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Episode 6

Tim Bousquet: This episode contains graphic descriptions of violence. Listener discretion is advised.

Tim Bousquet: On March 1st, 1998 in Moncton, New Brunswick, a man named Glen Bennett calls police and tells them he has witnessed a terrible crime. Within hours, Michael McGray is arrested. The next day, the CBC reports on McGray's appearance at court.

Sound Clip: [News Reporter] There was intense security surrounding the appearance this morning of 32 year old Michael McGray. He's been charged with two counts of 1st degree murder. The first is in connection with 48 year old Joan Hicks. A neighbour who identified her body says her throat had been cut and there were several slashes across her upper body. McGray is also charged with murdering the woman's 11 year old daughter, Nina. No details about the cause of her death have been released. Both bodies have been sent to Halifax for autopsies. Police say the bodies were discovered early Sunday morning in their basement apartment, near the Moncton Hospital in the city's north end. The scene was so gruesome that a psychological team will be assembled to counsel the officers involved.

Tim Bousquet: Awaiting trial, Michael McGray is placed in prison in Renous, New Brunswick. While there, he starts talking to a fellow prisoner named Emerie LeBlanc, telling LeBlanc that Joan and Nina Hicks were just his latest two victims. He has killed many others before them. LeBlanc is so disturbed by the revelation, that he calls a cop he knows. Within weeks McGray is sitting with police, telling them he is a serial killer. In 2000, CBC reporter Jo-Ann Roberts received a call from McGray from the prison.

Sound Clip: [Jo-Ann Roberts] Tell me about these these other murders. Why are you talking about them now?

Sound Clip: [Michael McGray] Well, there's a few reasons. Everybody, all the cops that I've talked to when I was in there saying that, you know, why don't you help us clear up these cases? So for the families will know what happened and all that. And I'm not going to bullshit you and say that that's the reason, because it's not. Because that's not really a concern to me. I know how it sounds, but it's not. Mostly because I want to get some help and I want to make a deal. There are some other murders that I'm going to confess to, but there's three conditions that I want to have met first, right.

Tim Bousquet: We will return to McGray's conditions a bit later. Robert's interview continues.

Sound Clip: [Jo-Ann Roberts] There's been a lot of talk about how many other murders there are, Mr. McGray. How many are there?

Sound Clip: [Michael McGray] Counting the ones that I've been charged with, there's about 16. A couple of them, I'm not sure if they lived or died at the time, they might have lived. But I think there's about 16 altogether.

Sound Clip: [Jo-Ann Roberts] Where did they happen?

Sound Clip: [Michael McGray] All over the country. Couple in the States.

Sound Clip: [Jo-Ann Roberts] What do you say to someone who says that this might not be true? You're just somebody who wants to be the...

Sound Clip: [Michael McGray] Well, I'm willing to confess. Meet my agreements and I'll confess to all the murders. I confessed to five or six already. And all you've got to do is meet my conditions and you'll find out.

Sound Clip: [Jo-Ann Roberts] Can you tell us about one of them that might give us some idea of the kind of details you do have?

Sound Clip: [Michael McGray] OK, well, there's a couple down in Nova Scotia. There's one from Weymouth. Her name is Gail Tucker. I picked her up hitch- I picked her up outside of a bus station, actually, she was hitchhiking. And there was another guy with me. We were both from Yarmouth, both small town in Nova Scotia. And we just took her in a truck and we took her out of the truck. We offered her something to drink. She wanted something to drink. So we stopped the truck. And when we stopped the truck, I just started stabbing her, left her on the side of the road. This road called, I think it's called Concession Road. Her name was Gail Tucker.

Tim Bousquet: Gail Tucker was a 17 year old girl from the north end of Dartmouth who was killed in 1985 in the woods near Church Point, a small town on the French shore of Nova Scotia. Her murder has gone unsolved for 15 years. And Michael McGray has just given interviewer Jo-Ann Roberts information that only the police and the murderer would know.

Sound Clip: [Jo-Ann Roberts] How come you've never been caught do you think?

