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Tonight on Dateline. An investigator called me to say that we had found Duane's car.
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It was on fire and we're looking for Duane. I started panicking. I was crying. There was so much luminous from the amount of blood in the car that you could pretty much see it from space.
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Probably something very bad had happened to Duane. She commented that she would not be surprised if her ex-boyfriend might have something to do with this.
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He said, you're spending time with him and not with me. We can't track him down. Nobody has been to his home. They don't know where he lives.
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He's a ghost, this guy. I reached out to his grandmother. I send her his driver's license.
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She immediately says, that's not my grandson. I've never seen him before. this guy had taken her grandson's identity.
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He only asked one question. How far will this jet ski go on a full tank of gas? I almost feel like we're chasing James Bond here.
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I lived in terror, sleeping with one eye open. He will stop at nothing to get what he wants.
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A murder suspect armed with a stolen ID and a jet ski makes for a manhunt like no other.
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I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Keith Morrison with The Case of the Man with No Name.
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He was a ghost. A grainy image on a bit of security video. The whatever it was that lurked in a midnight dumpster.
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the mystery man rushing into the street with something under his arm. That he was up to something devious here in this big northern city seemed obvious.
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If only someone could make sense of him and his deeds as he slipped in and out of view like some prairie poltergeist.
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Just who was he? This man with no name. What did he do? And where did he go? No one could believe it.
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If you'd scripted this for a movie, they would say this is far-fetched. And here is how it began.
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It was a bright Sunday morning going on noon, May 31, 2015, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
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A pedestrian walking past a parking garage heard a loud explosion and, quick as a wink, pulled out a smartphone
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and caught this video of a man running away from the garage and the smoldering hunk of an Acura sedan inside the garage.
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Firefighters and police, to their relief, could find no victim inside the car. But why did someone set it on fire?
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Had to be a reason. The registered owner was a guy who lived a three-hour drive away in the city of Edmonton.
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42-year-old Dwayne Demke. This is Dwayne's brother, Darren. I received a call from the Calgary Police Arson Investigator.
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Called me to say that we had found Dwayne's car and it was on fire and we're looking for Dwayne.
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kind of insinuating maybe that he had something to do with it. And I knew right away that, no, Dwayne didn't have anything to do with that.
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His friends had just seen Dwayne the night before at a birthday party for one of his best friends,
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Kahlia Polly Juanopoulos. But he left early to pull a shift at his limo service job.
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Here's Kahlia. Dwayne said that he'd come back after he was done his limo shift.
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But he did not. I didn't really think anything at the time. I just thought maybe he went home to bed or something. He was tired.
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So nobody was very worried about it at the time. No. And then I got a phone call from a friend asking.
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Had you heard from Dwayne since the party? And I said no. And he said that Dwayne's father had called to say that the police had called him to let him know that the car was on fire in Calgary.
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And then, of course, you just start panicking and phoning Dwayne like crazy and just trying to call anybody that I could think of that he might have gone to spend the night at their house or anything.
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You're hoping that somebody just stole the car or something, right? Dwayne's friend, Darren Bavare, got the news from one of Dwayne's cousins.
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She'd said apparently Dwayne hadn't come home after his shift the previous night working as a chauffeur.
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and then I knew Duane had worked for a company at that time called Revolution Limousine.
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Shortly after that conversation, I'd Googled the address. I just started curiosity to see where it was located
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and it turned out to be not too terribly far from my home address. This, Darren, by the way, is a rodeo rider.
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Laconic, slow-talking. His friends call him the cowboy. But now, in that moment, the cowboy adopted a new role.
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amateur detective. And when I was young, teenage boy, I'd read a lot of these Encyclopedia Brown books, which is
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basically a boy detective that kind of solves crimes in his neighborhood. And now hearing about a possible
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crime in his neighborhood, maybe involving his friend, Cowboy was on the case and on his own
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drove out to Revolution Limousine in search of clues and I surveyed the whole area taken it all in I taken quite a few pictures of the parking lot
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the vehicles in the parking lot, license plate numbers, and came around behind this planter here,
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and I didn't notice it at first. I'd passed by because I was looking at the ground,
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and I happened to look to the side and notice sitting in the corner here was a black ball cap and a sheath of some sort.
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And the cowboy wondered, what would Encyclopedia Brown do? Well, if this was a crime scene, if that is,
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then this hat, this sheath, should be handled as evidence, which is what he did.
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Took some pictures from quite a few different angles, close up, didn't touch anything.
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disturb anything. And then, after donning a pair of gloves, Darren Beauvais took the hat and sheath
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to his truck and put them in separate plastic bags, having no idea. He had just collected
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evidence that would eventually help explain the mysterious disappearance of his friend,
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Dwayne Demkew. With a nickname like the cowboy and a childhood hero like Encyclopedia Brown,
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it hardly needs saying. Darren Blavere was a determined man. Unable to find his missing friend Dwayne Demke anywhere in or around the Revolution Limo Company,
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Darren drove over to the FedEx office, where Dwayne was scheduled to go to work on his second job that very night at 8 o'clock.
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and kind of staked out that workplace and waited around, and 8 o'clock came and went, and still no sign of Dwayne.
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Now the cowboy was really worried. This wasn't like Dwayne at all. So the next morning, he handed off his evidence,
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the knife sheath and the hat, to the police. And that same morning, Dwayne's friend Collier
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got a call from a detective with a request. They asked my boyfriend and I to come down to the police station to be interviewed.
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And they wanted to know more about what kind of person Duane was and what sort of relationship he had with Collier.
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Duane would come over a lot to my house. I'd make dinner for him once or twice a week.
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He got along really well with my boyfriend. Duane was a popular guy? He was very popular, yes.
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What was it about him? He was just a really fun-loving guy. He was jovial. He laughed at everything.
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He was very kind-hearted and thoughtful. He was a hard worker. And he really went out of his way for people that he cared about.
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He worked really hard so that he could take a few months off a year because he was a PADI instructor.
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So he liked to go to tropical destinations and teach scuba diving. So he worked as hard as he could to save up and then take a few months off.
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That sounds like kind of an ideal life for some people I know. Yeah, it was for him.
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He, I hear, had quite a crush on you. He did. But he wasn't ever forward or awkward about it.
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He always was respectful of my relationships, but he did have a crush on me. And so Kalia, like the cowboy, decided to pitch in to help.
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But rather than working alone, she pulled together a team of friends. And then we start trying to do our own detective work to put the pieces together.
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Sure. So what kinds of things did you do? We got flyers. We also had a friend who put up a billboard.
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We called all his friends. We were trying to lay all the puzzle pieces together to try to figure out what happened.
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Did quite a lot of work. It was, but you feel like you have to do something. Did you go over to the location of the limo company and look around there?
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We sure did, yes. What did you find there? Nothing. We were just looking to see if there was cameras, if we could see maybe there was a different angle, maybe just trying to find anything.
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Like I said, you're trying to be a detective. By using Dwayne's iPad, they found the spot where Dwayne's phone last pinged.
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about five miles from Revolution Limousine, along this highway that leads to Calgary,
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as if the phone had been tossed from a car. Of course, we're trying to drive to see if we can see maybe something.
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Maybe he's in, like, a drainage pipe or anything. We're just trying to look, you know.
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I mean, we don't really know what we're looking for. We're just trying to find anything.
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Did it seem to you that the police were doing that same kind of work or not? No, they were. They definitely were.
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But you just can't sit still. Understand, the cops were treating this seriously, but as a missing persons case.
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After all, Dwayne could resurface any time. Sure, it looked bad, but people do turn up, often.
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But by June 4th, 2015, four days in, the missing persons cops knew it was time to make a phone call.
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And they began to realize that probably something very bad had happened to Dwayne.
