Uncover - S33 E4: Cash for Bodies | Calls From a Killer

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

<p>The country is shocked to learn that a serial killer has been paid by the police - $100,000 in return for the locations of his murder victims. </p><p><br></p><p>Even as decades have passed, opinions are split on this controversial deal. Was Clifford Olson rewarded for his heinous crimes, or was this necessary to stop the killing? And what do the architects of the deal think about it today?</p>

So our podcast House Party was supposed to end right after the election, but we're really not done with the party yet. Yeah, there's way too much to talk about still with the new government and everything. That's right. House Party is now going until the end of June and I am excited to keep nerding out about politics with you guys. I'm Catherine Cullen. I'm Daniel Thibault. And I'm Jason Markossoff. And you can find House Party in the feed for the house wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. The following episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Please take care when listening. See, we closed the deal here. We closed the deal at about 12 o'clock. All right. And then the next day we left at nine o'clock when the money was delivered. Then we went directly from there looking for bodies.

You get what I'm getting at? In my decades working as a journalist, I've covered a lot of violent crimes, but I've never heard of a deal like this being struck with a suspected murderer, before or since. Olsen received $100,000 to lead the RCMP to the bodies of his victims, and he was only too pleased to be the model of cooperation.

And he walked around in a bunny suit and like a white painter's suit, taking the cops to where he had murdered these children and buried them or covered them up or left them. And they had the videotape of him taking them to the crime scene and they had all the evidence. Olson was so proud of the deal being struck that from custody he called his wife Joan, telling her, honey, you're going to be rich. Here's John Daly, a former reporter with the BCTV News Network.

But you've got to remember, it sounds like, you know, pocket change now, $10,000, and we've got billion-dollar cost overruns and all kinds of things. But back then, $100,000 was like a million bucks now, easy. In today's dollars, it's closer to $300,000. Still a small fortune. John had prior knowledge of the deal before it was struck.

Others in the media, like Ian Mulgrew, had the truth leached to them from an unsavory source. Olsen himself then began to call a couple of other reporters that he had been talking to pretty well bragging about it. And as a result, a good number of reporters began to realize that some sort of deal had been struck. They began to try and track down that story as I did and basically we all ran into this brick wall and it turned out that the brick wall was partly because publishers

and media executives had agreed with the RCMP not to report any of the information until after a trial and conviction. We knew it had happened, but the attorney general of the province, Alan Williams, and the media executives essentially, you know, collaborated to ensure that none of us were allowed to write the story and tell the public until after the trial ended. until the public, until after the trial ended. That meant Ian, John, and their colleagues in news had to sit on the story for six months. While Olsen was arrested and charged with murder in August 1981, his trial didn't start until January 1982. It ended up being a short one. He initially pled innocence, but about three days later, before any of

his case had been heard, he reversed his plea. Olson instead pled guilty to 11 counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to 11 concurrent life sentences, with no chance of parole for 25 years. In passing sentence, Mr. Justice Harry McKay told Olson, quote, I do not have the words to adequately describe the enormity of your crime or the anguish and heartbreak you have brought to so many people. There is no punishment a civilized country could impose that would come close to being adequate.

The fact that the cash for bodies deal was just as newsworthy as the sentence should tell you something. The Clifford Olsen story isn't over yet. Yesterday he pleaded guilty to murdering 11 young people in British Columbia. And then the prosecution announced an unusual trade. The location of the missing bodies in return for $100,000 for Mrs. Olsen. Today the news that crime does pay was a concern all across the country.

There are so many creeps, including lawyers, who will use this to the advantage of future offenders that it's a questionable method of tracking them down. Well, this is the first crime that I'm aware of in Canadian history where an accused as opposed to an informant has been paid monies. I think it's politically insane and I personally do not approve of it. You can't debase the carnage of justice this way and expect the system to maintain the respect of ordinary Canadians. There's a risk in it from the other side that to my mind is even greater

than that of a parent's harm and suffering. An itinerant parolee like Olson is never going to amass $100,000 in a lifetime. There's a real danger that he or others like him will conceive that this is a way to make murder profitable at the expense of Canadians, and it's very dangerous. This was a horrific, completely unbelievable revelation that a government had entered into an agreement with a serial killer and paid him to return the bodies of his victims. And the parents of the children, of course, were outraged. What kind of an explosion did it make, do you remember? What kind of explosion? Was it Hiroshima or Nagasaki? This is Calls from a Killer from CBC's Uncover.