Sound Clip: [Michael McGray] I think because I was pretty damn smart. I always made sure that they were strangers. I always, I go from city to city. I pop into a city and I lived there for a couple of months. I go out, I'd do a prostitute or a homosexual or a homeless person or something like that. Somebody who was not connected to me. I always used to study a lot about forensic scientists. One of my biggest hobbies was studying other serial killers, stuff like that. I have for years. And I don't think it was luck or nothing like that. I think it's because I was always very, very careful when I did em. I always knew what I was doing. I always planned them well ahead.

Sound Clip: [Jo-Ann Roberts] Are we safer now that you're in jail?

Sound Clip: [Michael McGray] Oh, definitely.

Tim Bousquet: I'm Tim Bousquet and this is Uncover - Dead Wrong. Episode 6: The Trail of a Killer.

Tim Bousquet: Roberta, a sex worker whose true identity I've been protecting, had identified Glen Assoun at his trial as the man who had horribly attacked her. In 2010, she saw a picture of serial killer Michael McGray. She broke down sobbing and said it was he, McGray, who had attacked her. But when Jo-Ann Roberts interviewed McGray in the year 2000, no one knew the full extent of his criminal history. Jo-Ann Roberts was working at CBC as the host of Information Morning in Moncton. Today, she's the interim leader of the Green Party of Canada and she lives in Halifax. I caught up with her to ask her about her interview with Michael McGray.

Sound Clip: [Jo-Ann Roberts] I was sitting at my desk and the reporter says Michael Wayne McGray has agreed to our interview request.

Sound Clip: [Tim Bousquet] And you dialed the phone or he called you?

Sound Clip: [Jo-Ann Roberts] He called us. I ran down to the studio thinking, what do I say? What do I ask? You know, talking to you right now, I can see myself sitting in that studio, like you with the headphones on. You know, hello, Mr. McGray? I mean, that's how it starts. And for about 20 minutes, we have this discussion about why he had murdered the women he had murdered. You know, he says he wants to tell me about other murders he has done. And he wants to admit that, you know, he has I think it was 16 in the interview, he said he had killed. And I challenge him and say, well, how do I know that you don't want to just have a reputation as the person who's killed the most people in Canada? You know, some kind of a weird, bizarre reputation. And he said, well, maybe I should describe for you one of the murders that I committed that I've not been found guilty of. It's you know, you kind of catch your breath and think, do I want to hear this? I said, OK. And he does. He describes a murder. And he said, you can check that with the Halifax police. And I said, well, of course, we will.

Sound Clip: [David Bousquet] That was the Tucker case, was it?

Sound Clip: Yeah. And he confirmed it or the police confirmed it.

Sound Clip: [Tim Bousquet] I'm wondering, is your recollection that it should have raised enough issues with the police, that they should have been full on?

Sound Clip: [Jo-Ann Roberts] Well, you know, I often wondered why I didn't hear a number of cases were being closed. I wondered though, with the details they had and the fact he was talking, that they weren't able to use the information he had, to close more cases and that we didn't hear about it.

Tim Bousquet: Michael Wayne McGray was born in 1965 in Collingwood, Ontario, but as a child moved to Argyle, a small town near Yarmouth at the southern tip of Nova Scotia. When he was 15, Michael was placed in the Shelburne School for Boys. It was called a school, but today we would call it a youth correctional facility. Pretty much everyone in Nova Scotia knows about the Shelburne School for Boys. It has a long and documented history of physical and sexual abuse. Thousands of former students have filed claims against the school. There have been several provincial reviews and hundreds of lawsuits. Pierre Green was at Shelburne in 1980, alongside Michael McGray. Pierre has filed a lawsuit against the province and his allegations have not been tested in court. Pierre lives around the corner from me in Dartmouth.

Sound Clip: [Pierre Green] My first day, I got beat up by a counsellor. This guy grabbed me by the scruff of my, the back of my shirt or whatever I was wearing and my pants and threw me like a bowling ball down into the dorm and I whack my head off the radiator. I remember I had a bump on my head. He said, you're going to learn the hard way or the easy way.

