Uncover - S2 "Bomb On Board" E3: A Fifth Man

Episode Date: November 15, 2018

Last moments from the cockpit and evidence of a fifth suspect. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/uncover/uncover-season-2-bomb-on-board-transcripts-listen-1.5129876

We know the news can be relentless and it's hard to keep up. On Your World Tonight, it's our mission to catch you up in less than 30 minutes. When news breaks, our reporters are there across Canada and around the world. We bring you context and analysis and sort out what's real and what's relevant. I'm Susan Bonner. I'm Tom Harrington. I'm Stephanie Skanderis. We host Your World Tonight.

New episodes every night, seven days a week. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Just a heads up, this episode contains a recreation, which may be disturbing to some listeners. Previously on Bomb on Board. 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. The chief RCMP investigator, final witness in a six-day coroner's inquest,

named the three, Edgar, Steve Kolizar, 54, and Peter Bruce Broughton, 29. 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. All right, so how many calls have we made so far? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. A woman came into my store one day because she had read about me in the paper and said her husband had this ring.

I would love to be able to return this to the family that it belongs to. I'm Johanna Wagstaff. And I'm Ian Hennemancing. And this is Uncovered, Bomb on Board. Investigating one of the biggest unsolved mass murders on Canadian soil, the crash of CP Flight 21. Chapter 3

How far away are we now from the logging road? Pretty quick. We'll be switching over to gravel and cattle guards. And here we go. And if they've just braided it, it can be kind of skiddy. We're driving with DeeDee Henderson, headed west from Hundred Mile House. We're sort of up above Hundred Mile House right now, moving deeper into the woods. Well, we're lucky that we have dry weather today

as opposed to the storm. Yeah, oh my goodness. On a stormy day, obviously, we wouldn't have been able to come out. Yeah. Okay, so here we are. Okay. It is a beautiful trail. Calming. Didi's leading us down an old logging trail,

a few dozen kilometres west of Hundred Mile House. A little deeper in this forest is where CP21 went down. We're curious, after more than 50 years, what's left of the plane? What does the crash site look like? And how does Dee Dee feel about this place where her father was killed? You're right, it doesn't take long for sort of the pine smells and the... Mm-hmm. Can you smell the juniper?

I can't remember the last time I've seen so many butterflies. After poring over so many documents, studying the technical and police analysis of what happened, being here just adds to the weight of this crime. Who would deliberately bomb a plane carrying 51 other people? We were literally doing a grid search back and forth off the trail on both sides for I think about two square kilometres. Because we really didn't know what we were looking for,

so I'd go, I see something there, and it was always a log, but you had to check it out. This time, Dee Dee knows exactly what she's looking for and where she's going. Because my dad was a geologist and loved working in the field, loved the outdoors, that to me this is a fitting resting place for him. Like some people might visit a grave site, this is where I come. This is where I feel most connected.

While Dee Dee was quite willing to take us into the crash site, she also wanted us to make it clear to people that this isn't just a hiking destination. July the 8th, so it wouldn't have gotten dark till late. It was raining hard. Just look at those woods there, which is just thick with trees. And imagine having to step so closely just in case there's a piece of evidence, you know, a blasting cap, a body for sure, but even little things, right? So quiet, isn't it? Yes, yeah.

We'd be walking for maybe 10 minutes when DeeDee signals us. So we're coming up to the end of this trail. This is the top of what they would have had to cut in to get to this site. We can barely see past the pine trees. The brush underfoot is dry and crackling. The sky has been grey with smoke from nearby forest fires for the past few days. But today, there is a stillness, and the sun is hot. There's nothing to keep the mosquitoes away.

Watch these branches flicking back. Now we're basically in a trail that only one person can fit. You can see burnt-out cans. Old pop cans, food tins, rusted out and collected in a pile. Kind of a trail marker, signaling we're on the right path. So there's a little easier way in through here. So do you want to go first? Do I want to go first? Okay.

