I'm Kate Winkler Dawson.

I'm a journalist who's spent the last twenty five years writing about true crime.

And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.

Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes.

And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a twenty first century lens.

Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.

This is buried Bones.

Hey Paul, Hey Kate, what's going on?

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.

No, I'm excited.

I'm looking forward to it.

Now, what pairs well with seafood?

And I'm not sure whiskey is going to be the answer.

What do you think about that?

You know, I think with seafood.

I probably could just do a red wine, you know, versus a bourbon.

Might surprise you with that.

You're gonna cheat on bourbon, that's what you're telling me.

I just might.

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.

I know, you know, it should be fun, it should be a.

Great time, and I'm really looking forward to hanging out with you more in person.

All the details in booking at Virgin Voyages dot com.

Slash true crime.

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?

Oh?

I took four years of French in high school and might be able to ask you where's the bathroom?

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 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.

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.

They do still.

One of my kids is taking it.

She switched from Spanish to Latin.

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.

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.

Pul holes and that's it, right.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 kind of scary, but nothing too bad.

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 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.

Maybe I'll suggest that you should.

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 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, 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.

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 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 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.

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 looks like it probably holds more than fifteen passengers, but it's still it's small.

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 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 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 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 a crime scene at all.

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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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, 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 then shoot a seat a quarter of a mile, right.

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 the plane or if that's been completely separated from this part of the plane.

But obviously just massive.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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 the explosion.

He just happened to be the poor guy that is on top of that device.

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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 not on Rey Paul, who was sitting in that seat, is involved.

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 of using explosives.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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?

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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 Rita's death.

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 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 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 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 lasted a year.

He hasn't been caught yet.

Sure, but he's wanting to have sex with Marie more often than what he can from traveling.

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 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 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 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 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 not Marie.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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?

This is.

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.

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, 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 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.

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, but actually fully involved with the homicides of was it nineteen people?

Eighteen people?

Nineteen?

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 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, 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 way I want to live life, you know.

And so that's you know, he's recognizing he made a mistake involving Marguerite.

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 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, 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 a timer maybe situation.

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, 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?

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, 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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 know that they know that they must have been a source in order to be able to get the detonation to go off.

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 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, 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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 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, but now he needs to have the money for himself for sure, but also to pay off Marguerite.

And maybe he's a narrow.

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, 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.

Yeah, no, as they should.

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 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.

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.

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, 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?

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.

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 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, philosophy that he's putting out there is like, Noah, he's lying.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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.

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.

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 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 wants them, you know, to in essence pay for their crimes.

Now that he's in prison or is looking at the death penalty.

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 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 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.

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, 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 the same saying the same thing right there as well.

At least I'll be famous, right for something horrific.

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 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 was the last execution of a woman in Canada nineteen fifty three.

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 very bad for her.

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.

Marguerite went and bought the explosives and the detonation court.

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 things happening all the time.

We will not have a plane next week.

That I can guarantee you.

I can never say never.

You're not going to bring up dB Cooper.

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.

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?

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.

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.

And Albert may be a true psychopath.

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.

See Okay, looking forward to.

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.

Research by Alison Trumble and Kate Winkler Dawson.

Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.

Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.

Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark, and Danielle Kramer.

You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at buried Bones pod.

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.

And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life Solving America's Cold Cases is also available now.

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