Uncover - S33 E2: Something Monstrous | Calls From a Killer

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

‘They called him the Candyman.’In British Columbia’s lower mainland, children are disappearing. Families are terrified as the local RCMP attempts to find out who is preying on vulnerable kids.At a time when both the public and the police don’t know how to deal with a serial killer, Clifford Olson slips through the cracks.

In this acclaimed new production of Anna Karenina, the National Ballet of Canada asks, what is fair in love and society? Renowned choreographer, Christian Spook adapts Tolstoy's epic novel to dance in a spectacular work complete with lush costumes, cinematic projections, and a glorious curated score, featuring the music of Rachmaninoff. On stage June 13th to 21st, tickets on sale now at national.ballet.ca

sponsored by IG private wealth management. This is a CBC podcast. The following episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Please take care when listening. He seemed on level, he seemed charming, maybe not really even charming. Just seemed like a normal ordinary businessman to me and then he offered me a job in Whistler, BC for a 16 year old shampooing carpets for $10 an hour sounded really good. And I thought this would be a way

to make my mother proud of me. The voice you were hearing is Kim Wurbeckis. It's 1994, and she's being interviewed by Hannah Gardner on the CBC TV show, Contact. At this time, she's a young woman, but the night she's describing, she was just a terrified teenager who decided to hitchhike a ride from a stranger. One hour outside Vancouver, on the way up to Whistler,

suddenly you're stopping at a motel. Your antenna must have gone up. Yeah, no, not at that time because it was foggy out and he said that we would continue in the morning and I could phone my mother from the motel and that we would get separate rooms. And there was nothing that seemed wrong. I mean, he wasn't trying to touch me or anything like that.

So nothing seemed out of the ordinary. What happened? He followed me into the motel room, into my room, and closed the door and locked it. And that's when I knew something wasn't right. I knew something wasn't right. I knew something wasn't right but I was trying not to think the worst that could happen and the worst did happen in that motel room that night. I don't remember exactly what order things happened. I remember him telling me to take my clothes off and to get onto the bed.

And I did. And he forced sex on me. He raped you? He raped me, yes. One thing I'll never forget, and that's his eyes, the way his eyes changed. They were just so evil. They looked so evil to me. And then after it was all over with, he was just so calm, like nothing was wrong. And he started calling me his little sister. Kim says she was held at gunpoint and assaulted for more than 10 hours.

When her assailant decided to get back on the road with her as passenger, she managed to escape at a gas station after pleading for help from the attendant. Days after the ordeal, she went to the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to report what had happened. From hundreds of photographs, Kim pointed out her attacker. His name was Clifford Robert Olson. The police charged Olson with rape, buggery and gross indecency, plus two counts of possession of a weapon. When the police ask Olson for his version, he says the girl's a hooker and he paid her for sex.

Olson is locked up for two months waiting for his trial, but Wehrbecki never gets to tell her story in court. The Crown Attorney finds inconsistencies in her statement and feels a jury just would not believe the child prostitute. The sex charges are dropped. We know better now than to so freely call someone a child prostitute. There is no such thing as child prostitution. There is exploitation and sex trafficking. But even though Kim was just 16 when this happened to her, this was the 80s. And because she had been paid for sex prior to ever meeting Olson,

she had doubts the justice system would take her seriously. I would think that the police would think that it was just a bad trick gone wrong, or they really wouldn't believe me. The so-called inconsistencies in her statement came down to whether or not Olson left her money after assaulting her. She had initially left out details about it happening in a motel room, but Kim had never wavered on the claim she'd been raped. Do you think perhaps the prosecution was really in a tough spot here?

They had a 16-year-old hooker who couldn't get the facts straight. It doesn't matter whether you're a hooker or whatever. I think rape is rape. Would it make a difference if I was a straight-A student in school? Is that what they're saying? They're saying now that hookers can't get raped? Is that what the Crown was trying to say? I don't know. On April 8, 1981, Clifford Olsen walked out of the courtroom on $5,000 bail.

