It was a Thursday morning in December. The kind of morning when St. Anthony, Newfoundland,  a fishing village of 2500 people, clinging to the northern tip of the island, is still pitch black at a quarter to seven.

Inside the house at 8 Husky Drive, fifteen-year-old Deana Penney woke to a persistent noise. It was her mother's phone alarm, ringing from the kitchen. She banged on the bedroom door. No answer. She opened it. Nobody inside.

She walked through the house. Her mother's phone was on the counter. Her purse was on the table. Her keys were still in the ignition of her car, parked in the driveway. Her shoes were at the door.

Everything was set down, Deana would later tell a jury, as though her mother had just arrived home and left it all behind.

Deana called her grandmother. Ruby Penney came over within 20 minutes. Ruby called her son, Deana’s father, Dean Penney, who drove in from his hunting cabin right away.

But Jennifer Hillier-Penney was gone. She was thirty-eight years old. A mother of two. And she would never be seen again.

For seven years, nobody was charged. For seven years, her family fought to keep her face in the public eye, plastering posters across town while the RCMP conducted searches over land and sea, coming up with nothing.

And then, in December of 2023, Dean Penney was arrested at the Deer Lake airport. What the public didn't know, what almost nobody knew, was that the RCMP had spent the previous four years running one of the most elaborate undercover operations in Canadian history to get him to talk.

They built an entire criminal empire around him. They gave him a best friend. They took him on heists, diamond runs, and gun deals from Newfoundland to Alberta to British Columbia. They paid him $27,000. And in the end, on a yacht in Vancouver harbour, exactly seven years to the day his wife disappeared, Dean Penney sat across from a man he believed was a mob boss, and told him what happened that night.

Or did he?

That is the question a jury of twelve spent four days deliberating, after an eight-week trial that gripped the province.

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It was a Monday night in November. The kind of night when the streets of Markham, Ontario — a quiet suburb northeast of Toronto, full of tidy homes and minivans and families who came from somewhere else to build something better — are dark and still by ten o'clock.

Inside the house at Helen Avenue, Bich Ha Pan had just come home from her weekly line-dancing class. She was soaking her feet in the living room, watching television. Her husband, Hann Pan, had already gone to bed upstairs. Their twenty-four-year-old daughter, Jennifer, was in her bedroom. Their son, Felix, was not home.

It was November 8th, 2010. Just after ten o'clock in the evening.

Within the next twenty minutes, Bich Ha Pan would be dead — shot at point-blank range in the basement of her own home. Hann Pan would be shot twice — once in the back and once through the face — and left for dead on the floor beside his wife's body. And Jennifer Pan would call 911, her girlish voice hysterical, claiming that armed robbers had broken in and tied her up.

"Help me, please I need help," she told the operator, while her father's screams echoed in the background. "I don't know what's happening."

It was a terrifying story. And nearly every word of it was a lie.

I'm your host Ryan Dell. This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.

Today's story takes us to Markham, Ontario, where a young woman who spent a decade building an elaborate double life arranged the murder of both her parents — disguised as a violent home invasion — using her on-and-off boyfriend's drug-dealing contacts to carry out the hit. The price tag was ten thousand dollars.

This is the story of Jennifer Pan, her co-accused Daniel Wong, Lenford Crawford, Eric Carty, and David Mylvaganam — and the trial, the appeals, and the stunning guilty plea that unfolded over the next fifteen years.

But before we get to the murder, we need to go back to the beginning. Because the roots of this crime weren't planted in a single moment of rage. They were sewn slowly, meticulously, over the course of a lifetime built on lies.

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It was a Monday morning in October. The kind of morning when Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, is still dark at six a.m. — the streets empty, the courthouse locked, the judges still at home in bed. The kind of morning when nothing is supposed to happen.

Just after six o’clock on October 10th, 1988, a homemade pipe bomb detonated outside the Sir Louis Henry Davies Law Courts in downtown Charlottetown. The device had been hidden in a flower bed at the rear of the building. The blast was so powerful it drove shrapnel through walls and wooden beams, sending metal fragments up into the judges’ chambers on the second floor.

When Chief Justice Kenneth MacDonald arrived for work a couple of hours later, he found holes punched through the floor of his office — and a piece of shrapnel lodged in his desk, right about where his midsection would have been had he been sitting there.

No one was hurt. The building was empty. But for the people of Prince Edward Island — Canada’s smallest province, a land of potato farms and unlocked doors and the fictional home of Anne of Green Gables — a line had been crossed.

It would take eight years, three more bombs, a series of chilling letters signed by a mysterious figure calling himself “Loki 7,” and a joint police task force before investigators would finally unmask the bomber. His name was Roger Charles Bell. A retired high school chemistry teacher. A quiet, brilliant loner who lived in a drab apartment within walking distance of every bomb site.

I’m your host Ryan Dell. This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.

Today’s story takes us to Prince Edward Island, where a divorced chemistry teacher retreated into a world of Norse mythology, Wagner’s operas, and Nietzsche’s philosophy — and emerged as a serial bomber who held an entire province hostage for nearly a decade.

