Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime

How do you convict a killer with no DNA, no fingerprints and no weapon?

In 2005, 14-year-old Chelsey Acorn was murdered and buried in a shallow grave beside the Coquihalla River near Hope, BC. Two men confessed to undercover police: Jesse Blue West and his son, Dustin Moir. But the confessions didn’t match. Once the case reached court, each man told a new story in which the other was the killer and he was only the one who helped bury her.

In Part 2, I break down how the Crown proved murder using almost nothing but the killers’ own words. The evidence includes a borrowed shovel, four secret details only the killers could know, a newspaper clipping hidden in a safe, and a recorded conversation in the back of a sheriff’s van where the father told his son, “It wasn’t all me.”

You’ll hear how a joint trial fell apart 8 weeks in, and why a jury’s murder conviction was overturned on appeal. You’ll also hear how the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling in R. v. Hart changed the rules for Mr. Big investigations in the middle of the case, which forced the Crown to fight for the son’s confession all over again.

Along the way, I explain in plain language what makes a murder first-degree, how the law separates a murderer from an accessory after the fact, and how judges decide whether to believe someone who takes the stand.

It took three trials and more than a decade to get there.

Content warning: this episode discusses the murder of a child and the sexual exploitation of youth.

Part 2 sources: R. v. West, 2013 BCSC 132 (CanLII), Reasons for Judgment of Justice W.G. Grist; R. v. West, 2015 BCCA 379 (CanLII); R. v. Moir, 2013 BCCA 36 (CanLII); R. v. Moir, 2013 BCSC 1696 (CanLII) (bail); R. v. Moir, 2013 BCSC 1750 (CanLII) (change of venue); R. v. Moir, 2016 BCSC 386 (CanLII) (expert evidence ruling); R. v. Moir, 2016 BCSC 1720 (CanLII) (admissibility of Mr. Big confession); R. v. Moir, 2017 BCSC 1006 (CanLII) (admissibility of telephone call); Global News, "Father of convicted killer also found guilty in murder of Chelsey Acorn" (January 21, 2013); Abbotsford News, "Dustin Moir convicted at second trial for Chelsey Acorn murder" (2017). The identities of the undercover officers are protected by a publication ban under s. 486.5 of the Criminal Code.

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Part 1 of 2

In April 2006, hikers on a trail off the Coquihalla Highway near Hope, BC, poked a stick into a pile of river rocks and found bone. Under the rocks was 14-year-old Chelsey Acorn, a girl in provincial care who had walked out of her last foster home 10 months earlier carrying a Winnie the Pooh backpack. She was buried with no clothes and no jewellery, and nothing to say who she was.

There were no witnesses, no DNA and no weapon. There were only a phone bill, a Safeway receipt, and two men who had been seen with her: a man in his 50s who called himself "Blue," and his son.

So the RCMP built a criminal organization that didn't exist and invited both of them to join. Over months of fake jobs, cash and hotel rooms, father and son were each brought before a "crime boss" who was actually a police officer. Each of them confessed. But their stories didn't match.

I  takesyou inside the investigation and the two Mr. Big undercover operations that cracked it. You'll hear the 4 secret details only the killer could know, a newspaper clipping hidden in a safe, and the moment a 21-year-old looked at a crime boss and said, "I did that."

Content warning: this episode discusses the murder of a child and the sexual exploitation of youth.

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On February 6th, 1975, a delivery driver pulled over on Westminster Highway in Richmond, British Columbia, to throw out a bag of garbage. He saw something sparkling in the snow about 6 feet away. It was a ring, on the finger of a 14-year-old girl. Her best friend was lying beside her.

For his trouble, Ralph Sanders spent the next 27 years under quiet suspicion, including from inside his own family.

What finally broke the case was a pair of brown suede shoes seized in February 1975 by a Mountie who had no idea why he was taking them. They sat in an exhibit locker through 1984 and 1988, giving up nothing. In 2001, the science arrived.

What came next was 8 months undercover, $324,000, a staged beating in a motel room, $80,000 in a bank vault, and a videotaped confession in a Whistler hotel suite that the trial judge warned the jury not to trust.

Sources: R. v. Bonisteel, 2008 BCCA 344 (CanLII), Court of Appeal for British Columbia, reasons of Levine J.A., Lowry and Bauman JJ.A. concurring, September 9, 2008. Contemporaneous trial reporting: The Vancouver Sun (May 3, June 8, June 22 and June 25, 2005), reporting by Maurice Bridge and Gerry Bellett; The Province (May and June 2005, and July 1 and 5, 2005), reporting by Keith Fraser; the Richmond Review (April 30 to July 14, 2005), reporting by Martin van den Hemel; the Times Colonist (May 3 and July 10, 2005), CanWest News Service and The Canadian Press reporting by Camille Bains. Subsequent legal framework on Mr. Big confessions: R. v. Hart, 2014 SCC 52. A court-ordered publication ban prohibits publication of any information tending to identify the undercover officers involved in this investigation, including their likenesses, attire and physical descriptions.

