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Hey, it's Nancy. Before we begin today, I just wanted to let you know that you can listen to Crime Beat early and ad-free on Amazon Music, included with Prime. He's the most terrifying serial killer you've never heard of. Haddon Clark has confessed to several murders, but investigators say he could have over 100 victims. At the center of the mayhem, a cellmate of Haddon's that was able to get key evidence into Haddon's murder spree across America.
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When police officers wake up each day and head to work, they know there's always the possibility they'll face a life or death situation. Most cops will tell you they don't dwell on it or they wouldn't be able to work.
But it's definitely something that's always there in the back of their minds. I think to be able to survive doing the job is you don't think that will happen to you, right? You just, you know, you're prepared when you stop, you know, vehicles or when you go to complaints and stuff like that where there's a, you know, where there's a risk of violence and whatnot. But I think a lot of policemen don't think that will happen to them. That's RCMP Sergeant Brian Topham.
He's been a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for 37 years. He looks exactly like the photos you see of Mounties. He's very tall, well over six feet, with broad shoulders, and he has a mustache. He jokes that he was born with that mustache. It's his signature.
Topham worked as a traffic cop for many years. He's well known for his work catching bad guys and intercepting drugs on Canadian highways. He's currently the officer in charge of a detachment in northern Alberta, west of Edmonton. He spent nearly four decades fulfilling his oath to serve and protect, always hoping that it wouldn't mean his own life would be put on the line.
And then it happened. It was the worst case scenario. Sergeant Topham was hit.
I'm Nancy Hixt, a crime reporter for Global News. Today on Crime Beat, the story of strangers brought together in a special bond after falling victim to the same criminal. This is Carlos. And this is the story.
That is Nadia El-Dib. She was five years old when this was recorded. She's speaking Arabic, her first language. Nadia was born in Montreal and also spent a lot of time in Lebanon, where her family is originally from. She moved to Calgary when she was 11 years old. From the time she was just little, she was bubbly and loved to sing and dance. Hey!
By the time Nadia was 20, she was studying to become a legal assistant with dreams of one day becoming a lawyer. Nadia was smart, but also stunningly beautiful.
Her family calls Nadia the Kim K of the family, with long dark hair, big brown eyes, and those super full Kardashian kind of lips. She loved doing makeup, so that's why all of her pictures are very glamorous. That's Rasha El-Dib, one of Nadia's three sisters. She's probably the funniest person I've ever met. So her sense of humor is kind of what sets her aside from other people, and she is the most pure-hearted person.
Nadia had the whole package, a fact that wasn't lost on the men who crossed her path. On Sunday, March 25th, 2018, my cell phone lit up. It was my day off, but there was a suspicious death, and as a crime reporter, I immediately tried to get more information. A body had been found in the backyard of a Northeast Calgary home. The homicide unit was investigating.
A woman had been stabbed over and over, more than 40 times. Her throat was slit and she had been shot twice. Calgary Police Homicide Detective Colm Cavilla was assigned as the primary investigator. I've been in the homicide unit for over seven years and seen lots and this is as violent a homicide as I've seen.
At that same time, Nadia's family was panicking. She didn't come home after a night out with friends. She lived with her parents and sisters, and it was completely out of character for her not to call or text to let them know where she was. I just had a very, very uneasy feeling.
Rasha decided to go out looking for Nadia. She searched everywhere she could think that Nadia might have gone. Friends' homes, her favorite nightclub, even an ex-boyfriend's house. I encountered the police cars and there was, you know, the yellow tape and then... That's how Rasha found out Nadia had been murdered. And then somebody pulled me aside and they said they were from the homicide department.
At this point, the investigation had a lot of moving parts and Detective Kavila was in charge of coordinating them all. Who had done this and why? In a, I guess, kind of dramatic twist, the next morning, Nadia's body lays there all night despite, as a side note, some of the neighbors hearing a woman screaming for help and then hearing gunshots. We do not get a call that night. The Calgary Police Service is not notified.
That's not at all unusual to me. I find a lot of times people worry about backlash if they get involved, so it's easier to just turn a blind eye. Unfortunately for Nadia, that meant no one intervened. She was likely dead for several hours before police were even called.
It was a middle-aged woman who eventually found the body. She had gone out her back door and made the grisly discovery. She ran to a neighbor's house and called 911. She came in, she says that there's a body in the back. There's somebody dead. There's a woman dead in the back. That was it. So then we call 911. Police knew they had a murder on their hands. They needed to backtrack to figure out what happened.