It feels strange to walk towards the crash site. Do you want to go first? Do I want to go first? Okay. It feels strange to walk towards the crash site. Excited isn't the right word to describe it. Not anxious either, but maybe uneasy about being so close to where this tragedy happened. And just keep your eyes open. So as we get closer to the crash site, there's sort of bits of metal strewn about. I don't know, maybe part of a seat? Sort of cables and tubes. sort of cables and tubes.

We can see the glimmer of it through the trees. There's been so much anticipation leading up to this moment, I realize I'm holding my breath. Wow. This is one big piece of metal that is, you hear that term, twisted wreckage? That's exactly what this is. That's what this is. Yeah.

It's one thing to read about the way the plane hit the ground, but it's sobering to see just how deep some of this wreckage is stuck in the forest floor. So somebody did this. Yeah. Right? I mean, all of this would look the same if it had been an accident or an error. And it would still be tragic, but somebody did this. Yeah. How does that change things?

Well, I mean, if it's an accident, there's nothing you can do about it. You kind of go, that's so horrible, but it's an accident, and accidents happen. But this is still the biggest unsolved aviation murder crash on the books. And not being able to know who did it means you have no place to even focus your anger. it means you have no place to even focus your anger. One of the burnt trees has, it looks like people's initials in metal, nailed to the trunk of the burnt tree, in memory of flight CP21, July 8th, 1965, 52 lives lost. And then there's initials, LPH, WMW, KDE, ESED. In 1995, family members of the victims gathered here for the first time to mark the 30th anniversary of CP21.

Most of them had never been to the site before. People left mementos. Joe, did you see this? I did. A little toy plane. And there it is, just at the base of the tree, a little toy airplane. White, blue stripes, four propeller engines. It looks perfect, right? It's beautiful and it's like it's weathered better than anything else here. And someone made metal tags with everyone's initials to mark the day. There's no Didi emo up there. I still have my tag. You weren't ready to put it up.

I've thought about where I would put it and I think I would like to put it at the tail section. The tail section landed further into the bush, about a kilometre and a half away. There's no real trail, no markers. That's where her father, Wallace, was found. From what I've read in the coroner's report, etc., when the bomb blew up, the tail section of the plane literally broke off and fell. And anybody really close probably would have been killed by the blast instantly, but those

seated nearby would have been sucked out. I would hope mercifully for him that it was quick. I would hate to imagine someone being conscious, falling through the air from however many feet it was. I really, really kind of wanted to believe that maybe he survived and had amnesia and one day would walk out of the forest. You actually hoped for that?

I hoped for that. I mean, I guess I wanted my dad to come back. Yeah. So here's a question. Where's the rest of the plane? Right? Where's the nose of the plane? The cockpit?

I thought the same thing, yeah. Being here at the scene of the crash, my mind keeps turning to what must have been going on in the cockpit those last few moments. I got my pilot's license when I was just 17, and I still fly a small two-seater plane for fun on the weekends. I love the perspective you get from up there, but I also love the constant challenges that come up, the problem-solving your brain is always working on, which is why I can't stop thinking about those pilots. Did you guys see this piece of record?

It doesn't look like much at first. A piece of rusting metal with a young pine sprouting up against one side. But then I see the remains of gears, bits of cables and electronics sticking out. This is definitely the cockpit. This is some kind of air intake, right? And it's right by what does to us look like the cockpit. Walking around the cockpit,

I'm trying to be as respectful as possible. And our producer Polly senses that hesitation. Do you still feel like you shouldn't touch anything? Yeah, have you noticed? Yeah. I do feel like I, yeah, I feel very like,

I don't know, I just definitely feel like it's a bit of a sacred site. It's like the one piece of respect I can give without, you know, having a direct connection to this. I don't know. It's almost like whispering in the church. This is the only spot we know where someone was sitting. And now there is, you know, a tree growing up through the centre. Someone's put a small plaque inside the cockpit. It's almost hidden.

