S33 E7: The Escape | Calls From a Killer

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This is a CBC podcast.

The following episode contains descriptions of violence.

Please take care when listening.

By the autumn autumn of 1992, I'd been talking to Clifford Olson for nearly three years.

When he first called me, I was a young reporter convinced I could get into Olson's head to find a reason to provide answers to grieving families in a shocked nation.

I had this unprecedented access to Canada's most notorious criminal.

I had to try,

but my patience was wearing thin.

Now, why did you have the violence?

It was never really clear.

Yes, it was.

The violence was as big.

I told you.

It was the lockup and segregation unit for that nine years.

You can talk to any criminologist, Clifford, and that doesn't make a man hate women and want to kill them.

Well, okay, to answer your question, it was from being locked up.

Simple as that.

I turned to a hate, which was released when I got out through alcohol and I took it out on women and children.

Simple as that.

And you understand that?

I become addictive to the murder after a while.

Olson kept insisting that the criminal justice system was to blame, that his years incarcerated prior to his murder spree turned him to booze, and that the alcohol turned him into a killer.

I didn't buy it and I told Olson as much.

Even after all these times in prison, there's some things that you still won't tell people.

And I don't think that society can learn anything until you're willing to talk.

And you think I should give you the right to everything?

No, I won't.

Absolutely not.

Oh, well, that's fine, Clifford.

I mean, I'm the one who sat there with your ex-wife for four times and went through your whole life history.

I'm the one who's been through all your escapes, and we've done all this research.

I've driven up and down the strip, places were apparently that you murdered.

Now all of a sudden you're saying, why should I tell you why I killed?

Come on.

You got some problem, Arlene.

I'll tell you what.

Listen.

I don't have a problem.

If you have a problem, then I just won't call you anymore.

You don't have to come in to visit me.

Well, why every time when I ask you, do you get angry?

I don't get angry.

I get angry.

As we spoke, I was realizing, you can hear it in my voice, Olson, even after years of conversations with me and Peter, either he had no idea why he killed, or he would never tell.

I was starting to feel like I'd learned all I could from from him.

I'd heard him brag about killing children.

I'd heard him take credit for murders, only to turn around and claim innocence in the next breath.

And I'd received my share of abuse and anger from him.

Nothing he said was shocking to me anymore.

That is, until he said this.

I can escape anytime I want, Arnie.

I can put myself to go anytime I want.

This tape is from November, 1992.

I stole a handcuff key that was left on the desk about five months ago.

It was just lying there.

Yeah, it was lying there, and they sent me out of the office and told me to wait.

And I just picked it up, put it in my pocket, and I come back in.

Clifford Olson was planning to escape.

I'll get out.

I'll get out on an escape when I'm ready to go.

This is the final episode of Calls from a Killer Killer from CBC's Uncover.

I'm Arlene Bynan.

And I'm Nathaniel Frome.

This is episode 7,

The Escape.

While Olson telling me about his plan to escape caught me off guard, it wasn't a complete surprise.

And it was no idle threat.

Olson had escaped prison at least seven times throughout his life.

The first one in 1957, nearly 25 years before his arrest for the killings.

In the CBC archives, we found silent news footage of a 1965 attempt.

A young Olson is being led through thick bushes by a pair of police officers, hands behind his back, a smile on his face.

Escaping is something Olson couldn't help but brag about.

It was a point of pride for him.

You've escaped seven times, as I understand, haven't you?

Yes, I have seven escapes.

You want me to tell you every date I got them here?

I know what's happening.

I know them.

After another of his early escapes, Olson's father speaks to a local newspaper, saying, if he doesn't give himself up, I hope they get him before he does something really bad.

The threat of Olson breaking out of prison felt so real that Peter and I had even spoken to each other about what to do if he ever got out.

We reasoned that if Olson escaped, he would come to me first.

At the time, I lived outside of Toronto in a relatively remote location at the end of a dead end road.

Peter, the Korean War veteran and war correspondent, had come up with a plan.

If Olson came to my door, tell him I was going to call Peter and we were going to help him get his story to the press.

Then after I called Peter, to grab one of the pokers from my fireplace and strike Olson when he wasn't looking.

Peter said, just keep hitting him and when he falls to the ground, hit more.

