with a whole bunch of other cars. All I remember is I jumped out of the car, and I just absolutely had to see who the hell was in this car. I didn't care. You know, I just wanted to know,

because I thought this is the opportunity to figure this thing out and see if there's anything to it or not. So I ran over, and I kind of jumped over the hood of the car and went after the driver, trying to open the door, and the light changed and off they went. Not every incident was so dramatic, but there was always a looming sense of menace, the feeling that danger, or at least the potential for danger, was everywhere. The O could be around every corner, always.

I think you really thought, at times, you thought that, you know, you were going to fight for your life and you had to protect. Seems amazing, doesn't it? I just feel bad for, you know, I feel bad for Elaine about this. Ted had also been given one of the small radio transmitters that Stan gave to me to be used in case of an emergency to contact help. It was just a piece of crap from Radio Shack. Nothing special. I remember opening it up and there was nothing in there that looked like it

wasn't made by the manufacturer. Of course you did. Turned it on a few times, pushed a few buttons, did whatever I was supposed to do and waited for the cavalry to come and no one ever showed up. I tested the radio out once, too, when I heard a fight outside my apartment door in Halifax. There was no response. When Mom relayed this to Stan, he replied the next day that someone had come after me

and my protectors had been injured in deflecting them and were unable to let me know this. When things went wrong, when the cavalry didn't come, there was always an explanation. And for Ted and Elaine, that exhaustion led to doubt. And what kind of conversations were you and Ted having about all of this? It would come up, you know, when I met Stan and all that kind of stuff, where he told me that, you know, if I ever told my parents that they would be replaced with doubles, and that's where I went, yeah, that is not happening. You know, and I've been thinking about this for a long time is like, how could somebody absolutely not understand that, you know, your parents, there's a smell

that they have, there's, there's this relationship that you have. And how could you have a double replace that, you know? So that was probably my instigator with Ted is like, this isn't true. There's something wrong with the story. You know, we should really just go to the RCMP and tell them the story and see what they have to say. CMP and tell them the story and see what they have to say. And I just wanted to talk to somebody who I thought was stable and that would probably keep it confidential. And someone that's, you know, might have a reasonable knowledge of, you know, if this is even a possibility, you know, because anything's possible.

I went down to the police station and just said, I need to talk to somebody. It's an urgent matter. It's, you know, I don't even remember what I said, but I managed to get into what ended up being probably an interrogation room of some sort. I'm sure this guy never saw it coming. What did he say? He was like, wow. He says, are you kidding me? And I said, no, I'm not kidding.

And what was his message to you? Nothing really. I mean, it was just like, okay, wow. So this isn't possible. He said, no, it's not possible. Why did he say that? You know, like things like, you know, I would say, well, there's somewhere where they keep all these guys and there's hundreds of people in a compound that's hidden away from their bases. And in this day and age, there's nothing, nothing can be hidden like that. You know, impossible. Someone wouldn't have seen it and asked the question, which is true. Really, if you think about it. Right.

So you walked away from there thinking what? Trying to figure out what on earth we're going to do to get out of this thing. Meaning, you know, how can we possibly get mom out of this? At this point, you said, I don't believe this. Mom's caught up in some kind of weird thing. Like I never, like, like I never believed it. Believed it. But you believed it.

You know, it's, how could your mother ever do this to you? Because you knew that she loved you? You know, there's no question it was, she loved us more than any else in the world. So unless it was true, how could she do this? It's a hard thing to explain, believing and not believing something at the same time. I think you can do it for a while, maybe even for a long while, but it catches up to you. You can only exist in that in-between space,

that weird world, for so long. How much do you think this had to do with you and Elaine splitting up? I'm sure it didn't help. Yeah. By the time we finally split up, I think all this was no longer a factor in our lives, but it was probably certainly enough to not allow our relationship to continue growing,

that's for sure. For me, it became less a question of belief than one of loss. What was I willing to lose? When Ted talked about his growing skepticism, I was quiet about my own feelings. He was ready to accept the consequences of saying it wasn't real, but I wasn't. My love for my mother, the terrible grief I felt when I imagined our relationship being severed, those feelings were real. What else mattered? Once Kevin and I had committed to going inside, it soon became clear that there was always something preventing it.

Threats from the O, terrible things would happen to any of Mom's family left behind if she were to disappear. Awful things were always close by. So one time Stan was visiting and he and Mom and I were on a little road trip in Cape Breton. Cape Breton was always a good place to go because there were fewer people, so the people protecting us could more easily see who was around and track license plates and so on. And Stan gets a message, the little transponder in the lining of his wallet.

It was like he'd been punched. He just, he had a physical reaction, and he groaned, and he said that he'd just gotten a message that we need help. We've discovered a ship that's been abandoned and is floating just off the coast of Nova Scotia, and there are all these people on it who are either dead or dying or in terrible shape. And as we drove along, he was just getting other messages and updates. And it had been a case of, you know, an organized crime ring had kidnapped people

and they brought in surgeons harvesting their organs to sell on the black market. And some of these people were dead and some were suffering. And could we help? Like, could we get bandages? Could we drive down to meet the ship? It was all hands on deck. This was a terrible crisis. And so we said, of course. And in the back of my mind i'm thinking really i'm actually going to see some of the people from

the weird world in real life i'm going to be pitching in on deck or on shore or something so we drove we picked up supplies sheets to for bandages and various things, and a couple of hours on our way to Yarmouth, where the ship was supposed to come ashore in southwest Nova Scotia, like a five, five-and-a-half-hour drive. A couple hours in, we get another message. Stand down. The ship's going into St. John now on the other side of the bay. So thanks very much. We don't need you now.

What was your reaction after that? I thought, yeah, of course. That was a big moment for me in terms of just thinking, nothing ever actually happens unless it's, you know, my car is stolen and that gets wrapped into a story. And you, yeah, you said you, a few months later, you saw like a news report, right? It was sometime that same summer I

remember back in the days of getting a newspaper at your door and the paper arrived and I'm reading it and there's a story about a ship full of illegal immigrants off the coast of the U.S. whose organs were being harvested to be sold on the black market. And that was just like a, you know, one of those moments you think, oh, okay, maybe that's real. But I couldn't sustain those moments much longer, couldn't just trust what I was told anymore. If Stan and Mom wanted me to keep believing in the weird world,

I needed proof. And I was devising a way to get it. Next time on Run, Hide, Repeat. I remember you calling me quite scared. You said, it's the people, these people that have been watching. And now they know where I live. And they've broken into the car. And they're going to come into the house next. And you were very angry because you didn't know what the reality was. You needed to know whether it was true or not. You set up the sting. I think a lot about, you know, what made her so vulnerable.

Have you thought about that? Yes, absolutely. And he found her at a point in time in her life where she was very vulnerable. Deeply depressed. Yeah. You've been listening to Run, Hide, Repeat from CBC Podcasts. I'm Pauline Dakin. The show was written and produced by myself and Michael Catano. Graham MacDonald is our associate producer and sound designer. Roshni Nair is our coordinating producer.

Special thanks to Eunice Kim for her help with this series. Our senior producer is Willow Smith. Our executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. And Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts. Thank you. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.