We have to get down on the ground to read it clearly. Captain John Alfred Steele, 1923 to 1965. You live in our hearts every day and for always. September 17, 2002. John, his son, Julie, his niece, and Betty, his sister. I mean, it's hard. Everywhere else on this wreckage, you can't pinpoint a seat. Everything is too mangled.

But here, literally John Steele was sitting right here. We knew this crash site had become a place families were drawn to, a tangible connection to the tragedy. And in finding the cockpit, we found a direct link to the last moments of the plane. After the bomb went off, the man seated at the cockpit controls, along with two colleagues, still had to try and fly the plane. There's a picture that I've often looked at over the years that's in the newspaper, and it shows two boys draped on the fence looking longingly at a DC-6,

the four-engine propeller plane that our dad flew. My name is John Steele. I was the oldest brother of four, the oldest brother of four and our father was the captain on Canadian Pacific Flight 21 that crashed in July of 1965. John was 15 years old when his father died. Growing up he often tagged along with his dad to work and the airline gave families a free flying pass every year. John treasured that time up in the air with his father. I also had the opportunity to be invited into the cockpit. I'm thinking the statute of limitations allows me to share that sitting there, I also got to handle the plane, and it was a DC-6. And I remember distinctly feeling how heavy the controls were. Of course, the first officer was monitoring totally what I was doing.

But for me, it was both thrilling and scary. I remember a heck of a lot from that, fortunately. We'll never know if the pilots had any idea what was happening at the back of the plane. Did they see anything suspicious beforehand? Did anyone on board have time to try to stop the person with the bomb? One thing that really struck me about the technical reports is that the pilots tried to save the plane. John is a pilot too, and I knew he must have been thinking about

what happened in those last few moments from the cockpit. The witnesses had heard the engines being throttled up and down and noted, whether they appreciated the reason for it, that the plane was kept level. Without a tail, it couldn't continue to fly. It was losing altitude. But the actions of the crew kept the plane flat versus going into a dive or a cartwheel or something like that. When it hit the ground, it cut out a pattern in the trees

that exactly reflected the dimensions of the plane. There are many, many examples where pilots are known from the cockpit voice recorders to attempt to save the day by continuing to figure out different ways and attempting to figure out a way to survive. We've been hunting for the Mayday Call ever since we started our investigation. There's a reference to a recording in the coroner's report. And we've searched all the places that might have stored it, but it appears it no longer exists.

But we do have the transcript of the radio traffic between Vancouver Tower and pilots from that day. And this is how it likely sounded. And this is how it likely sounded. Air Canada 870 taxi to position and hold. The pilot had enough time to give the three Mayday calls, but nothing else. And how chilling it must have been for air traffic, never hearing any more than those three Maydays. CPA-21, have traffic at 1 o'clock, 4 miles northwestbound, altitude unknown, looks like two targets.

21, no contact. Here's some of the transcript between air traffic control and planes in the area. And just reading it now, you can just imagine what that was like to be sitting there, a routine day. Vancouver Centre, CPA-22. We have an aircraft in sight passing to the west of us, 2 o'clock position. 22. Centre, 22. Confirms visual pass on 21. CPA-22, roger. It was a family friend, a close friend, Fred Foster.

Captain Foster was flying south as my dad was flying north, and they passed each other and briefly communicated with each other. 22, 21. 22. And then Captain Foster continued south. Roger. Vancouver Centre, CBA 3, we're at 11500 requesting one four thousand. CPA3, roger, cleared to maintain 14,000.

Maintain, maintain, maintain. Mayday. CPA-3, Vancouver, do you read? Vancouver, CPA-3, go ahead. CPA-3, did you hear a mayday call just then? Not on this frequency. Of course, my dad's friend, Fred Foster, he heard it. Apparently it was very, like, crackling, poor signal. Just mayday, mayday, mayday. Couldn't, wasn't even enough to distinguish it

as having been the words of one person versus another. It was one of the crew who did it. Just mayday, mayday, mayday. Suddenly, air traffic control was scrambling to try to figure out who that was and what they needed. CP21, Vancouver, do you read? Williams Lake Radio, Vancouver. Williams Lake. CPA 21, CPA 3.