Tim Bousquet: It's been 40 years, but Pierre still remembers the abuse he says he suffered and witnessed, like it was yesterday.

Sound Clip: [Pierre Green] And here I am, Two years or whatever of my life, just get assaulted left, right and centre. And not a thing I can do about it. Nothing. You know, like, defenceless little kid.

Tim Bousquet: I ask Pierre about his memories of Michael McGray at Shelburne.

Sound Clip: [Pierre Green] What I remember about him most, he would never back down. If they beat him, he would, he would laugh at them. He would say is that all you got, you know, or that does nothing to me or whatever like, and then they'd do more.

Tim Bousquet: Michael McGray would go on to kill a lot of people. So many people that he says he can't keep track of them all. Here's what we know from McGray's court records. He is 20 years old when he kills Gail Tucker near Church Point. He told CBC reporter Jo-Ann Roberts that was his first murder. But he also told her he was 17 or 18 when he first started killing. So who knows, maybe there were previous murders.

Tim Bousquet: At 22, in Saint John, New Brunswick, during a robbery, McGray stabs his accomplice to death. He isn't charged with the murder, but he gets five years for robbery. In 1991, McGray is in prison in Quebec and gets a pass for the three day Easter weekend. On Saturday night, March 30th, he goes to The Campus, a strip bar and Montreal's gay village and allows himself to be picked up by 59 year old Robert Assalay. McGray goes to Assalay's apartment and the two drink while watching TV. McGray goes to the kitchen, grabs a knife. He returns to Assalay's room, smashes a lamp over his head, and then stabs him and repeatedly slashes his throat, killing him.

Tim Bousquet: The next night, McGray returns to The Campus and is picked up by 45 year old Gaetan Ethier. The two go to Ethier's apartment and watch a hockey game on TV. Ethier makes a pass at McGray. McGray turns him down and Ethier falls asleep on the couch. For several hours, McGray sits in an armchair and watches Ethier sleep. McGray eventually smashes a beer bottle over Ethier's head, then stabs him to death. He returns to prison with no one the wiser for what he has done.

Tim Bousquet: In 1993, McGray is released from jail. He meets a girl, Tammy, on Spring Garden Road in Halifax. And for the next four or five years, the couple wander the country together. In 1997, Michael McGray, now living in Moncton, kills 48 year old Joan Hicks by stabbing her and slashing her throat. He also kills Joan's 11 year old daughter, Nina. McGray is arrested for the killings of Joan and Nina Hicks. After his arrest, McGray confessed and pleaded guilty to the six murders I just listed. But McGray said he killed many more people.

Tim Bousquet: You'll recall he told interviewer Jo-Ann Roberts, he killed up to 16 people. At another time, he told an investigator that he was so stoned for years at a time, that he couldn't really be sure of how many people he killed. But McGray told police he wasn't going to confess to any more murders until they agreed to his conditions. Here are the conditions in his own words in January 2000.

Sound Clip: [Michael McGray] There are some other murders that I'm going to confess to, but there's three conditions that I want to have met first, right.

Sound Clip: [Jo-Ann Roberts] What are those conditions?

Sound Clip: [Michael McGray] Well, one, there's two other people that were involved with me and I want to make sure that they're not going to be charged. That's guaranteed, has to be met. There's one person that was involved with me with one murder and there's another one that was involved with me for maybe six or seven, but I'm not, haven't been charged with yet. Two, is that, and this is the main one for me or is a pretty big one, is that I want to get some kind of treatment. I know that I'm going to be in prison for the rest of my life and rightly so, I agree with that. But I want to get some treatment. I don't know what will help, but I know that the killing hasn't stopped. I'm almost ready to do another one right now. And third, I don't want to be charged with the rest of the murders. I don't want to spend the next five years bouncing from province to province. I figure that, you know, they can make deals with people like Clifford Olsen and Karla Homolka and people like that. Well they want to know about these other murders, then they can make a deal with me.