I'm Arlene Bynum. And I'm Nathaniel Frum. This is episode four. Cash for Bodies. We were called by news media. We were asked by a reporter if it was true. They had heard this rumor and we hadn't heard anything. We were all, what? What? This is Sharon Rosenfeld, whose 16-year-old son Darren was killed by Olson. In the months following his disappearance, she and the families of other victims had banded together.

And so we quickly called a meeting, and all of us got together. And of course we were all just devastated. Like how could this be? What are you talking about money? We had no idea what was going on. Thus started the phone calls to the RCMP, to the attorney general's office to ask, is it true? The deal was not only approved by the Attorney General of British Columbia,

Alan Williams, but also by the Solicitor General of Canada, a man named General Robert Kaplan. While the position no longer exists, what this means is that the upper levels of Canadian government knew about the payment and gave the go-ahead. And in the weeks following the deal-making headlines, a lot of the public debate pivoted not just on the policing, but the politics driving the compromise. These are some of the callers into CBC's cross-country checkup, Canada's longest-running

national phone-in radio show. a little more work other than just saying, well, you know, here's the money. Well, if you wanted to stop murders, if that was your priority, you wouldn't sit back and say, ah, yes, there's a period of four days when we didn't have enough manpower to follow him around, and during that period he committed three murders. I don't believe them when they say our priority was to stop murders. If you want to stop murders, you put ten men on that guy and you sit on him. I'm against the police informers because Olson himself has been paid evidently many times in the past as a police informer and I believe that that's why they didn't objectively look

at him earlier in this case. Cross country check up, where are you calling from? Vancouver. Should police pay criminal suspects for information? Well, I'll answer your question but first I want to compliment the police and the RCMP in this area. They did a fantastic job. People are overlooking the fact that the families were in distress in this area.

The ones who have their children that were lost and have not been found for many weeks and months were in terrible distress. And it wasn't one family, it was a whole lot of families. And other families were in constant fear that their children would be taken away, kidnapped, or something would happen to them. So the pressure was tremendous. Now, how do you solve a crime and get it over with? There was also this call from someone who claimed he knew Olson

while both inmates in the Saskatchewan Penitentiary. Well, Olson obviously came up with the plan because he's a deviant person. Like, he's had to fend for himself all the time, by himself, for himself, and there's no way around it. So he obviously came up with that plan. My experience with police, they wouldn't do that. They wouldn't say,

we're going to pay you $10,000 to tell us where the bodies are. I don't think they'd do that. I think that Olsen came up with that and it got to the politicians, and the politicians are devious enough to do that because they want it over with. And then Terry Carson got on the line. Her 15-year-old daughter, Terry Lynn, was murdered by Olsen in the previous July. Hello, Mrs. Carson. Hello. Do you think money should be paid in this instance or should have been paid? murdered by Olson in the previous July. like my daughter was cremated. And at least she had a service, you know.

Do you think the police should make a general practice of this kind of thing? Well, if it ever comes about to having a mass murderer again, I think they should, yeah. 11 confirmed victims means there were eleven grieving families, who it should come as no surprise, have differing opinions on the deal and how it affected their lives. And then of course you discover that they would give this monster ten thousand dollars, basically cash for bodies. Bridget Cosma, Judy Cosma's sister.

And the families didn't matter. The families were kept in the dark. The families were mourning. I mean, it was so bad. But yet, they pay a killer money. Tell me about how the reaction was around you, where you were, so close to where it all happened. They were completely outraged.

I mean, he paid death's off. It's sickening. Meanwhile, these families, including mine, were just trying to put our lives back together, trying to find strength to carry on the financial burden on loved ones to pay for funeral. The list just goes on. And then on the other token, a murderer enjoying the fruit of his labor of killing 11 children, slaughtering them, brutally murdering them.