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Which is why they called in lead Edmonton homicide detective Brian Robertson and detective Rob Billaway.
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Based on the lack of signs of life with Dwayne Demke, it was obvious that harm had come to him.
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Mind you there was still no forensic evidence that Dwayne was dead still the detectives took it on the way they would a murder investigation and started from scratch They looked at that cell phone video shot by the bystander who saw
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the man running away from the parking garage after Dwayne's car exploded. As he was recording,
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he saw a guy running from the parking garage and he was looking back over his shoulder at the car
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that was on fire. Afraid of being detected, the passerby put his phone down by his side,
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but told detectives he saw the man. And he was carrying a license plate, and he kind of tucked
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around behind a garbage bin, and he took off his shirt, he wrapped up the license plate in the shirt
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he was wearing, and he started to walk away, and he essentially walked out of sight of where he was.
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Not suspicious behavior at all. Just a little bit, yeah. What made it even more strange is
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the timing of the day, his actions in plain view, it certainly didn't make any sense at all.
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So who was that guy? The video was just too fuzzy to tell. They brought the car in for forensic
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analysis. And right away they could see that guy, if he was the one who started the fire,
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was an amateur. Whoever started the fire really didn't know much about fires because
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they started the fire in the trunk of the car, but when they started the fire, they closed the trunk.
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And when they close the trunk, they eliminate all the oxygen, the fire goes out.
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So it really didn't get going sufficiently enough to do much damage to the car. Leaving most of the car and its contents intact.
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There were some documents with different individuals' names on them. Keys were in the ignition. The vehicle was running.
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And one more thing. Quite probably the very thing the arsonist wanted most of all to destroy.
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On the back seat, there was blood. Blood. Blood. Never a good sign when it turns up in the back seat of a missing man's car.
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If it was Dwayne Demke's blood, that is. Also, it was unclear how much blood was in there, without some more testing.
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Was it blood that said you'd had a nasty cut? Or blood that said you were dead? Anyway, detectives Billoway and Robertson spent their time
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combing through all the stuff the missing persons investigators had found inside Dwayne's car.
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They needed to sort out what was evidence and what was just... junk. It was quite a mess.
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There were some documents with different individuals' names on them. One of the names on a piece of paper in there was Angel Chalafu.
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So they gave Angel a call to see what information they could glean from her. Angel? Who is she?
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Well, as it turned out, Angel had already been questioned by the missing persons cops
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just the day before Robertson and Billaway were assigned the case. So they pulled up the video of her interview.
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to see what she had to say. Angel and Duane used to live common law. They were living together for about eight years.
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They ended their relationship, but they still maintained a very strong friendship.
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They spoke every day. They saw each other probably four to five times a week. They were just very good friends.
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In fact, said Angel, she saw so much of Duane, another guy in her life got jealous.
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She commented that she would not be surprised if her recent ex-boyfriend, a fellow by the name of Robert Aubrey Maxwell, might have something to do with this.
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He did not like Dwayne very much, and he was not really comfortable that his then-girlfriend, Angel, had such a close friendship with Dwayne, who was an ex-boyfriend.
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Well, that's a classic motivation, all right? Absolutely. And according to Angel, Dwayne told her this Robert Aubrey Maxwell fellow was bad news
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and wanted her to dump him. Dwayne said, Angel, get rid of him. I'm worried every time you're with him.
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Even my sisters were like, no, no, don't hang out with him. Get rid of him. Is there anyone else you think that would have a problem with Dwayne?
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No, we can't think of anybody. Can you describe Robert to me? Describe him. How's he?
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Tell me what he looks like. This is the point of the interview where Billoway and Robertson sat up in their seats.
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Because Angel went one better than a simple description of Robert. She pulled out her smartphone, showed them a video.
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He looks big. He looks like a big guy. Yeah, yeah. And then just dressed like that, like jeans.
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Is that a North Face coat? Is that his winter coat? Yes. Then Angel said this. His hat is a North Face.
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His hat is a North Face, she said. Just like the one the cowboy found outside Revolution Limousine where Dwayne worked.
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Well, if that hat was Robert's, then perhaps it could tie him directly to Dwayne's disappearance.
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Big if, of course. Lots of those caps ride around on the heads of Edmontonians on any given day.
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Still, that one hat was what they had. So they sent it out for DNA testing and waited.
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Don't hold your breath, said the lab. There just happened to be a backlog. Lots of cases vying for DNA attention.
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So don't expect to see results for weeks, at least. So we just have to sort of forge ahead with our investigation.
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Which meant bringing Angel back in for another round of questions So I know the police have already spoke to you This time Detective Billoway wanted to ask Angel did she recognize that guy in the cell phone video
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The one walking away from Dwayne Demke's burning car? It's a really short fit. I've probably looked at it a couple times.
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And I just want you to be clear on, if you recognize him, anyone as being anyone, you do.
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If you don't, that's just as important. Yeah. Okay. Oh, wow. God, I hope not. But would I pin that as him if I was walking down the street and think, hey, Robert?
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Yeah, I would probably do that. Okay. Yeah. On a scale of one to ten, how? Well, an eight.
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You're an eight? Yeah. Now the hunt was on for Robert Aubrey Maxwell. The problem was, Aubrey Maxwell, like Dwayne Demke, was missing too, without much to tell
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what happened. Except this dark security video recorded just hours before Dwayne's car exploded.
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Six days after Dwayne Demke vanished from his happy life in Edmonton, Detectives Billaway and Robertson were now searching for two missing persons.
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One, a possible victim. The other, Robert Aubrey Maxwell, a possible suspect. We were looking for him solved. Like, he was... he became the only guy that we were looking for.
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They didn't expect it to be easy. They had no idea. They started their Aubrey Maxwell phase of the investigation in the very same place where Cowboy started his.
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is, Revolution Limousine. That's the spot where, in a planter outside the front door,
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a cowboy found the knife sheath in the North Face hat. If there was a sheath, there had to be a knife.
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So was that around here somewhere nearby, too? We looked everywhere. There was absolutely nothing.
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We were behind the ball a bit because we're six days into the investigation, so it makes sense
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that we wouldn't have found anything. but I guess you have to try. Then they went looking for video.
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Surveillance video. Aren't those cameras everywhere now? Well, no. Outside, there was a grand total of one security camera
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attached to an adjoining building peering out over the parking lot. But there were hitches.
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For one thing, it wasn't recording all the time. It was motion activated. on the roof at the back of the industrial building.
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It's a black and white, and it's a really grainy video. Still, they went through it, squinting at every frame.
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And maybe they had something here? Maybe. At about 11.10 in the evening, the video turns on
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because what looks like a male figure walks through the screen and then off the screen out of camera range.
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Three or four minutes later, what's likely the same male returns on screen and walks past through again.
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And he goes to a dumpster, large industrial dumpster that's at the rear of a Revolution limousine.
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He opens the lid to the dumpster and he crawls inside and he closes the lid. What?
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And then on two occasions after that, the camera activated because the lid of the dumpster raised up about six inches and then closed again.
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And then a little while later raised up like someone was looking. You couldn't see the person, but like someone was peering out and then closed again.
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My, my, my. So one grainy camera outside where somebody seemed intent on some sort of weird surveillance.
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and two cameras inside Revolution Limo's garage, quality a bit better. So we were able to determine that at 2.50 a.m.,
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Dwayne was able to drive the limousine into the loading bay. We could see the loading bay. We could see him walking around.
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He cleaned up the limousine as he did every night. And we were able to tell that at 4 in the morning,
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He punches in the code to set the security system. And he walks out the door. After Dwayne walked out that door,
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Billoway and Robertson expected to see some sort of assault take place on that grainy motion-sensitive camera overlooking the parking lot.