Tim Bousquet: But police will make no deals with McGray. Instead, various police investigators interview McGray, but get nowhere. They get no new information about any other murders. McGray stops talking. In 2002, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police assigns the Michael McGray case to a special unit of the RCMP called Viclas - the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System. It is now up to the Viclas unit to find out who else Michael McGray killed through the years. Who were Michael McGray's 16 victims?

Tim Bousquet: By 2019, I had been researching the Glen Assoun story for five years. Going through court records, finding people who knew Brenda and Glen, talking with lawyers, piecing together Glen's 20 year journey through the courts and in prison. I knew there were several possible suspects who were around the Dartmouth stroll at the time of Brenda's murder. Which, if any of these suspects killed Brenda, I couldn't say. Then one morning, as I always do, I get up at 6:00 a.m., start the coffee and fire up my laptop. There is a Facebook message waiting for me from a former RCMP officer named Dave Moore. He wants to talk about Glen Assoun. "Follow his story," Dave tells me.

Tim Bousquet: Our Facebook messages start awkwardly, each of us holding back information from the other. But we talk every day, sometimes for hours at a time, typing over each other. He provides me with new information about Glen's case and makes some startling claims. So in January, producer Janice Evans and I, fly to Tampa, Florida, and drive to Sarasota to meet Dave Moore in person.

Sound Clip: [Sounds from flight]

Sound Clip: [Tim Bousquet] We're in a gated community. But apparently modest houses, despite the gate. Palm trees. We're in Florida. One story, small bungalow. Let's see what we have.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] Hello.

Sound Clip: [Tim Bousquet] Dave Moore.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] Hey, Tim Bousquet, how are you? Welcome. Come on in. How are you?

Sound Clip: [Small talk]

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] We have a couple of PTSD animals here. Two brothers, Hoody and Blackie. They call them emotional support animals. To deal with the PTSD as a result of all this nonsense that I've been going through. And anyway, we live here in a very modest home. And as you can see, good friends, good people. And that's it.

Tim Bousquet: Dave Moore is a giant man built like a refrigerator. He's maybe 6'2 and 350 pounds. He's got catcher mitt hands. I wouldn't want to be on his wrong side. But he's a joy to be with. We have a couple glasses of wine, play with the dogs, get to know each other. The next day, we get to work. Dave spends almost two entire days relating his story.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] I'm from Ottawa, Ontario. The capital. Grew up in a large family, seven kids. My father worked for Atomic Energy of Canada and my mom was a systems analyst for Revenue Canada. And I went on to business school and that's where I learned software development, software design. The early stuff was a 32 bit encryption software that I was working on for national security. And then the RCMP came along and said, we need people like you. You're at the top of the curve. They hand selected a group of people to move the organization forward. They realized it was stuck in the 50s and they were bringing in innovation. So that was a sales pitch I was given.

Tim Bousquet: Dave went to basic training in Regina. Then in 1986, was assigned to a detachment near Summerside on Prince Edward Island.

They were screaming at the time, the quote was intelligence based organization. That means you're hiring intelligent people to do the job. But then when you get in the field, they squash you like a bug. I ran into difficulty right from the beginning. There's an old expression that follows the RCMP. There's the right way of doing things, the wrong way of doing things. Then there's the RCMP way of doing things.

Tim Bousquet: What happened Dave Moore on P.E.I. is a long and complex story. The short version, as he tells it, is this. Dave butts heads with his superiors and is transferred to Nova Scotia. He gets bounced around from one detachment to another. And then in 2000, he's assigned to the Viclas unit in Halifax. Viclas was created as a result of the Paul Bernardo case. Paul Bernardo was a serial rapist and then a serial murderer, whose crimes spanned across Ontario in the 1980s and 1990s. He was assisted in three murders by his girlfriend, who then became his wife, Karla Homolka.