Don't stop until he's dead.

It wasn't much of a plan, I know, but I thought it was unlikely I'd ever have to use it.

After this admission from Olson, I wasn't so sure.

The most notorious killer Canada had ever seen was telling me he'd been hiding a key to his handcuffs for five months.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

What are you gonna do when you escape?

I mean, do you think that people aren't going to try to kill you?

You're a convicted killer.

Well, I I don't want to hurt anybody.

The thing is, I will go uh to Cuba.

They don't have extraditions there.

All right, that's where I'll go.

You know, and it's a sad thing that I don't get psychiatric help.

I don't get put into any programs.

I don't have to tell you that.

You say you have nothing to lose, so are you going to kill again?

Let me tell you something.

I would only kill in self-defense as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not going to go out there and start killing people.

But if I'm trying to be apprehended, definitely

I'll defend myself.

But if it's with police or anybody else, Arlene, any fool would do that.

You're not going to stand there and let them shoot you.

But serial killers don't get cured overnight, Clifford.

I meant what I said.

Serial killers don't get cured overnight.

I truly thought that Olson would kill again if he ever got out of prison, whether through parole or escape.

I'm going to spend the rest of my life in jail, and I'm not prepared to do that.

And one of these days, Arlene, I'm going to make a move and it's going to be a bloodbath.

I knew that killing was something he enjoyed.

So you can imagine I was more than a little unnerved when he called me to brag about his plans and to tell me about the seemingly lax conditions he was being held in.

I've been down to the hospital, what, five times?

All five times I could have left the hospital.

Nothing could have stopped me.

Well, that seems very hard for me to understand that you do have a history of escaping, and you've done some very creative escapes in your career.

And now you've going to a hospital, it seems to me it's not very safe for the community that you he not only managed to get out of prison and into the hospital, but had managed to steal a key to his own handcuffs.

After so many previous escapes and attempts, Olson had worked out his method.

I was starting to figure it out.

First, he laid the groundwork.

Now, you've been telling me over these years of times that you've been to the hospital and how you could have walked away and I know that is part of your method of operation to make people feel at ease you you don't do it the first time you don't do it the second time you don't do it the third time by the fourth time they think hey he knows the rules he's not going to do it and the fifth time you do it is that what was happening here well certainly you must lay your groundwork definitely definitely Like the opportunity is I had enough.

You know, I'm not going to be stayed locked up here inside a cage like I am the rest of my life.

Then he faked a medical condition.

Right, I put a little blood in the urine by pricking my finger with the needle there.

Okay, that's what I was going to ask you.

So, this ailment was totally fictitious.

Well, it's the same thing that I escaped back there in British Columbia from the Shaughnessy Hospital there in 1965.

I've done the same thing down there, so I'm

no dummy too when it comes to escaping.

And finally, he'd make a break for it.

You said that you took the key because you thought you were going to be there overnight.

So, to me, that means that you thought that maybe during the night or maybe in the morning, you would have seen an opportunity and you would have escaped.

I would have walked away, yes, definitely.

Most certainly.

Olson's latest plan was both detailed and expertly practiced.

But there was one fatal fatal flaw.

Where he hid the key.

But what has happened?

It showed up on the x-ray.

So they brought me back, so I removed it immediately.

It was inside a condom.

And what did they say?

They came in and said, Clifford, you've got a key up your rect.

Like, what did they say?

Oh, they just come in and showed me the x-rays and says he has a key.

I could hear him.

They're talking right there.

We're only 10 feet away.

The plan had failed.

this time.

But Olson vowed to me he would do it again and that he wasn't going to rest until he was out of Kingston Penitentiary.

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.

Olson had crossed a line that as a journalist, I couldn't ignore.

I had an obligation both moral and professional to make his attempted escape and lax security conditions public.

As far as I was concerned, it was a matter of safety.

To me, it wasn't if he escaped, but when.

I knew the story was going to embarrass authorities and in all likelihood, end my access to Olson.

The calls would be done.

Breaking this story would also mean the public would learn that Peter and I had been secretly speaking to a serial killer for almost three years.

So I braced myself.

I finished my call with Olson that day, knowing I might never speak to him again.

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I knew I had an obligation to break this story, but I worried about what the families of Olson's victims would think about the fact I'd spent years talking to the man who had killed their children.

