The secret in the slough: How an elaborate police operation caught the stone-cold killer

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Editor’s note: The following story was written based on recordings of a March 2023 voir dire and related court exhibits, to which Postmedia’s Brandon Harder was granted access. During that proceeding, an undercover police operator referred to as “Cliff” testified for the Crown. This story documents Cliff’s dealings with Joseph George Thauberger, a man who was eventually convicted of the 1997 murder of his brother, which he confessed to near the conclusion of a Regina police operation known as UCO Thaw.

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Like so many before him, Joe Thauberger put his faith in a patch of dirt.

The land where he’s headed hasn’t always made good on spring’s promise. But it has always kept a harvest secret. His secret.

In his life, he’s seen a lot of change, but travelling along quiet country roads northeast of Regina on Nov. 28, 2020, things look familiar.

“We picked berries in that bush when I was six or seven,” Joe says to the driver — a man he knows as Cliff.

A little further along, they pass an old schoolhouse, which Cliff mentions.

Joe, once a teacher himself, tells Cliff he ought to learn some history about this part of Saskatchewan.

He tells the driver about how his grandfather settled in 1893. Everyone had a quarter section then.

Farms grew, over time. Eventually, 160 acres didn’t amount to much. It certainly doesn’t now.

But bigger farms mean there are fewer eyes on these backroads.

That mattered to him once, on Sept. 3, 1997. It might just matter again, depending on how Cliff handles things.

“I would’ve been nervous,” Cliff says of that particular trip his passenger made to this place, back in ’97.

“What is there to be nervous about? It’s home,” Joe responds.

The 78-year-old does his best to retrace the route he’d taken during that previous trip. It had been dark then, and he’d tried to keep a low profile.

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But the possibility of seeing a cop out here was pretty much zero.

“Even if there was a policeman here, he’d be on other business. He just wants to get the hell out of here,” Joe tells Cliff.

“Yeah. Get back to the piggy pen,” the driver adds.

They pass some of Joe’s old equipment, and he points ahead of them to tire tracks on the road.

Hunters, the long-time farmer surmises, based on the time of year.

“Oh hold it, hold it,” Joe says suddenly.

Both men gaze out the window.

“There’s the slough there?” Cliff asks.

It is.

***

On Sept. 3, 1997, as Patrick Cyril Thauberger’s lifeless body lay on the floor, Joe took time to think.

His 53-year-old brother hadn’t died silently.

Joe’s wife Barbara ran a daycare in the basement of their Francis Street home. She and the children heard the “tremendous crash” as Pat’s body hit the floor. She’d later say she heard Pat’s voice after the crash — he was pleading, begging.

But Barbara wasn’t Joe’s most pressing issue at the moment.

He needed to decide what to do with the body of the man he was supposed to drop off at the Regina bus depot.

Of course, he’d tell people — their family and whoever else might ask — that he’d done just that.

But what would he really do?

He had plenty of time to decide, as the hours passed. Children were picked up, and the sun went down.

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Eventually, he wrapped his brother’s remains in an old chunk of blue carpet. His wife wouldn’t help him move it, so he did it himself.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

The sound of that carpet hitting the steps to the back landing of their home is something Joe’s wife would never forget.

He loaded the body into an old red Ford pickup, pulled out of the driveway, and headed east out of the city.

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***

Sitting in a courtroom on June 13, 2023, Joe recounted how he’d once asked officers investigating his brother’s disappearance why they wouldn’t arrest him, if they thought he’d committed a murder.

“Joe, we have no evidence. It looks like you’ve committed the perfect crime,” he recalled the officer telling him.

“You seemed to take a little bit of delight in that, huh?” asked prosecutor Adam Breker.

“I have to admit, I did,” Joe responded.

It was not his only admission. On the witness stand, he took responsibility for covering up his brother’s death — a necessary evil to save himself from becoming the next David Milgaard, as it was an accident, a fall down the stairs, he told court.

The 80-year-old man still believed there was no evidence he’d murdered his brother. At least none strong enough to convict him on.

He was wrong.

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Saskatchewan Court of King’s Bench Justice Janet McMurtry found him guilty of second-degree murder, as well as offering an indignity to human remains, on July 27, 2023.

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Joe told a number of different stories about Patrick’s disappearance over the years. But it wasn’t the version he told under oath that the judge believed.

It was the one he’d told Cliff only eight days after they’d met.

The enemy of my enemy

As an SUV idles up the 2700 block of Regina’s Francis Street on Nov. 20, 2020, the snow cover is beginning to look worn in.

The vehicle stops near a white house. The place is a 1950s build, showing signs of age, not unlike its owner.

The driver walks up the driveway wearing white sunglasses. He has a vest on over his black hoodie, and brown pants cover his legs. Under his belt, he has more than two decades of policework.

Of course, Cliff isn’t his real name. Cliff is just one of many covert personas he’s taken on in sensitive operations he’s been part of over the years.

The man he is there to see — just another subject in yet another undercover operation, this one handled by the Regina Police Service.

He knows, based on surveillance, to knock on the side door. It’s the one Joe always uses.

