S33 E6: The Others | Calls From a Killer

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This is a CBC podcast.

The following episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault.

Please take care when listening.

When I was about 12 or 13 years old, I was staying at my grandparents' house in Toronto.

Pete was at work at the Toronto Sun newspaper.

and my grandmother was out running errands with my sister.

This would have been in 2005 or 2006, so my grandparents had a landline which rang constantly.

I always answered.

That was a house rule.

You never knew who would be calling.

This time, it was a collect call from somewhere in Quebec.

I accepted the charges and a man with a friendly voice and a thick Canadian accent was on the other end.

He asked if I was Peter's grandson.

I said yes, and we started chatting.

I remember him as really friendly and curious.

He asked where I was from, I said Washington, D.C.

He said he knew it well, what part?

I told him.

We talked about what my parents did for a living, school, all sorts of stuff.

He asked if he could talk to my grandfather.

I told him Pete wasn't there, but I could take a message.

I wrote down his name on the message pad.

Clifford Olson.

I proceeded to doodle as he continued talking.

Then, as the call wound down, he said, oh, by the way, your grandpa might say I killed a bunch of people.

Don't listen to that, and hung up.

I grabbed Pete's computer and googled Clifford Olson, and I started to freak out.

I had just spoken for half an hour with a serial killer.

A big one.

My grandparents come home and my grandma is furious.

Olson should be calling Pete at the office, not at home.

She'd protested this before.

Pete's sort of amused and asked what Clifford and I talked about.

I'm still in the midst of panicking, but both of them assure me that Olson is locked up, far away.

He wouldn't be breaking out and coming to Toronto, to me.

But that's not why I was upset.

As I lay in bed that night, I kept thinking of how that voice was the last voice so many children my age heard.

How it would have twisted with anger.

He sounded friendly.

As someone who grew up in America, his Canadian accent was disarming and a little funny to me.

And he got so much information out of me after making me feel he was harmless.

He was a predator, and he was good at it.

Clifford Olson was cunning.

He was excellent at sniffing out the vulnerabilities that made someone a good target.

Understanding how he chose his victims can both tell us about how he was able to get away with it for so long and provide important clues.

Because Clifford Olson was only charged with 11 murders, but we believe there were many more.

This is Calls from a Killer from CBC's Uncover.

I'm Nathaniel Fromm.

And I'm Arlene Binan.

This is episode 6:

The Others.

From the moment Clifford Olson was sentenced to life in prison, he started trying to cut a second cash-for-bodies deal, and not just for murders he had committed.

At times, Olson claimed to me he knew about murders all across the United States.

You got to look at it this way.

We have to use logic.

If I'm never going to be released in Canada, therefore, if I cop out to murders and everything I know in Seattle, Oregon, along down to California, down to Illinois and New York and Florida.

Then,

if I ever got out, they could extradite me.

You follow me?

He also suggested to me and Peter that he was responsible for multiple murders in the Seattle area committed by a then-unknown suspect labeled the Green River killer.

And I'm betting a hundred to nothing that they haven't got a goddamn thing on the Seattle Green River murders or the other murders.

No, no, they've got nothing in that.

Right.

Nothing in that.

Gives a shit what they talk about 11 kids because they don't know nothing.

And I'll be honest with you, I thought that was very possible.

I knew from the BC police investigation that Olson traveled the roads down the west coast, which aligned with the killings.

But I later traveled to Seattle, driving those same roads with his lawyer, and visited the state attorney general Robert Keppel.

After I'd put to him all that Olson had been saying, Keppel told told me it was a dead end.

It was highly improbable Olson was their guy.

At other times, Olson switched tack and said he merely knew the identity of the murderer.

This Green River fellow doesn't have any idea he still thinks he's your friend?

Well, we are.

We're pretty close, you know.

In 2001, Washington police finally caught another man and charged him with the Green River killer's crimes.

His name was Gary Ridgway, and he was convicted of 49 separate murders.

He'd later claimed to have slain as many as 80 women throughout the 80s and 90s.

