Going Undercover | 9
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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.

On this podcast, I take you behind the scenes and inside the cases I've worked on. I give you unique perspectives with access to forensic analysts, sketch artists, and investigators that help solve crimes and bring justice and closure to victims and their loved ones. I've shared a handful of cases where investigators use covert techniques to obtain evidence or elicit confessions.

In our first episode, Mika Jordan, the broken princess, you'll remember an undercover operation provided key information that led to the arrest and conviction of the two people who killed the six-year-old. It's not looking good for her. They're coming to arrest her. That's what I figured.

I've also shared one case where the courts didn't allow the covert operation. In beyond a reasonable doubt, the justice ruled that police overstepped. You know, I can only talk about so much. I hope you appreciate that. I'm not going to lay out a confession for you.

I'm Nancy Hixt, a senior crime reporter for Global News. Today on Crime Beat, I give you an exclusive look at these specialized tactics used to push cases forward from someone who knows what it's like to lead a double life. This is Going Undercover.

For safety reasons, we aren't identifying the officer featured in this episode. He's retired now, but he was an RCMP officer for more than three decades, and most of that time was spent working undercover. This officer is like an encyclopedia of knowledge for major crimes files in Western Canada.

He's worked on several of the cases I've covered over the years, including Kelly Cook, a young babysitter who disappeared in 1981, only to be found murdered months later. Her case has never been solved. He also worked undercover in the investigation into the murder of Delene Hempel.

Over the past few months, we've had many conversations about both the cases he investigated and the techniques he used. He agreed to share some details of that work while of course balancing the integrity of certain strategies.

We did two interviews, so you will hear a bit of a difference in his audio. I know you've got a lot of experience with this, Nancy, and I think you know why I want to stay away from being too specific because I don't want to compromise anything that might be going on today. By now, if you've been a listener to Crime Beat, you'll be familiar with Mr. Big undercover sting operations. You've heard three cases already this season where this tactic was used to win over the trust of a suspect.

But this officer remembers when it was first developed. He was a part of the team that created this groundbreaking technique. When I started with the undercover unit in Vancouver in 1986, we had a team off the top of my head. There would be about nine people, nine people, a sergeant in charge, two corporals, and the rest of us were constables, primarily constables.

I would play one of two roles. I would either be involved in a drug project somewhere in the province or in the country, or be asked to participate in a jailhouse setting. He told me he spent many days and nights in custody. An undercover operator would be placed in a jail cell with the suspect to just essentially pick up any utterings that the suspect might make.

Obviously, relative to the crime that they're being investigated for in the 80s, when we did a lot of those for major crimes units around the country, traditionally in the West, I would say roughly 90% of the time, it would result in a confession, a jailhouse confession.

I would call myself a frequent flyer. I seem to be in those jail cells probably more than the bad guy themselves, just spending time with, again, suspects of more serious, accused of more serious crimes like homicide. And typically, a typical cell plant operation, it might only last overnight, but most of them usually went well into the weekend until the suspect was actually formally charged.

But unlike what you might see in a popular TV crime drama, this officer says these stints in jails were not easy. It was difficult work in difficult conditions. You know, and I just always felt that, and again, I speak for a lot of the guys on our team at the time, that if somebody had been contacted that knew they could help solve a murder or...

serious offense relative to one of my family members, I would always hope that they would say yes and step up and do the right thing. And if they had that skill set, so as a result, at least for myself, I'd always cross my mind when the phone rang and I could never say no. Yeah, it did negatively impact my personal life, but in terms of the bigger picture, it meant everything to that family and it meant everything to that court case to see justice done

But then, the rules for those operations changed. When the Supreme Court of Canada determined that the jailhouse inmate undercover cell technique was limited in terms of what we could do and what we couldn't do, we felt maybe there was a way we could support undercover homicide investigations in other ways.

Following that SCC decision in 1990, undercover officers could no longer actively elicit information from an accused without violating their right to silence. Instead, the court ruling stated that officers could only passively observe. They still allowed the trickery of undercover work, but they really curtailed the flexibility that...

an undercover operator could go to in terms of actively interrogating the suspect about the crime that they arrested for and basically do nothing more than sit back and in more of a passive sense and respond

only in a normal context of a conversation. For example, if the suspect was talking about murder, the courts would allow an undercover operator to simply respond to the context of that conversation. But if the suspect was speaking about a baseball game the night before, the undercover operator would not have the ability to turn the conversation towards the murder that the suspect was being arrested for.

That led to some brainstorming and innovation as police figured out new tactics to garner confessions outside of the jail setting. The unit that I was on at the time had some pretty forward-thinking people and this certainly wasn't my idea but contributed to it I'd like to think in terms of working within the team concept to say you know we like to think we're pretty good at infiltrating drug traffickers why couldn't we do that with homicide targets before they get arrested?

