Conversations with a Serial Killer

For the past 20 years, I’ve been in contact with Clifford Olson, Canada’s most notorious serial killer.

For the past 20 years, I’ve been in periodic contact with Clifford Olson, Canada’s most notorious serial killer of 11 young people (he claims over 100) in British Columbia, 1980 and 1981.

It’s been a curious relationship, dating back to around 1989 when he phoned Toronto radio talk show host Arlene Bynon (CHFI) where I used to broadcast commentaries. Arlene conducted several interviews with Olson.

Arlene and I collaborated on a proposed book about Olson, and negotiated a $300,000 advance from a U.S. publisher. The deal fell through because basically the publishers wanted a Ted Bundy-like chase story, while Olson’s story was one in which the police had no idea a serial killer was loose until he confessed, and was paid $10,000 by the RCMP for every body and murder site he took them too. (After getting $100,000, Olson claims the 11th body was a “freebie”).

I spent a summer in the early 1990s visiting and tape-recording interviews with Olson in Kingston Penitentiary. Arlene and I eventually signed over ownership of the manuscript to Bob Shantz, Olson’s lawyer in Maple Ridge, B.C., who later asked me to partner with him. And there the matter rests.

Since his Kingston Pen days, Olson has kept regular phone-contact with me. He has never forgiven Arlene for not visiting him in prison. From Kingston he was transferred to the penitentiary at Prince Albert, Sask., and more recently to Ste-Anne-des-Plaines in Quebec.

This past January Olson turned 70. Of those 70 years of life, roughly 50 of them have been spent in one prison or another. He is perfectly adjusted to prison life, and functions well, writing poems, filing complaints, active with hordes of pen pals, writing letters to prime ministers and U.S. presidents, making extravagant claims about unsolved murders, and – right now – claiming advance knowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Centre.

All this is vintage Olson – an admitted conman, with a weird sense of humor and grotesque sense of importance. I remember once interviewing a psychiatrist at the Penetang hospital for the criminally insane who remarked that “a characteristic of psychopaths is that they are endlessly resourceful, ever persistent and can be immensely entertaining.” In other words, they are always up to something and you can never afford to relax around them.

That’s Clifford Olson.

A few years ago he devised a way of changing one-cent stamps to look valid to send letters, and got a stern letter from Canada Post warning that this was a federal crime and if he kept it up he was liable to go to prison.

When criminologists and psychiatrists wanted to do research on his case, Olson also applied for funding so he could do research on what made him a serial killer.

Repeatedly, Corrections Canada has prohibited him from contacting relatives of his victims (he says he never has done so) and from contacting the media – a dictum he ignores or bypasses.

When he went before the parole board after serving his first 25 years, he asked if I would be a character witness for him. I replied that if I was the best he could find for a character witness, he’d be doomed to stay forever in prison. Olson laughed.

These days he’s focused on money. He claims (and remember, “claims” is not necessarily facts), to have a bank balance of some $500,000 in Australia from the sale of his murder memorabilia. Items about him are on sale on an internet site called murderauction.com.

When he talks of this “wealth,” I tend to put it in the category of the unsolved murders for which he claims responsibility. (In the early years, the police would take him to various murder sites, but found nothing. Eventually the police caught on and ignored his claims. For years he had immunity in the state of Washington if he’d identify the Seattle Green River murderer of 50 prostitutes, whom he claimed as a friend).

Olson also says he has over $100,000 in his local bank in Quebec. When I was skeptical, he said he gets Old Age Pension of close to $1,200 a month. He mailed me copies of Old Age Security payments from Revenue Canada: $7,735.41 (retroactive) in 2005; $8,716.59 in 2006; $6,082.23 in 2008. “Why do they put the small change in?” Olson wondered.

He has a letter addressed to him in prison from Service Canada stating that from July 2009 to June 2010 “we have approved your Guaranteed Income Supplement or the Allowance, whichever is applicable to your situation” of $1,169.47 a month.

I was incredulous that Canada was paying an old age pension and income supplement to Olson who is destined to someday die in prison.