Yeah, but you're going to turn him in.

Well, if I can get a deal, yeah, you know, and who cares?

I'm after to put some book money together and that and get a thing going, you know, eh?

During these calls, Ridgway was still at large, half a continent away from where Olson was imprisoned.

I found it unlikely that the two of them had ever crossed paths.

Well, I mean,

I thought you were doing it for the good of mankind.

That's what you said.

It is the good of mankind, but it's going to be done to where I'm not going to give them something for nothing.

What I'm getting at?

You know, you're a reporter.

Yes.

You make money by selling articles.

Olson was a greedy man and a gifted snitch.

So even though he'd pulled off the hugely controversial payment deal over his own murders, a decade later, he was still angling to capitalize off the killings of others or comfortable confessing to murders he didn't commit.

But this way, if I can put a deal together and be cooperative and give them bodies and give them all this, then I can say, okay, this is what I've done.

Maybe you can help me out for a parole.

That's what I'm doing.

But what can I get out of the deal is what I'm saying.

I don't mind pleading guilty to the BC murders, the Alberta murders, and the Ontario murders.

That's nothing because it's concurrent time.

You get what I'm getting at?

But I bring also information.

But if the bottom line was knowledge of murders paid, even if it was false, how are Peter and I going to squeeze the truth out of him?

So you are involved in other murders.

Yes.

And that because of deals, we're not finding out about them.

Right.

Part of the reason I wanted to interview his wife, Joan, was that I'd be able to cross-reference some of Olson's more outlandish claims.

If Olson was on vacation with her in BC, for example, on the day he claims to have killed in California, it would be a good indication to save my energy.

Through talking with Joan, I believed he was responsible for the murder of a sex worker who'd been hanging around their San Francisco hotel.

The girl in California, she's about 16 years old.

She was

pretty.

Once, during a particularly tedious phone call, Olson admitted to this killing, but he walked it back the very next day.

As usual, one conversation would often contradict the next.

We've established that Christine Wheeler was not the first murderer.

Oh, no, the States was.

Yeah, when was that?

Was that the one with the Seattle guy?

1978.

1978 with the Seattle guy.

Yeah.

Okay, but what about in 70?

Wasn't there some connection?

Nothing in 73?

73?

No, no, I was down in the States after I got out.

I made many trips down there, but we didn't have no killings down there.

No, no, 78 is the first kill-ins on the big trip down there.

Why, did I have 73 down there?

But despite Olson's constant attempts to muddy the waters, there is one name that emerges clearly in the tape many times.

You know who I'm talking about.

Yes.

Verna Berjerke.

That's who I'm talking about.

Verna Bajerki.

If she wanted to go somewhere, she would just go.

She'd just get on a bus and go.

But she always let somebody know where she was going.

This is Kathy Lamberton.

She's talking to me from her home in Hope, B.C.

about her dear friend Verna from 40 years ago.

Verna was kind of like a wild child.

She was like a free spirit.

She loved partying.

She was always happy, smiling.

Hazel eyes, blonde hair.

She had a gap between her two front teeth, which is her most noticeable feature.

I don't recall anyone disliking her ever.

Yeah, she was just always on the go.

She had a job at 16 working at the Godfather Restaurant in Hope.

Hope is a little town nestled amongst many mountains.

It's just got one little main street.

And just regular everyday people.

Everybody knows everybody.

We never locked our doors.

Kids were always out.

It was literally like you came in when the street lights came on.

One little tiny post office.

It's like literally just a little, little town.

But all highways connect here.

You cannot go anywhere in BC without going through hope.

When's the last time you laid eyes on Verna?

She left my apartment the afternoon, about one o'clock, on May 2nd, 1981.

She was going to see her boyfriend in Kamloops.

She was wearing jeans,

a light blue shirt, and a pair of roller skates.

Kathy was 19 at the time, and Verna 16.

Unlike most young people in the area, they treated hitchhiking like another mode of public transport, even if they understood it could have its dangers.

Before she left, I gave her a knife and I said, Verna, get them in the eyes.

And that's the last thing I said to her.