He faced no charges for his alleged abduction and rape of Kim Wurbecki. The police hadn't known that before Kim first came to them, Olsen had already killed one child. And in the four months following his release, Olsen would go on to rape and murder at least 10 more young people. I felt that I could have maybe done more or said something different,

or if I didn't forget the motel room, that they would not drop the sex charges and he would have been kept in jail and those children would be alive. Kim Werbecki's name has stuck in my mind in the decades since. She endured Olsen's violence and somehow managed to escape with her life. But she was ignored. It pains me to hear her blaming herself in this interview.

Those kids are never going to have a second chance in life. Their life is over with. It's gone. He's destroyed a part of me forever. Of course, with hindsight, it's easy to point out all the occasions when tragedy could have been averted. No matter what he did or what he was accused of, Olsen seemed to be gifted in slipping through the cracks. I've picked up, I'm let go. I've picked up, I'm let go. You get what I'm getting at? But in Clifford Olson's case, there were just so many missed chances

for the local police and RCMP to stop his murders and get him off the street for good. Hey, had the RCMP kept me in custody, kids would have been alive today. This is Calls from a Killer, from CBC's Uncover. I'm Arlene Bynum. This is Episode Two, Something Monstrous. British Columbia and certainly all of the lower mainland was sort of idyllic spot. I mean even though Vancouver was a big city it was still like a little town and you know

kids would. John Daly is a long time reporter who covered this area and this case for the BCTV news station throughout the 80s. I mean kids would wander all over, go hiking and go into the back lots, go play in the park, get on their bikes, they'd go exploring, hunt for caterpillars, just go play ball. Five ten blocks away. It was nothing. I mean, kids were all over the place and running around and enjoying themselves and basically fearless. It was happy times. People left their doors unlocked. I mean,

they told me that repeatedly. But then that all changed. It was shocking that kids were disappearing. It was all across the lower mainland, you know, Coquitlam, Richmond, Burnaby, New Westminster, all over. And this just hadn't happened before. And of course, it was children. So it was really, really terrifying. And the whole, all of British Columbia was basically seized with this fear and dread. And parents had to figure out whether or not they were going to take their kids to school, keep them in after school.

Kids wanted to go hang out at the mall. They wanted to go to the playground. And parents were basically fearful of this, and rightly so. It started with a girl from Surrey disappearing. On November 17, 1980, 12-year-old Christine Weller biked next to her father as he walked to the local pub. When they reached the Surrey Inn, her father kissed her goodbye and told her to bike home. And nobody really knew what happened.

It was kind of confusing. And of course, you know, the standard police response was, maybe she ran away, something must have happened, nothing to indicate foul play. We don't know if there's any kind of a crime involved here, you know, but we'll do what we can. A month later, on Christmas Day, Christine Weller's body was found. Police discovered the body of a missing 12-year-old Surrey girl buried in a lonely Richmond peat bog. Christine Weller had also disappeared from her home,

only to be found with 10 stab wounds. The news reports were vague. They had no suspects. It wasn't until the following year that another girl, a 13-year-old, disappeared. Colleen Dagnon. She was last seen at a service station, not far from where police were combing for clues

around Christine Weller's murder. Colleen's family reported her missing straight away. But again, there was no immediate sign of foul play. And they didn't find her body for a long time. So it took a while for anybody to start wondering whether or not these things were connected. But it was pretty scary. Just those two were enough to get people worried. It was very surprising that there wasn't more of a frenetic reaction and more reaction from

the police when these kids would disappear. We're not talking about 17, 18 year olds where you might suspect, well, maybe they've connected with some friends or how to fight at the house or something like that. I mean, these are pretty young kids who ought to be home at night. There's something seriously wrong here.

And yet it didn't really seem to light a fire under authorities. And, you know, looking back on it, you sort of see that clearly society and the authorities were, I guess, complacent, if you want to be kind. John admits that he should have made connections sooner. I guess I was a bit naive. I think I believed the police, and they said there's nothing to indicate foul play. There's nothing to indicate that these cases are in any way connected. Then I started to wonder, well, you know, how many people would go out and kill kids?

And that's, I guess, was probably in the spring of 81, where I started to raise the questions as to whether or not these cases were all connected and, you know, how this was being handled. You know, do we have three child killers out there acting simultaneously in the Lower Mainland, or is there one really bad guy out there doing this? He had no idea what was out lurking about in individuals. He had never been hurt by anybody. He was very straightforward and seemingly not afraid of anything, but extremely vulnerable.

