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The System Failed - The Wilno Murders Investigation · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: So I want you to imagine something for a second.
0:02
Imagine knowing that a massive catastrophic storm is bearing down
0:06
on your town, Like you could actually feel the barometric
0:09
pressure dropping in your bones, you know. You look up
0:13
and you see the sky turning that sort of bruised,
0:16
violent purple color.
0:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, that classic pre storm sky right exactly.
0:21
Speaker 1: And the wind is already ripping shingles off the roofs
0:23
of the houses around you. But when you look at
0:26
the official National weather app on your phone, it says
0:30
clear skies and sunshine because.
0:32
Speaker 2: The app is only reading its own data exactly.
0:34
Speaker 1: So the city council they look at the app and
0:36
they refuse to sound the sirens, They refuse to open
0:40
the emergency shelters, and they essentially just tell everyone to
0:43
go about their day.
0:44
Speaker 2: Which is terrifying because the bureaucratic apparatus, it really only
0:47
responds to its own internal sensors, right Like, if the
0:50
sensor is broken or if it's not calibrated to see
0:52
the storm, then officially the storm just doesn't exist, even.
0:55
Speaker 1: If everyone is already getting soaked.
0:57
Speaker 2: Even if everyone is getting soaked regardles lists.
1:00
Speaker 1: Of the live reality, and that terrifying gap that massive
1:04
chasm between the undeniable lived reality of a community and
1:09
the highly sanitized official record that is exactly where monsters
1:13
are allowed to operate. It really is so welcome. Today's
1:17
deep dive, everyone, we are unpacking an incredibly harrowing but deeply,
1:21
deeply important piece of investigative journalism. Today we're looking at
1:25
a transcript from CBC News as the fifth Estate, and
1:28
it's titled will no Murders? Why Didn't we Know?
1:31
Speaker 2: And this is a heavy one.
1:32
Speaker 1: It is. Our mission today is to explore one of
1:34
the absolute worst incidents of domestic violence in Canadian history.
1:38
This took place on September twenty two, twenty fifteen, in
1:41
Renfrew County, Ontario, in a single morning. Three women, Natalie
1:45
warmerdam and a Stagia Cuzick and Carol Cullton were murdered.
1:48
Speaker 2: In just a few hours.
1:49
Speaker 1: Yeah. But the detail that turns this from a devastating
1:52
tragedy into a blaring indictment of our entire society is
1:55
that the man who killed them was known by the
1:57
entire community to be profoundly dangerous.
2:00
Speaker 2: Everyone knew, right, And what's fascinating here is well fascinating
2:04
and utterly tragic. Is how we need to untack the
2:07
mechanics of this, because if we just frame this merely
2:09
as a true crime story, you know, a scary story
2:12
about a bad guy, we do a massive disservice to
2:15
those three women. Hun This isn't just a recount of events.
2:18
This is a complete autopsy of systemic failure. We are
2:22
examining this brutal collision between a community's whispering network, that
2:27
local knowledge where everybody just knows a specific guy is
2:30
a walking threat, and a justice system that requires very specific,
2:34
often completely impossible to gather paperwork before it will even
2:38
acknowledge that same threat.
2:39
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this because I want you the listener,
2:42
to really put yourself in this environment. Imagine living in
2:45
a place where everyone around you knows a specific person
2:48
is a ticking time bomb. But the institutions, the police,
2:52
the courts, the systems designed and funded to protect you,
2:56
they treat that person as if they have a completely
2:58
clean slate.
2:58
Speaker 2: It's a complete disconnect, it is.
3:01
Speaker 1: And to really understand how a dangerous man operates in
3:04
plain sight like that, we have to examine the environment
3:07
that allowed him to camouflage himself. So let's talk about
3:12
Renfrew County.
3:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, the geography is crucial here, it really is.
3:15
Speaker 1: Renfrew County is in the Ottawa Valley, and visually it
3:19
is stunning. We are talking sprawling farmland, these deep dense forests,
3:24
winding rivers. I mean, it's the exact kind of place
3:27
people escape to when they want to leave the noise
3:30
in the concrete of the city behind them.
3:32
Speaker 2: Right, it's idyllic, But the sociology of a place like
3:35
that is very distinct. Rural communities, by their very nature,
3:39
develop a culture that is heavily, heavily weighted towards self reliance.
3:43
Speaker 1: You fix your own problem exactly.
3:44
Speaker 2: You fix your own truck, you plow your own driveway,
3:46
you chop your own wood, and that fosters this incredibly
3:49
deep sense of neighborly community in times of acute crisis,
3:52
like if there's a flood or a barnfire, everybody round
3:55
road for sure. But on the flip side, it also
3:58
enforces a really rigid coat of par Minding your own
4:01
business is considered like a cardinal virtue out there. You
4:05
just do not pry into other people's affairs, which.
4:08
Speaker 1: Creates a really dangerous paradox, doesn't it Because you might
4:11
wave to the farmer down the concession road every single
4:14
morning for twenty years, you might help him pull his
4:16
tractor out of the mud, but you would never ever
4:19
dream of asking what all the shouting was about it
4:21
at his house the night before.
4:22
Speaker 2: Never, the culture dictates that you look the other way,
4:25
and the physical geography actually acts as an amplifier for
4:29
that cultural silence. How so well, think about the isolation
4:33
when your nearest neighbor is, say a kilometer away through
4:37
a dense patch of woods. Isolation is literally built into
4:41
the architecture of your daily life. For a victim of
4:43
domestic abuse, that means there are no shared apartment walls
4:46
where a neighbor might hear something and call nine to
4:48
one one right, There are no pedestrians walking by an
4:51
open window on the sidewalk. And abusers absolutely understand this geography,
4:55
They utilize it. The physical space itself becomes a weapon
4:59
of container that makes.
5:00
Speaker 1: So much sense, and it's so chilling. And that was
5:03
the landscape that Natalie Warren Dan moved into in two
5:05
thousand and five. She came from Toronto with her husband
5:08
Frank and their two kids. Valerie and Adrian, and they
5:12
were chasing that exact idyllic pastoral dream we just talked about.
5:16
Speaker 2: They wanted the space.
5:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, Natalie had actually grown up in the county and
5:19
she wanted her kids to experience the animals, the wide
5:22
open space, the fall colors. Her daughter Valerie later described
5:27
their farmhouse in a way that feels honestly, almost too
5:30
perfectly metaphorical.
5:31
Speaker 2: What did she say?
5:32
Speaker 1: She called it, quote A gorgeous house, cold but gorgeous,
5:36
hard to maintain but beautiful.
5:38
Speaker 2: Wow. That really captures the dual nature of that life,
5:41
doesn't it. The facade of the rural dream hiding this
5:43
much colder harsher reality.
