Uncover - S2 "Bomb On Board" E2: The Suspects

Episode Date: November 16, 2018

Gambling, gunpowder, murder charges and insurance claims. Almost immediately police narrowed in on four suspects. Ian and Jo find out why. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/uncover/uncover-season-2-bomb-on-board-transcripts-listen-1.5129876

The news can be hard to keep up with, but sometimes I want to spend a bit more time with a story that's made headlines. That's why I produce CBC's Understood podcast. We've covered the rise and fall of Sam Bankman Freed, the scandals surrounding Canada's very own Pornhub, the controversial leader of India. Our most recent series is about the bizarre alchemy that made Celine Dion the enduring star that she is. Each season of Understood is a short, four-episode immersive experience with a host who knows the story best. Follow so you never miss a season. This is a CBC Podcast. Previously on Bomb on Board.

Three staccato cries of May Day and an eyewitness report of a mid-air explosion. This was not an accident. This was pure murder. We were told nothing, and we wanted to know. I knew before I even left out there that we knew it had been blown up. It's remarkable to me that a human being could decide to blow up a plane full of strangers. So many lives were impacted by this. They knew who was responsible. I'm Ian Hanamansing.

And I'm Johanna Wagstaff. From CBC's Uncover. This is Bomb On Board. Investigating one of the largest unsolved mass murders on Canadian soil. The crash of CP Flight 21. Chapter 2. So, we're pulling up to... Can I park there?

Yeah, right here. No, you know what, you can't. Okay. You could walk around 100 Mile today and have no idea about this painful moment in the community's history until you go to the visitor center. So we're looking at the tourist information office right now, which is a beautiful little log cabin, almost like a ski chalet style.

Before we met Didi, before we met Chuck and Dave, before Ken showed us his dad's diary and hinted at his dad's suspicions, we came here. Hi, I'm Valerie. I'm an information counselor, so what I do is I tell them where to go and how to get there. So on this map here, which is our local map, if they're heading down south, we point out points of interest to them for them to stop at. Underneath the counter here is a file folder, and it's filled with documents.

Do you want to do it here, or do you want to do it at the desk? Police reports, RCMP memos, transcripts from the coroner's court, press clippings. And among those documents may be the answer to who put that bomb on board CP-21. And was it really a passenger? that bomb on board CP-21? And was it really a passenger? Let's take a look at the newspaper clippings. So this is the morning after.

And on the front page of the Vancouver Sun, in huge print, bomb plot probed in BC air crash, 52 aboard killed. Interesting that they had all this information the day after. Yeah. Like they already knew there was a Mayday call. They were already, you know, the giant headline saying... Bomb plot. Bomb plot.

Yeah. And the pictures they have of the, I mean, they've already got pictures the day after of the fuselage, you know, still smoking possibly in the woods. Yeah, this is the day after in the sun, and you look at this headline that is descriptive but seems almost indelicate, plain flattened like crushed bird. Plain flattened like crushed bird,

smoke rises from wreckage morning after tragic crash. A thin plume of off-white smoke rising lazily in the rays of the morning sun today was the epitaph for the 52 persons who died in Thursday's airliner crash near here. The base of the plume was a tiny spot amid blackened trees standing sentinel just off a logging road 25 miles west of here. A squashed mass of metal burned black, grey and white. Only the tail section of the airliner is missing. So July 10th, journey's end. Heartbreak stories behind the family death tragedies. I mean this is when we're starting to learn

who was on board. There's so much here. Yeah. So much here. Mechanic cries at the sight of scattered bodies. I saw the body of a young child. I couldn't tell whether it was a boy or a girl. It was so badly injured.

So we saw the Halifax Chronicle Herald. This is the Victoria Daily Times. So literally from one coast to another. And this two days later, blast marks confirmation explosion in airline bomb and toilet theory study. Another investigator said a passenger might have left something in the toilet. Right away, investigators had come up with a theory that it was someone on board who had planted a bomb in the bathroom. But what made them think this? Why were they so confident that the bomb could only have been set off by someone on the plane? Wow, so this is a picture of the recreated tail.

Shows whole blasted in tail section. This is the first time I've seen this, right? And we knew that they had taken all the parts of the tail from deep in the woods. And there's a description we saw in a report of a large number of RCMP officers who just went step by step by step. They picked up everything, transported it all back to Vancouver, and reconstructed it. But this is the first time I've seen the reconstruction. And that is where, and they circled it in the newspaper picture, that is where the bomb blast, kind of the force,

blew that hole in the tail section. A blast so powerful it fired fragments of steel through metal pipes in the tail section 10 feet away. This was the critical piece of evidence for investigators. The clue that showed them that it had been a bomb that brought down this plane and that the bomb had been placed in the left rear lavatory. Based on the bomb's location, police believe that whoever put the bomb there had to have been on board when it went off. Otherwise, someone would have seen it before the plane took off. Investigators also found traces of black gunpowder around the blast site. Investigators also found traces of black gunpowder around the blast site.