This is Sharon Rosenfeld describing her son Darren. I feel so strong in my heart that if Clifford said to him, do you want to stop and ask your mom, he would have said no. Like, he would have felt he was old enough to make his own decision on that. He wasn't a mummy's boy anymore. In 1981, Sharon and her blended family had just moved west from the Canadian prairies, settling in Coquitlam, B.C.

Darren was her eldest. My little guy was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and I was a 19-year-old mother. He was an inquisitive child. He really liked to be around people. He loved our family. We were a close-knit family, so he loved playing with his cousins, and he always made friends very easily.

Sharon says Darren was an easygoing kid for the most part. But when he reached 11 or 12, he started getting into a little more trouble. I thought he was growing up too fast. He wanted to have more freedom, and he was always chumming with kids who seemed to have more freedom. And I didn't like that at all. There was an incident when Darren and two other kids stole lighters from a local Zellers. He was brought home by the police and the reason for the lighters was it was a silly game that the kids did at that time. They would throw the lighters very hard on the floor and the

lighters would explode. I guess they got a thrill out of that. Anyway, it was the theft that really, really, really bothered us. It was as Darren barreled into his teenage years that Sharon agreed with her ex-husband that maybe the best thing would be for Darren to go live with him in Saskatoon. As a mother, I don't like admitting it, but coming from a broken home, usually one or two of the children have a few problems. My other two children were fine, but Darren was just, he was more of a daredevil, more of a, he wanted to be his own boss.

He had that type of personality. But like so many children of divorce, Darren struggled to be away from the other side of his family. He told his mom that he wanted to move back in with her and his stepfather, Gary. And he said, I want to come home. And I was so thrilled. For his birthday, they flew him home to B.C. The family returned from an overnight vacation in Seattle, where they'd ironed out the details. Darren would see out the school gear

and return to Coquitlam and Sharon in the summer. The following morning, he got up about 10, and I said, I asked him if he would take in some dry cleaning and pick me up something at Shoppers Drug Mart, which was only about two and a half blocks from our home. And that morning, for some reason, I walked him down the steps to get to the front door, and we had a glass window on the side of our door. And I watched him until I couldn't see him anymore. I watched that familiar jaunt of his.

And he was flipping his hair. And I was so proud because he was 16. And I was so filled with so much pride and love and that, because he was growing up. And he wanted to come and live with you again. Yes, yes. And things I thought were going to be well again. Darren's trip to the drug store was taking an hour. Then it was two hours, then more.

And Sharon started to worry. 12.30, one o'clock, we were getting concerned. And it was in my mind again, oh my goodness, this kid. You know, what's he doing now? You know, and so Billy said... Sharon sends Darren's cousin Billy to go check out the local kids' hangouts, like a pool hall. Nothing.

Other families start walking the neighbourhood to see if they could spot him. Gary, I knew, came home at 3 o'clock. Darren still wasn't home. I mean, I was just beside myself by that time. So, Gary went looking again. I just stayed by the phone all the time. And, of course, the other two children were coming home from school. So, then Gary went driving. He was gone for a couple hours.

By the time he came home, we said, okay, it's time to probably call the police. It was 8 p.m. when the local Coquitlam RCMP arrived at Sharon's door. We were sitting at the kitchen table and there was two officers and one of them said, we will not do anything with this for 48 hours." And he put his pencil down. He said, he's likely run away. He said Vancouver is full of young people that run away. And so they got up and they walked to the door.

And I said, so like, what do we do? And he said, Mrs. Rosenfeld, if you don't know your child by now, chances are you never will. Gary started going to neighbors across the street. He went to Shoppers Drug Mart, he went to the dry cleaners, he went to every little business that was in that small outdoor shopping mall. And he was so surprised and very, very upset that nobody had been there. No police had been there to question any of the shop owners. There was no investigation at all. And then we wanted to make posters of Darren.

And we went to the media. And the media said that they would need police confirmation before they would do printing of posters for the newspaper. And police wouldn't give their permission. Why? Because they felt that maybe he was a runaway. Eleven days after Darren disappeared, a boy's body was found. Sharon is notified by police, but is advised that it's unlikely that the body is Darren's.