Tim Bousquet: A review by the Ontario government found that the arrests were delayed and the attacks had continued, basically because of police turf wars. Details of the investigations were not being shared between different police agencies. As a result, the RCMP created a computer database called the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System. Viclas for short. Here's how Viclas works. Whenever a violent crime, a rape or murder happens, the investigating police agency notes all the known details of the crime- the scene of the crime, the method of attack, the kind of weapon, the victim's age, race, hair colour and characteristics of the suspect or person accused if they're known. The idea is that if a crime occurs in one part of the country, the evidence from that crime can be matched to the evidence from other similar crimes in other parts of the country.

Tim Bousquet: The RCMP trains Viclas analysts to interpret the data. These investigators are part psychological profilers, part computer experts. That was Dave Moore's job and he was the Viclas officer who was assigned to the Michael McGray file. It was Dave's job to find McGray's other victims.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] I flowcharted every missing and murdered person across North America. Every single person. Then once I geographically put them on a time scale and a geographic scale, I then looked for potential murderers because it was a needle in the haystack with Michael McGray. He doesn't conform to any of the criteria that Viclas is based on. Viclas is based on the narrowing down of circumstances with regard to pattern behaviour.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] This guy's an exception to the rule. His victimology is all over the place. He kills little girls and he kills women and he kills grannies and he kills men and he kills gays. So there's no, you can't put a thumb on him. He's all over the map. Geographically because he is a traveller and a vagabond, if you want to call him that or a drifter. You have to look right across North America. So that's a wide spectrum. And so by plotting the information across a flowchart, it showed a 15 year period in which I could place him incarcerated at the beginning. And incarcerated at the end and everything in between was wide open. So then you go, OK, I was having a lot of difficulty. But one of the main consistencies in his murders, was that he killed them right where they stood. There was no attempt to camouflage anything. And in that decision to look at that, you also stretch yourself from a behavioural point of view, because this person is cunning and he's very smart. This guy's not a dummy. A dummy's going to get caught. This guy knows well enough to kill somebody and hide it, but not take away the body.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] But there is also other patterns of behaviour. He didn't stick around after he committed murders. He would always leave with 24 or 48 hours, 72 hours, he was gone. You have to put him at the murder. This was very difficult for me because he's a traveller across the country over a 15 year period with probably 700 murders across North America. So the volume of information was overwhelming.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] So I looked to say, OK, how can I narrow this down? So the only thing I could come up with was, if this guy is on welfare, he's got to pick up a welfare check. And he's got to physically be where the welfare check is, so therefore, in order to pick up the welfare check, he's got a present I.D.. He can't present false I.D. It's got to be in his name through the government auspices of the welfare. So I was able to determine at any given point in time when he received the check, that he was in a given town. I couldn't say four hours later that he was there and I couldn't say four hours before. But I could tell you that at noon when he cashed it at the pay check place, that he presented the same ID that he did at the government offices. And then I put him on the chart.

Tim Bousquet: By studying McGray's movements and the victimology, Dave Moore is convinced that he has discovered several of McGray's other victims. One is a man killed in a cafe bathroom in Vancouver. And Dave tells me he thinks one of the 13 murders in the Spokane, Washington area, attributed to serial killer Robert Lee Yates was actually committed by McGray. Dave also tells me that he thinks McGray killed a third man in Montreal during that weekend in 1991.

Tim Bousquet: Dave keeps studying McGray and even starts corresponding with him in prison. McGray sends Dave quotes from the Bible and Dave responds with other Bible quotes, in hope of getting inside McGray's head. Dave even buys the same Bible McGray has, so the verses are the same. And then Dave expands his research by doing one more thing.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] I thought it's possible somebody is wrongfully convicted for a murder that he committed. Any community wants to clean up this crime that's terrorising the neighbourhood. So there's a potential for the wrong person being in jail because of political pressures put on the police department to solve this crime quickly. And in doing so is the human error. So I said no, I want to also input all the solved murders across North America. So you're looking for somebody who's using a knife, someone who's doing a very violent attack.

Tim Bousquet: Dave includes in his search those at high risk of being victims of violence, including sex workers.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] So what happened was, I put that into Viclas and Brenda Way's murder came out.