Even Olson chortles: “What good is money to me? I got no use for it, if you get what I’m getting at. I guess I gotta make a will in case I get a heart attack or something. Don’t want these bastards getting my money.”

I phoned Corrections Canada and asked if old prisoners were entitled to old age pensions. At first no one knew. “Good question,” I was told.

Later I was rather testily told that “pensions are the same for federal offenders as for any other Canadian citizen. Canada has no provisions to make any exceptions . . .  funds received by inmates are put in trust fund until they are released.”

I think most Canadians would be outraged if they knew Olson, who has contributed nothing to this country, is getting over $1,100 a month for simply being alive in prison. (It costs upwards of $110,000 a year to keep an inmate in maximum security). In the U.S. some 35,000 prison inmates are 65 or older, with parole unlikely for many. In Canada it’s around 750, or perhaps 2.5% of the prison population. Health costs triple after age 60.

Olson is not unintelligent, and is smarter than the prison system once labeled him. He has a dyslexic quality that makes him use wrong words, mindful of Yogi Berra. I’ve heard him mention girls he killed in the U.S. “who lived in a condom.” He’s promised to use a “perculator” to send me documents. He said he raped one girl “when she was unconscientious” and had “annual sex” with another.

At the moment, his top priority is persuading anyone who will listen that he had pen pals with Muslim students who told him that there’d be an attack on the World Trade Center long before 9/11. After 9/11 he contacted the FBI. I checked his FBI source, who acknowledged he’d gotten the message but figured it was a kook call -- and was a bit nonplussed to learn it was from Canada’s most infamous serial killer.

Olson has lobbied and written every authority he can think of. Now it’s Barack Obama who’s on the receiving end, since George Bush ignored five letters he sent. Olson has a series of sworn affidavits dated as far back as 1999 and 2000, purporting to give the identities (and photos) of six terrorists he says his Muslim pen pals indicated would attack the World Trade Center.

The letters supposedly were mailed to the likes of  Gordon Griffin, U.S. ambassador to Canada in 1999; Raymond Chretien, ambassador to Washington in 2000; Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day; Gov. George Pataki of New York; and, of course, the U.S. President.

In one affidavit, dated June 9, 1999, supposedly witnessed by Commissioner of Oaths Luc Mantha, Olson swears: “I have been contacted by the following students who are from . . .  Kabul in Afghanistan. They have all been living here in Montreal, Canada, and then went to the United States as students in the University of Florida . . .

“The name (sic) of these student pen pals are as follows, with photos of them all: Meleea-Shah, age 27. Walia-Abuja, 25, Zora Rabanni, 23, Ramzi Mohammed, 26. . . .

“I am informed in there (sic) letters about persons they mention who are friends . . . Mohammad Atta, who they say have been in Montreal and Vancouver. They inform me there are other friends, Satam Al-Marabh, M. Alshehri, someone named Abdulazis and Satam al Aauquamei. In their letters they state that all belong to the Fundamentalist Muslim and some group called Al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan and that some of them will be coming to Canada and then the United States to take some pilot training on jets . . . They talk in these letters about these guys going to do some kind of terrorism with a (sic) air plane in New York state . . . .”

And so it goes. No one has seen the purported letters or photos, which Olson says are in the hands of his U.S. lawyer, who remains unidentified.

There is uncanny similarity between these affidavits, and Olson’s Green River killer affidavits, and his other affidavits claiming to have killed various girls in unsolved crimes.

It challenges credulity to suppose Muslim girls attending university in Florida would become pen pals with a Canadian serial killer, and write him about their friends who were planning to hijack a plane and attack America.

By the same token it also taxes credulity to suppose that the RCMP would pay someone $100,000 to lead them to 11 murders they didn’t know were the work of a serial killer.

Olson wants center stage because of his 9/11 information.

He may get the attention he craves, but not from 9/11, but thanks to Canada’s zany policy of paying him, and people like him, close to $1,200 a month simply because he’s old and  is already getting free meals and board.

Meanwhile, my curious relationship with Olson continues . . .