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In 2022, Crystal MacDonald brought home two Cane Corso puppies as companions, not guard dogs. By April 2024, Khaos and Khairo had killed a neighbour's dog, mauled a tenant, put a family friend in the hospital with three broken ribs and a collapsed lung, and killed a household cat, all in nine months, all witnessed, and all explained away.

Then, on April 1, 2024, eleven-year-old Kache Grist, visiting his father in Edmonton for spring break, was left alone in the house with the dogs for less than an hour. He didn't survive it.

This episode covers R v MacDonald,  the Court of King's Bench of Alberta decision that convicted MacDonald of criminal negligence causing death, a rare and difficult charge to prove. We walk through what the Crown had to establish beyond a reasonable doubt, why "wanton or reckless disregard" is such a high legal bar, and how four ignored warnings turned into a criminal conviction.

Sources: R v MacDonald, 2026 ABKB 393 (CanLII), Court of King's Bench of Alberta,

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In 2025, the RCMP arrested a young Toronto couple, Chakib Mansouri and Majdouline Alouah, for running one of the most prolific phone fraud operations in Canadian history. 

Living in a rented Rosedale house with a Range Rover, a Porsche Cayenne, and no legitimate income, the couple used a caller ID spoofing tool called iSpoof to impersonate banks, trick victims into revealing their PINs, and drain their accounts, all while raising 2 young sons and posting their lavish lifestyle on social media. 

This episode traces the 3-year RCMP investigation led by Corporal Erin Power, from the London Metropolitan Police takedown that first exposed iSpoof, to a stolen vehicle report that accidentally handed investigators a voice match, to a covert entry into the couple's condo and an undercover operative who got Mansouri to explain his own money-laundering operation on tape. 

It's a story about identity theft, financial fraud, elder scam targeting, and how a couple who seemed to have everything built it all on nearly 1,300 victims and $1.8 million in stolen money. 

Part of Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime, covering real Canadian criminal cases with court documents, news archives, and first-hand investigative accounts.

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A man sits in his car on a quiet street in Burnaby, British Columbia, waiting for the woman he's been seeing for months. He thinks he's about to talk about some photos. He has no idea two people are walking toward him right now with kitchen knives hidden in their sleeves.

Fred Sangan died on that curb with 35 stab wounds, most of it captured on video from multiple angles, and a taunting text message sent to his fiancée within minutes of his death. By every measure, it should have been an open-and-shut murder case. Instead, a jury in the BC Supreme Court came back with manslaughter.

This week, we go inside the affair, the fake account built to shame a woman to her own family, the police report that went nowhere, and the courtroom fight over how much of a man's life a jury's verdict should cost him. Plus a plain-language breakdown of exactly what separates first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and manslaughter under Canadian law, and why this jury may have landed where they did.

This is the case of Riza Jafari, and the death of Fred Sangan.

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*Sources: R. v. Jafari, 2026 BCSC 1468 (CanLII); Global News, "Charges laid in deadly Burnaby stabbing: police" (June 2024); CBC News British Columbia (June 2024); court reporting on the Burnaby stabbing trial (2026), including the Crown's opening statement and agreed statement of facts; news coverage of the sentencing decision (August 2026); Criminal Code of Canada, ss. 229 to 236 (homicide, murder, and manslaughter provisions).*

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On July 5th, 1984, Helmuth Buxbaum did what he always did: he stopped to help. Two men flagged down his car on Highway 402 outside London, Ontario, and within minutes his wife Hanna, a mother of six known throughout her community for her generosity, was dragged from the vehicle and shot dead in a ditch. Police called it a robbery gone wrong. 

The truth was worse. Eighteen days later, investigators arrested not two strangers, but Buxbaum himself, along with six other people, in a murder-for-hire plot the millionaire had been assembling for months. 

What came out in court over the following two years was almost impossible to believe: a cocaine addiction, dozens of prostitutes, a hidden double life, a million-dollar life insurance policy taken out five months before the murder, and a wife who spent her last breath begging the man beside her, "No, honey, please not this way." 

This week on Canadian CrimeCast, the case that became known as the Good Samaritan Murder, and the trial that exposed exactly how far one man would go to avoid a divorce.

