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Crime Story Episode 17: Duncan McCue

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter, including references to sexual assault. Please take care.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I'm Kathleen Goldhar. This is Crime Story. Every week, a new crime with the storyteller who knows it best.

SOUNDCLIP

MURRAY SINCLAIR: The residential school experience is clearly one of the darkest, most troubling chapters in our collective history.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In June 2015, Justice Murray Sinclair presented his findings to the country. As the head of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Sinclair had spent more than six years listening to stories of people who had been ripped from their homes as children, taken from their parents and thrown into prisons that were masquerading as schools.

SOUNDCLIP

MURRAY SINCLAIR: What took place in residential schools amounts to nothing short of cultural genocide.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: One of the stories that caught the attention of journalist Duncan McCue was that of 16-year-old Richard Thomas. Thomas was forced to attend a residential school on Kuper Island in British Columbia, a school he never left because in June of 1966, Richard Thomas died at the school. And the mystery surrounding how it happened has haunted survivors and the community for decades. Duncan explores Thomas's life and death and the stories of three other students who did survive their time at Kuper Island Residential School in his unflinching and heart wrenching podcast, Kuper Island.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Duncan, welcome to Crime Story.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Aanii, Kathleen.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So nice to have you here. So where was Richard living before he was taken to Kuper Island?

DUNCAN MCCUE: So the Thomas family was a big family. There were 16, 17 children. They’re from the Halalt First Nation, which is near Shamans on Vancouver Island. The family lived for a time on the outskirts of Victoria, and they were back and forth between the Halalt First Nation and the Victoria area.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And tell me a bit about his family. You said it was big. Were they close? What did they do? Tell me a bit about the people he came from.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Yeah. So we got to know Belvie Brebber, who was Richard's sister. She said, you know, they were close and tight knit. At the time, they would have been considered poor. They didn't have a lot of means, but Belvie’s father was hard working. They had their struggles, certainly. Belvie’s dad had some issues with alcohol, but I think one of the things that Belvie illustrated to us was that the issues of having children taken away really impacted the family. At one point, Belvie herself, she had some health issues. And for five years, she was in the Indian hospital in Nanaimo. And when she came back, there were a whole bunch more children in the family that she didn't even know. And she talked to her parents and they said, well, they just keep taking them away. Many of her brothers and sisters went to residential school, and that was her father's explanation for one of the reasons that there were so many children in the family.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So let's talk about Kuper Island School. I know it was named or nicknamed Alcatraz.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Yeah, the survivors have called it Alcatraz for obvious reasons. Throughout the 100 year history, there were repeated instances of children trying to flee this school that's in the middle of the Salish Sea, and there's well documented instances of children dying in attempts to get away from the place. And you have to think to yourself, what was happening there that children so badly, that they would get on logs or that they would steal boats or, you know, even attempt to swim, in some instances, away from the place?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And these were children. Like really young children were trying to get away. I mean, that adds to the despair of the place, right? These aren't even teenagers. These are kids.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Yeah. In addition to looking into as much detail as we could about the death of Richard Thomas, we investigated other deaths. And for example, we looked into the story of two sisters who tried to flee. And according to officials, they took a boat in the early morning hours and tried to get away. The story, the official story was that they were going to a dance on Vancouver Island. But this was in the middle of the winter. And British Columbia, it's not the snow and ice of other parts of Canada, but this is a harsh, harsh…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Big water.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Big. You know, this… yeah, exactly. And these two young girls, unfortunately, they perished. One of their bodies was found and the other was not, but it's hard for me to fathom what would have been going through a child's head to try to attempt that journey.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. Who ran the school? Can you tell us about that?