It’s also the last door Joe’s brother Patrick ever used with a beating heart, but that’s far from an established fact when Cliff knocks on it.

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The man who answers has white hair, bad teeth and whiskers of a length that speak more of neglect than intention. At 78 years old, he stands tall in the door frame — maybe over six feet — his thin figure draped in a plaid workshirt.

“Hello, are you Joe?”

“Yeah,” replies the man in the doorway.

A little bit of small talk passes between the men, with Joe mumbling a half-hearted complaint about the weather, before Cliff decides to get to the point. He didn’t want to just show up at the house, he says, but he has a few questions.

“My niece is in the van here. I just want to show you something,” he goes on.

They walk down the driveway toward the waiting vehicle, and Cliff talks about how his niece Sam “worked her ass off” to build up a cleaning business, before being taken advantage of.

“She got f–ked over by some dude,” he says.

He takes a cell phone from the woman in the van — another officer — and shows Joe a photo of the man he says ripped Sam off for 20 grand.

“You know this f–king guy?”

It turns out Joe does know the guy, all too well.

Frank, as he will be referred to in keeping with a court order protecting his true identity, took Joe for a hell of a lot more than 20 grand, Cliff is told. More like 30.

Less than four minutes have gone by since Cliff knocked on the door when Joe says: “If I knew the right people, he’d be dead.”

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Wearing a piercing look, he gestures at the ground and says that two years back, he had a chance to put him “down there.”

It was stupid of him not to follow through, he concedes.

Well, Cliff is looking to find Frank and deal with him. But he’s going to do it his way. His niece is going to learn a lesson. He’ll try to get the money back, but it’s not about the money. It’s about the principle.

“He is mine to deal with. I deal with him.”

Having tucked $60 into the smiling older man’s front shirt pocket, Cliff warns Joe not to mess with Frank. He just wants to know where the “little slippery f–ker” lives.

Joe isn’t sure he knows, but he’s going to find out.

“You know what a blow torch is?” Joe asks.

He says he’d like to lay Frank down and take out both his eyes. He wouldn’t break any bones or anything. He’d just take out the eyes.

“See no evil. See no evil,” Cliff responds in a knowing tone, before surmising that Frank is going to get “slowed down.”

Having exchanged phone numbers, Joe agrees to call when he tracks down Frank’s address.

The undercover officers leave the old man and meet up with their cover person to go over what transpired.

Cliff is hoping they’ll hear from Joe. It’s important that he be the one to reach out. It’s important that Joe doesn’t feel like he’s being harassed. He has to buy in.

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And he does, calling the next day, leaving a voicemail regarding Frank’s whereabouts and requesting a callback from Cliff.

The call sets in motion another meeting between the men. This time, police plan to ratchet up the ruse.

Loud and clear

“One week!”

Cliff screams the words, as Joe looks on nervously from the passenger seat of the vehicle.

A tip from Cliff’s friend about the location of a car supposedly belonging to Frank brought them here. And Joe saw Cliff handle things his way, with a hammer.

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Then some tattooed pretty boy came running up the street and made a fuss about the damage to Frank’s vehicle. Joe didn’t know him.

Now Cliff is telling the kid, in no uncertain terms, that Frank has one week to pay what he owes or “more than just f–king windows will get cracked.”

Of course the message will never reach Frank — the car isn’t Frank’s and the pretty boy is just another cop, posing as Frank’s buddy.

But the message has reached Joe alright, loud and clear. Cliff means business.

“Just another day at the office, hey?” Cliff says, climbing in with Joe.

The older man laughs, but he’s not happy. He would’ve done things differently. There could be insurance on that car. Police protect insurance companies. And when Cliff was screaming at Frank’s buddy, he’d used Joe’s name.

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Joe doesn’t want to be implicated.

“Wisely and slowly. They stumble that run fast.”

With his flannel pants tucked into lined rubber boots, the old man, who has remembered his own lines for more than two decades, quotes a bit of Shakespeare to his acquaintance of less than 24 hours.

“That’s a quote?” asks Cliff, from the driver’s seat.

“These are what are known as, as aphorisms,” Joe responds, before repeating the phrase.

He tells his new acquaintance to take it easy and slow down.

“So we don’t make mistakes?” asks the officer.

“So we don’t make mistakes,” Joe confirms.

This was one of Joe’s opportunities to tell Cliff that the drink was too strong, that he wanted out. He didn’t.

Cliff asks him to pull a Kleenex box from the glove compartment and take $500 out of it. He can keep $100 for himself, for his trouble, the officer tells him.

They continue to talk, and Joe tells Cliff he’s nervous to get caught up in all this. He’s on probation, he says, because police found a marijuana patch on his farm.

“Mickey Mouse f–king weed patch. Who gives a f–k,” Cliff responds.

When the pair pull into the lot of a motel, Cliff gets on the phone with a man he calls Andy, who offered the tip that the targeted blue “grandma car” belonged to Frank.

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For this information, Cliff leaves Andy — yet another undercover operator — the remaining cash Joe took from the glove box. He places it in a coffee cup and puts it in the cupholder of a black Dodge in the lot, which Andy said was his.

