Clifford Olson in Podcasts
personClifford Olson was a Canadian serial killer convicted of murdering 11 children and teenagers.
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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.
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.
I can tell you that Clifford Olson was an informant to see what Clifford Olson could get and often thought he was smarter than the cops. So he may have provided information, but there was something in it for him.
The case was at a standstill because the Crown prosecutor, a man named Bob Shantz, didn't feel there was enough evidence to convict. But Olson provided a lucky break. Olson came up with the idea to trick Marcoux into writing down a detailed confession to the murder, under the pretense that he'd help him come up with an alibi.
For the next 22 years, he'd be in and out of custody, tallying up more than 90 convictions. Put away for robberies, burglaries, and forgeries mostly, Olson, by all accounts a charming man, would sometimes be granted early release for good behavior. On other occasions, he had his sentence extended after escape attempts. But he kind of thrived inside.
So even before 1981, Olson was well known to the RCMP. If not as a serial killer, certainly as a career criminal. And Glenn's right. In his entire adult life, Olson only spent around 1,700 days on the outside, not incarcerated. That's just a little over four and a half years. He was first imprisoned when he was 17, in the late 50s, for a break and enter.
Well, I knew Cliff Olson because he's a rounder from the Lower Mainland. He spent more time in jail than he spent out. But he was always known for these petty crimes, B&Es. There's no information or anything I can remember where he offended in this way prior to him being in his late 30s, early 40s, which is really late for these kinds of offenders to start looming, you know.
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