Northern Skies

On today’s episode, Paul and Kate head north of the border to Montreal, Quebec in 1949, where a plane heading to Quebec City goes down shortly after take-off. Investigators use the technology of the time and some impressive wit to uncover the cause of the crash. But can they figure out who is responsible? 

Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/4buCoMc 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried Bones.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, what's going on?

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Well? In October, you and I are going on the
Ultimate Trip. I've been promising you this for years now,
and I'd like to say we're hitting the road, but
we're actually hitting the ocean with this, you know, Virgin
True Crime Voyages trip that we're going to be taking.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
No, I'm excited. I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Now, what pairs well with seafood? And I'm not sure
whiskey is going to be the answer. What do you
think about that?

Speaker 2 (01:33):
You know, I think with seafood. I probably could just
do a red wine, you know, versus a bourbon. Might
surprise you with that.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
You're gonna cheat on bourbon, that's what you're telling me.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
I just might.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
Well, I'm gonna really do some research and figure out
what kind of cider we'll go with the outstanding food
that I know we're going to get on this Virgin trip.
I'm really excited. I've never done a cruise before.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
I know, you know, it should be fun, it should
be a.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
Great time, and I'm really looking forward to hanging out
with you more in person.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
All the details in booking at Virgin Voyages dot com.
Slash true crime.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
I have a question. We are going to have a
story that is involving kind of a different language, some
complicated words and a different language for me. Do you
know another language? Are you going to be at all
helpful if I tell you the language?

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Oh? I took four years of French in high school
and might be able to ask you where's the bathroom?

Speaker 1 (02:29):
This is French French Canadian, Okay. And the reason I
say that is I'll have to make a big apology
to our French Canadian friends. For however, I'm going to
Butcher the names of Oh yeah, but nobody feels like
nobody has a simple name in this story. I took Spanish,
and I know enough Spanish for people who actually understand

(02:50):
Spanish really well to sort of laugh at me when
I say things wrong. So I can get in trouble,
but I can muddle my way through some stuff. But
that's it. Now I'm a little about the French.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
Why French, you know, it really was a choice between
Spanish and French. You know, people might laugh. Latin may
have still been a language that they were offering in
high school.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
They do still. One of my kids is taking it.
She switched from Spanish to Latin.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yeah, So it was more of I really wasn't interested
in Spanish, even though you know, in hindsight, living in California,
that probably would have been a language that I would
have benefited from having learned. But it was just more,
you know, French just seemed like a more attractive type
of language to want to learn. And I am so poor.

(03:42):
I do not have the aptitude in order to do accents,
you know, like I can't imitate a thing. If I
try to imitate something, it just sounds stupid, just.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Pul holes and that's it, right.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
What you're hearing is what you get. And you know,
to try to sound When I was, you know, having
to speak French in class, you know, I just butchered it.
Even today, you know, I can look at written for
you know, something in writing in French, and I can
kind of make out what it is saying.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Well, that's good. I am, as I said, not even
remotely proficient in Spanish, but I can muddle my way through.
One of our girls was bitten by dog when we
were in Costa Rica, and I managed to muddle the
little way through getting her to a doctor. Yeah, but
they couldn't prove that the dog had had Raby shots

(04:38):
because at least where we were, it was really really
common for people to take their dogs to like cattle
cattle ranches and they would get their vaccinations there, but
they weren't given paperwork or anything. So we immediately came
back and she had the whole Raby series. Oh I know,
now they didn't do it. It was and now we're
going down a weird road away from language. But I

(05:00):
thought she was going to have to have it in
the wound, but the dog bitter on the lip okay
you know they did. I don't remember where they ended
up doing it, but yeah, she did all seven seven
of them.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
So god, you know this, I may be way off
on this. I just had this memory of I thought
raby shots had to be done through the abdomen, which
doesn't make sense, but that's for whatever reason that's popping
into my head.

Speaker 1 (05:22):
Yeah, I mean it was the last night we were there.
I actually found this wildly entertaining in a way. She
was examined by a doctor at a clinic down like
a alleyway, and the woman was amazing. The clinic was beautiful,
and the owners of the house where we were paid
for the fee, and she gave us powdered penicillin that

(05:44):
you mix up yourself. So I don't know if it
was a mock sicilin or what it would have been,
but we misread. She got like a double or triple dose,
and so by the time we got on the plane,
her wound was pretty good. At that point, she had
taken away I wouldn't recommend that, but she had taken
away too much. But you know, I was sort of

(06:05):
straddling between a little bit of Spanish and also just
the translator, you know, on my phone to be able
to get that information apart. But we are in Quebec
City for this story. We did a previous story where
I said, we've never done this mode of transportation, remember
the train story that we did with Sarah Mumford. This
is a plane, so I'm going to have a trigger

(06:27):
warning for people who are scared to fly. I'm not
scared to fly, but I'm wary of flying. And I
don't remember if you said you and we don't want
to get too deep into this to trigger anybody, but
I know you don't like to travel as it specifically
flying that you don't like.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
No, I've become quite comfortable flying, you know. I don't
like being stuck in that tube four hours at a time.
That's really what kind of beats me up, and living
out of a suitcase. But actually, for Golden State Killer,
after DeAngelo was arrested, I flew down in the cockpit
of one of those tiny little sesnas from Sacramento to

(07:02):
Santa Barbara for a meeting down there, and the pilot
was great, and that plane was bounced all over the
place going down and coming back up. And ever since then,
you know, flying on these big jets it's easy, you know.
So of course you know there have been some incidents
while I've been flying where I go, Well, that was

(07:23):
kind of scary, but nothing too bad.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
Well, a friend of mine, when I would get nervous
about turbulence, a friend of mine used to say, if
a plane can make it through World War Two with
people shooting at it and with much more rick any
designs that we have today, you're probably fine. But I
just want to warn people. This is a very plane
in the sky. Bad things happen oriented story. We've never

(07:48):
done one of these before, so let's get right to it.
Let's set the scene. Love love Montreal. Have you been
to Montreal before? No, we got to go, Paul. It's amazing. Really,
I don't know if there's a crime con Montreal. If
there isn't, there should be. I think I would love that.
Oh I love Montreal.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
Maybe I'll suggest that you should.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
Uh boy, what a city. I adore Montreal. But this
is not a great story coming out of Montreal. So
we are in very modern times, nineteen forty nine. So
there are photos, and I've asked you to preload your
desktop with those photos. I've already said that this flight
is things are not going to go well on this flight.
So this is flight oneh eight and it is originating

(08:34):
in Montreal and it takes off at nine am. It
ends up landing in Quebec City and it's now ten
twenty five. This is September ninth, nineteen forty nine, and
this is a Douglas DC three Dakota CF dash CUA,

(08:55):
which is an all aluminum propeller driven airplane. I've described
as the workhorse of Second World War. Isn't that funny?
I was just bringing that up. And it's operated by
Canadian Pacific Airlines at this airport in Quebec City. In
a minute, I'll show you the plane and just as normal,
you know, so you can just see what it looks like.
But let me get through a little bit of this.