Driving off, the men make small talk. Joe’s having supper at a friend’s who just lost her brother. Cliff commiserates, and talks about losing someone he looked up to. It stings.

But dying is part of life, and sometimes it “has to be done,” the officer suggests.

They talk about the damage to Frank’s car and how Joe doesn’t want to be implicated.

“‘Cause if I go to jail, that’s where I’ll die,” Joe says.

Cliff tries to downplay the older man’s concerns, offering assurances.

What seems to concern Cliff is trust — a theme that comes up over and over between the two men, with the older man offering his own assurances about being dependable.

However, Joe still hasn’t bought the idea that he’s getting his money back. He’s skeptical. Maybe they could send Frank a letter, threatening him to pay, or else, Joe suggests.

Cliff wants things to cool off a little and see if Frank ponies anything up. He has his own idea, he says, but he’s not going to show his entire hand just yet.

“But I have a way of getting this money, OK? And the way of getting this money is I trust somebody who’s crookeder than f–king shit,” he says.

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He implies that he too knows some things about insurance. The older man’s earlier rant had opened this avenue, which was raised in a police “brainstorming” session about where the operation could go.

Feeling each other out, the discussion about trust continues, with Joe talking about having been let down in the past. He’s made mistakes.

“My dad had a saying and I didn’t learn it. I should have,” Joe says.

“In business, there is no such thing as trust.”

Testing the vice

Junkies.

“lf it was up to me, if it was up to me, half the crack heads in Regina would be all dead,” Joe would later tell Cliff.

He described the loss of a family member through a fentanyl overdose as “really unfortunate,” but he would later muse about putting Frank to sleep forever with a hot shot of the same.

He doesn’t do drugs himself because they do nothing for him, he tells Cliff.

“What do you like?” Cliff asks.

“Chocolate milk,” Joe replies.

Chocolate period, as it turns out.

Joe tells the younger man he bought 21 boxes of chocolate bars yesterday, marked down from $10 a box to just over $1 apiece. They’re in his van, back at the Klein’s store near his home.

“All your teeth are going to fall out,” Cliff warns.

“They’ve already fallen out,” Joe responds, good-naturedly, trying in vain to foist a free box on Cliff.

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What about rock and roll music?

No, Joe says. For him, it’s Beethoven and Mozart.

“Do you like girls?”

Yeah, the older man admits.

Cliff tells him he makes some of his money in girls — the officer teasing another avenue down which he might take the old man.

Joe says he’s not into prostitutes. Frank brought a junkie girl to his house a few years back. She shot herself up in his living room.

“I drove her home and I gave her 100 bucks, ’cause she was there all night,” he said.

“I wouldn’t even touch her.”

The younger man says his girls aren’t crackheads, and they’re not kids either. It’s their choice. He offers them safety. Everyone gets paid. He’s even hired some for his niece Sam’s cleaning company and they’ve cleaned their lives up.

Joe says he doesn’t look down on him for it. He thinks prostitution should be legal, and if a vote were held tomorrow on it he’d mark his ballot yes, “with a big fat X.”

They should all get police protection, he goes on, before suggesting Cliff’s girls “must have quite a few police customers.”

The undercover officer offers a vague response in a serious tone, going on about knowing people from different walks of life. Part of his business is listening and learning from people he doesn’t necessarily like.

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Joe talks about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. The former U.S. president was “raked over the coals” for that affair. Lewinsky should’ve been given a promotion.

“I knew I could like you,” Cliff says.

The men shoot the breeze about politics, with Joe sounding off about Bolshevik communists and the things he’d been told as a child about the CCF, by his father.

“He was a big politician,” he says of his father, with whom he shared both a first and last name.

His dad was “addicted” to politics — better than being on the booze or the crack, he contends.

Joseph Alois Thauberger ran as a Social Credit candidate in numerous elections, beginning as early as 1935. At age 84, he led the short-lived Canada Party, and ran under that banner in the 1993 federal election.

Joe tells Cliff he’s a bit of a politics junkie himself. However, his views may have differed somewhat from his father’s. Eventually, he’d tell the undercover officer the smartest man he ever knew was David Irving. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, Irving was once renowned as a Second World War historian but “has cultivated a reputation as the world’s most prominent Holocaust denier.”

Somewhat apologetically, Joe says he has “time to bullshit” but acknowledges Cliff is a busy man.

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“I enjoy it,” the officer responds, complimenting Joe’s intellect.

The older man says he used to be a professional IQ tester. He was an educational psychologist.

“If I were to give you an IQ test, you would score well above average,” he suggests.

Then, knowingly or not, he tests Cliff a little.

“Just out of curiosity, where did you go to elementary school?”

Wisely and slowly. They stumble that run fast.

Joe Thauberger, quoting Shakespeare

The officer responds quickly.

“I went to a farm, small town in Alberta,” he says, stumbling slightly before stringing out a tale about his dad being a “dink” and moving “way, way up north” in Saskatchewan with his mom, who got treated poorly by her next man. He rattles off the name of a northern lake.

This seems to satisfy the older man.

Cliff says they should let things with Frank cool down over a couple days and then get back in touch.

When Joe steps out into the cold November air, Cliff rolls the window down and offers to stick around to make sure his van starts.