Do you read? CPA 21, this is CPA 3. Do you read? I'm afraid it's beginning to look as if CPA 21 is not flying just now. Could you talk to company on that? Roger. will do. The planes are 40 miles west of the house just north of Gustafson Lake. Okay, thank you.

Just north of Gustafson Lake. Thank you. Lake. Okay, thank you. North of Gunn. Lake. Thank you. The few people that could hear and did hear, it wasn't too long before they realized the plane that had gone down. RQT, RQT, now turn left heading. The one with six zero, still intercepting vector 300 east on the reception.

RQT. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 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. Oh, dog! Oh, my God, my God, my favorite photo of him. I love that photo.

It's just the spark in his eye, as I remember. He always referred to me as my little sister. And once, years and years ago, I won a Snow White contest. I was singing, and he was telling everybody about my little sister who won the Snow White contest, and it was getting a little bit embarrassing after a point. That's how he'd introduce me. Betty Corkish, Captain John Steele's younger sister.

She sits in an immaculate white living room with her daughter Julie. John's framed photo is on the side table next to Betty's chair. They still use his nickname, Jack. Gentleman Jack, which really was the way Jack was. There was about nine years difference in our ages, but we were nevertheless very close. If you can take us back to sort of the summer of 1965. I was around 33.

We were just in our living room. I was standing up and at that time we didn't have televisions. We just had radio. And I heard on the radio, Canadian Pacific. So I was thinking, oh, what's happened? There's been an accident at 100 Mile House. And I said, the Captain Captain John. And when they said, steal, well, of course, I almost collapsed because nobody had told us. Nobody told us that he'd been killed. I remember I wanted to just run, and there was a big field behind us. All I wanted to do was go out the door and just run and run and run. But my husband at the time grabbed me and held me very tight to calm me down.

So he held me in that grip for about five minutes, ten minutes, until the reality set in, what had happened. Nobody came out and spoke about how they feel. It just wasn't done. I just felt helpless because I didn't know what to do. Julie, Betty's daughter, sits across from us. She was just ten years old when the crash happened. And the tragedy was that it never had to happen because this unknown person, whoever it is or was to this day, has gone undetected.

And I personally believe that the person who detonated that or was responsible was not on the plane. I believe it was somebody else. I'm angry. I feel angry that somebody is still walking around that did that. And the mystery is that he hasn't, you know, he's kept quiet about, or maybe he's deceased now. It's hard to know. But I would like somebody to have to pay for doing something, all those wonderful people who lost their lives. 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 were afraid of lawsuits, that it's always been a big secret. So my hope is that whatever you are doing in terms of this documentary, it would be lovely if there was some kind of closure to this that was more than just our memories, that we could come to something that would tell us what happened. our memories, that we could come to something that would tell us what happened. What makes you think that it was somebody not on board? Well, again, it's anecdotal evidence.

So this was from my Uncle Bill, who was very much involved with the crash. And he mentioned at the time that there was one person, a man, who a year after the flight crashed his car into a rock-faced wall and died. And that was one indication. The other was my other cousin Kathy, who is in a vehicle driving up to the crash site. And in the car at the same time was a person who had worked for CPR who gave credence to that theory, that there was somebody that they knew. It wasn't somebody who was on that flight. And that was the end

of that conversation. The source of this theory seems to be Catherine Steele, Julie's cousin. And she was in a car with a man who said he also investigated the case, Doug Nassie. 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.