All we're looking to do is, if we can, maybe gather some evidence, physical evidence, and possibly gain the trust of the target enough that we could garner the truth. Truth being he or she did it or he or she didn't do it. And we certainly, police agencies don't want to be chasing down the wrong suspect if they actually didn't do it. And that allowed investigations to change their focus towards more likely suspects.

The undercover team approached homicide investigators in the lower mainland of British Columbia to put their ideas to work. He said they experimented to establish what would be allowed as evidence in court. You know, there was a bit of a trial and error period where, you know, we worked with Crown counsel to establish what parameters we think that not just the criminal courts, but the court of public opinion would use

approve of and as each case sort of unfolded we learned more and more in terms of what worked, what the courts liked and what was something that was within our parameters and our abilities to do.

As you might remember from the last episode, The Second Shift, in 1993, this officer was a part of one of the very first Mr. Big Sting operations in Alberta when investigators targeted Stephen Bairns for the murder of Delene Hempel.

Since then, he's developed a very specific set of skills to gain a suspect's trust. He told me there's a lot of work put into creating each scenario and cover story that gets the entire operation rolling. The cover stories are typically target-specific, and I'll just draw a contrast. In one hand, if you've got a contract killer versus suspect,

you know, shaken baby death, for example, you're going to curtail your scenarios accordingly because a contract killer is not going to be interested in rather minor and benign scenarios or criminality. He's going to want to be involved in the big stuff. Whereas, you know, a 30-year-old father who's had one bad day, maybe lost his job, and I'm not excusing this, but of course, I think

people would appreciate that you're not gonna bring that guy in front of

you know, the godfather or somebody he sees as the godfather or a big crime boss of organized crime because that's going to be totally outside his comfort zone. You don't want to intimidate and scare the target off, but at the same time, you want them to be at a level where they feel comfortable and you can gain their trust. I should note, police conducting a Mr. Big Sting operation have to follow very specific rules or risk the evidence being thrown out of court.

In a 2014 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada outlined key issues with the technique. It pointed out that these confessions are often accompanied by evidence that shows an accused willingly participated in simulated crime and was eager to join a criminal organization which can sully the accused's character and bring with it the risk of prejudice.

The court noted that wrongful convictions can often be traced back to evidence that is either unreliable or prejudicial. That's why Mr. Big stings are presumptively inadmissible in court, meaning the prosecution has to establish that the value of the evidence gathered in a Mr. Big outweighs its prejudicial effect.

Trial judges carefully scrutinize the conduct of police to make sure there is no abuse of process. You'll remember these guidelines and the judge's consideration of the SCC ruling in the episode Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, where I shared the story of Terry Ann Dauphiné.

Nearly two decades after her murder, evidence against her estranged husband, gleaned from a Mr. Big operation, was ruled inadmissible in court. Here's the prosecutor, Ken McCaffrey, and defense lawyer, Balfour Durr. The judge and her reasons for decision made comments about the police and

basically saying that they went too far in this case and I know that the police feel strongly otherwise and I respectfully disagree with some of what the judge said about police conduct. The problem is that is a finding of fact and the Crown is not allowed to

to appeal findings of fact. We could only appeal on the basis of errors of law. So even though I may respectfully disagree with the judge, it's not an appealable ground. She set everything out fairly and then was actually critical of the police for the tactics they had used in this one.

You know, the system is designed that it's better that one, that 100 guilty people go free than one guilty, one person who's not guilty be convicted. And we've had cases of wrongful convictions in this country. We don't want to repeat that again. So although I disagree with some of the judge's findings, I respect her decision.

Some people who don't understand the justice system have trouble with it. They think, well, if it wasn't Mr. Dauphiney's, he's not guilty, then someone else had to do it. But if there is no somebody else, then it had to be Mr. Dauphiney and he should have been found guilty. But that's not how the system works. The system works this way. If someone is charged with an offense, the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person did it.

As you'll recall, there were other evidentiary challenges in that case. And ultimately, the charge of second-degree murder against Ken Dauphiné was stayed. For everyone's protection, following the letter of the law was always top of mind, according to the undercover officer in today's episode. Some of these cases, the wrong suspect's being targeted. And by ruling out a particular person, you can...

you can assist that investigation with going on track and that's what you want. You never want to falsely convict anybody. In whatever scenario an undercover officer is carrying out, they need to be believable. Kind of like actors immersed in a role.

During my time as a crime reporter, I've met several officers who do this type of work. I've seen photos of them while undercover versus what they look like day to day. And it can be a stark contrast. A lot of times people were quite surprised to find out what I actually did for a living. I recall I probably had been doing undercover work for about two or three years. And I went back home to visit my family back east and found

I still am quite close with a network of high school buddies, about five or six of them that we still text and talk frequently. But on this occasion when I went back home, I looked remarkably different. I actually had to, in a pub, walk up and introduce myself to one of my best friends because he didn't recognize who I was, which kind of drew a laugh from some of the other guys who did.