Tim Bousquet: So along with all the murders across North America, Dave Moore discovers a possible murder committed by Michael McGray, in his own backyard. The problem is, he says the RCMP's Halifax division told him he isn't supposed to be looking into solved cases. And this case has been solved. Glen Assoun has now been in jail for five years. But Dave is determined. He sets to work reinvestigating the Brenda Way murder.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] The offender behaviour in the case of Brenda Way was so explosive, so frenzied an attack. Normally there's organized and disorganized murders. Typically, somebody who does a murder for the first time is disorganized. They don't know what they're doing, it happened and then they panic. How am I going to cover this up? They don't know they stepped in the blood. They don't know, you know, they have the knife in their hand with fingerprints on it. When you get a seasoned murderer, he covers all the bases. So in other words, he didn't step in the blood trail. He's not leaving a shoe print. He's of the mind that he's going to take this person out, it's going to be clean and even if there is blood splatter on his clothes, you're not going to know it. He's not going to dispose of those clothing on the site of the murder.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] So what my visual was on the Brenda Way murder, that it was a frenzied attack, a gruesome, frenzied attack. And it's not the first time whoever did this has murdered somebody. Clearly, to me, that was somebody who's done multiple murders.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] I believe that the left shoe and the panties were taken by the killer in this case. But the shoe, you certainly wear a shoe. You're not going to walk around with one shoe on. That's illogical. Unless you're being chased out of somewhere or something happens. So from that perspective, it told me it was an organized killer, not a disorganized killer.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] The main thing with Michael McGray, he killed and dropped them where they were. Now, other police officers have gone to hundreds of thousand dollars worth of expense with Mr. McGray, who never got it right with this guy. To me, they were untrained and they should have known better and they should have relied on people that actually knew him. Even if they had taken the time to read his psychiatric reports, which are extensive, voluminous reports, you'd get a real good idea what this guy is like. He's not interested in being deceptive and hiding bodies and digging a grave and shovelling. He drops them where he sees them. You piss me off, you're dead. It's that simple. And there'll be no historical reports to the police department that he's been harassing me, that he's attempted to hurt me or he's previously assaulted me. That's not going to happen with Michael McGray. There's going to be none of that. It's just going to be boom. I've decided, this urge has come across me, you've pissed me off, you're dead. Totally different mentality.

Tim Bousquet: Dave Moore talks with Gilles Blinn, his fellow Viclas worker in New Brunswick, about the Brenda Way murder.

Sound Clip: [Gilles Blinn] Well, Michael McGray, if I recall here, it wasn't an overnight query. It wasn't an overnight investigation, you know. Dave was always meticulous and did great work. With respect to Brenda Way, she came up as a victim of a potential crime that McGray could have committed based on the science of Viclas. And Dave had asked me to check this, if it made sense. And I did, I recall checking the queries, the boxes, he did, the cells. And I found it was very credible, very well done, and extremely likely that McGray could have committed that murder. I said, you know what? You're bang on. It's actually bang on.

Tim Bousquet: Dave uses the Viclas system to come up with Michael McGray as the potential murderer of Brenda Way. But that isn't enough. A computer database isn't evidence, so Dave investigates further.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] So the way it worked was, even though the RCMP had given me the task to solve these murders, it would seem that I had to do it on my own time. I was not getting ,there was one unit vehicle. The boss kept it the whole time. The staff never got use of it. And so they're saying, do this work, but we're going to, you know, so I'm going in my private car in a cesspool of criminals to conduct interviews and people in on it. I don't like to drive my personal vehicle because they might track it. And I was dumbfounded that, OK... Are you doing this for amusement? Are you not expecting me to find results out of this? So I, whatever, I'm entitled to my lunch. I go get the car going to Dartmouth to do one interview per lunch hour, notebook on each one.

Tim Bousquet: Dave works on reinvestigating the Brenda Way murder and connecting it back to Michael McGray. He has several hundred entries in the Viclas computer system. He has notebooks full of interviews with witnesses, which he keeps in a locked cabinet in his office. He has a 4-foot by 3-foot flowchart tracking McGray's movements on his office wall. The chart has an onion skin overlay, which shows when and where McGray cashed his welfare checks.