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But for some reason, it didn't activate. And that's the gut punch. Our only thought was that that night, shortly before 4 o'clock in the morning,
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a significant thunderstorm rolled through that area, probably knocked the power out in that area for a short period of time,
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and the camera went offline. So detectives were left with just this one final shot of Dwayne Demke walking out the door.
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And that is the last time that Dwayne has ever seen. Mind you, soon thereafter, the same could be said
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of the number one suspect, Robert Aubrey Maxwell. Not that he ever made it easy to be seen,
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even to his friends. It was a bit of an enigma. We knew nothing really about him recently.
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No one knew where he lived. He would never talk about where he lived. He grew up. No one knew what kind of family he had, if he had any brothers or sisters.
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No one knew anything about him. He's self-employed. He has a glass business. We go to the business address, and that turns out to be a storage facility.
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It's really unusual, isn't it? Very unusual, especially for Angel, who had known him for about a year and a half at that point,
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maybe two years, to know nothing about him. But nobody did. He has no online social media presence.
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He has no Facebook. We talked to some acquaintances of his. Nobody has been to his home. They don't know where he lives.
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He's a ghost, this guy. He certainly is a ghost. But he really did exist. They found all sorts of public records proving that.
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We were finding pieces of evidence all along the way. video evidence, cell phone evidence, everything that continued to tell us that we're going in
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the right direction and we're looking at the right person. And we've got pictures of Robert
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Aubrey Maxwell. He's got a legitimate legal driver's license with a photo. He's got a Canadian
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passport with a photo. He's got a social insurance number. We know who this guy is.
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And he was discovered on security camera video recorded around Calgary shortly after the car
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fire. His picture keeps showing up on this escape route basically everywhere he goes. We've got him
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on hotel cameras, we've got him all these places. And then the trail ran out. No idea where he went.
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So back to the other question. What kind of person was he? In a word, creepy. He just gave me the
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heebie-jeebies. There was just something off about him. Kalia knew Aubrey Maxwell. He, along with
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Angel and Cowboy were all part of a bigger circle of friends. And the first birthday dinner that we
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went to where he attended, we were in a private room. It was a nice birthday dinner and he's on
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his phone watching videos and I put your phone away. It's really rude. And he's watching videos
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of people get into car accidents and die. Yeah. He was an odd guy is how he was described. He
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He had previously lived with a couple people. They never got along whatsoever. The people that he lived with were even somewhat fearful of him.
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Maybe for good reason. Here's what the roommates found when they searched his old bedroom after he moved out.
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They found a large knife sheath and knife. And the similarity is the knife sheath that was found behind Revolution Limo was called a Gerber Jr.
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And the knife that was found in his apartment suite was called a Gerber Sr. So it was the same knife, but just quite a bit larger.
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It wasn't a knife, actually, but a machete. This is the junior version of it. 12 inches long with a fine edge on one side of the blade and saw teeth on the other.
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A very lethal weapon. which is made clear to the detectives once lab tech sprayed a chemical that illuminated the blood inside Dwayne Demkew's car.
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There was so much luminol or luminesce from the amount of blood in the car that you could pretty much see it from space.
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It just glowed. Wow. Enough blood that we were able to make a determination that whose ever blood that was likely did not survive.
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Which made this very much a murder case. But the killer, if killer he was, seemed several steps ahead of them.
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There one minute, gone the next, without a trace left behind. The forensic members had never seen a vehicle like that, that had been wiped that clean.
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There was no longer any question. The amount of blood found in Dwayne Demke's car came from wounds that were clearly fatal.
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Was it Dwayne's blood? Almost certainly. But like the detectives, Dwayne's family and friends could only wait for the DNA to confirm it.
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An awful grief-colored limbo. Did you think that there was any chance he was still alive?
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We hoped, but there was so much blood in the back of the car. What did that feel like to lose, Dwayne?
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Devastating. I was heartbroken, and it was just tough. I've never lost anybody like that before.
00:28:59
Yeah. I mean, I hope I never will, and I hope nobody else has to go through that,
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but, I mean, and you never think it's going to be the last time you see somebody.
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The detectives, meanwhile, were concentrating on the elusive Robert Aubrey Maxwell
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and found, through a records search, he'd once been arrested on an assault charge,
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an offense serious enough to have his DNA entered into the National Criminal Registry.
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A surprise, perhaps, but also a lucky break, because now all the detectives had to do was wait on the DNA test results for the North Face Hat
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to tie Aubrey Maxwell to Revolution Limousine and whatever happened to Dwayne Demkew.
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So we were looking forward to lab results telling us whether we in fact found DNA on the hat,
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because there's no guarantee it's there. And if we do find DNA on the hat, we were certainly hopeful that it couldn come back to Robert Aubrey Maxwell As for finding him records showed he owned a white GMC pickup truck which vanished at the very same time he did
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So we put a flag on that vehicle, so if any law enforcement agency were to run that plate,
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I would get notified immediately if that vehicle was ever stopped or located or observed.
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And two weeks later, Detective Billoway got an alert. from a Vancouver Police Department member
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saying that he had located this vehicle. It was in the Kitsilano Beach parking lot.
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Aubrey Maxwell, it appeared, had driven as far west as possible before he simply ran out of road.
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Based on the parking ticket stacked up on the windshield, police figured the truck had been there for three days.
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And it might as well have had an embossed invitation along with those parking tickets.
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Steal me, please. The passenger window was partially down. The keys were in the ignition.
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There was a brand new cell phone in a drink container. All of us, including the Vancouver police members,
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couldn't believe that it didn't get stolen on the very first day. Maybe because, to a potential thief, the truck looked staged.
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Almost like a setup. It was so obvious that someone wanted that truck stolen that the suspects would have thought it would have been a bait truck
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and they wouldn't have taken it. Obviously, that was the intent. Clearly. Robert didn't want to be found.
00:31:25
He wanted somebody else to take that truck, take the heat off. 100%. He wanted someone to take that truck, drive it, contaminate it,
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get it full of any kind of other evidence or whatever whoever steals a truck brings into it.
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And now the detectives had what surely must be a truckload of evidence to examine.
00:31:47
We want to search for fingerprints. We want to go through it with a fine-tooth comb, if you will, and just see what evidence we can glean from it.
00:31:55
What did you find? Well, we found that whoever had used it last had completely wiped it down.
00:32:04
The forensic members had never seen a vehicle like that that had been wiped that clean.
00:32:08
Even in between the door panels, everywhere you could think of was wiped down. As was the cell phone found inside the cab.
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Who was this guy? Who would think of prepping a vehicle to be both stolen by thieves and discovered by the police?
00:32:27
Besides the cell phone, the CSI team found only three items of note, all in the truck bed.
00:32:32
A small boat trailer, a plastic fork, and a chewed piece of gum. Almost like the driver of the vehicle threw a gum out the window and the wind blew it back into the box of the truck.
00:32:45
Came back in. Right. Now, what's not lost on us is this is a very common pedestrian area in that parking lot.
00:32:51
And someone could have walked past that truck and thrown a piece of gum in themselves.
00:32:55
Like someone apparently did with the plastic fork. Still, the detectives dutifully sent the fork and the gum out for DNA testing, just in case.
00:33:04
Weren't sure what was going to come of it, but the truck was so clean and there was a lack of evidence that at this point we were looking for anything.
00:33:13
Well, they waited for the lab analysis to come in. The detectives ran their registration on that small boat trailer found in the truck bed,
00:33:21
expecting it would come back in Aubrey Maxwell's name. But it did not. It was registered to someone else altogether.
00:33:30
Someone who lived in a Vancouver suburb. And we reached out to that registered owner and interviewed them.
00:33:37
What did they tell you? They said that a fellow with a white truck with Alberta license plates answered their ad for a jet ski for sale.