(09:17):
So I said, things are not going to go well here.
But just for the record, great weather, it's about sixty degrees,
no problems out there, great visibility. There are four crew
members on board and there are fifteen passengers, so we've
got a total of nineteen people on board this little plane.
So it went from Montreal to Quebec City and then

(09:37):
there are two more, well, there's one more stopover en
route to get to here's my first French word to
the final destination of Setiel, which is seven Islands, and
it's a fishing village approximately three hundred miles away. So
it sounds like this is a little commuter plane sort of.
So it's scheduled to take off at ten twenty, but

(09:57):
there's a five minute delay. And when it takes off,
it heads eastward along the wide Saint Lawrence River, which
I know is beautiful. So now let's go ahead and
look at the plane real quick. So open up your
PDF that I sent you.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
Yeah, the picture of a prop plane, I mean the
fact that it only has fifteen passengers, so it is
a small I mean it has four propellers. It looks
like but I can tell it's a smaller plane for sure.
It's like the regional jets that I fly all the
time when I hop up from Colorado Springs to the
Denver Airport. So it's probably about the same size. It

(10:35):
looks like it probably holds more than fifteen passengers, but
it's still it's small.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
So this plane takes off with nineteen people left Montreal
at nine. It lands, presumably about an hour later in
Quebec city and it's supposed to take off at ten
twenty Instead it takes off at ten twenty five to
go to this little fishing village. There's an explosion and
it's a blast, like a heavy noise like a bomb

(11:01):
the way it's described, and it's audible to fishermen and
railway workers in a little village about forty miles away.
And let me describe what it looks like. When they
look up, they look into the sky and they see
white smoke billowing from the forward fuselage on the port
on the left side of the plane. The plane veers
to the north, which means it kind of lurches to

(11:24):
the left, and then it plummets straight down from an
altitude of about five hundred feet, which you know Elson,
the researcher who did this great job. It's a low
estimate because the plane is about fifty miles from takeoff,
so it could have been higher, but they're saying an
estimate of five hundred and it crashes into some highly

(11:45):
forested cliffs. One witness describes debris of all kinds, like
human legs and arms, heads awful falling from the aircraft
on its descent, and everybody is killed instantly. What do
you think, I mean, I assume you've never worked anything
that has to do with aviation or that kind of

(12:07):
a crime scene at all.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
I personally have not. I think probably the biggest exposure
that I've had to anything like this was actually during
my own personal studies out of the forensic pathology books
and so I have seen, you know, multiple photographs of
what human remains look like after a plane crash, and
so I do have some familiarity with that. And then

(12:31):
I actually did a show, an episode for Real Life
Nightmare with that missing plane MH three seventy, which has
never been recovered. But it was interesting just and all
I was was a host. I was just like Peter Stack.
I wasn't investigating anything. But it was interesting just you know,
learning a little bit more about the kind of the

(12:53):
inside aspects of airports and the pilots and how planes
are flown and all the monitoring equipment. So, you know,
nineteen forty nine, obviously things were very different.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
Just to kind of make sure, you know, we know
who all the players are. So there is a railway
company that is the parent company of the airline, Canadian
Pacific Railway, and there's an investigator that goes out. His
name is Zohn E. Blase. So let me also just
say that Allison opted to go with strictly the French

(13:31):
pronunciations because she was trying to, you know, make sure
we were all correct. So forgive her and me if
we don't. These names are not the way you all
think they should be. So the important point about this
man is that he's overseen numerous train accidents, but no
plane accidents. So here's one of the things that is
interesting about the case. If the plane had departed on time,

(13:54):
it would have crashed into the Saint Lawrence River, which
would have made a lot of is about to happen
almost impossible as far as a forensic investigation. But because
of that five minute delay and there was no fire,
they are able to start recovery, not of obviously the passengers,
but we do have quite a few photos of the
plane crash when we get to it. So let me

(14:17):
tell you about how they start trying to determine how
it crashed, why it crashed. They start eliminating the human
error part of this, or equipment failure. So tell me
if this makes sense to you. So, Paul, I know
that You're not an expert in any of this, but
you know, we can kind of think a little bit
common sense here. The tips of both propellers are bent forward,

(14:40):
suggesting they had been spinning when they hit the ground.
A seat on the left side of the plane in
the forward baggage section is recovered a quarter of a
mile from the crash site, and they say that something
would have that would have only happened if it had
been thrown from the plane while still in flight, which
makes sense. I mean, it's not going to crash and

(15:02):
then shoot a seat a quarter of a mile, right.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
You know, in terms of the crash. I think that
that makes sense to me, is that that seat came
out of the plane in flight. Now that becomes significant
because of the witnesses saying they saw the explosion occur
kind of in the left fuselage I think forward part

(15:25):
of the fuselage, And so that now you have this seat,
and I have exposure to cases involving explosives in bombings,
you know, so now this is where you possibly have
a point of origin based on the location of this
seat as to where that explosive was, if it was

(15:47):
actually an explosive and not some sort of massive mechanical failure.
But I'm assuming that this is some sort of explosive
and the question is was ad in the passenger compartment
was at in the cargo hold.

Speaker 1 (15:59):
Well, tell you what they find once they really really
dig into this crash site, and I'll show you photos
in just a minute of it. They are looking for
an engine malfunction, and none of the experts there say
they can find it. I mean, I think it's very
clear this was intentional, but we don't know by whom,
and we don't know how yet. They do smell dynamite.

(16:19):
I did not know dynamite would have a specific smell,
but the investigators all smell it once they get there.

Speaker 2 (16:25):
I know what they're they're probably keying in on, you know,
but I can't say, oh, I know exactly what that is.

Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, yeah, I know. I know this is above overpay
grade a little bit here, But we will get into
the human aspect of it pretty quickly. They think, based
on the explosion, that it came from the forward baggage
section known as the number one compartment on the left side,
as you had mentioned, because of the fuselage leading from
the cabin to the control room. So that seems important.

(16:54):
They're not saying it's in the cockpit or at the
back of the plane. It's where the passengers would have
stored their luggage. And we have in a minute a
little manifest that details all of the luggage that was
loaded onto the plane, which I didn't know they did,
but I guess they have to write because of weight.
Maybe they do that on small planes.