I still have rage and anger. I just try to control it. The longer Bridget and I talk, the more I could see she doesn't really draw a line between the conduct of authorities and the pain inflicted by Olson. I can't even go out at night. I have a fear to go out at night. Like the RCMP and what they did caused us so much damage. When this all happened, pretty much a close family that we were, it tore us apart. Everybody didn't know, couldn't comfort each other. Sadly, my mother was not a mother anymore.

She was grieving. And my dad, he just submerged himself in working. The rest of us, as a close sibling family, everybody kind of went their separate ways. I ended up moving to Nova Scotia. We just saw separated. They had killed my family. They didn't just kill Judy. They had killed my family. They didn't just kill Judy, they killed my entire family.

I didn't even know until three years ago that my other brother, Peter, was suffering so much with this. He had so much anger that I didn't even know that he ended up in prison, I think, once or twice. There was so much anger in them that he was on depression medication until the day he passed away. I look at me talking to you. I'm 64 and it's still... pain.

So sorry, Bridget. Barely tough and you're very brave. The only thing we know is that she was stabbed 19 times. 19 times. Can you imagine? 19 times. I can't even cut up a chicken anymore. Like, when I look at knives, they give me fear. It's just... And they're now, they're just all forgotten. Like they just want to erase my sister. Just want to erase them all, like this never happened. It's part of history.

They're mistakes. They just want to forget about it. We'll never forget. You know. Bridget, there's people hearing this story for the first time. What do you want them to know? And my sister's life mattered. She was a beautiful person. And her life was cut short. And I blame the RCMP for all this. For a brief moment in the year 2000, the city of Phoenix was on fire. You could see a glow in the sky.

An arsonist was on the loose. How many more ways can we fuck this thing up? The culprit will shock you. I had several dreams about that house behind me. Your dreams about setting the fire one night I did. From novel and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to The Arsonist Next Door. Subscribe on Apple podcasts to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. What did this do to Canada in your mind? How big was it and how much does it leave behind after all these years? Well, it was a monstrously large, shocking, horrible, painful story. And I think really what it did was it crashed the glass for Canadians thinking that somehow we were in a bubble,

we were protected from this kind of American violence. And we had our own homegrown serial killer, child murderer right here under our noses and went on for nearly a year, and it was unimaginably horrible, the things that he did to these children. And I think it took away our innocence. It really shocked Canadians and made them realize

that we better sort of wrap our heads around that. We better come up with policing in a criminal justice system that can respond to these things. If my grandfather Pete had a more positive view of the RCMP and Bridget Cosmas is the complete opposite, John Daly's is somewhere in between. There were a number of other detectives who really sort of threw everything they had at these crimes. But overall, the system itself is lumbering along under paramilitary bureaucracy with

a lot of old thinking at the top. And you just start to look at it in a much more critical way, saying, you know, well, they can't keep us safe. The bad guys are out there. It's kind of like a slow-moving battleship or aircraft carrier. It's hard for it to turn around. And it does the usual stuff moderately well, but it doesn't do the exceptional things very well.

My grandfather wasn't the only legendary journalist in my family. On October 16th... My grandmother on my dad's side was Barbara Frum, one of Canada's most respected broadcasters. People still talk about her skill as an interviewer today, even though she passed away more than 30 years ago. And in January 1982, she interviewed Solicitor General Kaplan on the CBC show, The Journal. Did anyone ever make a case to you that they could not get a conviction or even a confession

from Olson unless a payment was made? No. Was that case ever put to you? No. The first I heard of the case was after this deal had been made. And I was informed about it. I was surprised about it, because it is an unprecedented arrangement. What is your view of it? What I wanted, I wanted to be sure right away that it was legal, and I was given assurances that a legal opinion had been obtained about it.