A few days later, everything changed. but is advised that it's unlikely that the body is Darren's. A few days later, everything changed. I got another phone call. Mrs. Rosenfeld, I'm sorry, I guess that was your boy after all. That was the death notification. And I just, I, at that time, I remember screaming and I knew my children were at home. And I remember screaming, Gary, Gary, it's Darren, it's Darren. And Gary picking me up off the floor. Our lives as we knew them died with Darren.

Our lives as we knew them died with Darren. Not only had the police made this most insensitive of errors, they'd left Sharon to find out the worst details of Darren's murder while running the most everyday errand. She'd been out chaperoning her younger son as he made his paper round. He was 11 years old and there was a specific place where he was to pick up his newspapers to deliver. And so I went to meet him and I seen him sitting on the curb and he had his hand in his hands and he was crying and I said, what's going on? What's the matter?

And he pointed at the newspaper and there was Darren's picture. So I took it out at the binding so I could look at it and under the bottom of his picture, it said, Darren Johnsburg's nude, raped, bludgeoned body was found along the banks of the Fraser River. I had no idea. I had asked the police if he had been found with his clothes on or off. That would give me some indication.

They said they could not give us that information. And so I respected everything that they told me because the last thing we wanted to do was mess up any type of investigation that they had going. So we had no idea that he had been raped. When the police still believed that Darren was yet another runaway, Clifford Olson had his car stuck in a muddy ditch in the Fraser Valley about an hour and a half's drive from Darren's home. He'd say he paid a local to help him get his car out,

and then, once the coast was clear, threw a bloody hammer and Darren's clothes into the Fraser River. Later that night, Olsen was apprehended for driving drunk. He was released the next day. Not long after Sharon learned her son was dead, Clifford Olsen married Joan Hale, the mother of his son, at the People's Full Gospel Church in Surrey. Four days after the wedding, Olsen picked up 16-year-old Sandra Wolfsteiner, who was hitchhiking in the area.

That afternoon, her worried boyfriend tried to report her missing to the police. They said they had to wait 48 hours first. In this acclaimed new production of Anna Karenina, the National Ballet of Canada asks, what is fair in love and society? Renowned choreographer Christian Spook adapts Tolstoy's epic novel to dance in a spectacular work complete with lush costumes, cinematic projections, and a glorious curated score, featuring the music of Rachmaninoff. On stage June 13th to 21st, tickets on sale now at national.ballet.com. projections and a glorious curated score featuring the music of Rachmaninoff. On stage June 13th to 21st. Tickets on sale now at national.ballet.ca. Sponsored by IG Private Wealth Management.

Hey, how's it going? Amazing. I just finished paying off all my debt with the help of the Credit Counseling Society. Whoa, seriously? I could really use their help. It was easy. I called and spoke with a credit counselor right away. They asked me about my debt, salary, and regular expenses, gave me a few options, and helped

me along the way. You had a ton of debt and you're saying Credit Counseling Society helped with all of it? Yup, and now I can sleep better at night. Ha ha ha, right on! When debts got you, you've got us. Give Credit Counseling Society a call today. Visit NoMoreDbs.org. Spring was turning into summer,

and the frequency of Olsen's killings was about to speed up. He'd murdered at least four children between November and May. But as the weather warmed, young people ventured outside to play, to hitchhike, to run errands for their parents, their neighborhoods, Olson's hunting ground. He would later refer to himself as the Beast of British Columbia. A week after Sander Wolfsteiner disappeared,

RCMP Corporal Daryl Kettles was dispatched to investigate an overturned car in Hemlock Valley. The driver was reported to be a suspicious man with a seemingly drugged teenage girl. The driver, Clifford Olson, was apprehended. The girl, not Sandra Wolfsteiner, was taken into holding to sober up. She described being offered a job by Olson, who then kept pushing beers on her. Corporal Kettles would later claim he felt strongly this man was the killer of Darren.

The two cases had so many similarities, including the age of the victims and where they were taken. But according to Kettles, there was insufficient material to question him about Darren's murder. Clifford Olsen was released that day on a promise to appear on charges of impaired driving and contributing to juvenile delinquency. The charges went nowhere, and another child went missing. It could have been 40 years. Since she was 13, she'd be 50-something.