Almost immediately, police narrowed in on four suspects, all of them passengers. Take a look at this one. Oh, man. Gambler on plane insured for $125,000, jury told. This would be the coroner's jury, and this is Douglas Edgar. The man, Douglas Garfield Edgar, 40, a gambler who had no apparent reason for being aboard a doomed airplane, bought $125,000 worth of insurance about 90 minutes before the plane crashed.

Here's what we know, according to the police reports. Douglas Edgar, 41, married with a daughter. He mostly made his living gambling, sometimes logging, sometimes fishing. He took, quote, next to nothing in clothing with him on the plane. Shortly before boarding, he spent $5.50 to take out four insurance policies at the airport, worth $125,000. He told his wife he had a job lined up in Prince George but police were unable to find anyone who had hired him. One police report speculates he was heading there to set up a gambling house. Oh my gosh is this the first time you saw a picture of him? Yeah actually it is the first time I saw a picture of him. What's striking to me is the juxtaposition between the way Douglas Edgar looks,

square jaw, short hair, smiling, and then what's implied in the headline, heir victim heavily insured. Yeah, $125,000. And Bank of Canada has on their website an inflation calculator so you can put in any value in any day. And I'll do the calculation again but i think that is about i think it was about like eight or nine hundred thousand dollars substantial yeah the chief rcmp investigator sergeant robert n mullock

final witness in a six-day coroner's inquest named the three, Edgar, Steve Kolizar, 54, Powder Man, and Peter Bruce Broughton, 29, and gave the reasons why his team was not satisfied with the results of his investigation. So we got a photo of Peter Broughton. Wow. So yeah, this is 29-year-old Broughton. And he's got, you know, those very hipster glasses that people wear now, the thick frames on top and then the wire below.

And it says here, he came from Ontario two years ago, going to Cassier to work and make enough money to go to university. A search of his home revealed a quantity of ammunition, loading equipment and gunpowder. They found a box which had an inventory of what it contained in Broughton's handwriting. Four 11-ounce tins of smokeless gunpowder were missing. He said the investigation showed

no indication of suicidal tendencies. Mullock said throughout, Broughton appeared to be a fairly normal boy, quote unquote, single, who didn't have many friends and was bent on continuing his education here. Peter Broughton, 29 years old, no children, returning to work at the Cassier Asbestos Mine, where he was saving up to attend university. Interested in guns, hunting, and fishing. Had been the mine's gun club president the year before. Noted as quiet, with few friends. He was the only one with an interest in gunpowder, although

experiments found the kind of powder found in his home could not cause an explosion like the one that brought down CP21. He carried no insurance. So when you look at this, with Broughton, there is his connection to gunpowder, but beyond that, there's really nothing that would tie him to this. No, and also at this point, which they do use in their, the investigators use in their report. You know, they talk about the other suspects here too. Oh, there's Steve Kolizar.

Oh my goodness, okay, this is the first picture we're seeing of the third potential suspect. He's an older gentleman wearing a suit and tie in this picture. Here, again, going back to the chief investigator, Sergeant Robert Mullock, he refers to Colazar saying a trace of his fingerprints revealed that he had one or two

murder charges against him and was acquitted and had various courts martial and was dishonorably discharged from the army. And also, here's the thing, Colazar was experienced in blasting and use of dynamite. And that's why he was going up to the north. That was going to be his job in a construction firm company.

Stephen Colazar, 54. He was a powder man and blasting expert heading to Prince George for work. He was married with four children. He had a temper and a criminal record, including a murder charge in a rooming house brawl that was reduced to manslaughter. His former employer said his temper never got in the way when he was on the job and that he was extremely careful around explosives. I mean, you can see why those things lead to, you know things would make somebody a suspect, right?

But not that it's anywhere near being proof of anything. It's also imprecise, right? Like, how is it that a senior investigator testifying at a coroner's inquest would say revealed one or two murder charges against him? Yeah, that's a bit, yeah. There's a stark headline from the Monday after the crash. Victims x-rayed for clues. So three suspects were named in the press.