This is the story of Roger Bell and Loki 7.

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Imagine waking up at two in the morning to the sound of fists pounding on your front door. You stumble out of bed, pull back the curtain — and the entire sky is orange. Sixty feet of flame, roaring out of your barn, so close you can feel the heat through the glass.

That's what happened to Marilyn and Earl Snedden on the night of July 3rd, 2002. A pair of truck drivers had spotted the glow from the highway and raced to their door.

And that was only the beginning.

Over the next eleven weeks, sixteen fires would burn across the farm country surrounding Almonte, Ontario — a quiet community of about forty-two hundred people, roughly fifty kilometres west of Ottawa. Known, if it was known for anything, as the birthplace of James Naismith, the man who invented basketball.

The fires caused over a million dollars in damage. They killed livestock. They exhausted a volunteer fire department already running on fumes. And they terrorized an entire community of farmers who began sleeping in their overalls with shotguns by the bed.

Residents started calling the arsonist "The Ghost," because no one could see him. No one could catch him. He struck at will — evening, night, sometimes broad daylight — and vanished.

When the truth finally came out, it was worse than anyone had imagined. Because the Ghost wasn't a stranger. He was one of the most respected men in town. A man who had spent thirty years of his life fighting fires.

This is the story of Gilmour "Gib" Drummond. And this is the summer he burned it all down.

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It's just after midnight on March 19th, 1998. Two Brink's guards push through the south entrance of Calgary's North Hill Shopping Centre, bags heavy with cash — $385,000 bound for the CIBC branch inside.

They don't know it yet, but two men are already waiting for them inside the darkened bank. Men dressed in fake security uniforms. Men armed with AK-47 assault rifles, military-grade tear gas, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

What happens next will shatter the silence of that empty mall — more than eighty-eight shots fired in a point-blank gunfight — and launch an investigation that would stretch from Calgary to Ottawa, from the barracks of Canada's elite military units to the docks of Cherbourg, France, and deep into the violent world of South African white supremacists.

This is the story of a decorated soldier, a self-styled spy, and the most spectacular armoured car robbery attempt in Canadian history.

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It was a warm Wednesday evening in August. The kind of evening that makes people on Prince Edward Island linger outside a little longer, tending their gardens, watching the light settle over the fields, and itting on porches as the day fades into dusk.

The kind of evening where the doors stay unlocked.

In a brown bungalow on a hill along St. Mary’s Road, about ten kilometres east of the town of Montague, a sixty-eight-year-old man named Brent McGuigan was sitting in his rocking chair in the kitchen. He was talking with his son, Brendon, who was thirty-nine. Brent’s wife, Marie, was in the next room. And down the road, Brendon’s wife, Kim, was home with their three children, waiting for him to come back and make popcorn.

It was August 20th, 2014. A little after nine o’clock in the evening.

Neither Brent nor Brendon McGuigan would survive the next few minutes.

I’m your host Ryan Dell. This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.

Today’s story takes us to rural Prince Edward Island — Canada’s smallest province — where a forty-four-year-old grudge, a lifetime of obsession, and a nine-month sentence from 1970 all converged into one of the most shocking acts of violence the Island has ever seen.

This is the story of Brent and Brendon McGuigan.

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It was a warm Saturday in May. The kind of afternoon that feels like summer, even though summer hasn't officially arrived yet. The kind of afternoon that makes a twelve-year-old girl feel safe pedalling her bicycle along a familiar highway, heading home.

Her name was Monica Jack. And on May 6th, 1978, she left Merritt, British Columbia, and began riding north on Highway 5A — a two-lane road that hugs the eastern shore of Nicola Lake, a long, blue body of water nestled in the hills of the B.C. Interior, about three hours east of Vancouver.

She never made it home.  She fell victim to a serial rapist and murderer who had a penchant for young girls.

I'm your host Ryan Dell. This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast true Crime

Today's story spans forty years, two provinces, a seventeen-year wait for remains to be found, and one of the most elaborate undercover police operations in Canadian history.

This is the story of Monica Jack.  

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It's 3:13 in the afternoon on March 11, 2022.  A security camera on Victoria Street in downtown Kamloops, British Columbia captures a man walking along the sidewalk. He's wearing a green hooded jacket, a jade-coloured toque, and heavy hiking boots. Slung over one shoulder is a brown leather satchel. In his right hand, a black cloth shopping bag. He is not rushing. His pace is described later, by the judge who reviewed the footage, as a stroll. He is early for his appointment with his friend and lawyer and taking his time.

He looks down at the watch on his left wrist.

He walks out of the camera's frame.

That is the last image ever captured of Mohd Abdullah alive.

What happened next, in a fire-damaged law office on Victoria Street, was not a sudden argument that got out of hand. It was not a crime of passion. It was not an accident.

It was a plan. Written on a cue card. With tools bought from a Home Depot. And the with the help of two unsuspecting people.

I'm Ryan, and this is Canadian CrimeCast — Coast to Coast True Crime. 

This is one of the most meticulously documented murder cases in recent British Columbia history, and justice got every detail right.  This is the murder of Mohd Abdullah.

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