Speaker 2 (17:15):
Yeah, you know that, I can say for sure. I've experienced.
I was actually at the Lebanon, Vermont Airport when I
started the paperback tour for my book, and we ended
up getting on and I couldn't tell you the make
model of the plane, but it was a little too
prop plane that held six passengers. And we walked out

(17:35):
onto the tarmac with our suitcases, our baggage. It had
gone through TSA, had all been screened of course at
the airport, but then it's handed back to each of us.
We go out there and as we hand that baggage
to the person who loads it on the plane and
distributes the bags as well as the passengers in order
to account for weight differences. So if you have this

(17:59):
huge guy on one side of the plane, he's counterbalanced
with another larger passenger or whatever in order to be
able to get that plane as even as possible.

Speaker 1 (18:10):
Well, okay, it's one o'clock and now news of the
crash has reached Quebec City, so there are reporters, there
are distraught family members of the crew and the passengers.
There's everybody knows the people from Quebec City and they
climb down to this site. Eventually, the investigator's cordon off

(18:31):
the area, so it's to not disturb what seems like
to be a crime scene at this point, but you
do have people down at this site climbing around what
could be a lot of evidence. And now is a
good time for you to look at the crash site.
So if you pull up, there are a lot of photos,
so you're probably just going to have to give an

(18:51):
overall summary. Well, the first thing you're going to see,
which is on page four, is a diagram of the
damage done and then a lot of photos.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Yeah, so this the diagram is really showing the crashed plane,
a sketch of the crash plane from in essence the
wings back and I don't know if it's indicating that
the front part of the fuselage, like the cockpit and
the forward seats got pushed back into the rear of

(19:22):
the plane or if that's been completely separated from this
part of the plane. But obviously just massive.

Speaker 1 (19:29):
Damage so that I think the color ones are more modern.
The wreckage must still be there. Page nine and ten
are from that time period, and you can see people
standing there looking at it, So it kind of depends
on what you want to see. First.

Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah, obviously this plane is just devastated from this crash.
And this is where you know, from a scene perspective,
this is where you have your experts from you know,
NTSB get called in because they're the ones that are
able to take a look at this mangled mess of metal.

(20:04):
And I'm sure you know the human bodies that are
in there, but they know what they're looking at. Like
I look at this. If I were to go out
to a scene like this, it would be I don't
know what's what? You know, it's so just crumpled together.
And this is where they today they would recover this
plane and take it back to like a big hangar

(20:26):
and then lay out all these components in the position
that they would be occupying if the plane were whole,
and start looking for Okay, what what damage appears to
have been done that is not related to the actual crash.
You know, do they find let's say, let's say they

(20:47):
find remnants of a pipe bomb with a timer on
it or something like that. You know, that's huge, But
also do they see evidence let's say scorching on some
of these components that's not related to the crash, or
you know, other types of shrapnel that could only occur
due to the forces of an explosion. Well, that becomes

(21:09):
sort of very important, where now you can sample those
pieces of metal to determine what type of explosive was used,
which doesn't sound like a mystery in this case, but
it also gets into is there anything whether it be
on the explosive device itself that it has identifying marks

(21:29):
on it, or is that explosive device, let's say it
is contained within a passenger's bag, Well, whose bag was that?
You know? So that's part of what my understanding of
this process would be, you know. And then now that's
when you really are getting into the physical evidence of
in essence of homicide investigation. But you have to have

(21:52):
those experts who know what they're looking at. That's just
like if I go into a fire scene and the
house has been completely burned down. He's an arson investigator.
I need a State Fire Marshal agent out there because
they know what they're looking at.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
I don't well, and I don't think they're able to
recover any of the luggage or the items that were
brought on board. They're barely able to recover any of
the bodies. So you're right. I mean, it is one
massive mess. So let me tell you what they do,
and then you know, we'll move forward because that manifest
I told you about becomes really important. The coroner's office

(22:27):
receives what's left of the bodies, what they're able to recover,
and what he looks for. What they actually several corners
do this. What they're looking for is the possibility of
eliminating a freak explosion caused by you know, a mixture
of co and air carbon monoxide. And they look for

(22:47):
carbon monoxide in the victim's blood and they can't find
any in anyone. So they're systematically trying to eliminate things.
So this happened on the ninth September or fourteenth. The
coroner's jury says the victim's deaths were accidental due to
an explosion of undetermined origin. There's one body missing. They

(23:10):
end up finding him. His name is Henri Bouchard. They
find him seven days after the explosion. A search party
finds him three hundred feet from the wreckage. When the
listeners and the viewers see these photos, it is very,
very dense, and so I can see how it would

(23:30):
be difficult for any kind of recovery. We talked about
a train with a murder and how it can cover
up murder versus suicide versus accident, and in this plane
crash is just a mess for investigators.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
Yeah, so it sounds like Henry must have been in
the seat that was found four hundred feet away, and
so he's blown out of the plane. Now, you mentioned
that the explosion occurred in essence the cargo hold where
the baggage was, right.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
Yeah, says let me tell you specifically. I just want
to make sure the wreckage indicates the explosion came from
the forward baggage section, which is known as number one
on the left side.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
It sounds like it's it's the section that would be
underneath the passenger area, and so the explosive and I'm
just going to call it an explosive device right now
sounds like it was situated underneath where Henry was seated. Now,
it doesn't mean that Henry is the one responsible for

(24:29):
the explosion. He just happened to be the poor guy
that is on top of that device.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
Okay, so now we're going to try to figure out
who brought on this device. Now that they're pretty sure
that somebody, a passenger or somebody and the crew brought
on this device, we need to figure out who did it. So,
because the explosion, you know, is believed to have come
from the baggage compartment for the passengers, they start looking

(24:59):
through the plane's car manifest for clues. Thank goodness, we
have this manifest. The items from that compartment at takeoff
included three suitcases, two typewriters, three Air Express packages containing
automobile parts, some laingerie, and a twenty five pound parcel

(25:19):
marked fragile. And it has the names of the sender
and the receiver on the tags. And when the investigators
try to figure out who these people are, it turns
out that the names on the tags are of real people,
but they don't know each other, and it just it's
almost like they got pulled out of air and happened

(25:40):
to have two people that are not related to this
case at all. And this is what we call a clue,
is that it okay, good, so twenty five pound parcel
and let's just assume it's twenty five pounds worth of
at least of dynamite that goes on if this is
our thing, but they can't recover it.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
Yeah, that seems like a lot of dynamite. You know,
maybe there's other components to this device instead of it
just being straight dynamite, you know, what is causing they're
probably having to figure out, Okay, we've got dynamite, how
does this get ignited? Is there a triggering device of
some sort that causes that dynamite to go off? Either

(26:21):
it's timed, you know, or I don't think in nineteen
forty nine would be sophisticated enough to once the plane
reached a certain elevation that it would go off. So
it's got to be on a timer, I would think.