Tim Bousquet: Meanwhile, he is continuing to write letters to McGray, exchanging Bible verses with him. He writes to McGray five times. McGray writes back three times. Dave is convinced that Glen Assoun did not kill Brenda Way and that Michael McGray did. Dave says that Glen Assoun is an innocent man sitting in prison for a crime he did not commit. He brings his theories to his boss.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] So I brought it to the attention of my direct supervisor, who was Ken Bradley of the Halifax Regional Police, and he went ballistic on me. Who do you think you are? And he's my direct supervisor. He is checking my work on a weekly basis to make sure that everything is done according to what they propose it to be. And he's also been my supervisor right from the beginning, so he knows my work. Anyway, getting back to the Viclas relative to Brenda Way, I found immediately a push back. If it's good enough for the Supreme Court of Canada, it's fucking good enough for me.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] From a police personnel perspective, there's nothing wrong with that. He's an emotional guy, I get that. But things don't add up for me, so I'm just going to continue. I understand your position Ken, but I think differently than you.

Tim Bousquet: There are two things you need to know here. First, Halifax is the only municipality in the country that has what's known as a blended police force. The Halifax Regional Police Department patrols in the urban area, while the RCMP works in the suburban and rural areas. But the major crime investigation unit has both Halifax PD and RCMP members in it. And so does the Viclas unit. So Dave Moore was an RCMP officer, but his boss, Ken Bradley, worked for the Halifax police. Here's the second thing you need to know. Back in 1996, after Brenda Way was killed, Kent Bradley worked on the investigation into her murder. And now, nine years later, he's Dave Moore's boss, when Dave is telling him the wrong man was convicted.

Sound Clip: [Tim Bousquet] Did you know at that time that he was involved in the original investigation in the Brenda Way murder?

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] Yeah, I did. Yeah, he told me that. He told me right from the onset. I believe he was the ident processing officer. The question is, did it cloud his judgement going forward in being able to do his job effectively in the Viclas unit? And I went to Chief Frank Beazeley and said, I have a problem. I'm being intimidated by this guy.

Sound Clip: [Tim Bousquet] Let me stop you right there. You went to Frank Beazeley, the chief of the Halifax police. When was that?

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] So the order of pecking was, I went to Dick Hutchings, who's the unit commander. And he also was of negative predisposition on this. Then I waited for him to go on holidays and I went to Andy Latham, who's in charge of the major crime section in Halifax. And what I basically was looking for with Andy, I had to explain to him what was going on. I explained the interoffice politics and what I was really wanting him to do. He was just upstairs. I wanted him to move me upstairs or at the very least change who I was reporting to.

Sound Clip: [Tim Bousquet] So when you say move you upstairs, you wanted to be moved out of Viclas and into major crimes?

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] Correct.

Tim Bousquet: Let's recap. As Dave Moore tells it, in 2004, he takes his suspicions that Glen Assoun is innocent of the murder of Brenda Way to his boss in Viclas, Ken Bradley, who was involved in the original murder investigation that led to Glen Assoun's conviction. Bradley tells Moore to forget it. Glen Assoun is guilty. Next, Dave Moore goes to Dick Hutchings, who is the commander of the Halifax Viclas Unit. Hutchings also tells Moore to drop the matter. Dave then talks to the chief of police in Halifax, Frank Beazeley, to tell Beazeley, that one of his cops, Ken Bradley, has a conflict of interest. Beazeley tells him he can't do anything about it.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] I was getting too much friction from those people in lieu of the fact that they tasked me to do this investigation and basically were obstructing my investigation.