They needed to come up with a timeline of Nadia's last movements. Detectives began gathering as much CCTV surveillance video as they could. More and more people are setting up cameras at their businesses and homes, and that's been extremely helpful for police. Video evidence is more reliable than witness accounts. You can't really dispute what's been caught on camera.
In this case, it turned out the shisha bar Nadia had visited the night before had surveillance cameras set up inside and out. Nadia loved shisha. She said it was a great way to meet people and she found it relaxing. I've seen videos of her singing, a hookah pipe in one hand and her other hand waving along to the music.
One of her favorite expressions was, "When things go to shit, smoke shisha." Friends told police one of Nadia's ex-boyfriends had shown up at the shisha bar. Friends also filled investigators in on their brief romantic involvement. Let's call him an ex-boyfriend who was trying to get back together with Nadia. They'd had, my understanding is, an on-again, kind of off-again
relationship that was wasn't, you know, it was a fledgling relationship. He and Nadia decided that she wasn't interested. I think that he asked to speak with her. It certainly looks like that on the video. And she complied with that. And then they had an extended conversation. The ex-boyfriend friends were talking about was Adam Betahar. Nadia and Adam had been seeing each other, I would say, late 2017.
As a child, Adam Bedejar lived in Algeria. But after his parents split up, he ended up back in Canada with his mom. He was six feet tall, slender with brown eyes and black hair. An attractive young man. His Facebook photos include the classic mirror selfies that a lot of guys in their late teens and early 20s post. Adam met Nadia through mutual friends in late 2017.
Nadia was so bubbly and outgoing, he was immediately drawn to her. Adam was instantly love struck. Unfortunately for him, that feeling wasn't mutual. I remember she had told me that she had seen some of his toxic behavior and traits, including telling her what to wear and how to act and what she should and shouldn't be doing. So upon her realizing that, she decided to break things off. Nadia told Adam she just wanted to be friends.
He didn't take that news well. He clearly had something else in mind and he wanted to get back with her. And she had told me that he was asking her now and again to get back. And she said, I can't be with somebody like that. Like, I broke things off for a reason. Nadia thought that was the end of it. She moved on and was loving life, spending as much time as possible with her family, who she adored.
It was only that morning, March 25th, 2018, at the Shisha bar, Nadia learned Adam was still in love with her. Surveillance video showed Nadia getting into a vehicle with Adam just before 3 a.m. and driving away. One of Nadia's friends told police Nadia had called her while in the vehicle with Adam.
It's a phone call suggesting that Adam's being difficult. She wants to go home. Adam's not really complying with that. That phone call's critical because it puts her and Adam in the vehicle together and alone in the 45 minutes leading up to her murder. What police weren't expecting to find was surveillance video of the actual murder.
As fate would have it, we were able to get video footage from the actual scene of the murder from a nearby residence. This kind of evidence is extremely rare. I've been dealing with homicide detectives for many years, and most will tell you this is not the norm. To have a killing captured on video is the most damning proof that could exist.
That video, combined with forensic evidence found at the scene, allowed police to piece together exactly what happened to Nadia. Two dark figures exit the vehicle. We know that Nadia at this point has been stabbed multiple, multiple, multiple times. She's basically fighting for her life.
The driver, which we know is Adam from all the other evidence, gets out and opens, we believe he opens the back door, retrieves the high-powered assault rifle from there. There's forensic evidence on the back seat.
in the form of smeared blood. We then see the two figures towards the front of the vehicle. Again, everything's black, it's at night, and you see two flashes, muzzle flashes, as Nadia is executed. We believe the second shot was when Nadia was already on the ground and to the head. 4:17 a.m. is when the actual execution of Nadia happens.
Nadia's stab wounds would likely have killed her had he not gone on to shoot her. He fired at close range. He executed her. He was leaving no chance that she was going to survive. Nadia would have died instantly on that second shot.
All evidence pointed to Adam as Nadia's killer and police believed her murder was planned and premeditated. We became aware that Adam that night was in control of a Ford Explorer that belonged to a friend of his. He had actually borrowed that vehicle from his friend earlier on that evening when they were together.