Every scenario calls for a unique strategy. He said there's careful consideration put into determining what an undercover officer is told about a case. My experience always has been that any of the details that I'm told about the case are extremely limited.

And any details, if any, are disclosed, it's for an officer safety reason. For another words, if this was a shooting case, I would expect they would tell me that I could expect the target of the investigation would be quite comfortable and might even not to be surprised that firearms might be something that he or she brings into the equation. But outside of that, my practice has never been to know any of the details for one simple reason, and that's the fact that

You never know when an utterance can be made. Hopefully it's in a situation where there's a clear recording of it. But I've had many occasions where, this being one of them, where utterances made and admissions made at the beginning of the investigation weren't recorded. And if they're accurate, I could have only got it from the person who committed the crime because the only other person who would know the details is dead. He said it's common for some key details to be kept from undercover officers.

That type of information, in my experience, is absolutely critical to whether or not you can prove the veracity of what someone's saying because there's a term in Canadian policing called holdback information. And what holdback information is basically what the mechanism of death is that basically only the police, the deceased person, and the person responsible for that deceased person would know. Over the course of his career, being part of hundreds of undercover operations took a toll.

In terms of my own mental health, I played a lot of hockey and I also competed in weightlifting events. And I found that was a real solid, formed a real solid foundation for me to sort of keep things real. One other thing that I always advocated and tried to do is at the end of every evening, if we were running scenarios or always working undercover operation,

I always made a point of going back to my hotel room, having a shower, and then just basically just getting into my sweatpants to sit back with a cup of tea or whatever and do my notes. I never liked to sit in the same clothing garb

that we would jokingly call it our crime fighting outfit is what we, my team members and I called the clothes that we would wear when we go doing the cover work. And I never liked wearing my crime fighting outfit when I was doing my notes because that's not who I was. It was just a role I was playing for the night and to go back, have a shower, clean off and like I say, have a cup of tea or coffee depending how long the night was going to be doing notes, which will often go into the wee hours of the morning. I would sit at my own, okay,

uncomfortable sweat pants and sort of reset. And usually in the morning, get up in the morning, no matter where I was, try and find a gym somewhere, have a good workout, and then get ready for the day's events that would unfold throughout the course of the afternoon and evening again.

In homicide cases alone, he estimates he garnered dozens of confessions, which almost always included graphic details, forever burned into his memory. As horrible as those details are, the reward was just the moment knowing that you're getting what the court needs to hear to be able to decide, killed her innocence, and you do the very best you can to bear out the truth of what happened.

what was being investigated. One of the victims he often thinks about is Delene Hempel, a case where he was instrumental in obtaining multiple confessions, which ultimately led to the killer's conviction. As I would find myself sometimes driving between Calgary and Edmonton, I knew the spot where Delene had been shot, and I saw the memorial that was up, the family maintained. I would occasionally stop

and pay my respects. I've done that on some occasions in the past before with families I know have set up memorials, but I don't know, one instance it just, I was moved just to write a little note to the family and leave my business card there in case they were to see it and just let them know that I'd never forgotten, which I haven't forgotten most of the cases I was involved in. And then as a result, Billine's sister reached out to me and made contact with me

Jalene Cosco, and she is an author, and she went further to write a sweet poem that means a lot to me. Yeah, so we've maintained some contact sporadically over the years. The poem is called The Dragon Slayer. To Jalene Cosco, that's what he is, the hero who helped bring her sister's killer to justice. As a professional police officer, I...

I have to move on to the next case and the next case and next and then I have my own family, my own sort of world going on but for these families this is it for them. They're seized with this for the rest of their lives and I just feel for them in a big way.

The decades he spent undercover have resulted in countless cases being solved. But he's also very humble and acknowledges his work was always a team effort. After 30 years and many nights away, he's happy to spend more time with his family now that he's retired from police work.

Thanks for joining me today, and a special thanks to this former officer for his willingness to give us a rare glimpse into his work as an undercover officer. Crime Beat is written and produced by me, Nancy Hixt, with producer Dila Velasquez.

Audio editing and sound design is by Rob Johnston. Special thanks to photographer-editor Danny Lantella for his work on this episode. And thanks to Chris Bassett, the VP of Network Content, Production and Distribution and Editorial Standards for Global News.

I would love to have you tell a friend about this podcast, and you can help me share these important stories by rating and reviewing Crime Beat on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can find me on Twitter at Nancy Hixt, on Facebook at Nancy Hixt Crime Beat, and on Instagram at Nancy.Hixt. That's N-A-N-C-Y dot H-I-X-T. Thanks again for listening. Please join me next time.