“It’ll start,” Joe responds.

When the van comes to life, Cliff rolls up his window.

“I’m away,” he says, to an otherwise empty vehicle and an electric ear.

Squeezing blood from a stone

Sitting together in the parking lot of a Burger King on the east side of Regina, Cliff tells the old-timer in the passenger seat to lay it out.

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“What’s the advice?”

Joe had called him two days back, on Nov. 24, 2020, telling him he had some advice for him. He arranged to meet with the older man to hear him out.

The car Cliff smashed up a few days back — Joe would’ve done things a little different.

“I got all kinds of old licence plates,” Joe begins, rambling into a suggestion that he’d have put a fake plate on their vehicle before they drove over to send Frank that message. Further, he’d have worn a mask.

Good advice, Cliff says, but counters that he wanted Frank to know who was sending the message. They argue over whether Frank would go to the police.

“I’ve had a few dealings with the police over the years,” Joe offers.

Cliff takes a concerned tone, asking what he means.

“Well, my brother disappeared, hey,” the older man says, beginning one of what would become a number of attempts to talk about his past with Cliff.

“I don’t wanna know any of your shit,” the younger man says, firmly.

He does. But not right now.

It’s around 9 p.m. when they travel to the McDonald’s just north across Victoria Avenue, where it’s arranged that they’ll meet with a woman.

The two men walk into the restaurant and stand in line. Joe’s not hungry — he’s full up on beet soup.

“Do you want an ice cream or a Vi-Co?” Cliff asks, using the Saskatchewanism for a brand of chocolate milk that has long since disappeared from shelves.

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The older man declines, so the undercover operator orders for himself. Two plain cheeseburgers.

As they sit in the restaurant, and Cliff quietly reassures Joe he has the situation with Frank handled, the woman appears.

She’s dressed much better than the two men, and takes a seat across the table.

“My girl, how are ya? Cliff asks.

“Long day,” she replies.

Without offering Joe an introduction, Cliff begins to direct the woman. While he lowers his voice, his tone suggests a rise in blood pressure.

“I need you to do me a favour,” he says.

“This will be the third time and the last time I ask you to do this, ’cause I trust you.”

He needs her to take out an accidental death policy, like she has for him before.

Having taken a laptop out of her bag, she manipulates the machine, tapping and clicking, as Cliff provides details about what it is he wants — backdated and made to look as if it was taken out by his niece.

“Ok, what’s the name?” she asks.

Cliff turns to Joe: “What’s the name of the guy who owes you money?”

Joe offers Frank’s name and then spells it for the woman, offering a few additional details he’s asked for.

As the event unfolds, Cliff seems to wind himself up tighter, and tighter, while still trying to keep his voice down. At one point, he engages in a profane exchange with the woman about money, after she says her rate has gone up.

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“I used to look after you, and you used to suck d–k for cash, and now you’re all fancy in your business suit,” Cliff says to the woman.

He acknowledges he hasn’t forgotten what she’s done for him, but warns her not to forget where she came from and that he backed her.

“I know I wouldn’t have this life if it wasn’t for you,” she spits, sounding hurt.

“I’ll never be able to pay you back.”

Cliff tells her he doesn’t expect her to pay him back.

“I’m asking you to do me a favour, and keep your mouth shut, like you do.”

The woman works on her computer and Cliff asks Joe about his supper, telling him he can smell the garlic on him.

“Keeps the virus away,” the older man says, matter-of-factly.

Satisfied with what the woman has arranged on her computer, Cliff says he’ll call her shortly, and the two men leave the restaurant.

Cliff reminisces briefly about how much he enjoyed his burgers and then tells Joe how he trusts the woman, whom he calls “Cassie.”

In business, there is no such thing as trust.

Joe Thauberger, recalling a saying his father used

He pulls his vehicle into the dimly-lit and abandoned parking lot in front of a flooring store off Park Street. It was once a Safeway, says the older man who rarely seems to pass up an opportunity to offer a historic fact, relevant or not.

The younger man reaches for a bag and pulls from it a bundle of cash.

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“Count that out,” he grunts.

“Oh my God,” Joe mutters, but does as he’s told before telling the man in the driver’s seat there’s an even thousand in the bundle.

There’s more in the bag. A lot more. And they keep counting together until they’re certain about the amount.

Cliff calls Cassie, and asks if she’s sure she “hit send” on “that thing we just talked about” before telling her to come to the parking lot alone. When she arrives, she exits her vehicle and climbs into Cliff’s back seat, sliding to the centre.

The exchange is brief. She’ll get nine grand up front for her work, and nine more later. But she’d better be sure what she did was clean, Cliff says, giving her the money.

Don’t even think about counting it, he says. It’s been counted.

She tries to formally introduce herself to Joe, but she’s cut off.

“Yeah it doesn’t matter what his name is. He’s just a friend I went to have a burger with,” Cliff says.

As she gets out of the car, Cliff barks: “Hey, you make sure you go straight home with that.”

Then he laughs.

The bills never left police custody, unbeknownst to the man who helped count them.

After they depart, Joe muses about how he’d considered giving Frank a hot shot of fentanyl. Giving him the “eternal sleeps.”