5:46
Speaker 1: It totally does. And Natalie herself she was undergoing this
5:49
profound transition during these years. She had been working as
5:52
a software writer in the city. But as she settled
5:55
into this rural life and her kids grew a bit older,
5:57
she just retooled her entire existence. At thirty five years old,
6:01
she went back to school and became a palliative care nurse.
6:04
Speaker 2: That is an incredibly difficult pivot, right.
6:07
Speaker 1: She started spending her days driving across this massive, sprawling
6:10
county to care for people in the final most painful
6:14
stages of their lives. And I want to pause here
6:16
because I have to push back on a narrative that
6:18
so often sneaks into these discussions about domestic.
6:21
Speaker 2: Violence, the stereotype of the victim exactly.
6:24
Speaker 1: There is this lazy, almost victim blaming societal assumption that
6:30
victims of abuse are inherently meek or fragile or just
6:34
overly submissive people who don't know how to stand up
6:36
for themselves.
6:37
Speaker 2: Which is statistically and psychologically false.
6:39
Speaker 1: Completely false. It's crucial we recognize that abuse doesn't just
6:43
target the meek. We need to look at Natalie. This
6:46
was a highly educated, highly capable woman. She was a
6:49
palliative care nurse. Her literal day job was walking into
6:52
homes filled with profound grief, managing complex pain medications, and
6:57
anchoring families through the hardest transitions of human exists.
7:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to be so strong to do that.
7:01
Speaker 1: You do not do that job if you do not
7:03
have a spine of absolute steal. Natalie was not weak.
7:07
Speaker 2: She wasn't weak at all. She was highly capable and
7:10
deeply resilient. But what we have to understand is that
7:13
the vulnerability that abuser's exploit isn't always a permanent personality trait, right,
7:18
It is very often a temporary window.
7:20
Speaker 1: A window of circumstance exactly.
7:22
Speaker 2: And for Natalie, that window opened in twenty ten her
7:26
marriage to Frank ended. Now, even though the separation was
7:29
reportedly pretty amicable and they remained close, her world was
7:33
still completely upended. A close friend of hers observed that
7:36
Natalie's confidence was deeply bruised by the divorce. Just totally normal,
7:40
completely normal. She was reeling trying to figure out who
7:43
she was as a single woman in her forties, living
7:46
in this isolated, hard to maintain farmhouse, and.
7:49
Speaker 1: Right into that temporary window of midlife vulnerability, walks Basil.
7:53
Speaker 2: Beutski enter the abuser yep.
7:56
Speaker 1: And initially, as they almost always do, he presents as
7:59
the helpful local. He's charming, he knows how to fix
8:02
things around the farm. He starts making himself indispensable to her.
8:06
But the wider community knew things about Basil that Natalie,
8:09
being relatively new to the inner social circles of the county,
8:12
just didn't initially grasp.
8:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Burutski family name carried a lot of weight
8:17
in Renford County. They had been there for generations. But
8:20
Basil himself had curated his own specific, incredibly toxic lore
8:25
within the town, made a reputation a massive one. People
8:29
who went to grade school with him remembered him as
8:30
a relentless bully. He wasn't just a guy who had sudden,
8:33
unpredictable snaps of anger, you know, he had a baseline
8:36
frequency of hostility. He held grudges like they were family heirlooms.
8:41
Speaker 1: And we aren't just talking about a guy who grumbles
8:43
at the waitress at the local diner. The level of
8:47
public grievance he operated with was just staggering. In twenty eleven,
8:52
he literally constructed twenty seven physical size seven He nailed
8:56
them to wooden stakes, and he drove them into the
8:58
snow banks all along the perimeter of his property. And
9:01
these signs listed the names of his quote unquote enemies.
9:05
Speaker 2: It's like a physical manifestation of paranoia totally.
9:08
Speaker 1: He named specific police officers, neighbors, and very prominently he
9:12
named his ex wife, Mary Anne. He was a visual
9:15
manifesto of his paranoia and his rage, warning all these
9:18
people to stay away from.
9:19
Speaker 2: Him, right and just try to conceptualize the sheer amount
9:22
of time the physical effort and the sustained anger required
9:25
to build and plant twenty seven individual signs in the
9:29
freezing Canadian winter weather that.
9:31
Speaker 1: Takes hours, days maybe exactly.
9:34
Speaker 2: That is not a momentary lapse in judgment. It is
9:37
a highly coordinated broadcast to the entire community. He was
9:40
marking his territory and publicly threatening anyone who crossed his
9:43
incredibly distorted sense of boundaries.
9:46
Speaker 1: So hearing that if a man is unstable enough to
9:48
plant a literal garden of threatening signs in his front yard,
9:53
you would assume his official criminal record is a mile long.
9:55
Speaker 2: We would assume so, yes.
9:57
Speaker 1: But here is where the diagnostic machine of our justice
9:59
system prints out a completely blank sheet of paper. When
10:02
Natalie met him, his first and last conviction for a
10:05
violent crime was from nineteen seventy seven, a.
10:08
Speaker 2: Gap of over thirty years thirty years.
10:11
Speaker 1: Three decades of an officially clean record. But between nineteen
10:15
seventy seven and when he moved in with Natalie, he
10:17
had been in a twenty six year relationship with his
10:19
ex wife, Mary Anne, and during that time he was
10:22
charged with assaulting her four different times.
10:25
Speaker 2: Right, and this is where we have to break down
10:26
the bureaucratic alchemy that turns four severe assault charges into
10:31
zero actual convictions.
10:33
Speaker 1: How does that even happen?
10:35
Speaker 2: Well, the first charge went to trial and actually resulted
10:37
in an acquittal, but the second and third charges were
10:40
simply dropped by the prosecution before trial, and the fourth
10:43
charge was dropped in exchange for him agreeing to a
10:46
peace bond, which is essentially just a restraining order. Well,
10:49
and just to compound the pattern, in twenty ten, another
10:52
woman pressed charges against him for criminal harassment, and that
10:55
was also dropped at the eleventh hour.
10:57
Speaker 1: So the system catches him, it processes him, and then
11:00
it just opens its hands and lets him fall right
11:02
back out into the community. Why does a prosecutor look
11:05
at a man with a history of terrifying women and
11:08
just decide to drop the charges. Is it just sheer
11:11
laziness on the part of the lawyers.
11:12
Speaker 2: No, it's not laziness at all. It's actually a structural handcuff,
11:16
and it's rooted deeply in constitutional law. If we connect
11:19
this to the bigger picture, prosecutors operate within the very
11:23
strict confines of admissible evidence. In a domestic assault case.
11:27
The primary and very often the only evidence is the
11:30
victim's testimony.
11:32
Speaker 1: Right because it happens behind closed doors, exactly.
11:34
Speaker 2: But abusers do not stop abusing just because they've been arrested.
11:38
In the months leading up to a trial, the abuser
11:40
is often out on bail, living in the same small town,
11:43
relentlessly intimidating the victim, especially in a.