That was Saturday.

And then Wednesday, her mom came to the door and said, Verna never came home.

A day later, they reported her missing.

Her mom and I drove all the way to Kamloops and back, looking in the ditches, creeks, back roads.

So we started right then.

And in the decade since, Kathy hasn't stopped thinking about Verna, nor stopped trying to get to the bottom of her disappearance.

I've organized searches, like big searches.

I've gone to see psychics, tons of stuff.

I've had interviews with the coroner, coroner, the head investigator, judges.

I've written letters to lots of people, including yourself, Peter Worthington.

She'd read in one of Peter's articles that he and I had been interviewing Clifford Olson.

Then she saw me on TV.

I thought maybe one of you could help.

And you both actually at least had some answers,

more than the police actually did.

She wrote letters to me and Pete, knowing we talked to Olson.

She told us she suspected that he was involved in Verna's disappearance for good reason.

Well, he was right on the very front page of the province paper on August 13th.

And I went, oh my god, that's the guy that drove Verna and I.

I instantly knew that that was who had killed her or made her disappear.

I don't know why, but I did.

I knew.

Kathy recognized Olson, and the sight of him triggered a frightening memory.

She and Verna had gotten into his car while hitchhiking, just two days before Verna went missing.

Verna wanted to go see her boyfriend.

He worked on the trains, trains and they were stationed in Kamloops.

It was like a little green, like an olive green rebel.

I don't know if you remember those cars, but...

Me too.

Yeah,

it was like that.

And Verna got in the front and I got in the back.

He just looked like a middle-aged,

very chubby man.

Just a regular middle-aged man.

So we kind of felt safe, I guess I had a knife in my hand open in the back seat the whole time yeah

first he started trying to push beer on us make us drink beer and then he just kept asking are you sure are you sure sure you want a beer come on girls stuff like that anyway i refused and i wouldn't allow verna to take it either but you thought she might she reached

she was going to.

So

I said, no, no, you're not doing that, Verna.

We're not here to drink beer.

We're here to go to Kamloops.

Then he had a big bag of peanuts in the middle of the front seat.

Alarm bells start ringing for Kathy, louder and louder.

He was just creepy.

He just kept talking about how his wife wouldn't have sex with him because of the baby and was ruining his life and just weird stuff he was talking about.

At some point along the journey, traffic is halted by road construction.

We sat for about 30 minutes and then he got out of the car because he was getting angry that we were stopped.

And so he walked up a ways, I guess, to see what was going on.

And that's when me and Verna were talking.

And that's when she said she was scared, and we were going to get out of the car, but we were in the middle of nowhere.

Anyway, we ended up staying in the car, and he did drop us off in Kamloops.

The fact that two girls eventually made it to their destination is one of the reasons why Kathy is so sure Verna became a victim.

If he offered her another lift from the same spot in Hope only two days later,

that she probably would have thought, well, he let us out, so he's okay.

She probably thought he was a little bit of a weirdo, but he let us out.

So when you went to the police and you saw the picture and you said, hey, my girlfriend's missing, see this man that you believe is connected with these killings.

We were in that car.

Yeah.

How long did it take for them to follow up after you said those things to them?

I don't even know if they've still followed up on that.

I've never heard another thing.

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In March 2017, police in Ketchiken, Alaska got a worried call.

And I haven't heard from them, so I'm getting worried.

It was about a beloved surgeon, one of just two in town, named Eric Garcia.

When police officers arrived to check on the doctor, they found him dead on a couch.

Is it a suicide?

Is it a murder?

What is it?

From ABC Audio and 2020, Cold-Blooded Mystery in Alaska is out now.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Verna's case remains open.

In October 1981, police found some of her belongings about five miles outside of Hope on the north side of the Fraser River, but no remains.

Before he was arrested in the same year, it's quite possible Olson saw or read something about Verna's disappearance in the news.

It's also very possible he knew knew and couldn't help uttering her name for other reasons.

After being apprehended for murder, Olson teases this to RCMP Corporal Fred Mailey during questioning.