00:33:47
The mail that they described matched the description of Robert Aubrey Maxwell. He tried to include a cell phone in the purchase.
00:33:57
They said they just wanted cash. So ultimately, he just paid them cash for the boat.
00:34:01
And he only asked one question. And the question he asked was, how far will this jet ski go on a full tank of gas?
00:34:22
Where was he? Did Robert Aubrey Maxwell actually escape on that jet ski? I thought he was on an island in B.C.
00:34:30
With something like a sinking feeling, Detective Rob Billoway contemplated all those rainforests that rise up from the ocean off the British Columbia mainland.
00:34:40
Islands studded with thousands of often empty cottages, many within easy range of a jet ski full of gas.
00:34:49
I think you can live quite a while undetected on one of those islands. So we got a hold of Canada Coast Guard, and the inquiries we made were,
00:34:56
is there any abandoned or lost jet ski that's been found anywhere that has come to their attention?
00:35:03
And they had no reports of any of that stuff. But then, lead detective Brian Robertson never did think their suspect was hiding out on some island out there.
00:35:13
The first thing I thought of was that he put that jet ski in the water, and he drove it around the coastline to Point Roberts, Washington.
00:35:22
Point Roberts, Washington is a tiny peninsula just south of Vancouver, but as a result of a long-ago border treaty,
00:35:30
this sliver of land is part of the United States, not Canada. From here on Point Roberts, it seems pretty clear what he might have done with a jet ski.
00:35:40
You see that slip of land out there, that's the ferry terminal, the southernmost piece of Canada heading out into the strait.
00:35:47
A jet ski could go around that ferry terminal come back into the land just behind those pillars there and be in America without anybody being any the wiser You can totally get to the mainland U undetected and not have to go through U customs again
00:36:06
Wow, that was an interesting route. What else would that tell you about this guy?
00:36:10
Well, that told us that I don't think he's going to go somewhere that he's not familiar with.
00:36:15
He's going to go somewhere where he's comfortable. A reasonable idea, except detectives Billoway and Robertson
00:36:22
could find nothing connecting Robert Aubrey Maxwell to the United States. No U.S. relatives or friends or girlfriends.
00:36:30
Nobody, as far as they could determine. It sounds like that hit a dead end. A dead end for sure.
00:36:37
There was absolutely nothing to indicate that Robert Aubrey Maxwell had any history with the United States whatsoever.
00:36:45
Still, just to be sure, they searched the entire shoreline of Little Point Roberts.
00:36:50
No sign of an errant jet ski there. So the detectives moved their search back north along the Canadian shoreline
00:36:58
and ran the jet ski's registration number through a national database for stolen cars and boats.
00:37:06
And it identified that that jet ski had been seized a few days earlier by the Delta Police Department.
00:37:13
Delta Police Department in Canada? In Canada. It had been found washed up against the Tawassan Causeway to the ferry terminal.
00:37:24
And that causeway is basically the last piece of land that butts out into the ocean before you get to Point Roberts.
00:37:34
So maybe he dumped the jet ski just short of the border and swam the rest of the way?
00:37:40
Or maybe the current pulled it back into Canada. Whatever. But they didn't know this. He was in the U.S., and they were on the right trail after all.
00:37:52
We know that he rode this jet ski at least 13 nautical miles. I don't know who comes up with an idea like that, but somebody who desperately wants to escape, I guess.
00:38:02
We kind of laughed at each other, Rob and I, and said, I almost feel like we're chasing James Bond here. This doesn't even make sense.
00:38:08
But if Aubrey Maxwell had really sneaked into the United States illegally, he could be anywhere.
00:38:14
Once again, his trail had gone cold. And then, two and a half months after the car fire,
00:38:21
six weeks after that jet ski was found, the first DNA results came in. Oddly, they were the last ones submitted and the least likely to be helpful.
00:38:31
The ones for the plastic fork and the chewing gum somebody had thrown into the bed of the white pickup truck in Kitsilano.
00:38:38
The fork came back clean. Nothing there. But the lab techs were able to extract a usable DNA sample from the gum.
00:38:47
We weren't really holding our breath on what that DNA might come back as, but it was certainly of interest to us.
00:38:53
Well, the DNA came back, and it was identified as unknown male 1 in our file. Meaning it did not match Robert Aubrey Maxwell's DNA on file from that earlier assault charge,
00:39:07
nor did it match anyone else in the national DNA database. So the gum must have been tossed into the bed of the truck
00:39:16
by an innocent passerby, just like they suspected. The North Face cap, though, that was the big one.
00:39:23
That DNA could lock up the case. I think collectively our whole investigative team
00:39:29
was waiting for this DNA to come back. And the lab results for that sample came in four days later.
00:39:35
It was certain to be a match to Aubrey Maxwell. Just had to be. But it was not. It was the unknown guy who chucked the chewing gum into the truck.
00:39:49
We recognized when we got the second matching unknown male DNA that we had a problem.
00:39:56
And it was a big problem. Big problem, yeah. We need to understand this DNA before we continue pursuing Robert Aubrey Maxwell.
00:40:06
And suddenly, nothing made sense at all. We were going down a path where we believed Robert Aubrey Maxwell was our suspect,
00:40:15
and getting that hit on that DNA, we're back at square one. Either Robert Aubrey Maxwell wasn't our guy, Robert Aubrey Maxwell had an accomplice,
00:40:24
Robert Armory Maxwell is our guy and we've got to figure out how is he our guy because if the unknown chewing gum guy
00:40:34
was also the North Face hat guy then he was almost certainly the guy who killed Dwayne Demke
00:40:40
but who was he? Who was he? Who was Dwayne Demkew's killer? Who was this unknown male one?
00:41:07
It was confusing. We were really on a linear path towards Aubrey Maxwell, and we were finding pieces
00:41:14
of evidence all along the way, video evidence, cell phone evidence, everything that continued to
00:41:20
tell us that we're going in the right direction and we're looking at the right person. And now we
00:41:24
have this fly in the ointment, this unknown male one DNA that we can't establish.
00:41:29
The logical conclusion was that Aubrey Maxwell had an accomplice. And that this is this guy's DNA
00:41:36
so we're still driving towards Aubrey Maxwell because the first question we want to ask
00:41:40
him is, who was with you? Yeah, so maybe there were two guys in that jet ski leaving
00:41:44
the country. Entirely possible, right? Except, all the surveillance photos of Aubrey Maxwell taken in Calgary shortly after the car fire
00:41:52
showed him alone. So when in doubt call all about Robertson and Billoway gathered the rest of the homicide unit together to get their take on it
00:42:06
Maybe fresh eyes would see something. What were they missing? In this particular case, Brian was doing what Brian typically does, which is tell stories.
00:42:15
This is Detective Kurt Martin. Basically, I'm listening to their story and I'm thinking about what they're actually telling me.
00:42:21
They talked about the DNA evidence. I said, Kurt, is there any other way this DNA can happen?
00:42:29
We should be getting it from Aubrey Maxwell because he's a real person. He's got real ID, everything else. We know who he is.
00:42:36
Kurt looks up from his desk and he says, How do we actually know that Robert Aubrey Maxwell is actually Robert Aubrey Maxwell?
00:42:41
As soon as he said that, it's like, of course. You're right. You know, it's one of those, you're so busy in the investigation
00:42:51
that sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees and you need someone on the outside who really is not wrapped up in it.
00:42:58
And just like that, the whole investigation turned on a dime. What if they'd been chasing the wrong guy all along?
00:43:07
Or maybe the right guy, but the wrong name? Up to now, detectives had held off contacting Aubrey Maxwell's family for good reason.
00:43:17
We didn't want to alert the family that the police were looking for him until we got to the point where, holy cow, is this even Robert Aubrey Maxwell that we're dealing with?