11:46
Speaker 1: Place like Renfrew County, where they might run into each
11:48
other at the only grocery store in town.
11:50
Speaker 2: Precisely so, by the time the trial date actually arrives,
11:53
months or even years later, the victim is frequently too terrified,
11:57
too exhausted, or just two cycles logically worn down to
12:01
take the stand and face him in court.
12:03
Speaker 1: But wait, I have a question about that. If the
12:05
police show up on the night of the assault, right,
12:07
they take photos of the bruises, and maybe they even
12:10
record a nine to one one call of the woman
12:11
screaming for help, Why do they even need her to
12:14
testify months later? Can't the prosecutor just show the jury
12:17
the photos and play the nine one one tape?
12:19
Speaker 2: You'd think so, But the legal hurdle there is the
12:22
doctrine of hearsay, and specifically the constitutional right of the
12:26
accused to face their accuser okay, right. If the victim
12:30
refuses to take the stand to testify, the defense attorney
12:33
is going to stand up and argue that they cannot
12:35
cross examine a photograph, they can't cross examine a nine
12:37
to one one tape. They will argue that the accused
12:40
is being denied a fair trial because they can't question
12:43
the source of the allegations against them.
12:46
Speaker 1: Wow, so the constitutional protection actually works against the victim there,
12:50
it does.
12:50
Speaker 2: Judges are bound by centuries of legal precedent designed to
12:53
prevent the state from railroading innocent citizens, so they will
12:57
very often exclude that evidence if the and won't testify,
13:01
and without the victim's live testimony, the prosecutor's case just
13:04
collapses and they are literally forced to drop the charges.
13:07
Speaker 1: And the legal consequence of that is just a total
13:10
systemic blackout. Because the courts, the background check systems, the
13:14
police databases, they only log convictions. They are intentionally blind
13:19
to drop charges completely regardless of why they were dropped.
13:22
Speaker 2: They don't see the contexts. They just see a blank space, exactly.
13:26
Speaker 1: And Natalie, you know, she was not naive. Her mother
13:29
and her grandmother heard all the local rumors about the
13:31
signs and the snow and the ex wife, and they
13:34
explicitly warned her to stay away from Basil. So Natalie
13:38
did something incredibly proactive, which I think is so important
13:40
to highlight. She hired a private investigator to run a
13:43
background check on him.
13:45
Speaker 2: Which perfectly demonstrates that she wasn't just blindly rushing into danger.
13:49
She actively utilized the tools available to a private citizen
13:52
to assess her risk.
13:54
Speaker 1: But the PI came back with virtually nothing, just a
13:57
couple of old drunk driving infractions. The PI is pulling
14:00
from the exact same blinded databases that the courts use.
14:04
Drop charges do not show up on a.
14:06
Speaker 2: Standard check, So she gets this completely sanitized.
14:08
Speaker 1: Report, right, This is terrifying. It's like pulling a credit
14:12
report to see if you should loan someone in your
14:14
life savings and the bank is intentionally deleted all twenty
14:17
five of their previous bankruptcies just because the paperwork wasn't
14:21
perfectly finalized. Yeah, you're making a literal life or death
14:24
decision based on a sanitized reality.
14:26
Speaker 2: It creates this massive cognitive dissonance, and abusers eagerly exploit that.
14:32
Basil provided Natalie with a very compelling narrative He told
14:35
her his exes were quote crazy and vengeful women who
14:39
had just conspired to ruin his reputation with all these
14:42
false accusations.
14:43
Speaker 1: The classic abuser playbook exactly.
14:46
Speaker 2: He weaponized his legally clean record as undeniable proof of
14:49
his victimhood. And Natalie remember she's a nurse. Her entire
14:54
vocation is rooted in empathy and helping people through difficult times.
14:57
She wanted to believe that this man had just been
14:59
unf fairly maligned by a judgmental small town, but.
15:02
Speaker 1: That empathy became the exact thing he used against her.
15:06
Because his record looked relatively clean, Natalie initially believed him.
15:11
She tried to help him, which unfortunately led to a
15:14
deeply dangerous escalation. A close friend of Natalie summarized the
15:18
dynamic perfectly. She said, quote, a drowning man will drag
15:23
you under if you try to help him.
15:25
Speaker 2: That is such a chillingly accurate description.
15:27
Speaker 1: And by the spring of twenty twelve, Basil wasn't just drowning.
15:31
He was actively pulling Natalie below the surface. The mask
15:35
had completely fallen off. The drinking escalated, he had outbursts
15:39
of rage, He refused to leave her, farmhouse.
15:41
Speaker 2: He's isolating her in that space we talked about earlier.
15:44
Speaker 1: Yes, he would keep her up all night, screaming at her,
15:46
demanding that she'd give him half of her property because
15:49
he just randomly decided they were now common law partners.
15:52
Speaker 2: Notice the shift in his methodology there. It moves from
15:55
charming utility, you know, fixing the tractor, chopping the wood,
15:59
straight into titleman and coercive control the demands for her property.
16:03
That's about establishing a financial anchor, making it structurally harder
16:06
for her to extract herself from the relationship, right tying
16:09
her down. And when those financial demands didn't yield the total,
16:12
unquestioning submission he wanted, he pivoted to pure, unadulterated terror.
16:17
Speaker 1: And the threats he made they weren't just the typical,
16:21
you know, I'm going to ruin your life kind of threats.
16:23
They were deeply sadistic. He threatened her children. He told
16:27
Natalie he was going to skin her son alive if
16:29
he ever caught him.
16:30
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
16:31
Speaker 1: He threatened to kill her dog.
16:32
Speaker 2: The specificity of threatening to skin a child that is
16:36
designed to bypass any kind of logic and strike directly
16:40
at the most primal reptilian part of a mother's brain.
16:43
It induces a state of constant paralyzing hyper arousal. You
16:47
can never relax for a single second.
16:49
Speaker 1: Never. And he also dragged his pass into this psychological warfare.
16:53
He explicitly told Natalie that if his ex wife mary
16:56
Anne ever succeeded in putting him in jail for those
16:59
pasts assault, Natalie shouldn't even bother waiting for him. He said,
17:02
the very first thing he would do upon release was
17:05
hunt Marianne down, kill her, and then happily go back
17:07
to prison.
17:08
Speaker 2: The truly fascinating or rather terrifying mechanism he's using here
17:12
is how he turns Natalie into a hostage of her
17:14
own conscience.
17:16
Speaker 1: What do you mean?
17:16
Speaker 2: He is effectively telling her, if you go to the
17:19
police and try to get me locked up, you will
17:21
be signing the literal death warrant for another woman. He
17:25
is taking the moral weight of his own potential future
17:28
violence and transferring it entirely onto Natalie's shoulders.