DUNCAN MCCUE: Yeah. So it was run by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, which is a missionary group, part of the Catholic Church. The Oblates have a long history of going into communities to spread the word, to spread the faith. And the Oblates were responsible for running a number of residential schools right across Canada. So they were the primary leaders at Kuper Island.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Because of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and because of the work that indigenous journalists like you and others have done, we really have, over the last decade or so, started to really understand what was going on in these schools, the deprivation, the hunger, the physical abuse, the taking away the language, the attempt to rip, as they said, take the Indian out of the child. But one of the most rampant horrific parts was also the sexual abuse. And one of the people you talked to is a man. And sort of unpromptedly, when you ask him what it was like to sleep there, he asks, he says to you, do you mean sleeping or being sexually abused? So I can't even imagine what life was like there during the day. Night must have been a horrendous place. What did you learn about what their lives were like when they were supposed to be going to sleep?

DUNCAN MCCUE: That was a really sobering moment for me, Kathleen, when I was talking with James Charlie. We interviewed Tony and James Charlie. They’re brothers. And James, I asked just a real simple question. I just wanted to get him to describe what the sleeping conditions were like. You know, I wanted him to describe the rows and rows of bunk beds and to explain to me what it would be like for a young child to sleep there. And, you know, this was early on in the interview and I thought, oh my goodness, that he would instantly kind of go to that in his head, spoke so much to me about what the experience was like and what this elderly gentleman is still experiencing when asked about something as simple as the sleeping conditions at the school. Certainly for Tony and James and for Belvie, sexual abuse was a gut wrenching aspect of their lives at the school. But here's the really upsetting thing is that as we started to dig back into the records, it is very clear that school officials knew about the sexual abuse at the school decades before the 50s and 60s when James and Tony Charlie were there and before Belvie Brebber was there. And not only school officials knew about the sexual abuse that was going on in the school, but police knew about this, the Catholic Church knew about this, Indian affairs officials knew about this. And I'll tell you why. we know that. We uncovered a document from 1939 where, again, several boys tried to escape from the Kuper Island school. They successfully made it over to Vancouver Island. And as often happened when children fled the school, they send police officers out to go back and retrieve them and send them back to the school. Usually, that was the end of it. The police officers would go and collect the children, take them back to the school. But in this instance in 1939, something very unusual happened. The police sergeant there asked the boys a simple question. Why did you run away? And they began to tell him of the abuse that they were experiencing at Kuper Island. And they had told their parents of what they were experiencing. The police officer talked about how the parents were absolutely livid, did not want to send their children back to the school, and in fact, were so angry that they were ready to go over with shotguns and take out some of their concerns in violent ways, which they didn't do, I emphasize. But that's how upsetting it was for the families to discover what was happening.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So what did happen?

DUNCAN MCCUE: So the police, they went over to the island and started interviewing children, and they discovered that dozens of children were being abused by multiple people at the school at that time. And they recommended to the attorney General that there be further investigation and charges laid. Well, when Indian Affairs got wind of these officers who were doing this investigation, when the local Catholic Church got wind of this, there were complaints made to the attorney general that the police officers were overstepping their authority, that police officers shouldn't be asking questions of the children and that the officers should be reprimanded. This went on. There were furious letters back and forth between Indian affairs officials, the church, both saying that the attorney general of B.C. should not be investigating this. As a result, two employees from the Kuper Island school were suddenly whisked away from the school so that no charges can be laid. And that is the end of the story. But what it said to me, I mean, as we were going through these documents of the police and the stories that they heard from children, we heard about sexual abuse going on in the laundry room, for example, at the Kuper Island school. That was particularly upsetting to read these gut wrenching stories in the first person words of small children talking about the abuse that was happening, because we heard those very same stories coming from Belvie Brebber about how all of the girls knew that going down to the laundry room was potentially dangerous, because that's where abuse happened. So it was so disturbing to know that officials at Indian Affairs, the Catholic Church, the highest levels of the justice system in British Columbia knew that this kind of abuse was happening at the school and that nothing was done. And then generations later, there are still children being abused by predators in the school when people knew. And I think that's really the upsetting thing as we started to dig into the documents that became clearer and clearer to us that, you know, there are many Canadians today who say they didn't know. They didn't know that history. They didn't know about what happened at Indian residential schools. But it is so clear when you start to go through the records that Canadians did know, that they were willfully blind, we’ll say that at the very least, to the kinds of hardships and deprivations that the children were experiencing at the school. And so, you know, I used the example of the two sisters who tried to flee. You know, there was actually a short inquest into their deaths. And within 15 minutes, a jury determined that there was nothing untoward about what had happened. But again, it boggles my mind that someone wouldn't have asked the question, really? They tried to cross this strait, the open ocean to try to go to a dance? That doesn't make sense.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And you also discovered that the government knew that the schools were in bad condition almost right from the beginning, didn't you?

