Dennis Tarr

You know, you do need the cops, and if they want to sort of teach you a lesson, they can feed the stories to somebody else, and you get beat on it. So the cops were in a real power position. And then when bodies were discovered, they often didn't tell us.

They'd hide that information for a week or two, in which case, you know, the TV stations couldn't get any pictures, the crime scene had been vacated, and...

BCTV sort of took an outside-the-box approach to dealing with the police, saying, you owe us answers and we're the agents of the public and we're trying to ask the questions that the average Joe, the average cab driver, the average McDonald's worker would ask in a situation like this. Like, what the hay is going on? What are you doing? Is there any progress? Do you have any suspects?

Why is this taking so long? How come another kid has disappeared? I remember one day having almost a shouting match. I had stayed up almost all night writing a big list of questions for Superintendent Bruce Northrup, who was the head of the task force. And they had a news conference, and I went to the news conference and basically just started hammering away, and we went at it, blow for blow.

I think Northrup at some point said, you know, okay, ten questions, that's it. He wouldn't say whether or not they had a suspect. And it was like, I guess, three days after that when they popped Olsen.

I was on a day off, and I'm in the newsroom filling out timesheets so I can get paid. And the assignment editor says to me, they've caught this child killer. It was pandemonium. It was big. And then when we finally found out that the person was Clifford Robert Olson and that he was basically a career criminal, all hell broke loose.

I got a phone call from an official in the criminal justice system who said to me, we need to have an off-the-record chat. And they said, okay, what if we had to pay Clifford Robert Olson $10,000 a body to recover the bodies? What would the public's reaction be? And I said, well, it'll be outrage. It'll be, you know, over the top. People will be furious.

I said, well, we're in a very difficult position. And I said, well, you know, if you get the bodies and you get the evidence and he takes you to the bodies, because these bodies were in the middle of no place, strung out around all over the lower mainland, right?

I said, you know, I think for the family's sake, having interviewed a number of the families, if you can get their kids' remains back and get the evidence you need to make this ironclad, I said, I think it's worth it. And they did it.

I believe he was a confidential informant for Dennis Tarr. He was telling Tarr about stolen property and, you know, where he could get it. And I think what Olson was doing was backfilling information he had from his fence about other robberies and so forth.

In any event, Olson was making money from the cops, ratting out other criminals. and suggested to Tarr that he might be able to get some information from bad guys about who is taking these kids. Tarr, you know, really saw that something was fishy here. This just didn't square. This didn't make any sense.