17:32
Speaker 1: Wow, so she feels like if she saves herself, she's
17:34
killing someone else.
17:35
Speaker 2: Exactly. It's an impossible bind.
17:37
Speaker 1: Natalie is totally trapped in this vice but out of
17:40
desperate necessity to protect her kids because he threatened her son,
17:45
she finally goes to the police. She reports the physical assaults,
17:49
the intimidation, the threats to skin her boy. The police
17:52
arrest him, and the justice system immediately begins to negotiate
17:56
away her safety in the name of bureaucratic efficiency.
17:59
Speaker 2: Here we go.
18:00
Speaker 1: The Crown prosecutor drops the assault charges. In exchange, Basil
18:04
agrees to plead guilty just to the lesser charge of
18:06
uttering threats.
18:07
Speaker 2: This is plea bargaining at its most destructive. You know,
18:10
the justice system is chronically overburdened. Prosecutors have hundreds of
18:15
active cases on their desks. A full trial takes days,
18:19
it requires a victim who might recant under the intense
18:21
pressure of cross examination, and it carries the risk.
18:24
Speaker 1: Of a total acquittal, so they take the easy win.
18:27
Speaker 2: A plea deal guarantees a conviction, even if it's for
18:30
a lesser charge. It clears a file off the desk.
18:34
From a bureaucratic standpoint, it's a success.
18:37
Speaker 1: But from Natalie's perspective, I imagine she was probably relieved
18:40
she didn't have to testify. Right she avoids his wrath
18:43
in the courtroom. But the terrible trade off is him
18:46
getting out almost immediately. The prosecutor actually asked the judge
18:50
for a longer sentence, but the judge gave him five months.
18:53
Speaker 2: Five months for threatening to skin a child.
18:55
Speaker 1: Yes, and the judges remarks during sentencing, they are just
18:58
a permanent stain on the record of this case. The
19:01
judge stated out loud on the record in the courtroom
19:05
that Basil hadn't been convicted of a violent crime since
19:07
nineteen seventy seven. The judge used that sanitized, blank piece
19:11
of paper as the official justification for giving him a
19:14
lenient sentence.
19:16
Speaker 2: Because the judge cannot legally factor in the decades of
19:19
drop charges for Marianne or the other women. The system
19:23
structurally forces the judge to wear blinders. They are looking
19:27
only at the nineteen seventy seven conviction and the current
19:29
threat charge, and they're completely ignoring the massive iceberg of
19:33
violence lurking just beneath the legal waterline.
19:36
Speaker 1: So he gets five months, but the math of the
19:39
justice system is broken too. Because he sat in a
19:42
holding cell waiting for his court date. He was given
19:45
what they call credit for time.
19:47
Speaker 2: Served right pre trial custody credit The rationale behind that
19:50
policy is that pre trial custody conditions are often much
19:53
harsher than post conviction prisons. You know, there are no
19:55
rehabilitation programs, there are tighter lockdowns overcrowding, so courts will
19:59
often credit those pre trial days at a ratio of
20:02
one and a half to one.
20:03
Speaker 1: Okay, but the real world translation of that math is
20:05
that a five month sentence for threatening to mutilate a
20:08
teenager was reduced to thirty three actual days.
20:11
Speaker 2: In jail, barely a month.
20:12
Speaker 1: He was going to be back on the streets of
20:14
Renfrew County in a month. The police knew this. They
20:16
knew he was highly volatile, so they offered Natalie what
20:19
they called protection.
20:20
Speaker 2: And this is just it's hard even fathom.
20:23
Speaker 1: They gave her a panic button. It looked like a
20:26
chunky nineteen nineties pager with a GPS tracker inside. They
20:30
told her to keep it on her and press it
20:32
if he showed up at the farm. Natalie, realizing the
20:35
absolute absurdity of this, went out and bought a shotgun.
20:39
She installed high definition security cameras all around her house.
20:42
Speaker 2: She knew she was on her own, She.
20:44
Speaker 1: Knew the pager was useless. I mean giving a woman
20:46
a plastic GPS panic button to defend against a man
20:50
who has promised legal violence. That is like handing someone
20:53
a smoke detector to fight a five alarm fire.
20:56
Speaker 2: It doesn't put up the flames.
20:57
Speaker 1: It doesn't put up the flames, It doesn't stop the
20:59
house from burning down. It just provides the police with
21:02
the exact GPS coordinates of where they can find the ashes.
21:05
So they hander a plastic pager against a man threatening
21:08
to skin her son. Just outrageous.
21:10
Speaker 2: It is outrageous. The state was outsourcing the burden of
21:13
her physical safety entirely onto her. They released a man
21:17
who is clearly fixated on her destruction, and their policy
21:21
was essentially, you need to be hypervigilant every second of
21:24
every day. If he breaches your parimeter, push this button
21:27
and we will dispatch a cruiser that might take twenty
21:29
minutes to even reach your.
21:30
Speaker 1: Rural farm, which is an eternity when someone is kicking
21:33
in your door. So let's ask the obvious question, what
21:37
happens when a violent, narcissistic man is released from a
21:40
cell after just thirty three days, with his anger fully intact.
21:44
He doesn't reflect he stews, he crystallizes his grievance.
21:48
Speaker 2: He violates his probation immediately and finds a new victim exactly.
21:52
Speaker 1: When Bezil was released in twenty thirteen, he was placed
21:55
on probation. One of the strict, supposedly non negotiable terms
21:59
of his release was that he had to stay thirty
22:01
five kilometers away from Natalie. He was required to live
22:04
near the town of Wilno, but the system, by shifting
22:07
him to Willno, simply moved the predator into a new
22:10
hunting ground.
22:10
Speaker 2: Out of sight, out of mind for the authorities, but
22:12
right into the path of Anastasia Cusick.
22:14
Speaker 1: Yes, Anastasia was a real estate agent in the area.
22:18
She had actually helped Basil with a property transaction years prior,
22:21
so they somewhat knew each other. She was this vibrant
22:24
presence in the community. She was an avid equestrian. She
22:27
had won provincial writing championships, but twenty thirteen was a
22:32
year of profound hardship for her.
22:34
Speaker 2: She was very vulnerable at this time, very.
22:36
Speaker 1: She had purchased an old, drafty farmhouse that required massive renovations,
22:41
far more than she had originally budgeted for. She was
22:44
also navigating the emotional fallout of a really painful breakup,
22:48
and as the harsh Canadian winter set in, she was
22:50
financially strapped and physically running out of firewood to heat
22:53
her home.
22:54
Speaker 2: And predators possess a highly attuned radar for distress. Basil
22:58
didn't approach Anastasia with her hostility, Just like with Natalie.
23:02
He arrived presenting as a savior. He had tools, he
23:05
had time exactly. She offered to cut firewood, he offered
23:08
to patch up the farmhouse. He exploited her immediate practical
23:10
needs to bypass her boundaries, and within a matter of
23:13
days he had moved his belongings into her home.