*Sources: The Toronto Star, July 6, 1984 to October 15, 1986 (staff and Canadian Press reporting).*

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Peter Demeter was serving a life sentence for arranging his wife's murder when the system did something almost unthinkable: it let him out. By 1983 he was living on day parole in Peterborough, lecturing university students on morality and taking his daughter to the movies. He looked like a reformed man.

He wasn't. Within months, Demeter hired an arsonist to torch the house where his wife died, then tried to recruit that same man to murder his own teenage cousin, dismember the body, and ransom the family. When the arsonist quietly walked away, Demeter simply found someone else, and police launched an undercover sting they codenamed Operation Dragon.

What follows is one of the most astonishing runs of criminal behaviour in Canadian history: a whistleblowing strongman who spent five months in hiding, a mistrial triggered by a defence lawyer who showed up drunk for weeks, a suicide attempt in a solitary cell, and a devoted young girlfriend who would have done anything for him, right up until his next target was a 16-year-old girl. By the end, Peter Demeter carried five life sentences for four separate plots, and a judge told him to his face that he "oozed evil out of every pore."

This is part 2 of our two-part deep dive into the Demeter case. If you haven't heard part 1, the 1973 murder of Christine Demeter that started it all, go back and listen there first.

New episodes of Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime drop regularly. Subscribe and leave a 5-star review to help more listeners find these real Canadian stories.

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Sources: The Toronto Star (February 1983 to July 1989; April 28, 2006); The Globe and Mail. Trial coverage drawn from contemporaneous reporting on the 1984 to 1985 counselling murder proceedings and the 1988 conspiracy trial

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A woman found beaten to death in her own garage. A husband who never once cried. And a killer nobody ever caught.

On July 18, 1973, Peter Demeter came home from a shopping trip to find his wife, Christine, dead on the floor of their Mississauga garage, her skull broken open by repeated blows from something like a crowbar or a tire iron. There was no forced entry, nothing stolen, and no weapon left behind.

What investigators found next was stranger still: a mistress in Vienna, a $1.1 million life insurance policy, a friend secretly wired for sound who says Demeter spent five years describing a dozen different ways to kill his wife, and a fabricated kidnapping threat against his own daughter that police caught on tape, because Demeter didn't know his own phone was already bugged.

The trial that followed ran 11 weeks, the longest in Canadian history at the time, and produced testimony almost nobody could believe: a hooded witness testifying under a fake name, a convicted boxer's claim that Christine herself may have been plotting against her husband, and a jury that convicted Peter Demeter of murder without ever identifying the man who actually swung the weapon.

This is part 1 of a 2-part series on one of the strangest, longest-running murder cases in Canadian history. Part 2 picks up nine years later, when a second chance at freedom turned into three more murder conspiracies.

New episodes of Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime drop every week. Subscribe and leave a 5-star review if you want more real Canadian cases like this one.

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Sources: The Toronto Star (July 1973 to December 1974; February to September 1983); The Toronto Sun (August 1973; September 1974); The Globe and Mail (January 1974; July 1974); Niagara Falls Review (June 1974). Trial coverage drawn from contemporaneous reporting on R. v. Demeter (Ontario Supreme Court, 1974). Appeal decisions: R. v. Demeter, 1975 CanLII 50 (ON CA); Demeter v. R., [1978] 1 S.C.R. 538, 1977 CanLII 25 (SCC).

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A woman runs out of a roadside motel in Mississauga, Ontario, wearing only a T-shirt. She has no phone, no money, no car, and barely any English. She borrows a phone, dials 911, and over twenty-six terrifying minutes she unknowingly lays out the entire architecture of a human trafficking operation.

This is the case of R. v. Laguerre — one of the hardest kinds of crime to prosecute, and one of the most quietly extraordinary convictions in recent Canadian court history. Two women, brought from Montreal and controlled by one man through money, drugs, violence, isolation, and the oldest trick in the book: making someone believe he loved her.

Here's what makes this case almost impossible to forget. Both victims were subpoenaed. Neither one came to court. One of them tried to retract everything. The accused's confession was thrown out for a Charter breach. By the ordinary logic of a criminal trial, this case should have collapsed.

He was convicted of every single count.

In this episode, host Ryan Dell walks through the trap phone, the Swiss gold bar, the $4,100 in cash, and the body-worn camera footage that built the case piece by piece — and answers the question everyone asks but few understand: why do trafficking victims refuse to testify, even after they've told police everything? Drawing entirely from the court's own written reasons, this is a detailed, respectful, and unflinching look at how coercive control really works, the challenges police face, and the harm done to the women caught inside it.

Listen now to Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime — and discover how a desperate phone call from a gas station convicted a human trafficker.

Victim identities are protected by a publication ban and have been changed. Contains descriptions of human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and violence. Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline: 1-833-900-1010.

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