DUNCAN MCCUE: So as early as 1907, Dr. Peter Bryce, who was a medical examiner, was hired to go and look into deaths in the schools in British Columbia in particular, but other schools in Canada. And he had well documented evidence which he shared with Indian Affairs, which he shared with Duncan Campbell Scott, the superintendent of Indian Affairs, that as many as 50% of children who were attending schools in the early 1900s were dying in some schools. That was very clearly documented. And Dr. Peter Bryce said that the conditions at the schools, that the nutrition at the schools needs to be improved. And this was not a secret that was kept behind, you know, within government bureaucracy. Dr. Peter Bryce in the 1920s published his findings and shared it with Canadians. And yet, this was ignored. And in fact, Duncan Campbell Scott in 1920 made attendance at residential schools compulsory. So, you know, Canadians did know, and that I think is the most upsetting thing is is that we knew in the 1900s, the early 1900s that this experiment, and it was very much an experiment, of, quote, civilizing Indian children, was having disastrous impacts. You know, not only life threatening impacts on indigenous children, but it was having disastrous impacts on indigenous families, not only in the Kuper Island school, but in so many schools right across the country.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. I was just going to say I know you focus on Kuper Island, but obviously, this is a story that is about the entire country and every single residential school that existed in Canada.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What do you know about what happened to Richard? I mean, you speak to a lot of people, but unfortunately, Richard isn't around to speak about himself. So what do you know about what happened to him at the school?

DUNCAN MCCUE: One of the things that Jody and Martha and I wanted to do was try to help Canadians and listeners understand this really complex history of the residential school policy, which, you know, there are well over 100 residential schools from coast to coast to coast, but we wanted to try to make it digestible and tell it through one school. So we approached the community of Penelakut. They had been involved in ground penetrating radar work for a number of years, long before the announcement of unmarked graves at the Kamloops residential school. I had heard awful things about treatment of children at Kuper Island, and so we approached the community of Penelakut to see if they would be interested in participating in our podcast. They invited us to go and make a presentation to the elders of Penelakut. And, you know, in the indigenous community, elders are not just senior citizens. I mean, they're kind of like our Google, right? Like they're the repository of all our wisdom and knowledge. And so I was a bit nervous that day that we showed up at Penelakut for the first time to present our pitch that we wanted to do a podcast about something really difficult, about unmarked graves in particular. And there was just a palpable sense of both hurt and distrust amongst those elders. And I understand that distrust because I've been a reporter and an indigenous journalist for 25 years now. I understand that it's upsetting when people come and take a story away. You know, that's been the experience of so many indigenous people, so many indigenous communities. And so I was trying very hard as an indigenous storyteller to honour those stories. So they began to share, you know, some of their experiences with the residential school. They kept talking about this boy and this awful death that had happened. They talked about it because, you know, they drive by where Richard was found, in the school gym, almost every day to get on the ferry. You know, the school may have been torn down in 1975, but it is still very much part of the living memory of the people of Penelakut because the community has grown up around the former school grounds. And so, you know, they drive by that place where Richard Thomas was found hanging in June of 1966 almost every day to line up. The ferry line up goes right past where the school gym used to be. And elders and former students and survivors have whispered about Richard's death for 50 years now. They've been talking about it quietly because there were all kinds of stories about what may have happened to Richard.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Before you tell us what you actually learned, what did happen to him, what were the kids at the school, the community at the time told happened to Richard?