Adam was supposed to return the vehicle several hours later, but did not do that. More surveillance video put the explorer into the alley at Adam's house at about 2 a.m. It shows a dark figure going inside the house and then back out to the vehicle a few minutes later. That is when we believe Adam went and retrieved the assault rifle. He goes to the shisha bar, doesn't get to the shisha bar until...
after 2:30, with a plan, I believe at that point, that either Nadia is going to welcome his advances or she's going to die. Kavila said it's clear to him from watching the video recorded at the shisha bar, Nadia had no clue the danger she was in. When you watch the video back, it's very eerie knowing that he had a high-powered assault rifle in the vehicle that he was about to try and get her into.
In hindsight, friends said there were definitely some red flags. But no one, including Nadia, ever thought she was in any real danger. Nadia is a sweet, innocent young girl. And she had no reason at that point, outside of what we know now are flags and obviously what police understand to be flags, that anything bad or untoward was going to happen. She thought he was just being childish or immature.
This friend tells us that Adam and Nadia had dated for four months and broken up in December of 2017. So they in fact had been boyfriend and girlfriend. They broke up because of how Adam treated Nadia. This is what Nadia relayed to her friend and that Adam had wanted to sleep with her but she did not want to sleep with him. After their breakup in late 2017, Adam left town to work up north in the oil patch
But in early 2018, he returned to Calgary. And he was making it clear he was still interested in Nadia. This friend stated that Adam was still very much in love with Nadia. So you have all the elements there of someone who could maybe do something drastic. Driving by the house, calling, texting, these sorts of, in hindsight, stalking activities occur all the way through March, up until the time he murders Nadia.
Police learned Adam had a history of trying to hold on to relationships when they were over. He didn't take rejection well, bottom line. So it wasn't anything that led to charges. It was pretty minor. But, you know, in hindsight of what happened, you look at that through a different lens. Just two weeks before Nadia's murder, Adam had legally purchased an assault rifle.
On that same day, he shot 40 practice rounds of ammo at the range. Adam lived with his mother. She had no clue about any of this, including his history with Nadia. She conducted a search of her son's room, and she located an empty rifle case under the bed, and that she had...
Adam was a loose cannon. He was on the run and armed. You're watching Global News at 11.
Calgary police are on the hunt for a 21-year-old man wanted for first-degree murder. Sunday, a woman was found dead in the backyard of a home in Marlborough Park. And as Nancy Hickst reports, a Canada-wide warrant has been issued for his arrest. Adam Betahar is now facing one count of first-degree murder. Investigators believe he may have fled Calgary in a dark blue 2004 Ford Explorer.
Now here's something you might not know. When a suspect like Adam is on the run, homicide detectives are under extreme stress. That would probably be as stressful as three or four days as I've ever had. Police were granted warrants to track Adam's cell phone and banking activity. And that led to their first real lead on Adam's whereabouts.
We learn very quickly that Adam is still actively using his TD bank card and had made a recent cash withdrawal from Edmonton. And he also made a purchase in Onaway, Alberta, which is 40 kilometres west of Edmonton.
One good way to track offenders is through their cell phone. Police can map someone's movements through cell tower pings. But it seems Adam knew that. He had turned his phone off. We're trying to establish some patterns. We're trying to guess his next move or where he might be. We're checking every hotel, every known location.
contact that he had up there if there were any left and there weren't many, if any at all. And just trying to cover off really every base that we could to try and locate him and be able to surprise him so that he couldn't, so that he didn't have the upper hand tactically when he came in contact with police. The one saving grace for police was that Adam's mother was willing to help.
One of the pieces of information that we had gotten from Adam's mom is that Adam did not want to turn himself in and had no intention of turning himself in peacefully to police. Detectives got a warrant so they could track calls to his mom's phone. This is a bit time consuming, but a necessary process. Police aren't allowed to just track people's phones. They have to get a judge to sign a warrant.
To do that, detectives have to give detailed information outlining the specifics of the offense they're investigating and give good reasons why tracking that phone would provide evidence needed for the case.
In this case, having Adam's mother's phone tracked allowed police to see where he was calling from even though he wasn't using his own cell phone. So if he was calling from a gas station, police could access that number and the location. The problem was they always seemed to be a few hours behind him. Investigators fanned out information to police throughout Western Canada.
From what detectives could tell, Adam was circling around northern Alberta with no clear plan or pattern. Specialized units were put on alert, including covert surveillance teams, experts in fugitive apprehension, canine units, and air support. The goal was to make sure no one else got hurt because the longer Adam was on the run,
the more unpredictable the situation became. My main objective as the primary investigator was to get eyes on Adam before he knew that we had eyes on him. Then, after three days on the lam, Adam made a call to his mother. He placed a phone call from a gas station close to the Evansburg area
which is west of Edmonton. RCMP in Evansburg were notified and they were on the lookout. An officer who's actually on the way home from his shift, I believe his shift was ending and he was on the way home and decided to take a couple side roads, I believe, and he came across a vehicle matching a description of Betahar's vehicle.
and it was actually pulled over on the side of the road. That's when the exact situation Detective Kavila had feared happened. Even now, as I'm saying it to you, I can feel my stomach turning.