But internal documents show there were four men the RCMP would not, or could not, rule out. That fourth man whose body was x-rayed by the coroner was Paul David Vandermuelen. Paul Vandermuelen, 35 years old, had moved to Canada with his second wife and her two children a few months before. He was a new partner in a mine heading north on a prospecting trip. before. He was a new partner in a mine, heading north on a prospecting trip. He held a $100,000 life insurance policy. RCMP noted he traveled with a gun, $800 in cash, and that he suffered anxiety from a previous head injury. An x-ray of his body found traces of copper, a metal used in blasting caps, and one of the police reports describes this as being foreign to the plane. Mullock said,

the investigation will go on until we're satisfied the person who did it can never be known or until that person is positively identified. Like there's no way we have enough evidence to ever find him, which is ultimately what happened. So these are the suspects RCMP identified. Douglas Edgar, the insurance guy. The professional gambler who took out that big life insurance policy at the airport. Peter Broughton, the gunpowder guy. He was described as a loner, and a friend said he may have taken gunpowder on the plane.

Steve Kolizar, the guy with the criminal record, a powder man whose job it was to set off explosives. He'd once been charged with murder. whose job it was to set off explosives. He'd once been charged with murder. And Paul David Vandermuelen, the American, a prospector who also had a large insurance policy and whose doctor raised questions about his mental state. All of these men left behind families who would have to live not just with their sudden death

and the grief, but also a terrible question, unanswered for more than 50 years. Was it their relative who planted the bomb? 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. Wow. Yeah. Not what you normally expect to get at a visitor center. Enjoy the rest of your day in Hunter Mill House. Wow. That was way more than I expected to get. Yeah get yeah yeah but you look at the four leading suspects and all four of them have compelling reasons why you'd really want to take a long hard look at them but then you have to ask the question like those things they're in the case of one guy their violent past in the case of another guy the black gunpowder you know in the case of all four of them really is there enough there to take explosives on board and want to take down a plane and not just kill yourself but kill all the

other people on board yeah i don't i don't know if any one of them have all of the things that you need, motive, means, and what's the last one you need? Opportunity. I talked to a veteran police investigator who said that even he was surprised that four suspects like this would be among just 52 people on a plane. He actually told me that it seemed more like the plot of a novel than real life. But this was all too real for the families involved, including the families of the suspects. Some of those suspects are innocent. But we know someone put that bomb in the lavatory. Was it two people working together?

Was it one person by themselves? And did they get up an hour into that flight, walk into the washroom, lock the door and say, okay, I'm going to kill 51 other people? Did they walk back to their seat calmly and just wait for the explosion? These suspects have all been dead for 53 years, so obviously we can't ask them for answers. But maybe their families can help us understand who they were and what it's been like to live with the possibility that they were the ones that did this. So our team started calling. Please leave a message and I'll return your call as soon as possible.

Hi, calling from CBC. I'm trying to reach Bill Broughton, the brother of Peter Broughton. Hello, we are not available now. Please leave your name and phone number after the beep. Hi, my name is Ian Hanamansing from CBC News. I'm trying to reach Bill Broughton, and the Bill Broughton I'm looking for is the brother of Peter Broughton. Here we go, next call.

We're sorry, the number dialed is not in service. Please check the number. I'm trying to call again. Sorry, we can't get to the phone right now. Sorry, I think we have the wrong number, but I apologize. Hello? Hi, can I speak to, we're looking for Bill Broughton. Is this Bill? Bill who? Uh, all right. We still have lots of B. Broughtons to go through, though, so. And we weren't just calling. Our producers, Polly and Tiffany, were emailing,

sending out Facebook requests, and scouring public records. This is Tuesday morning. Tiffany has an update for us. Okay, so I think I mentioned to you guys I was trying to find Leah Edgar, the daughter of Douglas. So right before I went to bed last night, I got an email. So it was Leah. She hasn't agreed to talk to us yet.

She writes, which is kind of how she starts it, it's interesting in itself. I'm the proud daughter of Douglas Garfield Edgar. So this is a fairly remote chase. We are trying to reach Cinda Taylor, who's in New Mexico, who is Paul VanderMuelen's granddaughter. And I have no idea if she's willing to talk to us.

We'll find out. Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. Hi, this is an unusual voicemail. My name is Ian, and I'm doing a story about flight CP21, the plane that crashed back in 1965. One of your grandfathers, Paul Vandermuelen, was on that plane. All right, so how many calls

have we made so far? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. We also tried RCMP inspector Robert Mullock, who led the original investigation. His name keeps coming up in everything we're reading. Is that Robert Mullock? Oh, hi there. My name is Tiff from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. He didn't want us to record him, but he did say this, quote, Yes, I did the investigation. But he did say this, quote,

Yes, I did the investigation. We did a complete review. And in the end, we were satisfied that the person was on the aircraft. One of the fascinating things about this story is that all of these documents, including the police reports, are sitting there on a shelf in a visitor's information centre in a small town. And that's because of the hard work of some of the family members of those who died on board. One of those family members is Dee Dee. Dee Dee Henderson, who still holds onto her father's briefcase. I love the screen door creaking. That's one of my favourite summer sounds like that.