23:15
Speaker 1: Which we have to loudly note was a flagrant violation
23:18
of the probation order he had just been placed on.
23:21
Speaker 2: It was a massive violation, but Basil deployed the exact
23:24
same narrative on Anastasia that he had used on Natalie.
23:28
He painted himself as the persecuted victim of the justice
23:30
system in all these vengeful ex lovers in Anastasia, isolated
23:35
by the winter and deeply grateful for the physical help
23:38
with the freezing house, trusted him.
23:40
Speaker 1: But the savior act neverthlasts. On December thirtieth, the tension
23:44
erupted into a horrific, prolonged physical attack. He beat Anastasia savagely.
23:51
She later testified that he choked her, held his hands
23:53
over her mouth, and struck her repeatedly. She was in
23:56
so much physical agony during this attack that she actually
23:59
begged him to just kill her and get it over with.
24:02
Speaker 2: It's agonizing to even hear.
24:04
Speaker 1: But the detail from this attack that completely chills the
24:06
blood is what he said to her while his hands
24:08
were around her throat. He told her that he wasn't
24:11
beating her. He said she was quote taking the beating
24:14
for the other women who had wrecked his life.
24:16
Speaker 2: We really need to pause and examine the profound psychological
24:19
displacement Basil exhibits there. It is a text pic example
24:22
of displacement, but taken to a near delusional extreme. What
24:26
goes through someone's mind to say that, well, Basil does
24:29
not view the women in his life as independent, autonomous
24:33
human beings. In his mind, they have merged into a singular,
24:37
monolithic entity. It's like a hive mind of female persecution
24:40
dedicated entirely to ruining his life. He is literally telling
24:44
Anastasia that her physical body is merely a proxy.
24:47
Speaker 1: Wow.
24:48
Speaker 2: He fully believes he is the victim of a conspiracy.
24:51
He is punishing his ex wife, Marianne. He is punishing
24:54
Natalie by breaking Anastacia's bones. He is entirely insulated by
25:00
his own fabricated victimhood.
25:01
Speaker 1: Anastasia was severely traumatized, and like Mary Anne, like the
25:05
others before her, she was initially too terrified to testify
25:08
against him. But this is where the story takes an
25:10
incredible tragic turn. Natalie Warmerdam, who lived thirty five kilometers away,
25:14
who was terrified of him herself, finds out about the
25:17
attack on Anna Station.
25:18
Speaker 2: Then she steps up.
25:19
Speaker 1: Natalie reaches out to Anastasia. Natalie convinces her to take
25:22
the stand. Natalie tells her, quote, if we don't put
25:24
him in jail, other women won't know he's a danger.
25:27
Speaker 2: Think about the immense moral courage that required. Natalie knew
25:31
that stepping back into the light, getting involved in Basil's
25:34
legal proceedings would put her right back in his crosshairs.
25:38
Speaker 1: She knew he wanted to kill her.
25:39
Speaker 2: Exactly, but she recognized the systemic flaw. She knew the
25:44
only way to protect the next woman was to force
25:46
the justice system to generate the literal paperwork it demanded.
25:50
She sacrificed her own fragile security to help Anastasia build
25:54
a paper trail, and.
25:55
Speaker 1: The testimony actually works. This time. Basil is convicted of
25:58
assault and choking. The judge sentences him to seventeen months
26:02
in jail. Again, the math fails with that credit for
26:06
pre trial custody, that seventeen month sentence for a near
26:09
lethal beating evaporates. He serves just five months.
26:12
Speaker 2: And this is the juncture where the bureaucratic system doesn't
26:14
just crack, it completely dissolves into a black hole. Because
26:18
when Basil's five months are up, he is brought to
26:20
the release desk at the jail. The correctional officers slide
26:23
his new probation conditions across the counter. The order explicitly
26:26
states he must stay away from Anastasia standard procedure. Right,
26:30
Basil looks at the paper and he flat out refuses
26:32
to sign it.
26:33
Speaker 1: Okay, wait, I need to stop you right there, because
26:35
this is the part that breaks the brain of any
26:37
logical citizen. How does an inmate look at a guard
26:40
say no, I'm not signing my court mandated probation order,
26:44
and then the guard just opens the front prison doors
26:47
and lets him walk out into the sunshine. How is
26:50
that possible?
26:51
Speaker 2: Because of the deeply siloed nature of our institutions. A
26:54
correctional facility is not a courthouse. The guards hold people
26:58
based strictly on warrants and sentence end dates, so his
27:02
time was up exactly once a sentence expires. The prison
27:05
has no legal authority to hold the inmate for another hour,
27:08
regardless of whether they sign a piece of paper, so
27:11
the refusal to sign is noted. The unsigned paper goes
27:14
into a physical file folder, and the inmate is released,
27:17
and then what that folder is then mailed or digitally
27:20
transferred to a probation office, where it lands in a
27:23
massive stack of hundreds of other files. The system is
27:26
designed to process paper at the speed of bureaucracy, while
27:29
the violent offender is moving at the speed of human intent.
27:32
Speaker 1: We are just looking at cracks in the system. The
27:34
system is a giant, gaping hole. The disconnect is lethal
27:39
because it gets worse. He was also ordered to attend
27:41
a mandatory living without violence program, and the intake counselor
27:45
for that program, a man named Mike Richard actually did
27:48
his job.
27:49
Speaker 2: He was the one guy paying attention.
27:51
Speaker 1: Richard read the file on the attack against Anastasia. He
27:54
noted the chilling ferocity of it. Rishard recognized that this
27:58
was not a bar fight or a sudden loss of temper.
28:01
This was predatory behavior. So Richard wrote an urgent email
28:05
and sent it up the chain of command, explicitly sounding
28:07
the alarm and requesting a high risk review of Basil Bruski.
28:11
Speaker 2: He pulled the fire alarm, and the alarm.
28:12
Speaker 1: Just echoed in an empty hallway. The email went completely unanswered.
28:16
He was ignored. Basil never showed up to the mandatory
28:19
anti violence classes and there was zero enforcement none. His
28:23
driver's license was suspended, yet he was seen driving around
28:26
the county every single day.
28:27
Speaker 2: It's a complete collapse of oversight and inexplicably.
28:31
Speaker 1: The probation officer even granted Basil a special exemption to
28:35
travel into the specific township where Natalie lived, the very
28:39
woman he had threatened to skin her son, under the
28:42
guise that he needed to travel there for the anti
28:44
violence program he wasn't even attending. It's maddening Natalie found
28:48
out about this exemption. She called the Probation office in
28:51
an absolute panic, filed a formal complaint and nothing changed.