Speaker 1 (26:33):
Yeah, I would think so too. And you know, we'll
get some more evidence later from American Sherlock. The train
robbery that actually wasn't a robbery because they were so
inept at using dynamite. These train robbers put it in
the wrong place and didn't use enough, and so they
damaged the wrong part of the train and set on

(26:55):
fire the things they were trying to steal, which was
the mail. And it was a detonator, you know, it
just like they threw the dynamite on and there was
a cord and then they detonated it and it didn't
do anything productive except kill some people. And so that
taught me dynamites about that easy to use. So it'll
be interesting to see how this happened and whether or

(27:16):
not on Rey Paul, who was sitting in that seat,
is involved.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
Well, you know, for an offender to use an explosive device, generally,
I would suggest that they've got some experience with the device,
with utilizing explosives, you know, And I have seen pictures
of bombers that have accidentally blown themselves up before they
intended to use the bomb. Yeah, part of the problem

(27:39):
of using explosives.

Speaker 1 (27:41):
Okay, they go back to the airport at Quebec City
and they talked to a baggage clerk because somebody has
to put this twenty five pound package on the plane.
And the clerk says, I took the package from a
woman in her forties with dark brown hair, who had
delivered the package shortly before the flight was scheduled to depart.
She had hopped out of a taxi. The taxi waited

(28:03):
and she hopped back in the taxi. The taxi took off.
So now the investigator is looking at the taxi records
and he finds the driver, and the driver remembers her
very well. He said he picked her up at eight fifteen.
He took her to the airport and dropped her off
at a fancy hotel. And he doesn't know her name.

(28:26):
But the investigator says, well, if she's a local, then
maybe the police might know her. And they're not finding
any luck there with this person being a local in
Quebec City. So they are looking at the different passengers backgrounds.
There are three corporate guys who are on the plane

(28:47):
who they wonder if this is some sort of business
deal going wrong or what's happening. As they're investigating them,
they're looking at anybody who has a connection who has
either themselves a criminal background or they're connected to somebody
with a criminal background. They run across a woman who
was a passenger. Her name was Rita Gway, she's twenty nine.

(29:09):
She was a wife and a mother of a four
year old girl. And they look into her husband, whose
name is Albert Gway, and they look into him because
he had just been arrested a couple of weeks earlier,
and he was one of those family members who showed
up at the crime scene asap, you know, kind of

(29:32):
been mourning and trying to figure out what was happening.
Do you want to talk about the brown haired woman
or do you want to talk about the way that
they're approaching the passenger list to try to figure out
what happened?

Speaker 2 (29:45):
You know, I think this is where now they are
conducting a bona fide homicide investigation, and so this is
where they're trying to figure out why was this plane targeted?
You know, you could have a random act of violence, right,
that's that's a possibility, but they're looking into, Okay, there
is somebody on this plane that the offender wanted dead

(30:10):
and didn't care that they're going to take out other people.
So who is that person? Based on you know, assessing
the victimology of all the passengers on this plane and
you have to count the crew as well, what stands
out and is there somebody that kind of rises above
others as possibly being a target to be killed. And

(30:33):
so it sounds like they focused in on Rita and yeah,
you know, Rita is the one that is killed amongst
the passengers. Alberta is the one that he has. He
was recently arrested, you know, So what is he arrested for.
Could he be the one that is spearheading the efforts

(30:55):
to have Rita killed? Or did Albert Let's say he
had an an affair and now maybe this dark haired
woman if somebody had an affair with and she wants
the wife dead, or you know, some sort of lover's
triangle type of scenario.

Speaker 1 (31:11):
Well, there you go, ding ding, he was having an affair.
So let me tell you what the arrest was for.
And then before you kind of get into that and
we really start heading down the Albert road, I'll ask
you a different question. So they look into albert A.
Few weeks ago the police had arrested him. He's thirty one.

(31:33):
He was arrested for the attempted assault physical assault on
a nineteen year old waitress who he had been having
an affair with for two years. Her name is Marie
ange Robataya. And as I said, they had been having
an affair for two years. It's complicated their relationship. But

(31:54):
before we talk about that, so there are details about
the alleged assault. If this is Albert, what is the
mindset of somebody who is trying to pull this off?
I mean, this is diabolical, and I don't think I've
ever used that word on this show before. To take
down the entire plane, not be there to kill one person.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
Well, it's definitely showing just a massive disregard for human life,
you know. It is like, in my experience, I think
this is very unusual, you know, for an offender to
take something to such an extreme versus being much more
targeted and going after the person he wants to have killed.

(32:36):
So I think it does, you know, speak to the psychology.
Let's say Albert is one behind this, and I'm not
convinced of that just yet, but assuming that, let's say
Albert is one, then it speaks to his pathology. He
definitely has in essence, you could say there's an absolute

(32:58):
lack of empathy for all the innocence. He is so
self centered to meet his goal of getting rid of
Rita that he's willing to kill eighteen other people.

Speaker 1 (33:09):
You know, and this isn't the perfect analogy, but I
was thinking about the various murders that happened during well,
Katrina was one, but during September eleventh, where people were
murdered and that family members were you know, the person
who did the killing, a husband or a wife were
able to say, well, this person was actually in the
you know, one of the towers. Yeah. And so what

(33:31):
I was thinking with Albert is I wonder if he
was thinking, the plane goes down, my wife is dead,
which is what I want. Inevitably, there has to be
some kind of a lawsuit that's going to go against
you know, the airliner. So I just that's what if
I were him, I'd be thinking, great, I get to

(33:52):
score several different times. My wife's gone. You know, maybe
I can get this girlfriend back on track with me.
And there's probably going to be some kind payout. I
don't know if it's life insurance on RITA, but maybe
there'll be even some kind of big payout, and he
gets attention, you know, sympathy.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
I think, you know, you've got a theory that is
very sound on that that could be one possibility. And
you know, he's he's covering up because if something bad
happens to Rita, he's naturally a suspect. He could potentially
be utilizing a plane crash to really you know, just

(34:29):
kind of diffuse any suspicion on him as I, you know,
kind of ponder things. Now we have Marie. She's only
nineteen years old. You know, he's physically assaulted her. Now
what happened? You know? Was this something where she's breaking
it off because he's married, you know, And so now
he goes, well, I got to get rid of Rita
so I can continue having a relationship with with Marie.

(34:52):
Does Marie match the description of the dark haired woman?
But you said the dark haired woman was somebody in
her forties Yep, So now you could have where you
could have Marie's mom or somebody that's very close to
Marie going, oh, this piece of shit, Albert he physically
assaulted our daughter or my friend or whatever. I'm going

(35:15):
to go after his wife. Yep. That's kind of in
an indirect way to go after Albert. I think I'm
more partial to Alberta somehow convincing either through money or
whatever else to be able to get the explosives into
the airport and onto the plane that Rita's a passenger on.
Albert is the one that seemingly right now benefits from

(35:36):
Rita's death.