This Bajerki thing just bugs the shit out of me.

Why?

Because you can't have done it, according to what I know.

I mean,

Joan says that you're with her all day.

And you know, Joan could be all all wet too.

I mean, it's not as simple as you didn't do it from my point of view.

I don't know.

Joan can be mistaken.

But during his first psychiatric interview, Olson changes his story yet again.

Do you know of Bajerki?

Bajerki?

Yes, I know of her.

Yes, of what I've read in the paper.

She's a girl from Hope.

Yes.

What?

Did you have anything to do with her?

No, I don't know her at all.

She went missing on May 1st, that night i was at jones month place her brother was with us uh but you did not kill her no i never met the girl never met her no

ten years after this tape olson told me and peter he was responsible for verna's death he was trying to put together a second cash for bodies deal offering information on more killings and the location of more bodies.

See, you have Jameson's body, you have Darlington's bodies,

you have Wayne's, Wayne's body,

but Journey Berkey's, you haven't got hers.

Okay, well, I'm not saying which order we're going to go in, but this is okay, well, with Vernon, okay, Burnett Jerky.

Unfortunately, we could never ourselves get much further on this case.

As you've heard, Olson's side of the conversation was 95% bluster, evasion, and lies.

But there were a number of reasons why she could reasonably have been another of Olson's victims, and that we still find Kathy's theory compelling today.

Verna disappeared on May 2nd, 1981, when Olson wasn't recorded to be in custody for drunk driving or something or other.

She was known to hitchhike, and that day her route would cut right through Olson's old hunting ground.

I learned from Joan that Olson loved snacking on peanuts when driving, a detail Kathy couldn't have known when she and I first spoke.

We also know now that Olson often selected victims he'd interacted with before.

Kathy has also done an impressive amount of research on Olson's movements leading up to Verna's disappearance.

She believes that he was at a bank and a campground in the area just days before Verna went missing.

But perhaps the the biggest step forward for Kathy in her quest for confirmation is Olson's own words to her.

And then in 1996, I started writing Olson.

She'd found out which prison was housing him and went through the process to mail an inmate.

I asked him why he did not kill the two of us that day he picked us up in the car.

and his answer was because I'd never killed two people before at once.

When I actually heard it from him, I started bawling because that's when I realized that I could have been dead that night too.

Did he admit he killed Vernon to you in those?

No.

He does not admit it.

I think maybe in some of his letters he hints at it and teases kind of.

Typical for Olson.

It just validated what I already knew, but it didn't validate for the police, I guess.

We recently reached out to the RCMP to get an update on Verna's case.

They told us that the investigation into her disappearance remains open and that, quote, there is currently no evidence to link Werna's disappearance to Clifford Olson, Unquote.

Back then, the theory they gave Kathy is that Verna was a runaway, something she's never accepted.

Why?

You know, what was it about Verna that you think made them feel that way?

Did they look at her family?

What were the criteria do you know?

Well, probably because she was only 16.

She was living at home, but she was living at my house also.

You called her a wild wild child.

Did they believe that as well?

Was that a factor, do you think?

I have no idea.

She was just fun.

She was a fun person.

The reason I asked this was because we'd seen this pattern so many times before.

Olson could smell any kind of vulnerability in a potential victim.

Or at least he could sense what would make them a less prioritized case for an eventual police investigation.

Lower income.

Parents who were divorced or separated.

Kids in so-called broken homes.

That was the selection of targets.

But how he'd get them into the car, lower their guard, and keep them comfortable before attacking, that was expertly thought out too.

In my grandfather Pete's boxes, I found phony business cards and checks for a fake construction business.

Olson would use those to try to prove to his victims that he was legit.

That's when I spotted Louise.

So I picked her up.

She wasn't hitchhiking.

She was walking around going to work.

So I picked her up and I says, you're working?

She told me she's working at Vino's.

I says, yeah.

And I says, well, listen, do you want to work for me?

I said, we're building a construction company.

I says, here, I says, I'll give you $50.