DUNCAN MCCUE: So the official records say that Richard was discovered by two oblate brothers. And as their version of events goes, as they told the police, Richard went to breakfast in the morning. One of the Oblate brothers went off the island with a group of children, and it was assumed that Richard was with him, and Richard wasn't seen for the rest of the day. It was only late in the evening, about 8:00 or so, that they determined that Richard was not around. And it was when they began to search the school grounds that they found him hanging in the gym. That is the story that the two oblate brothers and the principal of the school told the police officers. But that's not what we heard from children. The police did interview three children. One of them is still alive and we spoke with him. And according to him, it was the children who found Richard hanging in the gym. They had been playing a game of what they called shadow tag. And as a result of some confusion and… It's upsetting, actually, as I'm thinking about it, just kind of remembering how difficult it was for this survivor to share this story. But he said they were playing. And at the end of their play, Richard was found hanging. I asked… the way that that story was told to me, I wondered if it was an accident. And he said it was very clear to him that it was not an accident. It's one of the challenges of talking with people who are in their 60s and 70s and 80s about traumatic experiences that occurred when they were young children. We know that trauma affects the brain in all kinds of different ways, that young children do all kinds of things to try to protect themselves from these kinds of traumatic events. And so trying to piece together, 50 years later, what happened on that evening, it was a complex task, in part because the survivors have done their best to try to protect themselves from the awful things that they witnessed.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How do you approach these interviews then? I mean, you're an indigenous journalist. This is your history as much as it is any other indigenous person in Canada. And you know that the trauma of retelling, of being retraumatized, all that is all there. And you're knowing you want to tell the story and get as deep as you can because you have a good reason to want to tell it. But also, asking the people to do these things is so hard. So what have you learned? How have you developed as a reporter yourself, as somebody asking this questions about how to get to a place that's safest for all of you?

DUNCAN MCCUE: One of the things that the elders said when we had that first meeting with them at the elders committee was we've told this story before, Duncan. We've told these stories over and over again. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission came to Vancouver Island, and a number of survivors from Kuper Island went and shared their testimony. There have been criminal cases as a result of work that was done by an RCMP task force that prosecuted a former teacher at the residential school at Kuper Island. So there were survivors who testified in criminal court, in civil court and shared their story there. They said, we've told our stories over and over again. What's it going to take for Canada to get the message, to start to hear the truths that we've been sharing? Why should we pour our hearts out again? Why should we go to these difficult places for a podcast? And that was a question that I had to wrestle with myself, that Martha and Jody and I had to wrestle with was what are we doing? We're making a podcast, but what, you know, how is this going to help? What is this… what benefit? And all I can tell you, Kathleen, is that I, as a journalist for a really long time, I do believe that sharing our stories makes a difference. I mean, it is crucially important that we understand history, particularly through the voices of the people that experienced it. For so long, those voices of survivors were ignored by so many people, by government officials, by church officials, by justice officials. Those voices were ignored. And we need to hear them now because we are losing those generations who experienced that. And we need to hear firsthand, if only for the official record. But Canadians need to know today that those survivors are still amongst us, and that what happened to them in the schools impacted them. So I think that it is important to share these stories, and that's the explanation that I gave to the survivors. But that said, I do feel a duty of care to not harm these people any more than they were already harmed, because you and I know, Kathleen, that that simple asking of questions can start to open up a whole can of worms for somebody, and asking something as simple as what happened the night that Richard died can take people into a place, incredibly viscerally to a place that they have been trying to protect themselves from for decades.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

DUNCAN MCCUE: And so to me, the challenge of doing these stories is being 110, 150% transparent about what it is that we're trying to do and how we work as broadcasters and podcasters so that they, the survivors that we spoke with, had as much of an understanding as possible and could give us their full prior informed consent, because so many people have come to them, taken their stories, gone away and used them for all kinds of different purposes and never checked back in again. And so we made that pledge, and I'll call it, I mean, that's a strong word, but we made that pledge that if you share your stories with us, we will… we're not just going to fade away and go back to Toronto. And I would hope that if you were to talk with the people who participated in our podcast, that they feel that their stories were respected and that we treated them with care and did our best to honour the words that they shared with us.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, certainly as a listener, I can tell you that that came across loud and clear.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Thank you.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What were the stories that you heard about what actually did happen to Richard?