Speaker 1 (35:38):
Let's get into the backstory so you understand the dynamics.
So this one is less forensicly and a lot more psychology,
I think, but let's see. And I also, of course,
I always want to know what you think about what
the investigators are doing here. Marie had met Albert during
one of his business trips to Quebec's city, so she
lives in Quebec City. He lives in a smaller area

(35:59):
with his wife, and he has a four year old daughter.
Albert was a door to door jewelry and watch salesman.
I forgot we even had those guys. I mean, I
remember vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias and stuff. But he would
carry around rings and watches, I know which I think
Marie was impressed with, and he kind of drew her

(36:20):
in by giving her a ring. But her friends, everybody
says that they've always had a really difficult relationship, tumultuous.
So she was seventeen when they started, and he was
twenty nine gross in nineteen forty eight, despite the fact
that they were on again, off again in nineteen forty eight,
so this was a year before the crash. Albert moves

(36:40):
the family, Rita and the daughter moves everything to Quebec
City to be closer to Marie. So this sounds sort
of obsessiony a little bit to me. And I don't
know where the male mind would go where he thinks
this is going to go. Is he going to be
able to do this for Abban? I don't know what
why he thinks this is a good idea. It's already

(37:02):
lasted a year. He hasn't been caught yet.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
Sure, but he's wanting to have sex with Marie more
often than what he can from traveling.

Speaker 1 (37:10):
That's the male mind, Okay, I got it, Albert. Okay.
So because he moves the whole operation, including his family,
to Quebec City, he gets busted and Rita figures out
what happens, and this dooms relationship with both women. So
at the time of the assault on Marie in late

(37:31):
nineteen forty nine, Rita had taken the daughter and moved
in with her mom, who lived in Quebec City, and
Marie had said, go kick rocks. I don't want to
have anything to do with you, loser, And so he
is going off the deep end, which is the scientific term,
and he is stalking Marie, and he's threatening her with

(37:52):
a gun. I want you to come back with me
right now, he said. If she didn't come with him.
At one point during this assault, he said that he
he would take his own life and probably take hers too,
is what he said. And there was a previous incident
that happened earlier that year, so they would have only
been together about a year and some change before this

(38:13):
thing happens. She tried to leave him. He followed her
to the train station and demanded that she go back
with him to her apartment to ensure she wouldn't try
to escape the apartment. Once they got back there, because
she was scared, he burned her gloves and he slept
in her coat because you know, he was trying to
delusionally try to get her to stay. And then this

(38:36):
is the really alarming part to me. The next day,
he really doesn't want her to leave the apartment, so
he bites her on the face because she wouldn't want
to explain, you know, nineteen forty nine, how are you
going to explain that? But again, Marie is alive and
Rita's dead. What Rita did was take the kid and leave.
So I still don't understand why he's targeting Rita and

(38:56):
not Marie.

Speaker 2 (38:57):
Male mind, Paul, Well, no, this is I think where
you're getting into, as you mentioned before, the psychology of Albert.
You know, so you're talking about how he's confronting Marie
with a gun and saying you need to get back
together with me. That is what DiAngelo did to his
ex fiancee, Bonnie DiAngelo, the Golden State Killer. So think

(39:22):
about that type of behavior. He has this pathological obsession
with Marie. Albert has this obsession. She's in essence, his
relationship is done. He's also lost the relationship with Rita.
Now he may blame Rita for losing the relationship with Marie,
you know. So that's why he's targeting to get rid

(39:45):
of Rita, you know, and there may be additional you
know that you've got sounds like several years of marriage
to Rita, and there may be other perceived slights if
you will, you know, every couple has, you know, disagreements
and arguments and things could stacked up in Albert's mind.
But I think fundamentally, the loss of Marie is is

(40:05):
huge to Albert. He is turning into a stalker. So
that shows a level of obsession. It shows that he's
willing to commit violence, even violence on this person. He's obsessed.
He's biting her face and he's utilizing that violence in
order to try to contain her and control her. You know.
And when you mentioned that, I had this vision of

(40:25):
Hannibal Lecter in silence of the lamb and his mouth
going against you know, the one of the security guard's face. Yeah,
it's very apparent at this point that Albert is the
one responsible for the planting of the explosive on the plane.
He's physically not the one who put it on the plane,
nor is he physically the one that physically got it

(40:45):
to the airport. So we need to figure out who
this forty year old woman is. You know, she could
have just been a patsy, maybe a family friend staying
at a fancy hotel. And Albert just says, hey, I
need to get this shipped, you know, and blah blah blah.
What the scenario.

Speaker 1 (41:01):
Well, now we're gonna have to figure that out. Because
Marie is helpful. The police go to her and they say,
you know what happened to his wife? And the baggage
clerk says that there was a dark haired woman in
her forties. Do you know who this person is? And
she says yes, I think it is a woman named
Marguerite Petra and she's known around town. This is probably

(41:24):
the funniest I can be here in this episode as
Madame le Corbo, which is Madame Raven because she always
wore black. So she had a bad reputation, and I
mean bad as in she wasn't murdering people, but she
was doing all sorts of illegal activity slash legal activity.

(41:45):
I did not see sex work anywhere in there, but
you know, kind of gambling stuff. She's a shady character.
So Marie was one of Marguerite's tenants after Marie's parents
kicked her out for sleeping with the mayor. Marguerite and
Albert have known each other for a while. She has
kind of a boarding house, and Albert says, I'm so

(42:09):
sorry that happened. Let me help you. I'll pay for
the rent, move in with my friend at her boarding
house Marguerite. So now it's a few weeks Paul after
the plane crash and they're looking into, you know, this
mysterious woman. So they're talking to all sorts of witnesses
and they are trying to figure out if there was

(42:31):
an interaction that somebody can attest to between Marguerite and Albert.
The witnesses say that about September nineteenth, which was twelve
days after the explosion, Albert shows up at Marguerite's apartment
and says, you're going to take full responsibility for this
plane crash, and then you're going to take your own life.
So this is, you know, a surprise to Marguerite. She says,

(42:54):
hell no. And the word from these witnesses is that
she checked herself into a hospital with quote old abdominal
ailment and she's been there ever since. So she freaked out,
obviously and was looking for some kind of protection. They
do not go to this hospital. They wait for her
to come home, which is about September twenty third, so

(43:15):
it must have been within a couple of days. When
she gets to the apartment, the police are there. She says, yes,
I transported this package from the airport, but he told her.
Albert told her that it contained a religious statue. So far,
what are you thinking here?

Speaker 2 (43:32):
This is.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
I mean, you've got this kind of shady woman and
she's admitted to being a mule for Albert and witnesses
around her saying he's threatened her.