It had been a decade since Olson was first convicted, but their grief was still so raw.

And I was about to put him back into the news.

You're listening to the best of Chronicle.

Good morning.

I'm Arlene Binan.

This Tuesday.

At the time, I was the host of Chronicle, a popular news program on CHFI, a Toronto talk radio station.

The day the story was set to air, I was nervous.

That morning, I got a call from the mother of Terry Lynn Carson, one of his victims.

She'd heard a promo for my interview with Olson.

Don't do it, she said.

Please don't do it.

Hearing her say this, my heart sunk.

I felt nauseous.

She was so upset.

She told me she worried that we would be giving Olson a platform.

The man who was continuing to cause so much devastation for so many, given another moment in the spotlight, all because of me.

For a moment, I considered calling it off.

Terry and I talked on the phone for a long time.

As we spoke, we came to an understanding.

I explained about Olson's plans to escape, about how close he'd gotten to getting out, and that he would keep trying until he did.

Terry knew better than anyone what Olson would do if he were free.

He would murder children.

And she also knew that we had to do whatever we could to stop that from happening.

After talking to Terry, we decided to only include the details about Olson's escape attempt.

And then the audience heard what would end up being my very last interview with Olson.

There's a lot of people that's not locked up like Clifford Robert Olson year after year, 11 years in a cell five feet by 12.

But you've killed a lot of people.

What do you want?

Do you want to stay in a hotel?

Well, do you think, do don't you believe in corrections yourself?

Don't Don't you believe that a man should have or a woman should have some right to

inhuman decency, as we say?

The most basic human decency

is life, and you took the life from people.

The same day, Peter published an article in the Toronto Sun.

The headline, Olson, I can escape anytime I want.

The story was out.

A few months later, I received a sad letter from Olson asking me to call him again.

And not long after, I received a form to sign if I wanted to be on his contact list.

I didn't respond.

After three years, I was finally done with Clifford Olson.

While that would be the last time Olson would speak with Arlene, he continued to communicate with my grandfather, Peter.

Following his latest escape attempt, Olson's telephone privileges were temporarily revoked.

And after he was discovered to have smuggled a broom handle into his cell, he was sent to a federal penitentiary in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

Corrections Canada said they made the transfer specifically due to his possession of contraband and because he was publicly talking about his plans to escape.

In 1997, Olson was transferred again to a prison outside Montreal.

After spending so much of his life behind bars, this was the final place he'd be incarcerated.

To nobody's surprise, from prison, Olson continued to play the victim, this time using the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The charter was established to enshrine the civil rights of all Canadians, but Olson tried to use it to his advantage.

Here's Peter speaking with another reporter.

Well, Olson has picked up his Charter of Rights and just plays it like a fiddle.

Nobody else in the country quite knows what it means.

He's, you know, he's had something like 21 or 22 Supreme Court cases, reaches right to the top.

Well, you know, he's now going right to the Supreme Court trying to get a sex doll in prison with him.

He used every petty grievance to try to better his situation in prison.

From access to porn to receiving books and movies about serial killers, he mounted so many legal challenges that the criminal code was amended so serial killers like Olson could no longer apply for early parole.

And perhaps most disturbingly, Olson spent much of his time in prison tormenting the victims' families.

The man who killed their children was sending them letters.

He recently sent a letter to the parents of one of his victims, 16-year-old Darren Todd Johnsrud.

In his letter, Olson threatens to sue Rosenfeld for defaming his character, saying, I've never been convicted of any sexual offense, nor are there any convictions on my record for any sexual offenses.

Olson went on to say, so smartass, we will see you in court.

Hope you have a lot of extra monies to pay the legal bills.

Olson would continue to call my grandpa for over a decade more, into the 2000s.

The calls became increasingly incoherent, and Olson's claims got stranger and stranger.

His letters to the victims' families became more gruesome and he claimed to have inside information about the September 11th terrorist attacks.

But Pete, never one to turn down a source, was able to break one last story from Olson.

The Prime Minister says he is upset about it, and apparently so are a lot of Canadians.

Taxpayers are funding a public pension for notorious serial killer, Clifford Olson, more than $1,100 a month.

