Triggered - The True Crime Podcast

In 1995, a Canadian schoolteacher took the trip of a lifetime to New Zealand. Her tour guide was a six foot seven, four hundred pound former city councillor who had spent his entire life on the water.

Fifteen years later, one of them drowned in a mountain lake in British Columbia. The other one was the only person on earth who saw it happen.

What followed was one of the strangest homicide cases in Canadian history. A rock. A fishing rod. An accidental death policy pulled out of a stack of bank flyers. A jailhouse informant with a list of five names. A four month trial where the accused defended himself and performed a haka in the courtroom. A hung jury. A first degree murder conviction. And then an appeal court that took the whole thing apart and wrote five words that ended it: the Crown's case was not strong.

Sixteen years on, there is still no answer.

This episode is about the case. But it is also about a woman who taught grade three in a hamlet called Dapp, Alberta, and the town that still remembers her.
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On the night of September 16, 2009, a 24 year old woman sat down alone at Geoffrey's, an upscale restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. She ordered dinner. She could not pay the $89 bill. Staff described her behaviour as strange, and deputies were called.

Mitrice Richardson was a Cal State Fullerton graduate. She was warm, brilliant, and by her family's account she had been quietly struggling with her mental health in the weeks before that night. Her father would later say she had bipolar disorder. She was arrested for defrauding an innkeeper, a small amount of marijuana was found in her car, and her car was impounded.

At roughly 12:28 in the morning on September 17, she was released from the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff's Station in Calabasas. No car. No purse. No phone. No money. She was from West Covina and had no reason to know a single road in that canyon. She walked out into the dark and was never seen alive again.

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Michelle Hadley was in her twenties, in grad school, and by her own description sickeningly wholesome. Then she was arrested, held on a million dollars bail, and told she was facing life in prison.

The emails threatening her ex fiancé's pregnant wife were real. Sent several times a day, from an account called Lilithistruth, describing what the woman wore to work and where she went. The Craigslist ads inviting strangers to her door were real. The men who showed up were real. The 911 call was real.

And every piece of it pointed at Michelle. Including two emails she really had written, months earlier, in her own name, using the same name the stalker was using.

She sat in that cell for 88 days saying she'd been set up. Not one person believed her.

This week Chantal walks Ashley through the case behind Netflix's A Toxic Love Story, and she starts a long way before the documentary does. With Michelle before any of it. With cameras in a kitchen and a life narrowed to three points on a map. With a woman in a Huntington Beach bar telling a police officer what she does for a living. And with a family in the Arizona desert who found a stranger walking alone, miles from her own car.

Content warning: sexual assault allegations, coercive control, staged assaults, and a psychiatric crisis. No graphic detail.

Sources include the Orange County District Attorney's Office, the US Department of Justice, filings from the Central District of California, and Netflix's A Toxic Love Story.

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We grew up outside Pembroke, Ontario, hearing a story adults would only tell in whispers. A daughter. Her boyfriend. A little boy. A farmhouse. And a line that followed the case for fifty-five years: "She should have gone to prison too."

We never knew the names. This week, Ash went looking for them.

In March 1971, in what was then Alice Township, six-year-old David Witt and his uncle Leslie Molson were murdered. David's mother, Eleanor, survived and testified that she had been held and abused for more than two weeks before the killings. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, Catherine Delarge, and Catherine's twenty-three-year-old boyfriend, Lorne Edward Lafrance, were both charged. Lafrance got life. What happened to Catherine is where the public record goes quiet and where a small town's memory took over.

This is an episode about what actually happened, and about what happens to the truth when a story gets passed down for half a century.

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Welcome to our FIRST "After Hours with Triggered"! This is a monthly instalment where Ashley and Chantal tell YOUR stories. If you would like to submit your tales for future episodes, please hurry over to triggeredthepodcast.com

🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast
💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN
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🌐 triggeredthepodcast.com
Make sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast

Contact us at triggeredthepodcast.444@gmail.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.