So, for example, one of the cleaners of the aircraft saw someone getting on and she described kind of a German style hat. He said, I don't believe that. He said, I believe it was like a pilot or a co-pilot or an engineer's hat that she saw. They all wore the similar type of hats. You know what pilots wear, those kind of hats. According to police reports, early on in the investigation, a cleaner working on CP-21 said she saw a mysterious man with a receding chin wearing a narrow-brimmed hat and a checkered jacket, described as a man with a moon-shaped face. And she said she saw the lavatory door moving as if it had just closed.

The three other cleaning staff on board testified they saw no such man. I said, so the woman that saw the guy with the German-style hiking hat on, do you think that could have been who it was? He said, well, he said, I have another story for you. He said, this was one of our theories. So the investigators believe that one of the other pilots had been disciplined, and it was that person that put the dynamite in the lavatory. And I said, well, how would you ever prove that?

And he said, well, on the one-year anniversary of the crash, one of the CPR pilots drove himself head-on into either, it was either a semi-trailer or a rock wall up near 100 Mile House and was killed. And he said as soon as they found out that guy had killed himself, they believed that is who the plane cleaner saw on board. That's what convinced the CPR investigators. That's what took down Flight 21. And who did it? There is no hint of this theory in the coroner's hearing, nor in the thousands of pages of the RCMP reports we've read. And we can't verify this with Doug Nassi because he's passed away. But we have confirmed that this Nassi did contribute to the pilot union's investigation on this case.

And we have Catherine's account and her cousin Mike Stielma. He was in the car as well. He mostly confirms it. and her cousin Mike Stielma. He was in the car as well. He mostly confirms it. But he does say that Nassi didn't link this pilot and the mystery men reported by the cleaner. I don't know if the CPR investigators ever went into the coroner's inquest.

I doubt they were called as witnesses, only because I truly do believe that Canadian, the litigation against them would have been huge if their investigators had said anything like this in a coroner's inquest. This is the most detailed account that we've heard of this theory or rumor so far, that the person who placed that bomb wasn't a passenger at all, that it was a pilot who might have been punished somehow and who may have been that mysterious man spotted by the cleaning woman.

We've spent weeks trying to figure out how much of this was true. So we can confirm that Nassi was with the Canadian Airline Pilots Association, but nobody from that association had a chance to testify at the coroner's inquest. We also know the RCMP questioned every single airport employee who was anywhere near CP21 when it was on the ground in Vancouver before it took off. No one else remembers seeing a mysterious man with a moon-shaped face. And after giving her a lie detector test, RCMP decided that the cleaner was not telling the truth. So what about a pilot who

was disciplined? RCMP notes say that they interviewed all CP Air employees who had left the company for 18 months before the crash, and according to the Mounties, no one seemed to have a grudge. And yet still, some families believe that whoever placed that bomb on the plane walked away. We have to keep digging into that idea of a fifth suspect to see if it's possible. But we have to stay focused on the main suspects, those four people who were on the plane. focused on the main suspects, those four people who were on the plane. Sai Leyland was one of the investigators, and he stayed in close touch with the RCMP. Sai said the Mounties had narrowed the list of suspects down to one.

His diary had meticulous notes about this case, but he didn't write down the name of the man police thought was responsible. It took him 30 years before he opened up to his son Ken. And then another two decades before Ken chose to open up to us. Ken. Ian. How are you? Good, how are you? Good, come on in. Thank you very much. I'm Johanna, Johanna Wagstaff. Nice to meet you too. When did you first hear from your dad that he and the RCMP were pretty sure who did it? The night before the reunion. This would have been July 7th, 1995. I asked him point blank, I said, do you know who did it?

And he said, we have a very good idea who the responsible person was. And there's a lot of evidence that points that direction, but it's all circumstantial evidence. It's not anything that you could take to court and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this particular individual was responsible. Ken has never spoken publicly about this before. Today, we're sitting at that same dining room table, the same spot where Ken's dad first told him. I said, who was it? I remember him saying that this particular individual was one of the youngest of the four suspects. He was very much a loner from the investigation the RCMP did on him. No friends, no close associations.