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He wouldn’t bother with trying to get the money back. But he admires Cliff’s resolve. He understands the plan, to an extent.

Cliff questions whether Joe really wants Frank dead. He wants to be sure the older man isn’t just some guy who’s been “watching movies and saying dumb shit.”

“I don’t watch movies,” Joe responds.

And he wants Frank dead, alright. He’s even more committed to putting his enemy in the grave than Cliff, he says.

If he could turn back the clock, Frank wouldn’t still be a problem, he says. Frank wouldn’t exist.

“You ever got any ugly shit on your hands?” Cliff asks.

Joe asks the younger man to clarify, and eventually Cliff just asks it plain.

“Have you ever put anyone in the ground?”

“I would prefer not to answer that question,” the older man responds.

But he would answer. Eventually.

The big problem-solving machine

Sitting in a McDonald’s drive-thru lineup on Nov. 27, 2020, Joe schools Cliff about the Doukhobors.

The white-haired man gets a real kick out of the “strange Russian religious sect,” and laughs about Doukhobor women who he says would strip naked to protest having to send their children to a public school.

Perhaps he got a kick out of their pacifism, too. After all, what he and the man behind the wheel were planning was quickly becoming a conspiracy to commit murder.

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It was shaping up to be a pleasant morning, with negative single-digit temperatures climbing to within spitting distance of zero.

Cliff has recruited the older man to help him pick up his niece Sam’s van at a shop off Dewdney Avenue, and they’re headed that way when the younger man’s phone rings. It’s Cliff’s sister “Tammy,” or so Joe believes.

“I want to let you know that I have your luggage ready for your trip,” the woman explains, telling Cliff she has to get going to Calgary, so he needs to come by sooner than later.

By design, the conversation reroutes the men to a downtown high-rise condo. On the way, Joe talks about his days as a youngster in school before asking Cliff where he went to school.

The story the officer gives the older man lines up with the origin story he told days earlier, raising no apparent suspicion from the target of the operation.

They enter the building and head up the elevator, as Joe rambles about a tornado that struck Regina in 1912.

“Killed quite a few,” he says, his voice echoing on the officer’s microphone.

After a knock on the door, Cliff introduces the older man to Tammy, yet another undercover operator. But she’s not the only woman inside. Multiple women are milling about, which draws a smile from Joe, who nods at the younger man.

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While it’s a half-decent suite in a newer building, the place and its occupants give the impression that business is done here, likely for cash. Tools of the oldest trade — lotion, towels, women’s clothing — offer less than subtle clues.

“Busy last night?” asks Cliff.

“Not as busy as normal, but it was still really good,” Tammy tells him.

One woman asks about Joe, who Cliff calls “a friend of mine,” specifying the older man is not a client.

At this last comment, Cliff senses some disappointment in Joe.

“Remember I told you the other day, no young girls. Man, when I do business, no young girls, no crack heads, no nothing,” he reminds the older man, before he tells Tammy to send the other women out of the room and asks where the luggage is.

Joe says a woman is “as old as she looks,” drawing a quizzical response from Cliff.

“A man’s not old until he stops looking,” he adds, before his hiccuping laughter suggests he’s amused himself with what he believes is a winning joke.

Tammy sets a suitcase on the table where Cliff and Joe are seated. When it’s opened, Cliff removes items and wipes them with a towel before returning them to the suitcase.

Among them is a rope, and a blow torch.

See no evil. See no evil.

Cliff.

This done, he zips up the suitcase with hands covered by the towel, before tossing it at Tammy.

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“My lucky niece is going to get her money back,” Cliff says to Tammy.

“It might be ugly, but I haven’t decided.”

The two undercover officers make small talk, some about business, and Cliff instructs the woman to burn the towel when he leaves.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Joe asks the woman: “When was the first time you had sex?”

This draws a laugh from Tammy and mild exception from Cliff, who tells Joe to save questions like that for the working girls.

Once the suitcase is packed, Cliff says those girls can come back out, and he instructs Tammy to “open the bank.”

She pulls a bag full of bills from behind a piece of furniture and they all begin counting, Joe included.

Tammy said there was fifty-five grand, but Cliff says he wants to be sure.

“I’m a slow counter, eh?” Joe says.

“Nothing wrong with that,” Cliff says. “Like you said, the slower you go, you don’t make bad decisions, right? You don’t make mistakes.”

While Joe has been let in on the proposed insurance scam Cliff is planning, officers take pains to show their subject that his share of the money is literally on the table.

Once counted, the cash is split up, with $30,000 put in a bag to be held for Joe.

Then, grabbing a loose $20 bill, Cliff asks Joe for his birthday.

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On one side of the bill he writes Joe’s birthday, numerically. He writes the same on the other side, with the name George — Joe’s middle name. The bill is torn in half, with one half going to Joe, and the other to Tammy.

If Cliff should decide to give the order, he says, Tammy is to send a girl that doesn’t know Joe to visit him with the bag of money and one half of the bill. If Joe produces the other half, he gets the bag. It’s that simple, no questions asked.