We think, you know, we wonder how she would have been as she had grown, who she married, what her children would be like. One day late June 1981, Trudy Court's sister Ada was expected home from babysitting their brother's two children. She did that often. She was the responsible kind. Never gave Mom and Dad any problem. She was funny, beautiful, very smart, very loving, just a happy-go-lucky 13-year-old.

Their brother lived with his young family in an apartment complex in Coquitlam, and Ada had slept over. She had been at my brother's the day before because my brother and his wife were going out. The day that she went missing was Father's Day. Ada was supposed to get picked up by my sister, Dar. Something happened, I'm not exactly sure. I can't remember a lot back then. There's a lot of missing pieces,

but yeah, Dar was supposed to go pick her up. Something happened that she couldn't. My brother and his wife were probably a little hungover from being out the night before. So Ada decided she would just take the bus home because it was a beautiful day. Trudy says this wasn't unusual for Ada, and the bus stop was only a short walk from the apartment block. Ada left to catch the bus in the morning. My mom lived in Burnaby. So from Coquitlam to Burnaby on the bus, you know, it should be like an hour or so. My mother called my sister and I. It must have been about three or four. And said that Ada hadn't arrived home yet.

And could we come out? So my sister Dawn and I went out to Burnaby to be with mom. And we just waited and thought maybe she was, you know, stopped at her friends. But she was really responsible and would call. So, but we were thinking of all kinds of things that could have happened, right? Stopped at her friends, went to the mall and just got distracted. So we just waited and I remember clearly, mum had a couch in front of this big window that looked out onto the street.

And I remember sitting on the couch and watching the end of the street, there was a building, and I knew that when she got off the bus, she had to come around that building. And I remember getting the bus schedule and watching every bus that passed. For how long?

Oh, days. When did you call the police and what did they say? I believe mom called the police after it got dark that night. And of course their first question was, you know, could she have run away? We've been researching Olson in these cases for years. And, well, of course, their first question was, you know, could she have run away? We've been researching Olson in these cases for years, and there are familiar beats. Olson's MO was expertly practiced. Pick up a hitchhiker or any kid looking for easy transit. Maybe offer them a job. Get them to trust you. If they look up to it, push a drink on them, which has already been spiked. But Trudy revealed a detail on our call that I'd never heard before.

Not even from Olsen himself. We learned later that where my brother John lives, Olsen was kind of a maintenance person, possibly, but he was known by the children that he would hand candy out to them and they all called him the Candy Man. So Ada very well could have met him or known him. Was it likely or just a chance, do you think? Yeah, we believe that she did know of him because she would take the girls out to the playgrounds.

So we believe that she had met him. It makes sense. If he lived in the same building, had a young baby himself, and was known to the local children, Ada wouldn't have had her guard up around him. Do you remember how your parents felt when they found other children were missing? I mean, were they...

Well, my mother was just a wreck. She didn't really do well. She was just a mess. So it was up to the rest of us to gather whatever information we could. Some of the stuff we held back from her, she wasn't in good health. So we were doing all the trying to, you know, find out what's going on.

Unlike some of the other kids who previously disappeared, Ada Court simply didn't fit the profile of a runaway. It was becoming harder for local police or the RCMP to keep up the wait-and-see approach. I don't know whether they were just trying to keep the public calm, what the police were really thinking or doing. Maybe they were afraid of panic. Reporter John Daly again.

But the initial response when the children went missing was, you know, there's nothing to indicate foul play. We have a missing child. There's nothing to indicate that there was a kidnapping. There's nothing to indicate that this is related to any of the previous cases, either disappearances or murders. And that seemed to be the ongoing pitch from the cops again and again, but it started to build up. And if I may, I'll tell you one instance that really kind of sent a chill through my spine. I remember getting a sign to the disappearance of Simon Partington. They were just like any other young family. The Partingtons of Surrey were looking forward to their summer vacation until their little boy vanished.