28:56
Speaker 2: Because it is a catastrophic diffusion of responsibility. The police
28:59
assumed Probation is handling it, Probation assumes the court is
29:03
monitoring it, the court assumes the anti violence program is
29:06
tracking his attendance. And in the middle of all these
29:09
blind spots, Basil just operates with total impunity. It's infuriating
29:14
and to highlight the ultimate failure of communication here, Anastasia
29:18
Kuzick's family was never even told that he had been
29:21
released from prison.
29:21
Speaker 1: Oh that's right. Anastasia's sister Laura testified that they were
29:25
entirely in the dark. They were going about their lives
29:27
feeling this false sense of security, believing he was locked
29:30
securely in.
29:31
Speaker 2: A cell while he was actually driving around their.
29:33
Speaker 1: Town exactly Meanwhile, Natalie Warmerdam is living on the complete
29:38
opposite end of the spectrum. She is living in a
29:40
state of absolute hypervigilance. She's backing her car into parking
29:45
spaces at the grocery store so she can flee instantly.
29:48
She's carrying a tactical pen in her purse, gripping it
29:51
in her pocket whenever he walks to her car in
29:53
the dark.
29:54
Speaker 2: So you have the two devastating poles of systemic failure
29:57
right there. One victim is completely unaware, the predator is
30:01
loose because the system failed to warn her, and the
30:04
other victim is forced to act as her own private
30:06
security detail because she knows the system won't protect her exactly.
30:11
Speaker 1: And while both of these women are trapped in this dynamic,
30:13
Basil is already grooming a third target, which brings us
30:17
to the summer of twenty fifteen. Basil is out of jail,
30:21
living in a small community called Palmer Rapids. He claims
30:24
he has a bad back. He's unemployed, collecting disability. He's
30:27
living next door to a woman named Cheryl Rosler.
30:29
Speaker 2: And Cheryl is just trying to be a good neighbor, right.
30:31
Speaker 1: Cheryl's a kind neighborly woman. She feels bad for him.
30:34
She cooks some meals, She lets some barwer car, completely
30:37
unaware or perhaps just ignoring, that his license is suspended, and.
30:41
Speaker 2: Basil uses Cheryl's car to continuously travel to a cottage
30:45
on Kamaniskek Lake. That cottage belongs to Carol Cullaton.
30:49
Speaker 1: Carol was fifty seven years old, She lived in Ottawa,
30:52
where she had worked for years as a civil servant,
30:55
but she had recently suffered a massive tragedy. Her husband
30:58
had passed away.
30:59
Speaker 2: She was grieving.
31:00
Speaker 1: She was newly widowed, trying to process her grief and
31:03
preparing for her retirement. She was spending her weekends driving
31:06
two hours out to the cottage, trying to fix it
31:09
up so she could sell it and figure out the
31:11
next chapter of her life.
31:12
Speaker 2: And just like with Natalie, and just like with Anastasia,
31:15
Basil insinuates himself into the gap left by her vulnerability.
31:19
He shows up at the cottage, He offers to help
31:21
repair the roof, clear the brush. He adopts that familiar
31:24
persona of the overly helpful, indispensable handyman.
31:28
Speaker 1: But this time the escalation happens much much faster. It
31:33
rapidly fantastasizes into aggressive stalking. He wouldn't leave. Whenever Carol
31:37
drove the two hours from Ottawa to the lake, Basil
31:40
was already there, waiting on her property. He even managed
31:43
to find her primary address in Ottawa and showed up
31:46
at her home in the city completely uninvited, which is terrifying.
31:49
Speaker 2: A two hour drive just to show up on her doorstep.
31:52
Speaker 1: Carol was highly disturbed by this. She confided in her
31:55
friends that this man was stalking her. She explicitly rejected
31:59
his romantic advances. Make you very clear she had no
32:02
interest in a relationship. But tragically, she didn't view him
32:07
as a lethal threat. She told her friends she didn't
32:09
feel she was in quote imminent danger.
32:11
Speaker 2: And that is the insidious trap of the helpful stalker,
32:16
because he wasn't screaming at her or punching walls initially,
32:19
because he was disguising his obsession as devotion and neighborly assistance,
32:23
it masked the underlying lethality of his presence.
32:26
Speaker 1: It disguises itself until it's too late.
32:28
Speaker 2: Exactly, But that rejection was quietly destroying Basil's fragile psychological architecture.
32:35
This forces us to ask a really uncomfortable question about
32:37
how society identifies an escalation.
32:39
Speaker 1: Trigger, right, what are the signals?
32:41
Speaker 2: We look for the explosion, but we ignore the pressure
32:43
building in the pipes. By September twenty one, twenty fifteen,
32:47
Basil is facing an unbearable compounding loss of narrative control.
32:52
Natalie had escaped his control, Anastasia had put him in
32:55
a prison cell. And now Carol, this new woman he
32:58
had fixated on, was act rejecting him and trying to
33:01
sell the property that tethered him to her.
33:03
Speaker 1: His fragile, victim centric ego is just shattering.
33:06
Speaker 2: At this point in the mind of a malignant narcissist,
33:09
this cascading rejection is absolutely intolerable. It triggers what psychologists
33:14
sometimes call an extinction burst. It's a massive, volatile spike
33:18
and extreme behavior when a person realizes their usual control
33:22
tactics are no longer working.
33:23
Speaker 1: And the warning signs were flashing me on how many
33:26
behavioral signals need to be broadcast before intervention happens. Because
33:30
on the night of September twenty one, Basil was talking
33:32
to his neighbor Cheryl. He told her he couldn't sleep.
33:35
He told her he was in physical pain, and he
33:37
explicitly told her how angry he was at Carrol for
33:39
rejecting him.
33:40
Speaker 2: He was telegraphing his intent.
33:42
Speaker 1: Cheryl later recounted that the anger wasn't just in his words,
33:45
it was radiating from his posture. She gave this eerie observation, saying, quote,
33:50
I could physically see the anger in his eyes. I
33:53
could tell that night he was going to snap. He
33:56
had also recently asked another neighbor to ask her boyfriend
33:59
if any one would sell him a gun.
34:01
Speaker 2: And yet no one called the police. Why not because
34:04
being extremely angry and complaining about a woman isn't technically
34:08
a crime. Asking a neighbor's boyfriend if anyone is selling
34:11
a gun, which is highly suspicious, but in a rural
34:13
hunting community, it doesn't automatically trigger a swat response. It's
34:17
the normalization of devians. It allows people to witness horrific
34:21
red flags and rationalize them away until the very moment
34:24
the violence actually begins, and.
34:26
Speaker 1: That bubbling anger over Carol's rejection finally boiled over the
34:29
very next morning, setting off a horrific chain of events
34:32
across Runsherd County. We need to trace the timeline of
34:35
September twenty two, twenty fifteen, because the logistics of what
34:38
Basil did completely dismantle any defense that this was a sudden,
34:42
heat of the moment crime of passion.