Of the remaining cash, $5,000 will be set aside for the guys who are going to help him, once he decides how he wants to deal with the insurance plan, he says, having received a wink and a smile from Joe.

He then asks Tammy if she’s still sleeping with that cop — the creepy detective.

She is, she says.

Cliff says he’s going to text her a name — Joe’s name — and he wants her to run it by her detective boyfriend, to make sure Joe isn’t a cop.

They leave the apartment, and Joe is asked if he’s OK with what went on.

“Certainly,” the older man says.

He’s curious about the women though, asking how much it would cost for a man who wanted to “avail himself.”

“Speak English,” Cliff says, angrily.

When it’s established what the question was, the younger man tells the older one the women are “not cheap.”

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After seeing the thousands laid out on the table upstairs, Joe is surprised that the sex trade is that profitable, and says as much.

Back in Cliff’s vehicle, a call comes in. The man on the phone says they’ve driven through the night, and he and the others are at the stadium.

Big Clyde and the boys are in Regina, down from Fort McMurray, or so Joe comes to believe.

Joe can back out now, and if he wants to he should, Cliff says, because once he puts the luggage in Big Clyde’s truck, he can’t stop the “big problem-solving machine.”

The older man is resolute. He is committed, 100 per cent, he says. No, 110 per cent.

Mosaic Stadium sits empty. The Grey Cup game it was meant to host only a few days prior never happened. Neither did the season meant to precede it. The virus put a stop to all that.

In fact, the best play made at the venue all year is about to be run in the parking lot.

They’re on the northwest side of the stadium when they spot a brown truck that Cliff recognizes. Big Clyde and his boys are nowhere to be seen.

Cliff tells Joe he’s going to toss the suitcase into the pickup.

“You good with that?”

“Yes,” Joe responds.

Cliff calls Clyde and asks Joe to read out the licence plate number on the pickup. Clyde confirms it’s his. He’s in the sports complex nearby.

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With that, Cliff transfers the suitcase into the truck and sets the so-called problem-solving machine in motion.

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The very next thing Joe talks about is how he wished that two years ago he would’ve just invited Frank to the farm. He wouldn’t have left, the older man says.

Cliff says that sounds like good planning.

“lt’s almost like you’d done it before,” he adds.

The older man says there would be no insurance, though.

A quick call to Clyde, confirming the transfer and thanking him for his help, punctuates the conversation.

But if there’s no body, there’s no murder, Joe continues.

“How do you know that?” the man in the driver’s seat asks.

“Well, that’s the way it is,” the older man responds.

He keeps explaining the way it is, much to the officer’s interest. Sure, you can get rid of a body, out in the country. No, the coyotes wouldn’t get it, because you put it in the dugout. You bury it. Put rocks on top.

As he’s continuing to answer Cliff’s questions, the younger man points out the window. It’s Big Clyde and the boys. Does Joe want to stop this thing?

He doesn’t.

As the brown pickup pulls away, Cliff says: “There goes the big four-wheel problem-solving machine, with the three mechanics in there that are gonna fix the, fix the issues we got.”

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They too pull away from the stadium and eventually wind their way back toward Joe’s place.

“So, if I wanted to get rid of a body. Like, get rid of it,” Cliff says.

“You just come talk to me, I got lots of room at the farm,” Joe responds, with a wheezing chuckle that lends credence to the asthma he’d told the younger man about.

But when a body goes missing, you can’t collect insurance for years, he continues. As far as making it accidental goes, maybe a fentanyl injection would do, he muses.

Before the men part ways, the officer presses Joe for the umpteenth time about whether he’s sure he wants to go ahead with their plan.

Making no indication to the contrary, Joe launches into a spiel about how he doesn’t know anything about what’s going on, and he barely knows anything about Cliff. If anyone asks, he’ll just tell them Cliff called him looking for a house to rent, he says.

“I like that. That’s smart,” Cliff says, telling the older man to keep the burner phone he’d been given close.

“Did you ever feel like I was here to f–king bang you up or touch a hair on your head or anything like that?”

Not once, Joe responds.

The officer passes him $200 — to keep his phone on.

“Oh you shouldn’t,” Joe says, but his look and tone tell the officer the protest is a formality.

Hoodwinked

The Northern Lights have seen…

“Queer sights,” Joe says, finishing the line that Cliff had begun to recite from the famous poem the Cremation of Sam McGee.

“Queer sights,” Cliff repeats, before Joe launches into a recital of a larger part of the poem about a northern prospector who fears he will die of exposure and asks a friend to burn his remains.

Back in Cliff’s vehicle on the morning of Nov. 28, 2020, the men have just heard from Big Clyde. They’ve got Frank, but they haven’t touched him yet.

They’re still talking poetry, sitting in a largely vacant parking lot in Regina’s east end, when the video message hits Cliff’s phone. The undercover officer shows it to his passenger.

In it, a man directs a comment to another man in a chair whose head is covered. A man meant to be Frank.

“You have one f–king week to pay,” he’s told.

“This is how our problems get dealt with mother f–ker. What do you think is going to happen?”

Joe smiles and nods, looking intrigued.

He doesn’t reach for the asthma inhaler or the heart pills that Cliff asked him to bring along.