If the potential victim took him up on a menial job offer, it was a sign they came from a family that needed cash, which would lead to the next check.

He'd ask if they wanted to call their parents or guardian and tell them where they were going.

I then told her that she could work for me tomorrow morning, that I would like to meet her grandma that night, so she knows where she was at.

She says she was 13 years old.

Well, she says we should wait till tomorrow to meet her grandma because it was late at night.

If the child replied that there was no need, it meant no one would be looking for them.

Once he had them in the car, he would offer some convoluted reason to go elsewhere.

And when the journey was extended a little while longer, he'd offer a beer, which was almost always laced with chloral hydrate pills that Olson got from his doctor.

Mixed with alcohol, they would knock you out.

That's when the attack would begin.

Olson was not a highly intelligent man, but he had an instinct for all this.

Maybe it was all the years he spent being churned through the justice system and behind bars with other offenders.

Kathy is convinced that Olson had one final advantage.

She believes that Verna would have been added to the list of Olson's victims, but because the RCMP had already settled on the payment and they knew they'd secure conviction, They felt no need to up the already substantial figure.

They could have added another 10,000 for Verna.

I believe once they had those children found and everything,

they felt that the problem was solved.

He was in jail.

It was over.

And they were rude to her mom about the whole thing, too.

In what way?

They told her they do not absolutely, for the last time, they do not believe Olson killed Verna, and she's probably in the river somewhere.

Besides Verna, Peter and I felt that Olson should have been the key suspect for the disappearances of several other young people in the years leading up to 1981.

When Olson tried to put together a second cash-for-bodies deal in 1982, he had the additional victims' names ready to go.

He even shared them in a letter he wrote from prison to then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

The complete files of the murders and rapes of the following named persons in the province of British Columbia.

Carmen Robinson from Victoria, B.C., Marnie Jamieson from Gibson, B.C., Gil Ann Wees, W-E-Y-S from Canolops, B.C.,

Verna Bergerke from B.C., Helen Hopcraft from B.C., Pamela Darlington.

But by January the next year, he'd retracted those claims in a letter to the Toronto Star newspaper and apologized.

The police said they doubted he'd ever been involved in most of those cases.

What Peter and I were operating on was sheer logic.

Olson was a diagnosed severe psychopath who derived extreme pleasure from torturing, sexually assaulting, and killing young people.

He had had a criminal history dating back to his teens, yet the first murder he confessed to was committed just before he turned 40 years old, which is delayed for an offender of his kind.

Olson also traveled constantly, driving hours away from home, often crossing the border into the U.S.

and back again.

It didn't make sense to Peter and me that he'd only kill on Canadian territory.

Then there was the backlash to the cash-for-bodies deal, which acted like a shield.

Authorities had been chastised by the public, and I had very little appetite to deal with Olson again,

even if he was coming to them with names of potential victims, a fact he acknowledged.

And you're saying they said, we're not striking any deal with you, Clifford Robert Olson.

At this time, yes.

Okay.

Do you think that's because they were gun-shy because of everything else?

Definitely, definitely, my God.

The only reasonable conclusion we could come to, and that I still maintain, was that there were more victims, and that Werna Berjerki was one of them.

Have you given up, Kathy?

Or do you think Werna's remains will ever be found?

I think so.

I think somebody will stumble across them one day,

somewhere.

If you feel strongly about something,

and the police aren't doing anything, just keep doing it yourself.

That's what I say.

Just keep going.

After years talking to Olson, years of picking up the phone, only to hear admissions and retractions, lies and deception, I was increasingly feeling that I had gotten all I could out of him.

But it wasn't until what he told me next that I was finally done with Clifford Robert Olson.

But to make things perfectly clear to you, and I don't want to alarm the public, and I'm not doing this for notoriety, as people say, but I am leaving the Kingston Penitentiary on an escape sooner or later.

I'm making my plans, and they can do what they want, but they're not going to be able to hold me.

That's coming up on the final episode of Calls from a Killer.

Calls from a Killer was written and produced by me, Nathaniel Fromm, Arlene Binan, 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 Nurani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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