34:44
Speaker 2: It wasn't a sudden snap in a single room.
34:46
Speaker 1: No, it was a calculated mobile execution. List Let's walk
34:51
through it early morning, before the sun is fully up
34:55
Basil takes the keys to Cheryl's car without asking. He
34:58
steals it to Kamenis gig Lake. He kicks in the
35:02
front door of Carol Culeton's cottage. He finds her inside
35:05
and he strangles her.
35:06
Speaker 2: To death he uses his bare hands.
35:08
Speaker 1: He then leaves Cheryl's borrowed car parked in the driveway
35:12
and steals Carrol's vehicle, effectively swapping his transportation to confuse
35:16
anyone who might be looking.
35:17
Speaker 2: For him, which shows clear presence of mind. He is
35:20
thinking about evasion.
35:22
Speaker 1: From the lake. He gets into Carrol's stolen car and
35:25
drives twenty five kilometers northeast to the count of Wilno.
35:28
He pulls up to Annasaja Kuzick's house, Anastasia's sister Ava
35:32
happened to be visiting that morning. Ava is inside when
35:35
she hears screaming. She runs towards the sound and is
35:38
confronted with the sight of Basil Brutski holding a firearm.
35:41
Speaker 2: Imagine the terror.
35:42
Speaker 1: Ava turns and runs for her life, and as she
35:45
is fleeing, she hears the gunshot that ends her sister's life.
35:48
Speaker 2: So he has now murdered two women in two completely
35:50
different locations. The physical adrenaline. The psychological state required to
35:55
do this is immense. But he does not stop, and
35:57
he does not flee into the woods to hide.
35:59
Speaker 1: No, he gets back into the stolen car and drives
36:02
another twenty six kilometers east, heading directly for Natalie Warmerdam's farmhouse.
36:07
Natalie's twenty year old son, Adrian, is home. He is
36:11
in another room when he hears his mother's scream.
36:13
Speaker 2: It's just devastating.
36:14
Speaker 1: Adrian runs out and sees what he later described as
36:17
a big blur of a man shape holding a gun.
36:20
Adrian hears the gunshot, he realizes his mother has been killed,
36:23
and he runs. He flees the house without even having
36:26
time to put on his shoes. He runs deep into
36:28
the surrounding woods, pulls out his phone, dials nine to
36:30
one to one, and stays on an open line with
36:32
a dispatcher for an hour and a half, hiding in
36:34
the brush, absolutely terrified that Basil is hunting him next.
36:38
Speaker 2: And if we reflect on the sheer geographical spread of
36:41
this violence, look at the map, twenty five kilometers twenty
36:45
six kilometers he is driving on county roads for nearly
36:49
an hour between these murders. This requires focus navigation and
36:53
sustained intent. He had plenty of time behind the wheel
36:56
to calm down, to realize what he had done, and
36:57
to turn himself in, but he didn't. Instead, he used
37:00
that time to travel to his next target.
37:02
Speaker 1: As the nine one to one calls start coming in,
37:04
the community goes into absolute lockdown. The police realize they
37:09
have an active shooter moving across the map. Tactical units
37:12
are deployed, Sirens are screaming down the country roads. Schools
37:16
are immediately secured.
37:17
Speaker 2: The whole county is paralyzed.
37:19
Speaker 1: Natalie's own daughter, Valerie, is sitting in her high school
37:22
when the doors are locked. She's ushered into the principal's office,
37:25
totally unaware that her mother has been murdered, just waiting
37:28
and terrifying silence as rumors spread through the school.
37:31
Speaker 2: And the documentary highlights this really haunting visual juxtaposition of
37:36
the setting. It was a spectacularly beautiful, cloudless, crisp fall day,
37:42
the leaves were turning, the landscape was at its most peaceful,
37:46
and against that backdrop you have helicopters, armored vehicles, and
37:50
children locked in schools without knowing if the parents were alive.
37:53
Speaker 1: The man hunt lasts until early afternoon. At around two
37:56
point ner pm, police managed to track the signal from
37:59
Basil's cell phone. They locate him in a wooded suburban
38:01
area in near Ottawa, and they arrest him.
38:03
Speaker 2: It's finally over.
38:04
Speaker 1: The immediate threat is over. Yeah. But here is where
38:07
it gets really interesting, or rather deeply chilling. Just four
38:11
minutes before he was surrounded and arrested at one five
38:14
six pm, Basil pulled out his phone and sent a
38:17
text message.
38:17
Speaker 2: He sent it to Cheryl, the neighbor whose card he
38:19
had stolen at dawn.
38:20
Speaker 1: The text read, verbatim, your car is at the cottage. Sorry,
38:25
I left one hundred dollars on the console for gas
38:27
by friend.
38:28
Speaker 2: We really need to analyze that text message because it
38:31
is the absolute lynchpin in understanding his culpability. When a
38:35
defense attorney attempts to argue that an offender suffered a
38:38
psychotic break or was legally insane, they have to prove
38:42
the offender didn't understand the nature of their actions or
38:45
couldn't distinguish right from wrong.
38:47
Speaker 1: That text message completely ruins that defense.
38:50
Speaker 2: Exactly that text message proves Basilbaruski understood exactly what he
38:54
was doing.
38:55
Speaker 1: I mean, he had just spent the morning kicking indoors,
38:57
strangling a woman, and shooting two others. Yet he possessed
39:01
the cognitive compartmentalization to remember that stealing a neighbor's car
39:05
violates a social contract, and he actually felt the need
39:08
to apologize and reimburse her for the gas.
39:11
Speaker 2: He is polite and considerate to the neighbor while simultaneously
39:14
acting as a terminator toward the women who rejected him.
39:17
Speaker 1: He isn't out of his mind. He is enacting highly
39:20
calculated vengeance against specific women. He is perfectly capable of
39:24
understanding right from wrong when it comes to borrowing a car.
39:27
Speaker 2: It completely shatters the myth that abusers just lose control
39:30
because of an anger problem. If he had truly lost
39:33
all control, he would have attacked Cheryl the night before,
39:36
he would have attacked Anastagia's sister Ava. He didn't. His
39:40
violence was highly targeted, completely regulated, and applied only to
39:44
the specific women he felt entitled to punish.
39:46
Speaker 1: So Basil is in custody. The tactical teams pack up
39:50
and leave, But for the families and for advocates across
39:53
the country, a much larger, darker question loomed. As the
39:57
shock receded, the grief was immediately fallen by a wave
40:00
of furious questions. Amanda Dale, a prominent women's rights advocate,
40:05
went on camera to ask why the justice system can't
40:08
consider a history of drop charges to say women's lives.
40:12
Speaker 2: She was demanding an inquiry. She was pointing out that
40:14
the state essentially asks terrorized victims to act as the
40:17
sole prosecutors of their abusers.