00:43:28
So Brian was able to speak to Robert Aubrey Maxwell's family. I reached out to a woman that I had found in Ontario, and it turns out she's Aubrey Maxwell's grandmother and raised him as a kid.
00:43:44
And so she says, I haven't talked to him since 2012. He left Ontario and he went to Vancouver.
00:43:50
And he was living on the street in Vancouver. He's got a drug problem. He wasn't doing all that well in Vancouver.
00:43:57
So the detectives went back to their counterparts in Vancouver to see if they had any contact with Aubrey Maxwell.
00:44:05
Not as a criminal per se, but as a drug user. And they certainly did. Enclosed within this rich and extraordinarily beautiful city
00:44:16
are a dozen square blocks of misery called the downtown Eastside. Here, in this land of lost souls,
00:44:25
Aubrey Maxwell became known as a frequent flyer, an addict and street dweller who bumped into the law all the time.
00:44:34
Robert Aubrey Maxwell was well known to police. Every city he goes to, he's well known to police.
00:44:40
He's always dealt with in Ontario. He was always dealt with in B.C. Everywhere he went and very frequently.
00:44:46
For what reasons? He was a drug user. He was homeless. When he moved from Ontario to B.C., he was living on the street.
00:44:55
He was dealt with by police at least every week. So you can almost follow his movements that way.
00:45:05
Here in this sad place, he bounced from street to street, shelter to shelter, surviving, if only just.
00:45:14
And in September of 2012, all of that ended. He was no longer staying in shelters in Vancouver.
00:45:23
We were able to track down where he had stayed last. We have the last date he was there.
00:45:28
We were able to determine the last time he was ever dealt with by police. We were able to determine the last time his grandma spoke to him on the phone.
00:45:35
So our timeline of when Robert Aubrey Maxwell was last seen alive was pretty tight, and he was seen alive by a lot of people.
00:45:44
And all of that ends, he's never dealt with by police again, and his family never hears from him again, and he never shows up at another shelter in Vancouver.
00:45:53
In February 2013, more than two years before Dwayne Demke was murdered, Aubrey Maxwell's
00:46:01
grandmother reported him missing to the Vancouver Police Department. So the police found the rooming house that he'd been staying in.
00:46:09
In fact, in that rooming house, they said he's no longer here, he hasn't been here for
00:46:13
a while, but when he was here last, he cashed a check from a company in Edmonton called
00:46:19
called architectural glass. Well, well, well. And that's the last time we saw him.
00:46:23
So Vancouver Police Missing Persons investigators contacted architectural glass and said,
00:46:31
your grandmother's reported you missing. She hasn't heard from you in a few weeks.
00:46:34
She wants to know how are you doing, that kind of thing. He says, I'm fine. I'm living and working in Edmonton.
00:46:41
I don't want anything to do with anybody in my family. That's why I'm here. I've cut ties with them.
00:46:47
I don't want to be considered missing. So don't consider me missing. I'm just not contacting my family.
00:46:54
They canceled their missing persons file. They contacted the grandmother and they said, we found him.
00:47:00
He's in Edmonton. He's fine. He says he doesn't want to have anything to do with his family.
00:47:04
And that's it. And so she accepted that. And that's where it ended. The search stops.
00:47:11
And unfortunately, he's not listed as missing any longer. Now, more than two years after he was reported missing,
00:47:18
the detectives hoping to sort out who's who, sent Aubrey Maxwell's grandmother his most recent driver's license photo.
00:47:27
She looks at it and she immediately says, that's not my grandson. I've never seen him before.
00:47:33
To be double sure, Robertson checked with police in Aubrey Maxwell's boyhood hometown
00:47:37
to see if they had an old booking photo by chance from one of his drug arrests. And they did.
00:47:45
This one. this guy was clearly not the Robert Aubrey Maxwell Edmonton detectives had been chasing all
00:47:53
these months we know why unknown male one DNA is not coming back to Robert Aubrey Maxwell, because it's not Robert Aubrey Maxwell.
00:48:04
And we're also immediately of a strong opinion that this person, when he took Robert Aubrey Maxwell's identity, likely killed him.
00:48:17
Because Aubrey Maxwell comes to the attention of police far too often to not come to the attention of the police for three years on the Lower East Side in Vancouver.
00:48:27
So now we believe that we have two homicides that we're investigating. Two murders. One unknown killer.
00:48:51
They were just about stymied. Why would anyone decide to kill sweet, fun-loving Dwayne Dempsey, friend to everyone?
00:49:00
It was puzzle enough. And then dump his body God knows where? But this unknown puzzle within a puzzle,
00:49:09
who was unknown male one if not Aubrey Maxwell? The next phone call to Dwayne's family was not an easy one to make.
00:49:19
Dwayne's brother, Darren. They called and said, we have a problem. The DNA came back. Oh, okay, great. It's not him.
00:49:28
What? What do you mean it's not him? It's not his DNA. Somebody else's. We don't know who, but it's somebody else's.
00:49:37
What did that do to you? Deflates you. It deflated everybody, I think, at that point.
00:49:41
Dwayne's friend, Kalia. It was like a movie. It was crazy. It was like a movie. Not only was there finding out that he had murdered our friend,
00:49:50
but then finding out that he wasn't even the same person that you thought that he was.
00:49:54
And then you kind of wonder what life he was leading before. Is there other people that he's done this to?
00:50:00
Though now the detectives were pretty sure they had two murders to solve and no suspects.
00:50:07
The only evidence of any use? Just a couple of DNA samples from someone they knew only as unknown male one.
00:50:15
How do you look for a person when you don't know who they are? nothing to do but go back to square one. We poured back over Angel's previous interviews
00:50:26
that she had done and on one of the interviews we typically would ask her any sort of backstory
00:50:32
that her boyfriend Robert had given her about his previous life and she remembered that he had made
00:50:40
mention that he had been in Washington state for a short period of time before coming to Vancouver
00:50:47
And that resonated with us, obviously, because we believed that he took the jet ski to Point Roberts.
00:50:53
And that's a direct route to Washington State. So I contacted a friend of mine who now works for our motor vehicle branch.
00:50:59
And so I requested that he send a photograph of Aubrey Maxwell, the driver's license photo, to Washington State DMV and have them run it through their facial recognition software.
00:51:11
The photo recognition request was really just a giant fishing expedition. What Detective Robinson really wanted to do was run that mystery DNA profile through the U.S. database known as CODIS,
00:51:26
which the FBI agreed to do. But there was a catch, a true Catch-22. The FBI said we have to have a name.
00:51:34
We just can't sort of put an unnamed DNA to them. That doesn't meet their criteria.
00:51:39
But a name, of course, was what Robertson was hoping the FBI could give him. So now it seemed the entire investigation was riding on the Washington State DMV facial recognition search.
00:51:53
Maybe they would come up with a name. And surprise, surprise, three months into the investigation, on September 3, 2015, the homicide unit finally caught a break.
00:52:08
Maybe. Washington DMV representative called him back and said, we have a possible recognition on our computer for your driver's license photo.
00:52:21
As soon as that happened, they electronically sent us a series of photographs that the computer kicks out of their system and says,
00:52:29
somewhere in here is the closest recognition to the photograph that you sent us.
00:52:35
There were 25 photos in all, each given a probability rating on a scale of 0 to 1.
00:52:42
And one of them, this one, which looked a lot like the guy in their surveillance videos,
00:52:47
on the computer it scored a perfect 1. And that person was identified in their system as Jason Stedman.
00:52:56
Jason Stedman? Well, might be the right name, might not be the right name, but this was the important thing.
00:53:03
I can now have our forensic investigators send the DNA results to the FBI. And within a few days, it comes back as Jason Stedman.