Olson, who could never resist a chance to brag, told my grandfather Peter about the pension checks he'd been receiving under the government's old-age security and guaranteed income supplement programs.

Again, even from behind bars, Olson was managing to engender fury from the public.

Because of Peter's reporting, Olson and hundreds of other federal inmates had their pension benefits stripped by then Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his government.

I am really very pleased to be here to discuss Bill C-31, the Eliminating Entitlements for Prisoners Act.

Former Human Resources Minister Diane Finley.

This not only angers Canadians, but it's also outrageous and offensive to myself, to the Prime Minister, and to our government.

Olson added suing the federal government about this to his long list of legal grievances.

Later that year, Olson even asked Peter to testify at a parole hearing as a character witness.

Peter said he would, much to my grandmother's alarm.

He then told her, I'm going to say Olson should be taken out back and hung.

That parole hearing never happened.

In 2011, Clifford Olson died of cancer.

It was a quiet and underwhelming end to his story.

Ahead of his death, Corrections Canada got in touch with the victims' families, telling them that Olson was in his last days.

I don't know how to feel.

It's almost like sacrilegious if I feel pleased that somebody is dying.

My son summed it up.

He said, you know, Mama, he won't be able to hurt us again.

After 30 years, he won't be able to hurt us.

When I heard the news, I couldn't help but think about what I knew, about what he had told me throughout those many hours.

Jailhouse phoned to his ear.

And more than that, I couldn't help but think about what he hadn't told me.

Olson knew more than he ever revealed to me and Peter.

But whatever secrets he still had died with him.

When Nat first reached out to me, we had to decide whether or not to open these boxes again, to open up this story once again.

People consume true crime because it brings them into contact with the most dangerous people in the world while remaining safe.

But those who have felt the impact of Olsen's horrific crimes, friends and family, like Bridget and Trudy and Kathy and Sharon, they were not safe.

I could stop picking up the phone and answering letters.

I could walk away.

They couldn't.

In the years after Olson's arrest, some families chose to appear at parole hearings to deliver impact statements or advocate for victims' rights.

Others protected themselves by staying away from the media or from Parliament Hill, privately and quietly, trying to heal from an unimaginable loss.

But before anyone even knew the name Clifford Olson, even as their children were still disappearing from the lower mainland, the families were reaching out to each other.

The first person that I was able to contact was Terry Lynn Carson's mom.

Sharon Rosenfeld.

Obviously, police wouldn't give us any information, so I just kept kept phoning every carson in the phone book.

I luckily was able to get the right name.

I knew how our family was feeling and I knew her daughter was missing and she must be feeling the same.

As a young reporter I watched these families navigate an impossible situation.

As more children were found, this community tied together by heartbreak grew.

We stumbled around a bit because, well, who knows what to say to each other other than

we were very, very mixed up.

And so

her and I thought it would be a good idea to maybe try and contact other families as the children went missing.

Many of them have stayed in touch with each other to this day.

I had always wondered what the families thought of me.

A reporter who had spent so much time talking to the man who had murdered their loved ones.

A journalist there to report on the most difficult days of their lives.

And now here we are, speaking again for this podcast.

Bridget, thank you

from the bottom of my heart.

Thank you.

I was with you when you went back there.

You know, I buried a lot of stuff myself, too.

And it's all coming out as I go back.

Of course, I can't even imagine.

i i i i don't even know how they're able to process what you know from the killer's mouth for me it was traumatic to go

every two years to a prison and all i can stare at was his hands

those

that monster's hands

knowing that those hands took the life

of 11 innocent children.

Doesn't matter

where they came from or who they were.

That was someone's brother, sister,

child.

Thank you again.

Thanks.

Arlene,

I know this is hard for you.

Not as hard as it is for you.

So that's

1,000%.

Bridget, thank you.

Are you okay?

Are you okay?

Do you want to talk a little bit more?

I hate to hang up after everything.

No, no, no, of course not.

That's just hard.

I know what you're playing.

Nat, you know, when we started this, I knew what was on the tapes.

I just knew them.

One would go in and I'd go, oh, I remember that day.

And I did it with your grandfather, Peter.

And I remember when we first spoke about it, you just listened to those tapes and asking you what you thought the story was.

It was completely different than my perception, but you were on it all fresh.

So

is it different?