40:19
Speaker 1: You would expect a national tragedy of this scale again,
40:22
the largest multiple partnered domestic homicide in Canadian history, to
40:25
halt the political presses. You'd expect emergency debates in parliament,
40:29
but the political reaction was a masterclass in structural apathy.
40:32
Speaker 2: The timing is critical to note here. This happens smack
40:35
in the middle of a federal election campaign. The entire
40:38
political apparatus of the country was fully mobilized, holding press
40:43
conferences daily, and yet what happened.
40:45
Speaker 1: A previously scheduled national leader's debate, specifically on women's issues,
40:50
was quietly canceled. The major federal leaders, Stephen Harper, Thomas
40:55
Mulkairr and Justin Trudeau, went through the rest of the
40:58
campaign without making any major public addresses about the will.
41:01
Speaker 2: Know murders just silence.
41:03
Speaker 1: The premiere of Ontario, Kathleen Wynn just tweeted standard condolences,
41:08
And I want to be extremely clear here for the listeners,
41:10
we are objectively reporting these actions without taking political sides.
41:14
We are purely noting the lack of systemic response from
41:17
all ends of the spectrum. The silence was completely bipartisan.
41:21
Speaker 2: Because the silence is sociological. Politicians are incredibly adept at
41:25
reading public comfort levels. A mass shooting by a stranger
41:28
in a mall triggers immediate loud debates on gun control
41:32
or mental health funding.
41:34
Speaker 1: It's a public issue.
41:35
Speaker 2: Right, but domestic violence is still fundamentally viewed by society
41:39
as a private failure rather than a public terrorism issue.
41:43
Politicians avoid it because fixing it requires opening a constitutional
41:47
Pandora's box. So, well, how do you rewrite the laws
41:51
to prevent a bezel Brutski without accidentally stripping the presumption
41:54
of innocence from millions of citizens. Because they don't have
41:58
an easy answer that fits on a bumper sticker, they
42:00
simply avert their eyes.
42:02
Speaker 1: But while the politicians looked away, besil Bruski demanded the spotlight.
42:07
Four months after the murders, while sitting in a maximum
42:10
security jail cell awaiting trial, he made a collect call
42:14
to the CBC the audacity. We actually got on the
42:16
phone with the journalists from the Fifth Estate and the
42:20
transcript of that call, I mean, it's just sickening.
42:22
Speaker 2: It is one of the darkest, most revealing pieces of
42:25
audio you will ever analyze. It is a masterclass in
42:28
the abuser's mindset.
42:29
Speaker 1: The journalist asks him straightforward questions, but Basil doesn't show
42:33
an ounce of remorse. Instead, he claims he is the
42:37
victim of a twenty year conspiracy. He complains that he
42:40
has been quote accused and accused by women his whole life.
42:44
He demands to know why the police didn't protect his rights.
42:47
Speaker 2: Notice the inversion of reality.
42:49
Speaker 1: Yes, when the journalists flat out asks him if he
42:52
killed Natalie, Anastasia and Carol, he refuses to deny the murders. Instead,
42:57
he gets defensive and says he won't be judged in
42:59
a five been at phone call, demanding ten hours to
43:02
explain his real story before being judged.
43:05
Speaker 2: This is the operationalization of DARVO, which stands for deny,
43:09
attack and reverse victim and offender. Basil has murdered three
43:12
human beings, destroyed families, and traumatized in entire county, Yet
43:17
sitting in a concrete cell, his primary concern, his only
43:21
emotional bandwidth, is dedicated to his own self pity.
43:24
Speaker 1: He thinks he's the real victim of the police and
43:26
the women.
43:26
Speaker 2: He genuinely believes that the women forced him to do
43:29
it by rejecting him, and therefore they are the abusers
43:31
and he is the victim who simply defended himself. It
43:34
is an impenetrable fortress of delusion and.
43:36
Speaker 1: The most tragic part of this whole deep dive is
43:38
that Basil is not alone anomaly. He is just the
43:42
extreme end point of a very very common pathology. The
43:46
documentary lays out the broader statistics and they are crushing. Globally,
43:51
one in three women experience domestic violence. One in three
43:54
In Canada, one woman is killed every five days by
43:57
a partner or an X. In the mere four months
44:00
between Basil pulling the trigger and Will Know and the
44:02
CBC airing this documentary, fifteen more Canadian women were killed.
44:06
Speaker 2: It is an ambient war. In Renford County, there is
44:09
a physical monument a stone memorial dedicated to the local
44:13
women who have been murdered by partners. Before the morning
44:15
of September twenty two, twenty fifteen, there were eighteen names
44:19
etched into.
44:19
Speaker 1: That stone, and on September twenty two, three more names
44:22
had to be added, three more names. I want to
44:25
focus on Amanda Dale's quote again because it really summarizes
44:27
the systemic failure. She said, quote, we don't have huge
44:31
numbers of wrongful convictions in these cases. We have problems
44:34
getting convictions that keep women alive.
44:36
Speaker 2: The system is unbalanced.
44:38
Speaker 1: Are we prioritizing legal purity over human life? If well
44:42
meaning adults can see this man as dangerous, why must
44:45
the law pretend he isn't. We spent the last hours
44:49
looking at the tragic, vibrant lives of Natalie, Anastasia, and Carroll.
44:52
Speaker 2: We saw how the system failed them at every turn.
44:55
Speaker 1: We saw a justice system that erased a man's violent
44:58
history because of technicality. We saw probation officers who didn't
45:02
follow up, and a culture of privacy that enabled an
45:05
abuser to thrive.
45:06
Speaker 2: The core lesson here is that knowledge without action is useless.
45:10
The community knew, the victims new, the counselor Mike Roshard knew,
45:15
but the bureaucratic system lacked the tools, or maybe just
45:18
the will, to connect the dots.
45:20
Speaker 1: It forces you, as the listener, to look at your
45:22
own community. How often do we excuse belligerent behavior or
45:26
ignore a guy's bad reputation because he hasn't technically been
45:29
convicted of a crime.
45:30
Speaker 2: We rely on the courts to validate our instincts, So
45:33
what does this all mean? It pushes us to a
45:35
really provocative thought. We build our entire justice system around
45:38
the concept of innocent until proven guilty to protect citizens
45:42
from state tyranny. It's foundational. But when dealing with domestic violence,
45:47
where intimidation inherently prevents proof from ever reaching a courtroom,
45:51
does that very constitutional safeguard inadvertently become a license for
45:55
domestic terror?
45:56
Speaker 1: That's the real question.
45:58
Speaker 2: How do we redesign a justice sesms that vigorously protects
46:01
the civil liberties of the accused without requiring victims to
46:05
pay for that protection with their lives.
46:07
Speaker 1: It's a question we all need to be asking. Thank
46:09
you for joining this deep dive today, Keep questioning the
46:11
systems around you, and take care of each other.