Nathaniel Frum
speaker
55 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Nathaniel Frum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is a CBC Podcast. The following episode contains strong language and descriptions of violence. Please take care when listening. Whenever I stayed at my grandparents' house as a kid, there was a rule. Always pick up the phone. Because you never knew who could be calling for my grandpa Pete. A Soviet spy, a cabinet minister, a serial killer.
Growing up, I'd learn what my grandpa did for a living through the stories he'd share at the holidays or summers at the lake. It wasn't that he was bragging. Pete was actually really humble. He just had stories no one else could tell. And he never told the same one twice, because he never needed to. There was the time he stood just feet away from Lee Harvey Oswald as Jack Ruby pulled the trigger.
The time a bullet went through his sleeve in Algiers as fighting between the Algerians and French raged. The time he met the Beatles in Hong Kong. He didn't even think to mention that one until a couple years before he died. Long story short, he thought they all needed haircuts. My grandpa, Peter Worthington, was a newspaper man. And for some time, he was one of the newspaper men in Toronto.
He was a roving foreign correspondent, chasing every conflict through the 50s and 60s, until helping found his own paper, the Toronto Sun, a paper that still exists today. Pete continued to write until his death in 2013. The last thing he wrote was his own obituary. My grandpa left behind a bird's nest of papers, photos, and tapes, fragments of his extraordinary career.
It was all packed and sent away to Canada's National Archives by my grandmother, Yvonne. But six years after Pete's death, I brought those boxes back. By this time, I was in my mid-20s, trying to make it as a screenwriter in L.A., trying to find my next story. What if it lived in the boxes that Pete had left behind? I popped one of his hundreds of cassettes into a player. Tape 12, 1991. Okay.
Hello, Peter? Yeah.
This man, hoping to keep the peace at home, is my grandpa, Pete.
On the other end of the phone call is a man named Clifford Olson, a man convicted in 1982 of killing 11 children and teenagers. The oldest of them, 18. The youngest of them, 9. Pete's archives housed hundreds of hours of calls with Olson. They began in 1990, and they went on for years. And they were placed by Olson from prison.
Jean Chrétien. Holson was writing the prime minister.
But once in a while, you'd be reminded who's on the line.
But Pete wasn't recording these tapes alone. It became clear he had a partner. And she was where it all started.
Hello, Peter.
She was a journalist herself.
Although Olson often didn't treat her like one.
From what I could hear, she was also patient with Olsen. But then there was this exchange.
I paused the tape and scribbled on a post-it. Find Arlene. This is Calls from a Killer from CBC's Uncover. I'm Nathaniel Frum.
Okay.
Yeah, no, I had no idea you had dug up the boxes. I don't think when I first reached out to you that I understood how deep this story went, not just with you, but with the nation. In the years we've worked together since, I've started to realize how important it is that this story is told.
It feels appropriate that we've teamed up, and all these years later, you walking me through this story, you being the vet and me being the rookie. In an era where most serial killer stories are known and most murderers are famous, why isn't this one well-known? When I was reading about it, every detail was stunning to me.
Do you think this story was suppressed, or is there another reason why it wasn't well-known?
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