I mean, what did you think it was and what did it end up being?

You know, listening to those tapes for the first time, not knowing what was going to be on them, the first thing I came away thinking was just how mundane he talked about everything.

What he was saying, the content of what he was saying, was shocking and disturbing and upsetting, but there was a banality to it that he just sort of listed things unapologetically, unremorsefully.

But then as we started to talk with the victims' families, I realized I hadn't fully grasped the horror of what he had done and exactly what it meant when he said he killed a child.

When I approached this story too,

I don't know how this will sound, but but I was very much,

as we said in the first episode, a filmmaker looking for a story, and I approached it just as that, a story.

And then I incurred my own personal tragedy with my sister unexpectedly passing this year.

My ability to distance myself from the story suddenly evaporated.

This was suddenly hitting home, hitting a nerve, and talking to these victims' families, listening to them cry, crying with them.

And perhaps it's self-centered to say this, but I realized for the first time what it truly meant to lose someone.

And you know, when your sister died and we had to keep going,

I wanted to think of ways that I could protect you from what you just described, because I thought

this must be raw.

It makes you reevaluate every true crime story you've ever watched, every podcast you've listened to.

But it's important to remember these are real people and real families who have experienced a loss that you and I can't imagine.

I wish I could ask Pete this too.

You know, you spoke to him, you both spoke to him, you spent years trying to figure out what made him tick and we couldn't figure it out.

And

what was the point to this?

Is it just to shine light on a story that needed to be told?

Or is how do you look back on it and say,

I'm glad we did this?

I know, you know, I remember doing it and it used to haunt me all the time.

But, you know, I think about it as soon as I opened the box and I waited a long time, as you know, to do the story, because what was the point?

And I think I go back covering crimes and modern stories and I see that we haven't really learned, have we?

Have we really learned from it?

It still happens.

People can be fooled.

Police can be fooled.

Victims are judged.

They are.

I do think the point of it is

still almost the same.

But I think in this story, in a lot of ways, we shut it down and put it in a box.

And it seems like just such a disgrace and a tragedy.

It really was a dark mark.

And we have to learn something from it.

And I wasn't so sure at the time we did.

So I hope it helps more this time.

I think of Olson's legacy like a stain, one that was left on the victims, on the families, on the country, and on me.

The stain of Olson will never truly be gone, but it may fade with time

and with light.

My life is different now.

You know, I think I know enough ugly things about what life can do and what some people can do.

Sharon Rosenfeld, the mother of Darren Johnsrud.

And I think I've been hurt down to my toes time and time again.

And so in my latter years, I just want to just love my family and find peace.

Trudy Court, the sister of Ada Court.

But I think in the end, 40 years later, I think I'm probably just coming to terms with everything.

Like it's been a process.

A lot of years I don't remember.

But now as I get older, I think I'm finally becoming

okay.

Bridget Cosma, the sister of Judy Cosma.

I know it's been a long time, but

my wish has always been to honor these 11 children,

and I think that they should be remembered.

There's never closure.

You try to cope as best you can.

You can't change a broken heart.

Calls from a Killer was written and produced by me, Arlene Binan, Nathaniel Frum, and senior producers Ashley Mack and Andrew Friesen.

Mixing and sound design by Evan Kelly.

Emily Cannell is our digital producer.

Fact-checking by Hadil Abdul Nabi.

Our cross-promo producer is Amanda Cox.

Our video producers are Evan Agard, Tamina Aziz, and John Lee.

Special thanks to Alina Ghosh, David Downey, Julian Uzzielli, David Grine, Yvonne Worthington, Isabel Frum, and the CBC Reference Library.

Additional audio from Rogers Broadcasting.

Our podcast artwork was designed by Good Tape Studio.

Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak.

Tanya Springer is our senior manager.

Arif Nurani is the director.

director.

And Leslie Merklinger is the executive director of CBC Podcasts.

If this is your first time listening to Uncover, you should know that this feed brings you the best in True Crime.

And there are over 30 seasons to check out.

A season that has really stuck with me is The Village, which details how serial killer Bruce MacArthur targeted the queer community in Toronto.

And I recommend Hunting Warhead, a harrowing dive into the darkest corners of the internet.

You can find both of these seasons, and many more, right here in the Uncover feed.

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