I wanted to be sure that it wouldn't prejudice the trial so that there could still be a possibility of conviction, and I was satisfied about that. Mr. Kaplan, once Olson led police to those graves, once they knew who they had, why was payment made? Why wasn't it stopped then? Do you think it should have been stopped then? Well, here you come to a very firm tradition of the RCMP,

and that is that their word is their bond. And when criminals or informers come to the RCMP and make a deal with the RCMP, that deal will be respected by the RCMP. And without that assurance and understanding in Canada, the RCMP would be a lot less effective than it is. The cash for bodies deal wasn't just shocking to the Canadian public and the

families of the victims. Inside the justice system there were questions about it too. I can recall that I wasn't wildly enthused about paying him any money because I thought eventually I'll get this guy never stops talking. John Hall was the Crown Prosecutor in the Olson case. Hand selected by the BC Attorney General's office, he was the man in charge of making sure Olson was convicted. When John was handed the case, there was little direct evidence linking Olson to the murders.

The notebook found in his possession, with victim Judy Cosma's name written on the cover, was the best lead the RCMP had. But John believed he was up to the job of convicting Olson. That's why they hire guys like me. And I thought, you know, ultimately that he would confess to somebody about other people that were missing. As confident as John was that Olson would talk, that he could have convicted him without the deal, law enforcement was feeling pressure to close the case and catch the murderer who had been terrorizing the Lower Mainland. So it was decided the deal Olsen had proposed was their best chance. That sort of quieted things down and was a comfort to the parents who of course were

in a state of absolute upset because their children had gone missing. And by paying this money, it was found out that he had in fact killed them. As the Crown Prosecutor, John was ultimately the one to bring the case against Olson and present the deal to court. Where he knew that reporters like Ian Mulgrew and John Daly would be waiting. At one time, there was some suggestion that it would be announced in a sort of confidential way to the press that this would be done. And I said, there's no way that's going to be done.

The press knows that if they disclose this, that I will charge them with contempt and that'll be the end of that. Why? Why did you want to silence the reporters at the time? Well, you see, the problem would have been that if they reported this, it would have caused difficulties with prosecuting Olson. It would have been potentially biased to jury and so on. And so that sort of thing you just could not possibly put out in the public domain.

I mean, reporting it would have been very bad. Very few of the people responsible for this cash for bodies deal are still around today. And picking this story back up, more than 40 years after the deal was signed and the money delivered, the controversy still feels hot to the touch. After all this time, would the people behind the deal still stand by it? John, who is now retired and in his mid-80s does. Have you thought about this during your career because I can't think and we've tried to find another case like it in Canada or even in other places in the world where a suspect

was paid to give that kind of information and that amount of money? Well, have I thought about it? I suppose I've thought about it. I haven't thought about it at any great length. But I look back on it as a necessary thing that was done for public policy reasons. I think that the quieting down of the situation, the knowledge that the parents then had about the awful things that had happened that sort of gave them a bit of closure at the time on what had happened, I don't think I ever had any doubts that it was the right thing to do. When you say quietening down, was that part of this decision? The police were under a lot of

pressure. There were children missing. Was that part of it? The minister was under pressure, but it was, when I say quieted down, it was a way of getting information that would let the parents of the missing children know what had happened so that they weren't left in a state of, you know, alarm, confusion, sadness, whatever it is. They then had at least information about the dreadful thing that had happened to these victims. Why do you think it's not been used again to offer a suspect money to give answers? Well, I think it's a very bad thing to do to start thinking that we would offer money to people who commit murders, to confess to murders. That's not the way that the world should operate.

But remember that the Olsen case was a bit of an on-off because of the high level of uncertainty and alarm. In most other cases, it would not be appropriate to pay the money to get information. And you just have to treat the Olson case as a rather unique circumstance. As the decades have passed, some of the victims' families

have softened their harsh criticism of the RCMP's investigation and the cash for bodies deal, like Trudy Court, whose 13-year-old sister Ada was killed by Olson in June 1981. My initial reaction was, that's horrible and how can they do that? However, my position changed later on because my thinking turned to, well, if they didn't pay him, then we'd never know where our children were. We'd never get them back.

