Arlene Bynon
speaker
115 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Arlene Bynon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The kind of deal the Canadian police made with him, I don't think it had ever been done before or ever since. Some would say it was unconscionable. Others would say it was the only way to get him. What it all meant was the extent of Olsen's crimes were never fully investigated. So we're going back to the Olsen tapes, opening boxes I sealed over 30 years ago.
I reported on the story then, and I'll report on it now. And try, as best I can, to find the answers that so many are still seeking. About the RCMP. About Clifford Olsen. and perhaps most importantly, about his victims. To do that, we need to talk to the family and friends whose lives were shattered all those years ago.
You say you have nothing to lose, so are you going to kill again?
The following episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Please take care when listening.
And I'm Arlene Bynum. This is Episode 3, The Mounties Always Get Their Man. It's July 1981, and Corporal Les Forsythe and a fellow Mountie from the Burnaby RCMP detachment visit Olson's apartment. If they were going to place a trail on him, they needed to confirm he actually lived there. His neighbors tell them he'd left town on a vacation down the west coast of California.
They don't know when he'd be back. At this time, the RCMP had finally identified Olson as a possible suspect in the disappearance of children from the area, even if he was just one in a long list of others. Various detachments now knew his name.
Glenn Woods is a former RCMP investigator who now operates an investigative consulting firm in Vancouver. He worked on the Olson case back in 1981, but admits he was fairly low in the chain of command.
Simon Partington was the nine-year-old boy who'd gone missing only weeks before.
During that time in the investigation, there was a name that cropped up, Clifford Olson. When did you first hear that name?
Looking back, many think that's why the RCMP took so long to suspect Olson.
Ian Mulgrew is retired now, but he spent 40-plus years as a journalist, more than half that time with the Vancouver Sun newspaper. And in the years he was working as a journalist, the term serial killer was used far less than it is today. The public didn't have the words to describe someone like Olson.
He makes the point that in the early 80s, it took the community longer to come to what now seems like an obvious conclusion.
On July 22, 1981, approximately three weeks after police made Olson a suspect, he, his wife Joan, and their infant son returned from a vacation in California. They were back in B.C. and back on the radar of the RCMP. That same day, Corporal Ed Drozda of the Serious Crimes Unit of the Mounties also came back from vacation.
Assigned to the Olson case, he met up with a detective named Dennis Tarr from the local police service of the city of Delta, close to Vancouver. Tarr was the one who would inch the RCMP closer to seeing Olson as their primary suspect.
John Daly, who was a reporter for the BCTV news station.
Despite these rising suspicions, the RCMP and other police forces weren't able to act faster than Olson. He's brazenly abducting and murdering at alarming speed. Seven children are now dead. And in the last week of July alone, he murders his final four victims. On the morning of July 23rd, Olson spotted 15-year-old Raymond King Jr. waiting for a bus in New Westminster.
King had been out looking for a summer job to make some cash. He never made it home. On the night King disappeared, Detective Tarr paid Olson a visit.
Yeah. Tarr probed a bit about what more Olson knew about the disappearances and murders, asking specifically about the nine-year-old Simon Partington. Olson was reportedly relaxed, playing with his baby son as they talked. Tarr left without anything substantial. The RCMP did not put Olson under surveillance, not before Raymond King Jr. and not afterwards.
The very next day, an 18-year-old West German tourist named Sigrun Arnd is hanging out at the Caribou, a hotel and pub along the highway. She meets a man with dark curly hair who offers her a ride.
And the encounter follows a well-worn pattern. Olsen picks her up and drives her to a boggy area outside of Richmond, the same place he took Simon Partington.
Showing 61–80 of 115 · page 4 of 6
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