00:53:15
So now we know who the pitcher in the driver's license is. He's Jason Stedman. We know whose DNA is in the hat.
00:53:23
It's Jason Stedman. And we know whose DNA is on the gum in Aubrey Maxwell's truck.
00:53:29
It's Jason Stedman. Except, maybe he wasn't really Jason Stedman either. Three months into their pursuit of Dwayne Demke's killer,
00:53:53
Detectives Robertson and Billoway learned the man they were chasing was wanted in two countries had at least three identities and different looks from one photo to the next They learned their prey under another name altogether
00:54:08
Did time in Florida during the 90s for burglary, grand theft and arson. We learned that Jason Stedman has a family in Washington state.
00:54:18
He has an ex-wife named Jennifer and a young daughter. When we met, his legal name was Jason and that was it.
00:54:25
he got his legal name changed. Why? So his driver's license said Jason, and his last name was blank.
00:54:33
And I asked him about it, and he said he didn't have a relationship with his parents or his family,
00:54:40
and he didn't want anything to do with them, so he legally changed his name to get rid of his birth name.
00:54:47
At least that's the story he told Jennifer Stedman, who Jason met in February 2008
00:54:53
2008 through a single social club. And we hit it off and that's where it started. What were your
00:54:59
first impressions of the guy? First impressions, he was good looking. He was a charmer. Very polite,
00:55:07
very chivalrous, opening doors, offering to like just wane on me hand and foot. You know what every
00:55:13
woman's dream is. Jennifer, of course, had no idea her dream man was a convicted felon. All she knew
00:55:22
Is it when Jason started talking about settling down and getting married and having a family?
00:55:28
She was all in. He was always like, okay, when do you want to start planning having kids?
00:55:34
You know, we should start buying all the baby stuff now so we don't have a big expense in the end.
00:55:39
So he'd randomly start picking up things like a stroller, a car seat, a crib. Before I even got pregnant, he started buying all those little things here and there.
00:55:48
And I thought he was the guy that I'd spend the rest of my life with. You were happy about that.
00:55:55
Yeah, it was all good. It was like he wanted to give me the world and treat me like a queen.
00:56:01
Jennifer was three months pregnant when she and Jason married in Las Vegas on New Year's Day 2009.
00:56:09
And that's when Jason took Jennifer's last name, becoming Jason Stedman. Six months later, they had a baby girl,
00:56:18
and as if by sleight of hand, the once convicted arsonist morphed into a middle-class dad.
00:56:25
He had a wife, a baby, a nice apartment, was making good money as a union delivery driver.
00:56:33
But for some reason, he was no longer treating Jennifer like royalty. And he would go off and hang out with his friends and his girlfriend,
00:56:41
come back like at the end of the day. If I questioned him, he would start slapping me and getting physical.
00:56:46
I think when my daughter was about two months old, we were fighting. And I remember he put his hands around my neck and choked me and said, if you ever take my daughter away from me, I will kill you.
00:56:58
Jennifer was desperate to be out of the marriage, but was afraid to leave Jason.
00:57:03
Afraid of what he might do to her and their daughter. And then on the day before Thanksgiving 2009, just as they sat down for dinner.
00:57:14
That's when all hell break loose. It started with a pounding on the apartment's front door.
00:57:23
I looked out the peephole and all I could see was a bright light. So I was thinking, oh, it was the fire department.
00:57:29
Someone set off a smoke alarm. Opened the door to find 20 plus FBI agents, guns in my face.
00:57:36
battering rams at the door ready to be used, ripping my house apart, interrogating him in different rooms,
00:57:42
me in different rooms. It made the news. Eight black SUVs pull into our street and then park,
00:57:50
and then two police cars block off both sides of the street. And they were all wearing FBI shirts
00:57:55
with their badges and bulletproof vests, and they were carrying a battering ram.
00:57:59
Jason, much heavier at the time, was arrested. And that's when Jennifer learned to her considerable surprise that he had been fired from his delivery job two months earlier
00:58:11
and he didn't take it well and then that's when he decided to for lack of a better term
00:58:18
teach his boss a lesson it started with simple things of flooding the bathrooms and then it
00:58:26
turned into mailing threatening death threats with white powder in them to his employer's
00:58:35
headquarters with the Seattle Times. And I guess he had also been making pipe bombs and planting
00:58:40
them in newspaper boxes. Did you have any idea any of this stuff was going on? I had no idea.
00:58:46
And then they ended up arresting him and charging him with homeland terrorism. The pipe bombs were dummies, and the white powder nothing more than cornstarch.
00:58:57
Still, in September 2010, Jason pleaded guilty to one count of sending threatening hoax letters,
00:59:04
and one count of committing a pipe bomb hoax. And as part of the deal, was given a two-year sentence.
00:59:11
And I was able to divorce him while he was in jail, and get away from him and start over.
00:59:15
So that's kind of the blessing because he was removed from my life before it got worse.
00:59:21
And it did get worse because Stedman was released on probation after serving less than a year.
00:59:28
And what did he do then? He started phoning Jennifer about wanting to see their daughter.
00:59:35
And demanding unsupervised visits with her whenever he wanted. So I started getting that red flag pit in your gut feeling again.
00:59:45
So I went down to the court and filed a restraining order against him. He evaded it.
00:59:50
Every time they came to serve him, he evaded it. They'd leave business cards, he would evade it.
00:59:54
He was taking some college classes at the time They go to the college he evade them And then finally we had worked out a plan with the sheriff office to meet him at his next meeting with his parole officer
01:00:10
Everything was set. He didn't show for his meeting. They went to his apartment, found out he had completely moved out.
01:00:16
He was gone. The U.S. Marshals Service started hunting for Jason and learned pretty quickly he'd been looking into buying one-way bus tickets.
01:00:28
For him and a child. And a child. Mm-hmm. Which, once they told me that, I was like,
01:00:34
okay, well, this goes back to his threat of if I ever tried to take her, he was going to kill me and take my daughter.
01:00:40
So this was serious. It's the serious you can get. I'd have a detective meet me in the parking lot when I got to work,
01:00:46
walk me inside my job, one of the company's security guards with me the entire eight-hour shift while I'm at work,
01:00:53
even walking with me to the restroom. My Lord. And then when I clocked out, they would walk me to the front door where the detective would meet me and walk me to my car.
01:01:01
So you had to be pretty darn sure that he actually was out of the territory. Yeah. I lived my life in terror. I was constantly looking over my shoulders,
01:01:11
sleeping with one eye open, extra locks on the front door. I put little motion sensor alarms
01:01:18
on all the windows in case he tried to break in. I was living in terror. And then Jason just disappeared.
01:01:29
And very gradually, bit by bit, Jennifer let down her guard. Even though no one, it seemed,
01:01:39
had any idea where he was or what he might try to do next. It was August 2012 when Jason Stedman vanished from his ex-wife Jennifer's life.
01:02:04
Neither she nor the police nor the marshal's service had any idea where he was. They did issue an arrest warrant declaring he was a flight risk and a danger to the community.
01:02:15
As far as Jennifer was concerned, it was good riddance. Hope he stays gone. But what none of them knew was that by the time the arrest warrant was issued,
01:02:24
Jason was already in Canada. And at some point came here, to the downtown east side of Vancouver,
01:02:33
where the real Robert Aubrey Maxwell was living in a shelter, and from there phoned his grandmother for the final time on September 6, 2012.
01:02:43
Six days later, Jason, using Robert's birth certificate, applied for a government photo ID card.
01:02:51
And just like that, both the real Aubrey Maxwell and the real Jason Stedman ceased to exist.
01:03:00
Through the course of the investigation, we came to believe that he had in fact killed Robert Aubrey Maxwell
01:03:07
so he could assume his identity. And that way, he was able to get photo ID in BC,
01:03:14
which he then used to get photo ID in Alberta. He was able to get a social insurance number.