Speaker 2 (43:43):
It does come down to what did she really know?
You know, what is her culpability in terms of getting
that explosive onto the plane? And then it's also you
know who actually manufactured this package with dynamite in it?
But it's obvious Albert is the one behind this, all right,

(44:03):
So he's the mastermind. And so now we have to
figure out was Marguerite, just like I mentioned before, a patsy,
a mule, She had no idea what she was transporting.
Part of the investigation needs to figure out, Okay, what
kind of agreement occurred between Albert and Marguerite. What does
her bank account look like? You know, was there a

(44:26):
financial transaction? Is she being paid in order to get
this package onto the plane or whatever? You know, how
does Marguerite benefit? This is where there's going to be
the investigation into Albert, you know, and part of that
is now going to be searching his residence or whatever
locations he has access to to find the bomb making equipment.

(44:51):
And today, of course we'd be looking for the explosive residues,
et cetera. You know, but the same thing has to
be occurring with Marguerite. Are they conjoined so much? Is
that relationship so much closer than what they're realizing? And
you know, could she be, you know, not just an accessory,

(45:11):
but actually fully involved with the homicides of was it
nineteen people? Eighteen people?

Speaker 1 (45:18):
Nineteen?

Speaker 2 (45:19):
There would be strategic steps that have to be done
in order to kind of tease this out. I think
it's a little bit of a misstep to go and
confront Marguerite just right away without trying to fully understand
the relationship between her and Albert and then what she
really potentially knew about this package. But they've gone, and

(45:44):
in essence, Marguerite has been threatened by Albert, and in
essence he's covering his ass. You know, any time you
hire somebody to commit a homicide, right the murder for
higher type of gambit, there is that big kind of
the trust because now you've brought somebody else in on
that gambit that can undo your right to freedom. Right,

(46:09):
and so he he must have gone to Marguerite after
he started seeing uh oh, the investigation is now closing
in on him. So he must have been talked to
and now it's like, okay, Marguerite, you're you're a loose
end for my ability to continue to live life the

(46:29):
way I want to live life, you know. And so
that's you know, he's recognizing he made a mistake involving Marguerite.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
Well, hold on to your hat because there's more more involvement. Okay,
So they need to hold her because there's not enough
of a connection. Apparently they need more. So they talked
to the doctors and find out that she had been
requesting a lot of sleeping pills. They weren't giving them
to her. She says, yeah, I wanted more attention from

(47:00):
the doctors and that's why I was asking for all
of these sleeping pills. They turned this into an attempted suicide,
which is illegal because, by the way, Quebec city is very,
very Catholic, so they're able to arrest her. They also
arrest Albert and they charge him with the murder of
his wife. They put a plant, an informant in his cell,

(47:23):
and the plant says that he confesses to it being
a crime of passion, and he also implicates both Marguerite
and her brother Zennero, who is also not particularly reputable.
He has tuberculosis, he's in a wheelchair. He is helpful
though to Albert because he is a watch repair person,
so he can repair watches. We talked about this being

(47:47):
a timer maybe situation.

Speaker 2 (47:49):
Well, and this is also where it depends on what
they were able to recover out of the plane wreckage.
Did they find remnants of the timing mechanism, you know?
And can that time mechanism, you know, the components of
that timing mechanism be traced back, you know, to this
watch repair person or to Albert. Is there any physical evidence,

(48:11):
like in nineteen forty nine they were doing latent prints fingerprints,
you know, can they get a fingerprint off of this,
you know, timing mechanism. At this point, it sounds like
we have a conspiracy between Albert, Marguerite and Zanero. It's
now figuring out, Okay, who did what in this conspiracy?

Speaker 1 (48:34):
Well, let me preface this by saying, I don't know
what they were able to recover as far as this
bomb goes, but they must have recovered some things because
they are laying out the forensic experts in the trial
are laying out their theory, and it's a pretty specific
theory about a specific bomb. So February twenty fourth, nineteen fifty,

(48:57):
so this is five months after the explosion happens. The
prosecutors call eighty technical and forensic experts and Albert's associates
and friends, including Marie and of course the two accomplices
who they forced to testify. The forensic experts think that

(49:18):
this was likely a primitive time bomb, consisting of an
alarm clock, a dry cell battery, a detonator, a detonating cap,
and dynamite. Now, Marguerite and her brother will admit to
having some involvement here, but this was pretty specific, so

(49:38):
I wonder, you know, their testimony points to some of
this also, but they must have recovered some things in
order to be able to put all that together, right,
A dry cell battery.

Speaker 2 (49:48):
Yeah, well, it's also just you have to have certain
components in order for this mechanism to work, you know.
So it's not like you have dynamite and debt cord
or debt nation cord. You know, you light it, you
throw it in this box. You're not doing that. And
so for this alarm clock, you know, once it gets

(50:09):
to a certain point where the alarm is triggered. It's
got to be closing an electrical circuit that is going
to be touching off the detonating device to get that
dynamite to blow up. So I think part of that
is just you have these experts that know how these
mechanisms work. Now, is it possible that they actually recovered,

(50:29):
you know, parts of this alarm clock for sure? You
know that because you typically we've seen in all these bombings,
I've seen you know, photos, you know, and you got
these pieces of shrapnel from a pipe bomb, and you know,
and sometimes you get numbers in Oklahoma City bombing, you know,
you got this vehicle being blown up, and they're able
to trace numbers that they got off the vehicles parts

(50:51):
that have been scattered all over the place in order
to eventually get on to McVeigh. You know, this is
where I think they must have recovered enough to be
able to go okay. The timing device is going to
be the most significant Forensically, they got enough to say okay,
and alarm clock was used. And whether or not, you know,
the battery was recovered or not, who knows, But you

(51:12):
know that they know that they must have been a
source in order to be able to get the detonation
to go off.

Speaker 1 (51:19):
Well, here are more details. Marie takes the stand. She says,
I have no idea that he had this plan. I
can't stand him. I don't love him. And then a
friend gets on the stand and Albert had said that
he would give this friend five hundred dollars to poison
his wife with cherry wine. I mean again, I always

(51:41):
I just go back to man. I mean, he's really
trying to get rid of Rita, but I know the
obsession part of it. And we'll learn a little bit
more about that in a minute. So Marguerite and her
brothers say they are innocent. They got duped into helping him.
Marguerite says that she had assumed a false name and
purchased twenty half pound sticks of dynamite, fifteen detonating caps,

(52:05):
and a thirty foot length of fuse at a local
hardware store. And Albert, come on, Marguerite. Albert says that
he's giving it to a friend of his to destroy
some tree stumps, which sounds like it could destroy a
whole forest of tree stumps with that amount.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
I mean, come on, yeah, come on, Marguerite, I mean,
you are transporting a twenty five pound package with basically
false names addresses on him. You got to be clued
in that the stuff that you just bought at the
hardware store was used to put something inside that package.