Tim Bousquet: Next, Dave Moore goes to Andy Latham, who's in charge of major crime for the RCMP in Halifax, and asked for a transfer so he can investigate the Brenda Way murder. Latham says, look, you're stepping on Halifax police toes and there's a lot of interdepartment politics going on. Latham wants to help. Latham says, bring me some hard evidence and if you can do that, I'll get you transferred to major crime so you can keep investigating the Brenda Way murder. That conversation with Andy Latham happens on a Friday in March of 2004. The next day, Dave goes on vacation for two weeks.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] When I came back from my holidays, my transfer notice was on the front doorstep of my house. It was underneath the mat, it was wet, damp from somebody had left it there. And I didn't know what was going on. I was to report immediately at 9 o'clock in the morning, at 9:30, whatever it was. In the meantime, I went into the Viclas unit. And so the first thing that happened was my pass didn't work. I couldn't get in the door and I couldn't get in my office. And I'm going, okay. The only thing that was there, the secretary's desk was a box of some personal belongings. I was kicked out of the unit.

Tim Bousquet: With no advance notice, Dave Moore comes back from vacation and finds that he's been transferred out of Viclas. He's being moved to the RCMP gambling division. He makes another discovery. Everything is missing from his office. Years worth of research, interview notes, his flowchart tracking McGray's movements, all of it, gone.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] They had stripped out all of my war room flowcharts, this big chart with the 15 year period on it, the overlay, onion skin overlay was missing. I had noted that the lock was busted off of the file cabinet, that I kept all of the written documents in. So I was livid. I was absolutely livid. The bottom file cabinet drawer had 10 notebooks. I used a smaller version of a notebook for every person I interviewed. Every person had an individual notebook. On top of that, there were psychiatric reports on McGray. I had other suspects that I also had psychiatric reports on. I had a copy of the Moncton file, the entire file. Not just what was on the system, but all the Hicks information. There was a lot to that file that I didn't understand. I needed to have a closer look.. All of that was gone. All of the corroborating documents that I had obtained from correctional services, psychiatric reports from his school, Michael's school. So all of that was missing.

Tim Bousquet: That's not all. Dave Moore gets another Viclas analyst to look on the computer system. That is, to look at the hundreds of files Dave had put on the system about Michael McGray.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] A coworker, Karen Broydel was there. I went over to her office and I said, go in, let me see what's in there. So she was already on the system. She had already gained access with all the passwords or whatever. And I went to look at my files and they'd all been deleted. I was just told by the secretary, you got to be at Inspector Tanner's office by 9:30, he's not in the same building...

Tim Bousquet: Inspector Tanner is Dan Tanner with the Criminal Investigative Bureau of the RCMP in Halifax.

Sound Clip: [Dave Moore] I said to him, I don't give a shit what you do with me. I really don't care. But there's an innocent man in prison. What are you going to do about that? And I said, Glen Assoun is an innocent person. You know it, I know it. And the documents stolen from my office prove it. Now, are you going to do anything about it? And his response was tsk, tsk tsk. And if you know that man, that expression is known across Canada. He says that. Tsk, tsk, tsk, no one gives a shit about Glen Assoun.

Tim Bousquet: Coming up on Dead Wrong.

Sound Clip: [Sean MacDonald] I can tell you right now, I knew everything about this case. You think for a freaking second, if I knew the RCMP destroyed evidence, that I would be shouting from the rooftops. I had no idea. Zero.

Sound Clip: [News reporter] But today, the RCMP says there was no malicious intent.

Sound Clip: [RCMP spokesperson] If anything has been done, it has not been intentional or it was a mistake. But there has been no intention for the RCMP in any way to try and do a cover up.

Sound Clip: [Phil Campbell] Claims on behalf of the RCMP, that any evidence destruction was innocent or done in good faith or not for the purpose of obstructing justice, rings hollow. Rings hollow understates it.

Tim Bousquet: "Dead Wrong" is written and produced by Janice Evans, Nancy Hunter and me, Tim Bousquet. Sound design by Evan Kelly. Shamhan Bhuiyan provided transcripts. Our digital producer is Emilie Quesnel. Special thanks to Sarah Melton. Chris Oke is our story editor. The senior producer of CBC podcasts is Tanya Springer. And our executive producer is Arif Noorani. For discussion, posts, pictures from the case and more, find us on Facebook and Twitter at Uncover CBC. We're also on Instagram @CBCpodcast.

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TRANSCRIPT: UNCOVER: DEAD WRONG - EP. 6

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