DUNCAN MCCUE: Unlike the official record which, you know, a police officer looked into it, interviewed two oblate brothers and the principal of the school, and concluded that Richard committed suicide because he was despondent. The officer looked into Richard's notebooks. One of the amazing things we discovered about Richard, Kathleen, is that he was a writer. He was always writing in his notebook. And the officer looked into his notebook, and he found three or four examples of Richard writing about death. The officer concluded that perhaps he had been fixated on death, and this was an explanation for his suicide. When I read those selections, it seemed to me that it was a boy who was doing creative writing. And yes, there were deaths. There was a story about a car crash, for example. There was a story about a person choking on a bone. It didn't surprise me, I suppose, that a boy who was surrounded by people dying in a situation at a place like Kuper Island might be trying to process that by creative writing, but the official conclusion was that he was in an upset state that led to a suicide. But there were too many things that didn't sync up with that analysis, that official analysis by the police officer. For example, he was only days away from graduating from school when it happened. He was about to leave the school. That was something very puzzling. He was doing very well in school in terms of grades. So as we began to piece together the story of Richard and who he was, there were other things that started to be red flags, if you will. Belvie recalled only days before Richard died. She recounted to us a phone call that she had, her last phone call with Richard, as it turned out, and Richard was talking about his upcoming graduation and wanted to make sure that his mom had set aside some nice clothes for him. He had a private conversation with Belvie at one point. He said, I can't wait to get out of this hellhole. I just want to tell everything. And Belvie said to him, Richard, you can't, you can't speak like that, because Belvie knew that it possibly wasn't a private conversation. In fact, it was documented that priests and brothers and nuns listened in on the phone conversations that children were having on another line. That was not an uncommon thing, and the children all knew that. And in this particular instance, the phone conversation with Richard ended abruptly. After saying this, the phone line hung up. That was the last conversation that Belvie ever had with Richard, which led her to wonder if perhaps the fact that Richard seemed to want to share something about the experience and his experience at the school, if that had led to something untoward happening to him. We spoke with other survivors at the school who told us about the treatment that he had suffered at the hands of one brother in particular. And when we discovered that brother's name, Brian Dufour, a number of pieces of the story began to come together in ways that were disturbing and upsetting, because Brian Dufour was an oblate brother who was at the school for a couple of years. And in fact, it was Brian Dufour who had taken James and Tony Charlie to his family home in Montreal, where they were abused in the basement of the family home.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And just to make it clear that these boys were abused after Richard died. So what happened to Brother Dufour?

DUNCAN MCCUE: Brian Dufour was never charged. He was discharged from the school and he was never charged for any of his activities at residential school. However, he was charged for sexual abuse decades later in the Cornwall area where he was working as a social worker. Those charges were never followed through because he died days after the charges were laid. So we began to piece together these things that were happening to Richard, which explained why a boy would suddenly perhaps take his own life. We sat down with a coroner, an indigenous coroner, Coroner Williams, who's based in Ontario, and asked her to review the very brief one page, two page coroner's report from 1966. She said there's not enough information here, Duncan, for me to determine how Richard died. It does seem that his death is consistent with hanging, for example, but I can't tell from these documents whether the body was looked at with the same rigour that we would look at a child, a 16-year-old child who died in a school in this day and age. So she said, I cannot rule out that he may have been killed, but I can't… it doesn't point to that, what I'm seeing in this investigation. So in some ways, we were left with lots more questions, Kathleen. You know, I don't… there is no smoking gun when it comes to Richard's death. But I'm so glad that you asked me to be on this show, Kathleen, because, you know, one of the things we were most nervous about when we were asked to do a podcast about unmarked graves and the deaths of Indian children at residential schools is is that we recognized that if by its very nature, we were going to be slotted into, quote, true crime podcast, you know, we're talking about death, and the whole genre of true crime has become a thing in podcasting, as you well know. But what we didn't want was this to be a whodunit. You know, there was so much more to what we were hoping to share with people about, a, Richard Thomas, but, b, the past experience of survivors at that residential school, but more importantly, the current experience of the community of Penelakut and their wrestling with those ghosts of Kuper Island. Those were all perhaps more important things than trying to get to the bottom of what happened to Richard. It wasn't just a whodunit exercise for us. For us, it was about putting a human face to the historic and contemporary tragedy that residential schools represent in this country.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And that's one of the reasons why I so wanted you to be on this show and why I feel like this is so important to talk about, because this show, this podcast and sort of my 20 years of covering crime, quote unquote, crime, has helped me understand that it's not just about the one death, the one crime. It's about what brings us to the point that this is happening to people. And so, as Richard's death might not be conclusive as to what happened, everything that happened to him and everything that happened to his community, to indigenous people in this country is about Richard's death. And I feel that's, and this isn't to take away from the importance of having a conversation that's specific about something that happened at residential schools and the indigenous experience in Canada, but I feel like there is something about crime that is important to take it out of the sensational and understand where as a society, why does it happen? Who is it happening to and who does it affect? And that's the more interesting conversation in my mind about this stuff, and the stuff that actually does slowly start to maybe chip away at who we are and have a bigger conversation about what we care about and where our priorities are both as individuals and as a nation. And that's why Richard's death, to me, represents that.