Around 10.30 a.m. on July 2nd, 1981, nine-year-old Simon Partington finished his cornflakes and hopped on his bike on his way to a friend's house. He seemingly vanished in broad daylight. Simon's bike with a Snoopybook in the basket was found leaning against a corner store. That image, reported widely on TV and in the papers, stamped itself onto the public consciousness. I think it was the moment this became a national story. Simon's case was the first I'd heard of these disappearances

living across the country in Toronto. And for those living in lower mainland BC, the reality that something monstrous was happening around them was sinking in. When we get down to the point where you got a missing 9-year-old kid who's six blocks from his home and disappears when he's at the corner store getting an ice cream or a candy bar, you got a big problem.

I was like a blowtorch on my butt to be blunt. It was kind of like you get out there and you hunt this stuff down, you stay on these cops and you find out what they know and what they're doing, and et cetera, and it got really, really intense after that. John tells us that the Parnington family approached Todd Brass at the BCTV network to get a plea by Simon's mother, Marguerite, on television. She was afraid to do an interview.

She didn't want to be questioned. She just wanted to make a statement. We said, fine. And she wouldn't make a statement with us present. So we set up the camera in a chair in the backyard, left the thing running, and we went for coffee so she could come out, sit down in the chair, and make her pitch.

And, you know, we came back, I guess it was 35, 40 minutes later, and she was gone. We had a truck and we had playback in it. We went into the truck and she had left basically a three-minute crying appeal to the kidnappers to get young Simon, nine-year-old Simon back. So please, one more time, release Simon to any busy area where he can come home to his family. It was heart-wrenching, absolutely heart-wrenching,

and I think that really sent a chill through the spines of all British Columbians. He was this little, beautiful little blond-haired boy. And to know that or think that somebody could harm a child, like, it just didn't make sense. Sharon Rosenfeld, Darren's mother. It was overwhelming to us. All of us felt very, very sad, very hurting. Even though our children were either missing or had been found murdered, they were older than Simon. And I think Simon's age and just the look of Simon, I think, affected everybody. That was, I think, a turning point where the police realized that the media were

going to turn up the heat on them and that they better, you know, throw everything they've got at this. Olson would give the authorities yet another lead. Four days after Simon Partington vanished, a 16-year-old girl flagged down an RCMP car. She told the police that a man had offered a job, but once she was in his car, he tried to drug and rape her. He was driving a green Ford Granada. Within minutes, Clifford Olson was once again in police custody.

But again, Olson walked because investigators weren't convinced the teenage girl was credible. This time, however, something was different. The officer who questioned Olson, Corporal Les Forsythe, of the Burnaby RCMP detachment, was also looking into the disappearance of Ada Court, and he had a hunch that Olson was behind Ada and Darren's cases. So he began seriously looking into it. At Forsythe's urging, the Burnaby detachment of the RCMP held a meeting with 24 police investigators from surrounding detachments.

And we shot these cops going in there carrying these books, their case books under their arms. And that, I think, was the beginning of a massive task force. We didn't know it, but the RCMP started a list of potential suspects and surfaced Clifford Robert Olson. The meeting attendees decided Olson

was a key suspect in the cases of, at this point, five missing and murdered children. They agreed to put him under surveillance. The next day, Forsyth and a partner went to Olsen's apartment to establish it as his residence. But much to their dismay, He was gone. Not only had he slipped surveillance, he and his wife Joan left for a trip to California for what Olsen described as a vacation. They don't pick me up. They don't even put a tail on me. They let me go. Isn't that something? At least four more young people would be killed before Olsen's spree would come to an end. Our investigations over the past several days have now resulted in the discovery of two bodies

thought to be those of the some of the seven children that have been reported missing. I mean, they knew that there was children already missing. They never shared it with the public. I'm in the newsroom, and the assignment editor says to me, they've caught this child killer. It was pandemonium, but it was big.

All hell broke loose. That's coming up on Calls from a Killer. Calls from a Killer was written and produced by me, Nathaniel Frum, Arlene Beinen, and senior producers Ashley Mack and Andrew Friesen. Mixing and sound design by Evan Kelly. Emily Cannell is our digital producer. Additional audio from CBS News. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandes and Chris Oak. Tano Springer is the senior manager, and Arif Nourani is the director of CBC Podcasts. If you are appreciating Calls from a Killer, from CBC's Uncover,

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