01:03:19
He was able to get a passport. He was able to get a job where he could get paid under the name Robert Aubrey Maxwell.
01:03:25
And in his mind, he could do this. And the only way he could do it is he knew the real Robert Aubrey Maxwell was dead.
01:03:33
By posing as Robert Aubrey Maxwell, Jason Stedman built a kind of life in Edmonton
01:03:41
as a one-man glass business. He dated Angel Chalifu, maybe murdered Dwayne Demke and torched his car,
01:03:51
and then quite possibly shed his Aubrey Maxwell identity like an old coat. But who was Jason now?
01:03:59
And where was Jason now? Was he back in Washington? Jason's Canadian girlfriend, Angel, told the detective she thought Jason had gone anywhere
01:04:09
but the United States. He was always saying how worried the states, he wouldn't go back to the states.
01:04:16
He can speak Spanish. He could easily go to Mexico. Months passed with no sign of Jason anywhere in the United States.
01:04:27
It seemed likely he had indeed gone to Mexico or somewhere else. All this time, Jennifer Stettman was totally unaware.
01:04:36
She had no idea where Jason went when he fled Washington three years earlier and had no idea that he was once again on the run,
01:04:44
that he was wanted in Canada from murder. So she was not prepared when her mother called her in early November 2015.
01:04:54
The terrifying news. She says, guess who was just here? I said, who? She's like, your ex-husband.
01:05:03
he was just here at my house. Tell me what that was like to hear. It was petrifying
01:05:10
because I knew he had been gone for two, three years. Out of the blue, he shows up.
01:05:16
And with the threats he had made to take my daughter, that whole panic terror came back.
01:05:23
In full force, because Jennifer's daughter, then six years old, was right there at her grandmother's house.
01:05:30
and Jason had seen her, talked to her. And he asked, do you know who I am? And she says no.
01:05:37
He told her that he was her dad. He showed up at the door. Yeah. And he was there.
01:05:43
He was talking to your daughter who you tried so hard to protect. Yeah. What was that moment like for you?
01:05:50
It was like sheer and utter terror. I didn think I could get home fast enough from work before he took her in my mind he was there to take her and there was no way I was going to get home fast enough to save her I drove as fast as I can down a windy
01:06:07
narrow road from my work. It was just like the life flashed before my eyes. Like I need to save
01:06:13
her. I need to save her. He's going to take her. He's going to take her. And my mom can't stop him.
01:06:18
She's just a little girl. She wouldn't know how to resist. It was terror because I felt like my daughter was slipping through my fingers
01:06:25
if I couldn't go home fast enough to save her. Because all I know was he was there to take her from me.
01:06:33
I made that eight-minute drive, I think, in under five minutes. By the time Jennifer got to her mother's house, Jason had left alone without her daughter.
01:06:43
How did it feel to see her there? It was very relieving. It was like panic meets relief.
01:06:49
but I was still panicked at the same time. I couldn't turn the panic off but I was relieved that she was still there.
01:06:55
But yeah, I swooped her up, took her to the safest place I could think of in the quickest amount of time.
01:07:01
But they were by no means safe. Jason was still out there somewhere and had just shown he knew how to find them.
01:07:09
I got the U.S. Marshals on speed dial. They're like, no, we will be out there in less than five minutes.
01:07:14
We will contact the sheriff. They scoured the town, couldn't find them. In the meantime, I was afraid to go home, and I didn't know where else to go.
01:07:24
As he had so many times before, Jason had vanished, only to reappear three days later at the one spot where no one ever expected to find him.
01:07:47
Six months they'd been chasing him, chased down his fake ID, to his possible second murder,
01:07:58
to a sneaked border crossing, to what and where Robertson and Billoway did not know.
01:08:06
Six months, and the trail was colder than ever. Jason Stedman, now south of the border and beyond their jurisdiction, was gone.
01:08:14
Probably for good. quite possibly to Mexico, for all they knew. And then, in mid-November 2015,
01:08:23
Brian Robertson got a phone call from a U.S. marshal in Seattle. And he says, you'll never believe who just walked in our door
01:08:32
and turned himself in on his warrant, Jason Stedman. Stedman, who had outsmarted U.S. marshals,
01:08:40
FBI agents, sheriff's deputies, and evaded capture in Canada by fleeing on a jet ski,
01:08:46
was now trying to pull off his greatest escape yet, ironically, by going back to prison.
01:08:53
When he skipped out on his probation three years earlier, a warrant was issued for his arrest as Jason Stedman.
01:09:02
So, if he gave himself up and served the few months remaining on his sentence, he'd be in the clear.
01:09:10
Well, the cops ran in circles looking for some guy named Robert Aubrey Maxwell. Did he have any idea that the cops in Canada were well aware of what he had done?
01:09:19
He had no idea. Our belief is that the only way to not be Robert Aubrey Maxwell is to be Jason Stedman again.
01:09:31
And to be Jason Stedman again, he has to clear up his warrant. Then I can walk out, Jason Stedman, a free man, no one's looking for me, and we're off on a new life again.
01:09:43
It wasn't until he was back in court for his resentencing that Jason learned his clever plan wasn't such a good idea after all.
01:09:52
Kevin Greer, the U.S. Marshal, stood up in court and he advised the judge that he was wanted in Canada
01:09:59
on first-degree murder warrants. And Kevin Greer said all Jason did was put his head down on the table
01:10:07
and shake his head. That was the moment he realized. That is when he knew that the gig was up in Canada, that he was wanted for murder.
01:10:16
Interesting case. I mean, here's a guy who clearly thought it out very carefully and probably thought he was being very smart about it, but done in by his own mistakes.
01:10:23
And that was what his problem was. He thought he was too smart for himself. He thought by leaving little pieces of evidence behind, such as the North Face ball cap and the knife sheath, he thought that that would solidify everyone thinking that Robert Aubrey Maxwell was the suspect.
01:10:44
Bears repeating. Both Billoway and Robertson think Stedman left his knife sheath
01:10:50
and North Face cap at Revolution Limousine on purpose to make sure his Aubrey Maxwell persona
01:10:57
was connected to Dwayne Demke's murder. And then Stedman would just go back to being his old self in Washington State
01:11:04
with no one the wiser. And his plan probably would have worked, except for one thing.
01:11:10
If Aubrey Maxwell's DNA had never been in the data bank, we would have just got an unknown male number one DNA.
01:11:19
We'd never be able to find Aubrey Maxwell to get his DNA to confirm it. Nor would we even think to.
01:11:29
Because this guy's got legitimate government ID, passport, which is one of the hardest IDs to get.
01:11:36
He's got all of that. So we'd probably be sitting here right now with a warrant out for Robert Aubrey Maxwell for murder and not know where he is, if not for the fact that Aubrey Maxwell's DNA was in the databank.
01:11:53
That's what turned the case. At the end, that's what was his undoing. So Five months later, just after the long winter thaw, somewhere on the vast prairie between Edmonton and Calgary, a farmer was out walking the land with his dog.
01:12:11
And his dog came across skeletal remains on the roadside of the ditch. And when the medical examiner examined the skeletal remains, the DNA came back to Dwayne Debke.
01:12:27
Carefully hidden or just tossed out of the truck? I think just dumped in the ditch.
01:12:32
And Dwayne's family finally had to let go of whatever sliver of hope was left. Though, said his brother Darren,
01:12:40
Myself, I felt a sense of relief. They found him. But Dwayne's friend, Kaya, found no comfort in that.
01:12:50
Because now you know he's 100% dead. And there was no hope left. Six months later, in September 2016, Jason Stedman was turned over to Canadian authorities,
01:13:05
where he met with a string of detectives. There's some things that you need to explain.