Speaker 1 (52:43):
Yeah, and you know she is described as shady, somebody
whose street wise is not going to fall for any
of this. His attorney gets on the stand and says,
by the way, two days after the plane crash, Albert
called me and asked about how quickly we can sue
the airline for negligence. The next day, he had tried

(53:04):
to collect a ten thousand dollars insurance policy that he
had taken out on RITA for fifty cents the day
of the flight. I mean, come on, he took out
an insurance policy the day of the flight.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
He is trying to financially benefit, and you know, again
we go back to this pathology of willingness to kill
innocence in order to be able to get rid of Rita.
He wants to financially benefit. Part of his efforts on
the financial benefit, maybe there was an agreement of a

(53:40):
certain level of pay to Marguerite. Marguerite's not doing this
just because she likes Albert. She is benefiting somehow, and
based off of her kind of shadiness, she's probably going,
you want me to do this, I need five thousand
dollars or whatever, you know. So Albert is going to

(54:01):
have to be able to cover that, and he may
not have it doesn't sound I mean, he's thirty one
years old, he's a watch and ring salesman, so I
don't think he's exceptionally wealthy. So he may not have
enough money or enough cash to be able to pay
Marguerite upfront. Maybe he could get give her a down deposit,

(54:21):
but now he needs to have the money for himself
for sure, but also to pay off Marguerite. And maybe
he's a narrow.

Speaker 1 (54:28):
Well let's talk about how he pays people off. So
the brother testifies that he used his experience repairing and
tuning watch mechanisms to construct this time bomb for Albert,
and here's what he got out of it, a ring
worth eight dollars to ten dollars. He also says, oh,

(54:49):
tree stumps. This is the perfect thing for tree stumps.
I mean, okay, both of these people are going to
pay a heavy price I think for this.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
Yeah, no, as they should.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
After a two and a half week long trial, and
after seventeen minutes of deliberation, Jerry finds Albert guilty. He
sentenced to death. The judge is pissed at him and says,
your crime is infamous. You're the worst that I've ever seen.
Everybody's surprised that he doesn't appeal the case, which fuels

(55:21):
the rumor that basically he has no reason to live
if Marie won't be with him anymore. But Paul, he
does write a detailed, forty page confession. If you believe him, Okay.

Speaker 2 (55:38):
I guess what are the details in the confession? And
you know, okay, forty pages? I mean this sounds like
more of a manifesto, like Unibomber type of stuff.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
Kind of it provides a timeline and incriminate directs Marguerite
and her brother into all of this. Even more so,
this is what he says. He says that in nineteen
forty nine, after he and Marie she kind of said
I'm finished with you, he realized the only way to
be with her would be to marry her Catholic, you know,

(56:08):
in Quebec City Catholic. So he either had to divorce
Rita or murder her. You know, Rita is Catholic, She's
not going to give him a divorce. It sounds like,
so he sets his sights on murdering her. Does that
make sense to you? Make sense to me in his
wacky mindset?

Speaker 2 (56:25):
I guess no, yeah, the way he's looking at it.
But you know it's interesting from a I guess from
a religious stance that, Okay, the only way I can
be with Marie is because I'm Catholic, is to marry her.
So it's all right in God's eye, so to speak.

(56:46):
But I'm going to commit this mortal sin of murder
on Rita in order to be able to do that.
It's contradictory. And you know, I always talk about, whether
it be crime scene investigation to investigations, any time you
see something that is contradictory, you have to pause what
is going on here? And oftentimes this is where an

(57:09):
offender is trying to you know, like when we have
staged crime scenes, staged circumstances in their life, they often
will do things that are contradictory because they're not real
decisive and they don't know, let's say, how to make
a crime look like something it's not. They don't have
that expertise, so I kind of you know this you know,

(57:32):
philosophy that he's putting out there is like, Noah, he's lying.

Speaker 1 (57:36):
Well, I had wondered, you know, because I don't know
the wording, the exact wording he used. What I wondered
that he meant was maybe he meant Marie will only
get back together with me if I'm willing to marry her,
because I guess she's probably Catholic too. I don't know
if it was a religious thing for him. I do

(57:57):
agree with you on that it's a stupid stance if
that's what it meant. That I was wondering, if because
she got kicked out by her parents, that he just thought,
in his warped mind, well, if my wife dies in
a plane crash, plus he's gonna have all this money,
then maybe she'll marry me because she doesn't want to
be the other woman.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
It doesn't sound like well, she may have explicitly told
him that, you know, and that may have been the
kind of preceding the physical assault that he did on her,
which you would think at that point. Now, Marie doesn't
matter if you're if Rita's dead or not, Marie's not
going to get back back with you, you know. But
he still got that pathological obsession with Marie, and so

(58:39):
in his mind he's thinking, oh, you know, Rita's dead,
I've got all this this money, and you know, she
of course will now marry me. I don't think so, Albert.

Speaker 1 (58:50):
I don't think so. No, not after you bit her face.
So here's the plan, which he says was inspired by
an aviation tragedy which I had not heard of before
in May of forty nine, so just a few months
before his plan kicked in. This is in the Philippines,
two ex convicts were hired by a woman in her

(59:12):
lover to plant a time bomb disguised as a forty
five pound box of fish on a flight to Manila
that the woman's husband was on, and everybody died, All
thirteen people died. So he read about that because it
made global headlines and said, I'm going to riff off.
That sounds like a great idea. Albert offered the brother

(59:35):
three hundred dollars a fifty percent off discount on a
ring and a car if things go to plan. But
you know, the brother had said he only got a
rinky dank ring, and that was it. To Margo Reid,
he offered to cancel a six hundred dollars debt that
she owed him. So let me look real quick, just
because I'm always curious, six hundred dollars in nineteen forty

(59:59):
nine would be eight grand. He was essentially canceling an
eight grand debt to her. So he said that. When
Zenero is working on the bomb, Marguerite says, let's do
the taxi driver thing that I've been thinking about. There's
a taxi driver that lives in the apartment above me,

(01:00:19):
and why don't I just hire him to put the
time bomb in the trunk of the car, pick up
Albert and Rita and pretend that the engine is having trouble,
and when the driver and Albert get out of the
car to help, the dynamite would kill Rita, would explode
and kill Rita. So then she's suggesting bringing in a
taxi driver into all this. The idea is vetoed by

(01:00:41):
the taxi driver smartly. The taxi driver's like, why am
I going to blow up my own cad. That's not
going to happen. So here's another intricate plan, he says,
I want to repair our marriage. Let's go on vacation.
So he brings a couple of suitcases. Rita says, great,
I really want to get back together. I don't want
our daughter to not have a father. So he says,

(01:01:03):
let's go to that village I told you about Setil.
They go and fly together. They vacation in Setil, they
fly back to Quebec city together, and then he says, oh,
I forgot two suitcases of jewelry. They're really really expensive.
I've got work to do here. Will you fly back

(01:01:24):
and go pick up these two suitcases? And that's the flight.
So on the morning of the flight, Albert and the
brother wrap the bomb in a package that Albert delivers
to Marguerite, and eventually he gets Rita over to the
plane and says goodbye to her and she boards the plane.
So that is what he says happened in the confession.