Yeah, well, it reminds me of my childhood. You always have screen doors at the cottage, you know. Her search for answers has taken on many forms over the years. But at the beginning, she had one burning question. All I knew is it was out west of Hunter Mile. Where had the plane gone down? What happened over the years was different people, like hunters who had hunted out that way,

would mention that they had come across a piece of the crash or just different little tidbits here and there made me go, oh, maybe I can still go out there and see it and find it. And so my younger sister Gail and I were quite close and so we put our minds to it. So even after the victims had been buried and RCMP had moved on from the case, families still weren't told where to find the crash site. Literally the first time we went out, we took the car and went down the road out that way, which there's several logging roads, and just sort of stopped in Meadows going,

I wonder what a plane crash looks like after 30 years or 25 years. We had no idea. We were needle in a haystack. Then we were trying to guess, like, okay, well, trees would have grown this much, and then we started taking every little logging road and muddy little trail to see, you know, if it led to anything.

And this happened over several summers when she'd come to visit. And then Gail and I literally did a grid search, you know, on a map, you know, scratch out the little areas we'd searched and X them out. And then, you know, on the day we found the site, we went down a road, an area we'd been searching in, and we said,, well let's go down here. It looked too, you know, wide and used to be a real road, but then we realized it was very steep up and down and then we thought, well who would have put a road in here? We walked up the hill on the other side and walked into the bush

and we were there. It was just, it was, I get goosebumps just thinking about it. Just to kind of come on that place and see the devastation and know that that's where our father died. And it was kind of like the end of a pilgrimage. When you actually see crumpled up fuselage and areas burnt so deeply that nothing will ever grow on them again and some bits identifiable as an airplane and you think of 52 souls, there's sort of a sense when you go out there of, you know, the spirits of those lost there. After Dee Dee and her sister found the crash site, Dee Dee became a kind of a leader of a community of people who had connections to Flight 21.

And people in town started giving her items that had been taken from the crash site decades earlier. This is a small piece of a ring. It's one of the first things you notice Didi wearing when you meet her. She wears it around her neck on a long silver chain. A woman came into my store one day because she had read about me in the paper and said her husband had this ring. He must have been one of the rescue workers or whatever and she had always told him that he had to give it back. He had passed away and she brought it in for me. It didn't belong to my father but it was broken but I wore it for years until

it was beyond repair and then got it set in this little charm. It's a men's signet ring. You can barely make out the faint initials but they're there. J.R.M. J.R.M. I would love to be able to return this to the family that it belongs to if there's any known relatives which I have not been able to find. They're almost like relics, you know, holy relics that you get from a past loved one. That's why I wear it, and that's what it means to me.

It's amazing that so many items survived a crash like this. Sitting there in Dee Dee's house, it also gave us a sense of, to me, kind of the gravity of what we saw. And then it makes you wonder what it would be like to be out, like to see the actual crash site. You can't help but think when you're in Hundred Mile House that not too far away, in a place that you could get to in less than a day, is what's left of CP21.

I think making that journey, and not even just to see what's left there, but making that journey might help me get in the mindset of everyone that night and all the subsequent nights that made that journey to try and find those answers. There's such an emotional weight to this story when you read the coroner's reports, and then you talk to people like Dee Dee,

and you hold in your hand the cup that was on board the plane, and then I think about going to the crash site, where the wreckage is, where parts of this plane are still resting, to really feel the emotions of the story. On the next, bomb on board. How far away are we now from the logging road? Pretty quick. We'll be switching over to gravel and cattle guards.

Here we go. I really want to know what happened and it makes me extraordinarily angry that collectively, whether it was the RCMP or whoever it was at that time, whether they're afraid of lawsuits, that it's always been a big secret. Well, you have to operate on what's reasonable. Okay, so a suspicious moon-shaped guy hanging out, moon-faced guy hanging out, moon-faced guy hanging out on the runway. I said, what is your belief? You know, we keep hearing about these four alleged persons that could have been involved in this. And he said, well, we have our own version. They knew what had happened, but they didn't know why. I said, do you know who did it? And he said,

we have a very good idea. Uncover Bomb On Board is hosted by Ian Hanamansing and me, Johanna Wagstaff. The podcast is written and produced by Mika Anderson, Polly Legere, Ian, and me. Our associate producer is Alina Ghosh. Tiffany Foxcroft is our producer with The National. Mixing and sound design by Mika Anderson, Polly Legere, and Mitchell Stewart. Sarah Clayton is our digital producer, and our senior producer is Tanya Springer. Thank you. with others and get the latest updates, be part of our online communities by joining the Uncover Facebook group or following us on Twitter at UncoverCBC. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.