RCMP officers in a tiny rural community west of Edmonton had spotted Adam Betahar, the man wanted on a Canada-wide warrant for the first-degree murder of Nadia El-Dib. But Adam refused to pull over, and that sparked a high-speed chase. Coming up in range of 90,000.
The dramatic events were recorded by a man who was monitoring his scanner nearby. Mason Davis posted the entire recording to his Facebook account. Stand by, stand by. We're around the spike belt. It's down 140 kilometers an hour.
Adam was completely reckless, driving at incredibly high speeds up and down a major highway, and he drove around several spike belts. The chase went on and on, now 40 minutes and counting. Finally, he drove over the spike belt.
That still didn't stop Adam. At this point, there were about 20 RCMP vehicles, both marked and unmarked, following behind his SUV. The chase continued on for nearly an hour. We're just approaching 096. Perhaps with every meter that he is, you guys have your 875. Watch for the green guy. He's losing control. On a 40-kilometer hour, 130. 20,000.
And that's when RCMP Sergeant Brian Topham was hit. Adam Bedejar shot the officer in the head. A second officer was also hit in the hail of bullets. That officer was fortunate to only have a superficial wound. He didn't need to be rushed to hospital.
It was a frantic scene. Dozens of officers had converged on this major highway for a full-blown shootout. Police were under full attack by Adam Betahar, armed with his high-powered rifle, and they returned fire. Finally, the shots stopped. Betahar was hit. The man wanted for killing Nadia El-Dib was dead.
The shooting sparked an investigation by the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team, an independent body that acts as a police watchdog. ACER reviews cases like this to determine if the use of force by officers was justified. A main Alberta highway was completely shut down for 24 hours. Sergeant Topham was rushed to hospital by air ambulance. He survived
But had the timing been just a second or two earlier or later, the outcome likely would have been fatal.
I was shot once in the back of my head when I was exiting the vehicle. You know, that's how quick it happened. It just unfolded so quickly, there was no time. We got the vehicle stopped and the shooting started. If the bullet had been two millimeters lower, then it probably would have penetrated my skull and then things would have been much different. I was actually fairly fortunate. The round went through the door just as I was coming
exiting the vehicle and it struck me in the back left of my head and it was kind of a grazing type of a wound. So it didn't penetrate my skull or nothing else like that. And so, but it did, did render me unconscious for a brief period of time.
It was truly a miracle Sergeant Topham survived. A reality not lost on his wife of 30-plus years.
This was a life-changing moment for the Mountie.
My wife is pretty much done with me. Putting on my uniform and going out to work. In my 30 some odd years, I've never thought about being shot or what that would feel like. And when it happens, I don't know whether it's the innocence you lose. It's, I guess, that mindset, well, it can't happen to me or it won't happen to me.
But law enforcement is what Topham knows best. And he wasn't going to let some bad guy dictate how and when his career would end.
I've had a really good career. I've met a lot of super people and great people and I think I've made a difference in my career. And I'm closing in on the end of my career with almost 37 years done. And so I wanted to go back to work and retire on my terms.
Within just a few weeks, Topham was back at his detachment doing administrative work.
And just a few months after that, he was back on full duty. It takes a while to get over being shot and being nearly killed and that kind of stuff like that. It takes some time because it's not something you think about very often. I'm the first journalist Sergeant Topham has spoken to about the shooting. He agreed to do this interview because Nadia Eldib's family asked him to.
They share a special bond, all falling victim to the extreme violence of Adam Betahar. They wanted to come up and meet the members that were involved in the event on the 29th of March, just to say hi and whatnot and to see how everybody was doing.
Initially, Topham said he was reluctant to meet with Nadia's family. He wasn't sure how the conversation would go, given what happened. And Topham knew they were dealing with devastating grief. But the El Dibs persisted. The family made the three-and-a-half-hour drive north of Calgary to Evansburg. We met at the detachment here in Evansburg. They brought along some Lebanese food, so we had lunch with them.