“Want to get out?” Cliff asks.

Joe says he wants to tell the younger man a bit about how insurance works, and the reason he knows how it works.

Cliff wheels the vehicle to a nearby hotel. The short jaunt takes a few minutes — time to allow Joe to reconsider his involvement.

When they arrive, Cliff parks the vehicle so they can see the door to the room Big Clyde said they were in. The officer makes a phone call and directs that the door be opened.

Then the men in the vehicle get a look at what’s inside — it mirrors the scene Joe saw on the video a few minutes earlier.

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With the door closed again, Cliff says: “If you want to be done, you can get out. We can walk away and forget that we met each other.”

“We’ve already forgotten that we met each other, but I’m not walking away,” the older man says, before turning right back to talk about insurance.

Anyways, about the insurance, Joe says he knows about it because his brother disappeared some time back and he was named as his brother’s beneficiary. But his brother wasn’t declared dead for years, so he kept paying the premiums.

“Anyway, they finally paid me, but the income tax took half of it,” he says, summoning a chuckle from Cliff.

The younger man compliments Joe, telling him he’s a smart man, but says some things are weighing on him and he wants to make sense of them.

He drives the vehicle back over to Tammy’s condo, where they counted tens of thousands of dollars the day before. As they make their way up to the suite, Joe dips back into rambling about poetry.

Directed to sit down, the older man moves into a recital of The Madonna by Robert Service, which tells of a man painting the portrait of a woman. She’s from the street with a “heart unclean.” However, the artist’s rendition is later mistaken for a painting of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

“What it says to me is that what you see is usually not what you think it is,” Joe says.

He’s unaware the only trick being turned in this phoney brothel is the one being played on him.

He’s unaware that where he’s been asked to sit is in front of the watching eye of a video camera, set up by people who are exceedingly interested in what he might say next.

He’s unaware that he’s just uttered the opening narration to the final act of his life as he’s known it.

The hand that feeds

Bread will be broken.

Truth bread, Cliff says, about to bear down on the older man sitting across from him.

The communion is to be an unholy one.

The officer has convinced Joe that he’s a bad man, or at least a principled man who is capable of doing bad things. Perhaps Joe believes they’re alike in that way.

Anyways, they’ve planned a bad thing together — the potential serious harm or murder of a supposed common enemy.

Cliff had to be sure Joe wasn’t a cop. Or so he told the white-haired man he’s spent much of the past week with.

And the envelope the younger man holds, which contains information from the crooked cop his sister is sleeping with (or so the story went), proves Joe is no cop.

But now their secrets need to be put on the table.

If he’s going to go ahead and give the word to his buddy Big Clyde to bang up that slippery little Frank, Cliff needs to be sure that Joe isn’t a dog, as the older man put it earlier, that will bite the hand that feeds it.

Joe has been beating around the bush about his brother Patrick’s disappearance.

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“What happened to your brother? You told me he went missing,” Cliff says.

“Do I have to say?” Joe wonders aloud.

The officer’s answer is firm.

“Our secrets are going to be shared.”

Joe launches into a preliminary story about who his brother was, his business partner at the farm and a psychologist who “lost his marbles” — a claim that would later be disputed by family.

Pat began selling off the land at the farm before he went missing, Joe says.

Who did the police look at first? Well, Joe Thauberger, of course. Patrick’s business partner.

When he failed a polygraph test, it added to police suspicion, he says.

Cliff gets a little impatient, telling the older man to talk about the day his brother disappeared. He doesn’t want any “bullshit.”

Joe reminds Cliff he’d already said he’d prefer not to answer a question about whether he’d ever “put anyone in the ground.”

The officer is unmoved.

“We’re going to meet halfway,” Cliff says, noting that way he’ll be sure Joe isn’t going to turn on him.

“So that I know you’re like me,” he adds.

Stammering somewhat, Joe says his brother “disappeared at the farm.”

But how did he get to the farm, Cliff presses.

“With me,” Joe says seriously, before issuing a short asthmatic chuckle.

On his way back to Edmonton, Patrick visited Joe, who says they negotiated about the sale of land they collectively owned.

“I got four kids. I look after those kids,” Joe says.

He goes on about a previous divorce, and how he put his land in Patrick’s name because of the divorce. And because he was going to go bankrupt.

“You were over the barrel and he makes decisions that impact your business,” Cliff says, following.

Joe continues to roll out the story of what precipitated the meeting on Sept. 3, 1997. Patrick believed the land was his and started selling it off, Joe says.

Negotiation was “not good.”

“What else is there to tell?” Joe asks.

“He disappeared.”

But there is more to tell, and Cliff is going to hear it. He pushes the old man, who is verbally dancing around the point with an agility his body could never replicate.

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The older man admits his brother was “not breathing” when they went to the farm together.

“We’ll leave it at that,” Joe says.

But they wouldn’t leave it at all.

Yeah, he was dead. He hit Patrick in the head, he admits.

“How did you do it though?” Cliff asks.

“Um, I think, a hammer, or something,” Joe responds.

The uncertainty seems to anger Cliff, who makes his irritation clear.

“Somehow this, uh, hammer appeared,” Joe says.