01:13:11
You're wearing what appears to be a North Face bald cap and North Face jacket. But during the hours of questioning, Stedman said only this.
01:13:22
I can't discuss anything with you if I want to speak with my attorney. It was almost like a robot springing to life and then shutting down again.
01:13:32
It would take nearly three years of pretrial delays before Dwayne Demkew's friends and family would finally get a chance to find out why.
01:13:43
Why did Jason Stedman kill Dwayne Demkew? When Jason Steadman was extradited back to Canada,
01:14:04
detectives, of course, had a lot of questions they were hoping he would answer. Questions about the murder of Duane Demke.
01:14:11
I would like you to provide an explanation why your DNA was recovered from a North Face ball cap
01:14:15
found in a planter box at the rear of Revolution Limousine, the same location where Duane Demke was last seen alive.
01:14:23
Do you want to answer that question? He did not. Stedman refused to answer any questions about Dwayne Dempke.
01:14:32
So detectives switched course and started a line of questioning about Robert Aubrey Maxwell.
01:14:39
The real one, that is. I work for the Vancouver police and I here because I interested in the Robert Aubrey Maxwell situation What happened to him the sergeant wanted to know And how was it Stedman ended up assuming Aubrey Maxwell identity Do you have an explanation for where you bought his ID
01:15:03
But true to form, Stedman sat frozen, again refusing to answer any questions put to him.
01:15:11
Mr. Stedman, did you hear what I had to say there? At one point, almost childlike, he closed his eyes
01:15:17
as if he could make all this unpleasantness just disappear in a wink. And I don't know if you, when you close your eyes,
01:15:25
if you're listening or if you're just meditating or what's going on there. While Stedman sat in jail waiting to go on trial,
01:15:34
the detectives kept investigating and discovered the man had spent most of his time while on the run
01:15:40
hiding out not in Washington state, but in upstate New York. a glass of water before we get started?
01:15:50
At his half-brother Chris Preston's apartment, who said he, Stedman, who we hadn't seen in nearly a decade,
01:15:56
emailed him out of the blue. And then he's like, you know, I'm coming to town. I'm like, cool.
01:16:03
Don't tell anybody. I'm like, fine. Though Chris said he had no idea his brother Jason was on the run.
01:16:09
Did he ever talk about this homicide? No. I had no doubt. Just from the exchanges that we had.
01:16:17
that he had done and or been involved in and or been partying to some form of leaf alley.
01:16:29
What makes you say that? Just the way we talked about the rage and the seething.
01:16:36
You don't know. You don't know the things I've done. You don't know where I've been.
01:16:41
You don't know the s*** that I've seen. Did he ever get into any specifics? No. If he did, I'd tell you.
01:16:47
But he said Jason did talk about hiding under a false identity. I'm like, how'd you do that?
01:16:53
He's like, well, you know, I got a fake ID from Holland on the dark lab. It was a fairy tale version of how Jason took over the identity of Robert Aubrey Maxwell.
01:17:03
And when Chris later found out through news reports that Robert was missing, oh, he knew, he said, he knew what must have happened.
01:17:12
I'm like, yeah, that's a f***ing bad. You know, not to make light. I feel bad, I feel horrible.
01:17:18
I honestly have no doubt if it has to just exactly probably what... The only way you're going to...
01:17:23
You've got to find a body, guys. You've got to find a body. Did he ever talk about anything related to that?
01:17:31
I'm thinking sewers. I'm sorry? I would think sewers. Okay, why do you say that?
01:17:35
Just because he likes sewers. He likes sewers? Yeah. Okay. Detective Brian Robertson though has his own theories about what happened to the unfortunate Robert Aubrey Maxwell Thoughts which he shared with us as we walked through the tough downtown east side of Vancouver
01:17:54
The last home Robert ever knew. If home, you can call it. As you're looking around here, what occurred to you about what actually happened to Robert Aubrey Maxwell?
01:18:05
Well, because he's never been found, and that's significant, I think that he probably was disposed of in such a way that we're not going to find him.
01:18:15
That's the only way that Stedman can get away with this crime. It's a busy place. How would you do that?
01:18:19
Well, I mean, look at this alley. We look around, and there are lots of times when there's nobody in the alley.
01:18:25
And if there is anybody walking by, they're certainly not paying attention to what's happening up the alley.
01:18:29
And it takes nothing. There's dumpsters like this in every alley in the downtown east side.
01:18:33
and it would be pretty easy just to put his body in the dumpster, close the lid every night they get emptied.
01:18:39
So quite possibly he's just in a landfill somewhere. Yeah, that's probably our best guess.
01:18:45
And we'll never find him. And to this day, investigators have yet to charge Stedman,
01:18:51
or anyone else for that matter, for the presumed death of Aubrey Maxwell. But for murdering Dwayne Demke,
01:18:59
Jason pleaded not guilty, said he didn't do it. but prosecutors had all the DNA and video evidence that said he did.
01:19:08
That he hid in a dumpster outside of Revolution Limousine, and with that Gerber knife stabbed Dwayne to death when he left the building,
01:19:17
and then dumped Dwayne's body off this gravel road, and drove his car down to Calgary, where he set it on fire,
01:19:24
later making his way back to Edmonton on the train. Motive, though? That was a tougher case.
01:19:32
Not that prosecutors needed to prove motive, but juries tend to want to know. So, when Stedman went on trial in 2019, prosecutors were stuck trying to explain to the jury the inexplicable, the why of it all.
01:19:49
Though Brian Robertson suspects the motive was, what he thought all along, one of the oldest known to mankind.
01:19:57
Why would he do it? What was the motivation for this crime? Well, he won't talk to us about anything. He never talked to us about anything. Our belief is the motivation was Angel had broken up with him. He had always disliked Dwayne because Angel was such close friends with him.
01:20:19
He often said to Angel that the reason that we can't become closer is because you're still so close to Dwayne.
01:20:29
And so I think that in some narcissistic way he blames Dwayne for the failure of his relationship with Angel And when she broke up with him that was that And he set his sights on Dwayne Demke There was so much evidence against Stedman and his alter egos
01:20:50
it took nearly two months for the prosecution to present it all. And all the while, Dwayne Demke's
01:20:56
friends and family were there in court, keeping a constant watch on the man who'd taken his life
01:21:02
and cause so much pain. He just sat there like it was just any other normal day.
01:21:10
He didn't look concerned. He didn't look sad. He didn't look anything. He just was very neutral-faced, and he just sat there.
01:21:20
He had absolutely no emotion, like none. Like a narcissist, a sociopath, a murderer,
01:21:29
and to me, he still had that mindset, I'm still going to get away with this. But that did not happen.
01:21:38
It took the jury a little more than three hours to arrive at a verdict. It was a sense of relief when we heard guilty.
01:21:46
Oh, what a great feeling to hear that guilty verdict on first-degree murder being read.
01:21:57
Guilty of first-degree murder. Guilty of arson for the car fire. life in prison and no chance of parole for 25 years,
01:22:06
the maximum in Canadian law. We contacted Stedman through the prison administration,
01:22:13
but he declined our request for an interview. On the side of a gravel road between Edmonton and Calgary,
01:22:23
there is a simple but well-tended memorial for the gentle man who was murdered for being nothing more than a caring friend.
01:22:33
Does he pop back into your mind sometimes? Of course. As you go on with your life?
01:22:39
Of course. Does he come to visit in any particular way in your brain? Oh, sorry.
01:22:48
That's okay. I mean, I have pictures of Dwayne in the house of when we were on vacation and other times,
01:22:54
so I see his pictures every day. But, I mean, I do think about him a lot. He was really kind and supportive and just really a loving guy.
01:23:15
That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again Thursday at 10, 9 central.
01:23:21
And, of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News. I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.