DUNCAN MCCUE: And so when you're looking at the bigger picture, I mean, to me, the larger questions raised by the death of one boy, Richard Thomas, a boy who was a writer, a boy who had dreams of being a priest, as it turned out, a boy who was loved by his family, and a boy whose death very much touched off a string of tragedies in his own family because of the upset that it caused. The story of Richard Thomas, to me, is a much bigger picture of how these communities, First Nations and Métis communities and Inuit communities right across this country, whether they've had the opportunity to memorialize their dead, for example, you know, are there places that they can go to to remember and pay honour to the children that didn't come home? I think that's one of the reasons that we saw such a raw reaction from indigenous people in the summer of 2021, when the unmarked graves were beginning to be announced. Again, it was no secret. Indigenous communities knew about those dead children, so it was no secret. But there was something wrong and palpable because so many of those communities have not had an opportunity, do not have a place to go and pay their honour and pay their respect. So I think that's one of the important things that we need to understand and take away from all of this is that that memory and that honouring needs to take place, and indigenous communities need to be empowered to do that work so that they can begin to heal. That's certainly one of the important takeaways that I see in looking into this one death of one boy.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How does the lack of accountability affect that healing and that conversation you just talked about? Because in Richard's death, really, there was no accountability. And so much of the other stories we hear about, there is no accountability. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? How do you deal with that as a community that wants to move forward?

DUNCAN MCCUE: I think that's been one of the most challenging things for survivors and in particular who have been called before, as I said, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, before criminal courts and civil courts to share their story. They've named the names over and over again, but there have been so few people who have been held accountable because of the way that our criminal justice system works, because the Truth and Reconciliation Commission specifically was not about… it was, in its term, very terms of reference, it was not about holding the staff at schools accountable. So I think that's perhaps one of the most frustrating things for survivors is that on the one hand, the truth telling is an important exercise. But what seems to have been lost or forgotten or purposefully steered away from, in fact, I would argue, has been a level of accountability when it comes to perpetrators at the schools. And so yes, there have been a small number of priests, and in some cases, nuns, who have been charged criminally. And yes, all of the churches, the Anglican, the United, the Catholic Church have all offered some form of financial compensation. But I think that there is still, amongst survivors that I speak with, a level of frustration about the digging in of heels. For example, the release of records, that in particular the Catholic Church has over and over again fought survivors in court to prevent, you know, the release of records and the further examination of what happened and who may have done what. The Catholic Church has over and over again resisted those attempts at further accountability. I will say an interesting update. You know, after our podcast was run, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate did finally open up their records, something that they had resisted for years and years and years. The head of archives for the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, Raymond Frogner, was invited to Rome and spent a good couple of days in the archives of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and was able to look into some of the actual personnel files. He went there with a specific purpose, looking into the stories of some of the brothers that survivors have spoken about. He wasn't able to find direct evidence in the personnel folders that they had committed abuse, for example, but that's not necessarily surprising that this wouldn't be written down in the official personnel records. But there was plenty of evidence that brothers and priests were moved around on a fairly regular basis, that there were reprimands with regard to treatment of children, that it was encouraged that some brothers and priests should perhaps leave the order. These were very evident in the records. He also found over a thousand pictures that they did not know existed, which he described as a treasure trove. And so the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation are beginning to process and digitize and make sense of those records, and it's beginning to help paint a more full picture.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So there's a moment in the podcast where you're speaking to Belvie, Richard’s sister, and she's telling you about the abuse she suffered. And there's a very raw moment where you say, sort of stop, and then we hear you say, oh, Belvie. And it's one of the few times that your crack of being a journalist breaks a little bit open. This couldn't have been an easy thing for you personally to be hearing all these stories. And it's obviously not the one and only time this happens to you with the work that you do. How do you process at the end of all of this? At the end of your work, when you're going to bed or wherever you have your time to sort of think, how do you protect yourself? How do you process it?