The hammer was there, he adds. It’s not like it just happened.

“Was it premeditated?” Joe asks, attempting to assist Cliff who is asking questions to this end.

The officer, who is all too familiar with the word, tells Joe he doesn’t understand it, garnering an explanation and a confirmation that it was premeditated.

“If things didn’t go well,” Joe adds.

“Explain that to me, because to me you’re not a monster,” Cliff responds.

Joe didn’t do it for himself, he says, bringing up his children again.

“They gotta go to university.”

Nothing would’ve happened if Patrick had been better about turning the land back over to him, he says. He’d paid Patrick. He’d paid him well.

The older man’s capacity to ramble is on display while they talk. Joe goes on, first about his relationship with Patrick, then about his early days on the farm. One of his sisters was an “outdoor girl” and milked cows, while the other was an “indoor girl.” She cleaned the house. His dad loved to work on houses — just him and his hammer and his saw.

Cliff, getting impatient, tries to steer Joe back to Patrick. The older man has to get up to use the washroom. He can’t postpone things like that, you know.

Sitting back down he recites a line of poetry — something involving a striptease — after waving off Cliff’s praise for his memory of literary verse.

“Jeez, eh? You’re so smart,” Cliff says, his audible smile pulling at the sounds of the words. It’s the umpteenth time he’s complimented the old man’s intelligence. Maybe Joe doesn’t detect anything forced in the tone. Maybe he doesn’t care.

The officer leads the old man back to that day in 1997. While Patrick was reading a contract, Joe hit him over the head with a hammer. Five times. He didn’t see it coming.

The officer presses Joe hard for the absolute minute specifics of how it happened, how Patrick fell, so on and so forth. Where was Joe? What happened next? He’s looking up at you? Are you standing?

“I think there was a rope there,” Joe says.

“So I think I used that to cut off the air supply.”

Cliff has a habit of repeating Joe’s words back to him, as if to invite the older man to either affirm or walk back what he’s said.

Joe maintains his course. His brother was still breathing after he hit him. It took around five minutes before he stopped trying for more oxygen.

“You’re not telling me this just to bullshit me to make me think that you’re… This is the truth?” Cliff asks.

Joe says there’s only one other person in the world who knows what happened, and that’s his ex-wife Barbara. She was downstairs looking after pre-schoolers in the daycare she ran. She heard Pat scream. It was “quite loud.” Later, she saw more than she wanted to see.

The cops talked to her, but she didn’t say nothing, Joe says. (She would later say Joe threatened to kill her if she did.)

So Patrick’s not breathing. Now what?

Joe waited.

“Well, for darkness,” he clarifies.

“You’re a smart man,” Cliff says.

This time, the patronizing tone is absent.

Barbara, she didn’t want any part in it, or what would happen next, but she sympathized, Joe tells the officer — years later, in court, she would speak of horror, but not of sympathy.

“‘Cause you’re not a monster,” the younger man says.

“It makes sense to me,” he adds.

Even so, the younger man would keep asking questions. Question after question after question.

And the story all trickled out. He’d hauled Patrick’s body out to the farm in a red Ford pickup. He decided the body would have to be buried under water so police dogs couldn’t smell it. He threw it in a slough.

“Why do you have to know all this?” Joe asks.

The younger man replies he needs to know because he has to be sure Joe isn’t the kind of guy who will panic and do something that will bite him in the ass.

“We’re sharing a secret,” Cliff says.

And Joe continued to share, eventually talking about the rocks he put on top of his brother’s body.

“Game over,” Joe says.

Cliff wonders whether those rocks are still there.

They are, Joe confirms.

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Eventually, Cliff tries to shake Joe down about the times he’s spoken with police. They suspected him. They would come around and try to get him to confess, he says.

Once, Joe says, he asked officers why they wouldn’t just arrest him if they were so sure he had something to do with the disappearance.

“These were his exact words: Joe, we have no evidence. It looks like you committed the perfect crime.”

But the officers kept coming, nonetheless, he says.

“They’re relentless, those guys,” Cliff offers.

***

The same day he confessed to Cliff that he’d killed Patrick, Joe took the undercover officer to the site where his brother’s body was buried. When recovered by police, Patrick’s skeleton was incomplete, and a forensic anthropologist later concluded his limbs and skull had been sawn off.

Joe was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and offering an indignity to human remains.

Cliff testified at a voir dire, a kind of trial within a trial, to determine whether the evidence obtained by police during UCO Thaw would be admissible. It was.

At one point, Joe threatened to “take himself out of the equation” before his trial began. He didn’t.

He testified in his own defence, telling court his brother’s death was an accident and admitting to covering it up for fear of being wrongfully convicted, like David Milgaard.

On July 27, 2023, he was found guilty of second-degree murder and offering an indignity to his brother’s remains. More than a quarter century had passed since the killing.

He received a life sentence with no chance of parole for 10 years.

He spent around four-and-a-half months in custody as a convicted man. He died Dec. 12, 2023 at age 81.

His body was not buried in a slough.

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Banner illustration by artist Brice Hall, based on his reading of the Leader-Post feature The secret in the slough.

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