He didn't belong to any organizations with the one exception of the shooting club at the mine where he worked in Cassiore. Ken insisted that he couldn't remember names but everything he's describing fits what we know of Peter Broughton. He had been in Vancouver and while he was there, he went to the Vancouver Public Library and checked out a book on Douglas piston-powered airliners, of which DC-6Bs were one. When the RCMP visited his mother's home, the book was still there, along with a one-pound can of 60% nitro black gunpowder with approximately four ounces left in it.

And that's one thing that he said that sticks out very vividly in his mind from his discussions with the RCMP. In conjunction, the individual concerned was sitting in the very furthest seat possible away from where the bomb was placed. The bomb was in the port side toilet, aft toilet, and this individual was in the very front right hand starboard side seat. So, totally kitty corner in the airplane from where it was. One of their working theories with this individual

was they don't feel that he felt the airplane would be destroyed and that there would be an explosion, yes, but the airplane wouldn't go down, the passengers on this particular aircraft would get some notoriety, he would have his 15 minutes of fame because he was one of the passengers. Whether that's the case or not, you know, at this point, nobody really knows. Another thing that pointed them that direction, that he didn't think the airplane was going to go down, was if your intent was to destroy the airplane, why not use everything in the can?

And why sit that far away? One part of that that still I can't quite connect the dots on is motive. Like, I don't quite understand what the motive would be. No, I can't help you. I don't honestly know. Like I say, the only thing Dave felt was that he felt he might get some notoriety just from being a passenger on the airplane. We didn't actually gain access to the RCMP's main file on Broughton until months after we spoke with Ken, and it had some information that contradicted Sai's recollection. Broughton's room had smokeless gunpowder in it, but not black gunpowder, and black gunpowder is the kind that

was found at the blast site. There were books on aviation. We have an itemized list, but none of those books had details on the DC-6 or DC-6B, the specific model that crashed. But does that change the fundamentals of Cy's story? What was it like hearing your dad talk about that that night? It was pretty unsettling. You know, being, I guess, being privy to some of that information

that really none of the families were aware. The families really were kind of left in the dark after all this happened. The airplane was blown up and crashed, and now what? They knew what had happened, but they didn't know why. And to this day, I don't think they know why. I don't think anyone absolutely, for 100% certainty, knows why. On the next Bomb On Board.

So what do you think we need then moving forward to shed new light on it? There are at least two, I probably think of a third, but there are at least two things, nagging things that bother me about Broughton as the prime suspect. First of all, the lack of any apparent motive. Like, we're not talking about a guy who picks up a gun and inexplicably starts to shoot it. We're talking about somebody who built a bomb

or created some kind of explosive to put on a plane. Like, that's a pretty... I know, you don't, like, so, like this vague notion that somehow he wanted the notoriety of having been on this plane. That stuff doesn't make sense to me. The lack of motive. Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot, too. But, you know, something just popped into my head.

I mean, this just seems silly, but what if the black gunpowder is almost a red herring? Oh my God, I knew you were going to use that phrase. Well, I mean, I think we need a very clear sense of what caused that explosion or likely caused that explosion. And why there would have been black gunpowder there at all. I think you're right. We need an explosives expert. And that may shed some more light on Broughton. Hi, this is Alina. Oh, hi, it's Johanna.

You know, the last little while, of course, we've been looking into this theory that a disgruntled CP pilot is the one that placed the bomb on the plane. I found him today. Holy shit, like the guy? Uncover, Bomb On Board is hosted by me, Ian Hannah-Mansing, and Johanna Wagstaff. It's produced by Mika Anderson and Polly Legere, and written by Mika, Polly, Johanna, 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. Additional sound design on this episode by Tom Howell. Sarah Clayton is our digital producer. Our senior producer is Tanya Springer. And our executive producer is Arif Noorani. Subscribe to the series wherever you get your podcasts. We're at cbc.ca slash uncover.

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