It was fantastic. It really was, and everybody really enjoyed it. And my wife was present at the time. You could tell by speaking to them, especially Rasha, that they were easygoing and they were a really close-knit family.
You know, we introduced ourselves and hugs were exchanged and it kind of went around the table and we never really spoke about the events on 29th of March. They were glad to see that the members that were there were well and that I was out of the hospital and doing okay.
Topham said in all his years, he can't recall another meeting like it, where the officers and the victim's family developed an instant connection. With the LDS, for some reason, it was just different. I mean, they were, they obviously, you know, were extremely upset about the loss of, you know, a family member, and rightly so, given the circumstances. But they were also really concerned that, you know, that we were doing okay,
which we don't normally get. And I speak in general terms, but a lot of times in tragic events like this, people are mourning their loss and they have their own way to grieve and stuff like that. And it's not too often
Just weeks after Nadia's death, her sister Rasha spoke at a media conference hosted by Calgary police.
This could have been anybody's sister, friend, mother, daughter. But unfortunately this time, it was my sister, Nadia. The pain was still very fresh. You could see it in Rasha's eyes. But she was very matter-of-fact about the graphic details, committed to raising awareness about domestic violence. She was a strong young woman who fought and refused a man, and that decision alone resulted in her death. Her story and her legacy will live on forever.
She is the reason I will be able to continue fighting for what I believe in. And that was the start of what's become a new focus of Rasha's life, telling her sister's story to make a difference.
So we definitely wanted to make sure that Nadia's death was not in vain and that she was not going to be another one of those one in every six days woman passing away in Canada from an intimate partner. We wanted her story to be more than that and that's why we decided to really want to make a change and affect other people to be able to help them out. The family has created a scholarship in Nadia's name.
to be awarded to survivors of domestic abuse in need of extra support. We're looking to be able to sever both connections to the abuser and really be able to give the woman the opportunity to take her life and the lives of her children in a different direction.
It's a very bittersweet feeling of, I wish none of this happened and I'd do anything to get her back, but that's not possible. So the only way we can go about it is to do something good out of this. Rasha told me the pain of losing her sister still hits her every single day. Like when their favorite song comes on the radio. Would you still love the same if I showed?
Tell me honestly Would you still love me though? Her and I would just sing every word to it and sing along. We'd have like special dance moves and whenever those songs come on and just looking at like the passenger seat and seeing she's not there, it just, that's when it hits the most for me. It's very much triggers. But now there's a new, much sadder song that's become Nadia's song. It's been a long time
At the Eldib home, there's a nearly life-size picture of Nadia hanging near the dining room table. It's beautiful. Nadia looks stunning. She had on a black dress, her long dark hair was flowing, and she had the biggest smile on her face.
We were all very, very close to her because she was that kind of rock in our family. We're so proud of her. We're so proud of how people are just thinking and talking about her. So we're so happy to have had her in our life. The thing that constantly hits this family is how preventable Nadia's death was. Destroyed and ruined the lives of two young people with cancer.
you know, who knows what their futures could have helped. So it's all of their families. It's all of their friends, the families on both sides of the coin. Um, people are impacted. Numerous, numerous, numerous people are impacted here in this situation. You have a number of police officers involved in a spectacular shootout for a lack of a better way to put it that who knows how, uh,
they will deal with processing that and just how close some of them came to dying that day or having to take the life of an offender, right? Which at the best of times, you're always prepared to do as a police officer, but no one ever wants to do. Like Nadia's family, Sergeant Topham has a whole new appreciation for life and loved ones, knowing all too well any moment could be your last. Me.
Thank you for joining me this week.
Next time on Crime Beat. From the time she was six years old, you could tell she belonged on stage. A spotlight and a microphone were her best friends. And that was from the time she was at Tiny Little Things. She was a ham even very early in her life. By the time she was 25, she was on her way to becoming famous. But on November 27th, 2014...
Everything changed. One of the worst parts about this whole experience is you have somebody that you love and you care about and you desperately want to find them and there's nothing you can do. Crime Beat is written and produced by me, Nancy Hixt, with producer Dila Velasquez. Our audio producer is Rob Johnston with editing assistance from Tom Andriuk. Our executive producer of Curious Cast is Chris Duncombe.
If you like this podcast, please tell a friend about the show and help me share these stories by rating and reviewing it on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen. You can reach me on my Twitter account at Nancy Hixt, on Facebook at Nancy Hixt Crime Beat, or email me nancy.hixt at globalnews.ca. I hope to see you next time.