Sharon Rosenfeld has also reflected on and perhaps revised her stance. None of us at the time really quite understood that there had been I believe two or three children that had not been their bodies had not been found and of course once the arrest was made part of the deal was for Clifford Olson to point out the locations of each of the bodies of the children that he was being charged with. I said, fortunately, or unfortunately, my little guy had been found.

We had him. We knew where he was. But other people had not had their children's bodies. So I felt sorry for them. I'm not happy over the $100,000 payment. However, I'm still willing to give police respect today. But you can still sense there are lingering memories of treatment so offensive that at the time it must have really felt like the authorities

Were at emotional war with the families families who really just wanted answers Some of those incidents are indelible We just thought that the government or RCMP was paying him just to talk. And we just thought that was disgusting. But it really became a big deal to the point where the attorney general, their office called and said that they would meet with the families. So the attorney general was at the meeting, the deputy attorney general was at the meeting and the upcoming Crown

Prosecutor John Hall who is going to prosecute Clifford Olson. And in John Hall, I'll never ever forget, I still am incensed with it, John Hall looks at all around the room and he said, I don't understand why all of you people are so upset. I mean, 11 children could have just as easily been killed in a school bus accident. I mean, if they're dead, they're dead. The room went crazy. Ziggy Wolfste Steiner who had just had heart surgery and he got up, he was bent in half holding his heart. Ray King was lunging at them. Gary was hanging on to Ray King and Mrs. Cosmo was just beside herself.

Mrs. Court was just crying. I mean, the room went crazy. I asked former Crown Prosecutor John Hall about this incident. Do you remember a gathering where the families were there and you said if they're dead, they're dead and perhaps their children could have died in a bus crash. Do you remember that meeting? I don't think I ever said that or whatever said that. It doesn't sound very sensible.

Sharon Rosenfeld, who is the mother of one of the murdered boys, she said she remembers that meeting very carefully. And she said, you know, the families reacted quite demonstrably. They were upset. I recall going to a meeting and whether anybody said something like that to them at that time, I don't know, but I have no recollection.

All I recall is that the families were of course justifiably very upset and it was a difficult meeting for Alan Williams and the deputy attorney general. I tried to be as helpful to the families and let them know what I was doing as I could, but in the end of the day I don't know that there's any real solace that one can answer or give to parents who suffered such awful losses as they suffered. The best thing that I could do was to simply convict this villain and put him out of circulation and that's what we did. The thing I've never understood is, if Olsen felt the RCMP had nothing on him, or at least

so little that he had leverage to negotiate the deal, why did he agree to the cash for bodies deal? Was it to simply say he got one on the police? Was he just greedy? Eager to go back to prison where he lived comfortably? Or was it, as he says, really to provide for his wife and child? I says, look, if you put $100,000 together, we'll work something out. And I says, and that money goes to Joan and my boy in the trust fund.

And I put that whole thing together myself. At the time of Olson's conviction, Joan Olson, as she was then called, wasn't much more than a two-dimensional concept. A naive, probably foolish woman who didn't know her own husband was a monster. But who was with her son, reaping the rewards of his killing rampage, as the beneficiary of the trust $100,000 was put into. And for that, in the eyes of those who detested the deal, Joan was also a villain. But was this truly her story? Ten years after her husband's case was closed, I'd find out. Clifford, since the first time I talked to you, you said Joan would never lie, and you

said she has an excellent memory. Now that I'm... Clifford, can I finish? Now that I'm asking you some rather painful things... First of all, they're not painful things. Well, they seem painful because you're very angry with them. They're not painful. Let's not get in a philosophical debate here, you know?

Go ahead. Get on with your questions. This is the question that I want to ask you. Go ahead. Joan doesn't lie. Joan has a good memory, but everything I have asked you here today, Joan is either lying or has a bad memory. What do you think I'm going to think? That's next time on 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. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is the senior manager and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC podcasts. Tune in next week for an all new episode of Calls from a Killer from CBC's Uncover. Or you can binge the whole series by subscribing to our True Crime premium channel on Apple podcasts. Just click on the link in the show description.