DUNCAN MCCUE: Thank you for asking that question, Kathleen. And I have to say… here's where I'm going to speak to your listeners for a second, because again, I am very aware, and I think we're all aware that true crime is a genre. It is very popular. And I understand as a listener that it is incredibly engaging when a storyteller is telling you, you know, this gripping story, this mystery, when they are going down and doing the incredible work that investigative storytellers do of finding actual first person accounts of something awful that happened. I understand as a listener how gripping that can be to listen to. I think it's really important, though, that we be aware of the toll that that takes on the people who are doing all of that hard work, who are asking those questions, who are digging into those stories, who are hearing these first person accounts of awful things that happened. I say that because I'm not sure in the podcasting industry the way it is right now, that we're paying as much attention to the storytellers as we should be. I said at the very outset, I'm an indigenous storyteller. We're going to do this in a trauma informed way to the best of our abilities, but you need to understand that I am not untouched by this. These are my relatives. These are my… I am not Hul'qumi'num, but these are my relatives. You know, when I first met Jill Harris, who was in the opening of episode one, I make a reference to her being a short native grandma because I could see my grandma when I met Jill Harris. So I am not untouched by what they experienced and shared with me. And my full credit to the CBC Podcasts. They said you take the time that you need to take care of yourself throughout this. And that meant after these incredibly draining journeys of going and interviewing the survivors, that we took the time to do something as simple as sleep, which, you know, when, you know when you're buried deep in a podcast, you're just working, you know, around the clock, day in and day out. We needed to take care of ourselves mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically to be able to go through that long haul and do that work of honouring the stories that were shared with us. We had to take care of ourselves. And so you asked me, you know, how did it affect me? Of course it affected me, Kathleen. Of course. Like I've been telling residential school stories for all of my 25 year journalism career, and it never gets any easier. But I think the shocking thing in talking with Belvie and James and Tony this time around was that you think you’ve heard the worst stories, and then you hear one more and it's just like this happened to children. And as I said at the outset, this happened to children when Canadians knew it was happening. And it didn't have to happen this way. And I think that's the most upsetting thing. And all we could do was do our best to try to, as I say, honour the stories of the survivors, do our best to, in all instances, practice evidence based journalism and double source and triple source everything that we were finding out and take care of ourselves as best as we could.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, Duncan, thank you for honouring their stories, for honouring yourself and taking care of yourself, and thank you for talking to us. It's really been lovely to talk to you, and thank you for your work. It's nothing but wonderful.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Miigwech, Kathleen. It's really, it's really a pleasure to sit down and have this long conversation with you.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Thank you.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We drop a new episode every Monday. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts’ YouTube channel or by subscribing to the CBC Podcasts’ true crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to Early Access, subscribers to our true crime channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard. Our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcasts’ senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 17

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