(01:01:47):
Then we've got two trials because after this confession, I
think that they were going to press charges against Marguerite
and her brother to begin with, but now they definitely are.
Do you have anything to say about his manifesto as
you called it before we talk about I'm going to
be real brief with their trials.

Speaker 2 (01:02:02):
Everything he's written is adding up. I don't recall anything
that you said where I was sensing he's minimizing himself
in this plot. I mean, he's being you know, this
is what I did. This is the plan that These
are some of the you know, the circumstances some you know,
like that, you know, blowing Rita up in the taxiicab

(01:02:22):
that end up not being done. So I'm getting a
sense that this is probably fairly truthful. And you know,
it's like, well, why is he doing this? Why is
he writing this down? And it's almost as if he
has a vendetta against Marguerite and Zanio. He just he

(01:02:45):
wants them, you know, to in essence pay for their crimes.
Now that he's in prison or is looking at the
death penalty.

Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
Well it does seem like that. I mean, boy, they're
really wrapped up in this. There are a lot of
rumors about why this was even happening, Why would the
siblings agree to do any of this, Everything from maybe
Marguerite was in love with Albert, maybe they were having
an affair, I mean, just all kinds of crazy stuff.
But it doesn't really matter because ultimately Marguerite and her

(01:03:15):
brother are found guilty of murder and both sentenced to
hang at the same time on the same day, March
sixteenth of nineteen fifty one. And you know, Marguerite had
done all of these things, she had intimidated witnesses, she
was charged with perjury for lying. It's just like kind
of a nightmare thing. And Albert was hanged in the

(01:03:35):
middle of their trial. So he died. And Albert, for
his part, when he walked to the gallows, he confirms
the forensic experts were right in their conclusions, and then
he infamously declares, at least I die famous. He's complicated.

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
This is where you see the psychology of something like
the school shooter, where you have these in cels, you know,
these involuntary celibates. You know, they have an angst and
when they see a school shooting and then the shooter,

(01:04:19):
the shooter's name is in the press, they go, well,
I want that attention too. You know, I have similar
societal insults that I've experienced, and I want to die,
but I also want to have that fifteen minutes of fame.
And in many ways that's Albert is kind of doing

(01:04:42):
the same saying the same thing right there as well.
At least I'll be famous, right for something horrific.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
Gosh, Well, he dies and Marguerite, after some sort of delays,
they're both convicted. She and her brother. She compairs herself
to Jesus Christ, I mean, the people in this story.
And I wondered if this was the first time in
history that forensic experts got a shout out from somebody

(01:05:10):
who was literally about to be hanged up. You guys,
you did it, You got it, all right. And then
for his part, Zin a Row the brother was hanged
in fifty two, but they hanged him in his wheelchair.
He had tuberculosis. I've never heard of that before, So
they hanged him in his wheelchair because he wasn't able
to walk at that point. And that is that Marguerite

(01:05:32):
was the last execution of a woman in Canada nineteen
fifty three.

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):
Yeah. Well, basically you have, you know, three nut jobs
that found each other. And I think we always kind
of talk about sort of the you know something about
the story that we get out of it. Thank God
for Marie she survived now because things could have gone

(01:05:59):
very bad for her.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
Yeah, absolutely, And and you know she was the one
that connected. They probably would have found Marguerite at some
point anyway, but it happened much more quickly that way,
you know, And I just, boy, I want to it's
so many ways. I want to believe Marguerite and her
brother they're just sort of these stooges, But you can't
actually admit to constructing a time bomb.

Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
Marguerite went and bought the explosives and the detonation court.

Speaker 1 (01:06:26):
Come on, Yeah, this story is terrifying in the conspiracy
and the links that this man would go to eliminate
his wife, and then on top of that of the
delusions with this young girl, and oh my gosh, what
a mess of a story. But like I said, we
haven't been on a plane yet, Paul, so there's new

(01:06:47):
things happening all the time. We will not have a
plane next week. That I can guarantee you. I can
never say never.

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
You're not going to bring up dB Cooper.

Speaker 1 (01:06:57):
Now this just about broke me for planes. I have
to tell you this story, dB Cooper, maybe another time.
You know, this was so much kind of heavier in
the less on the forensics and more just on the
dynamics between these people, but still so interesting and lots
of photos just like you. Like so I thought this
would be right up your alley.

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
No, I think the investigators did a good job, you know,
considering the mess of the plane and the human remains
and potentially lack of forensic evidence, but they they were
able to piece things together, you know, literally starting with victimology, right,
this is now who on this plane would be a target?

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):
Yep? And ultimately, you know, when you come back to
the victims, just like you said, just somebody that the
inhumanity of killing an entire planeload of innocent people to
get to one person who herself is innocent. Also, it's
so nauseating, it's just and I wish that he had
remorse that we were going to find remorse in that confession.

(01:07:58):
There's no remorse in it at all, you know. And
then he dies infamous, he's kind of given up. If
Marie's lost, nothing else matters. And so not a not
a good satisfying ending for a true crime story at all.
All the people died and they don't know what happened,
and they have no idea why.

Speaker 2 (01:08:15):
And Albert may be a true psychopath.

Speaker 1 (01:08:18):
I would say so. On that note, I will see
you next week for a non plant, maybe non psychopath story.
I guess we'll.

Speaker 2 (01:08:25):
See Okay, looking forward to.

Speaker 1 (01:08:27):
It, me too. This has been an exactly right production
for our sources and show notes go to exactly Rightmedia
dot com slash Buried Bones Sources. Our senior producer is
Alexis Emirosi.

Speaker 2 (01:08:43):
Research by Alison Trumble and Kate Winkler Dawson.

Speaker 1 (01:08:46):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.

Speaker 2 (01:08:48):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.

Speaker 1 (01:08:51):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Speaker 2 (01:08:53):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark, and Danielle Kramer.

Speaker 1 (01:08:58):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
buried Bones pod.

Speaker 2 (01:09:03):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race to decode the
criminal mind, is available now.

Speaker 1 (01:09:10):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life Solving America's
Cold Cases is also available now.

Speaker 2 (01:09:16):
Listen to Buried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.