This episode contains descriptions of human trafficking, sexual exploitation, physical violence, and drug use. Some of it is graphic. If any of that is hard for you to hear right now, please take care of yourself, and feel free to skip this one.

A note on names and sources. The two women at the centre of this case are protected by a publication ban under the Criminal Code, a standard, mandatory order in cases like this. Their real identities cannot be broadcast. So throughout this episode, I'm going to call them “Mary" and “Jane”. Those are not their names. Everything else, the dates, the evidence, the rulings, the verdict, comes from the court's own written reasons in R. v. Laguerre, an Ontario Court of Justice case decided in 2025 and 2026.

INTRODUCTION

Picture it.

It's a Saturday afternoon in October. You are standing in a gas station off Kennedy Road in Mississauga, and you are not wearing pants.

You ran. You ran out of Room 408 of the Super 8 Motel in just a T-shirt, no shoes that matter, nothing in your hands, because the man you came here with had a phone charger cable in his and he was swinging it at you. He punched you. He kicked you. There's a bruise blooming under your eye and marks coming up on your arm and your back.

You don't have your phone “he took it”. You don't have your money “he took that too”, and it was “your” money, money you earned. You don't have a car. You don't really speak English. And the nearest person who loves you is 600 kilometres away in Montreal, in a life you can't get back to.

So you borrow a phone, or you find one, and you dial 911. And for 26 minutes you try to make a stranger on the other end of the line understand, through your panic and your broken English, that you need the police to come NOW before he realizes you called, before he disappears with everything you own.

You tell them his name. You tell them he drives a grey Honda Civic with a paper permit from Quebec taped in the back window. You tell them there's another woman still up in that room.

And then you say the thing that, more than anything else you said that day, tells the whole story in a few words: “all the money he has on him, it's all ours.”

I'm your host, Ryan Dell. This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.

Today's story takes us to a roadside motel in Mississauga, Ontario, and into one of the hardest categories of crime there is to prosecute: human trafficking. It's the story of two women, brought from Montreal and put to work selling sex, controlled by one man through money, drugs, violence, isolation, and the oldest trick in the book, making someone believe he loved her.

It's also the story of how the Crown won this case without either victim ever testifying. Both of them were subpoenaed. Neither one came to court. One of them tried to take it all back.

And he was still convicted of everything.

This is the case of Wooldy Laguerre.

CHAPTER ONE — The 911 Call

October 12th, 2024. Roughly 4:15 in the afternoon.

The call comes in to Peel Regional Police from a gas station attached to the Super 8 Motel at 6625 Kennedy Road. The caller is a woman. The transcript would later run to a dozen pages, and the audio would become one of the single most important exhibits in the entire trial.

Let's call her Mary.

Mary is distraught. She's talking fast, and the operator keeps having to ask her to slow down, because she's hard to understand. She says her boyfriend just hit her. She says he keeps hitting her. She says he took her phone. She fled Room 408, she says, wearing only a shirt.

She is terrified, but listen to what she's terrified of. She is not, in this moment, mostly afraid of being hurt again. When the operator asks if she needs an ambulance, she says no, she's not hurt. What she is frantic about is that the man will find out she called, and he'll leave, and he'll take her money and her belongings with him. “I can't go back to Montreal,” she says.

Over those 26 minutes, almost without meaning to, Mary lays out the architecture of a human trafficking operation.

She says she works for him as an escort. She says the other woman in the room does too,  let's call her Jane. She says the two of them have been working for him for about a year and a half. She says the money he took off her came from her "work." She gives the operator his name. His age, early thirties. His build. heavy. What he's wearing, black shirt, black jeans. The car. The Quebec paper permit instead of a licence plate.

She also tells the operator something honest that the defence would later try to use against her: she admits she and Jane had used cocaine earlier that day. She's careful to add that he was sober.

The call ends when the officers pull up. Mary walks out of the gas station to meet them.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** A 911 call like this one is gold, and not because of what's “said” but because of “when” it's said. This woman is calling in the middle of the worst moment of her week. She isn't strategizing. She isn't shading her story for a courtroom she doesn't yet know she'll be subpoenaed to. She's just trying to survive the next 10 minutes. In my experience, that's exactly when you get the truth, when the person hasn't had time to think about how the truth might land. Everything she blurts out here, scared and half-dressed in a gas station, is going to get matched up later against video, against phone data, against the cash in his pocket. And it's going to line up. That's what makes a call like this so powerful.

CHAPTER TWO — How Two Women From Montreal Ended Up in Room 408

To understand what the police walked into, you have to understand how Mary and Jane got there. And to do that, you have to understand a word that gets thrown around a lot and understood almost not at all: human trafficking.

When most people hear "human trafficking," they picture shipping containers. Chains. Someone smuggled across a border in the back of a truck who has never met their captor before.

That's almost never what it looks like.

What it usually looks like is this. A man and a woman who, on paper, are in a relationship. Who travel together. Who share hotel rooms and meals and, sometimes, real affection, or what feels to her like real affection. There are no chains. The door isn't locked. If you watched them check into the Super 8, you'd see a couple.

Mary and Jane were both from the Montreal area. They both spoke French, and very limited English. For about a year and a half, the court found, they had been working for Wooldy Laguerre, selling sexual services, with him taking the proceeds.

By October 2024, they were in Ontario, a province where they didn't speak the language, didn't know anyone, had no car, no money of their own, and no real way to get home. They had been staying at the Super 8 since around October 6th. Their reservation ran to the 15th.

Think about what that geography does to a person. You are in a strange city. You can't read the signs. You can't easily ask a stranger for help, because you can't explain your situation in the language they speak. You have no cash and no phone, because he holds both. The only person who can get you food, get you a ride, get you anything, is the man you'd need to escape from. The court used a precise phrase for this. It said their basic needs were “mediated through him.”

That's the part people miss. The cage isn't made of bars. It's made of dependency. Money, drugs, language, distance, and, in Mary's case especially, love.

Because here is the cruelest thread in this whole story. Mary believed she was in a romantic relationship with him. She was, the court found, emotionally bonded to him. And he knew it, and he used it. He even knew she was in the middle of a custody dispute over her children, and the evidence showed he'd been in contact with the children's father about her conduct. He knew exactly where her softest spot was, and he kept his thumb on it.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** People who haven't worked these files ask the same question every time: “why didn't she just leave?” And it's the wrong question. It assumes leaving was a door she could walk through. It wasn't. Take a woman, move her to a city where she can't speak the language, take her phone, take her money, get her using drugs you control the supply of, and convince her you love her, and now ask her to walk out into a strange city at night with nothing. Most people, in that position, don't run. They comply. Not because they're weak. Because the exit has been engineered shut. The genius of this kind of control is that it doesn't look like control. It looks like a relationship. That's the disguise.

CHAPTER THREE — The Business: "Marcus," the Trap Phone, and the Gold Bar

So how did the operation actually run? The court reconstructed it almost piece by piece, and it's worth walking through, because it shows you that this wasn't chaos. It was a business.

**The brand.** The women were advertised online, on a classified-ad platform called Leolist that's commonly used in the sex trade, under a working alias. Mary's ads ran under one name; there was a dedicated email account tied to those ads. The photos in the ads were of her.

**The phone.** There were two phones in play, and the distinction matters enormously. There was Mary's personal phone. And then there was what police called the "trap phone”, the work phone. The trap phone was used to communicate with clients: to take bookings, coordinate arrivals, set timing and pricing. Mary and Jane did not have the passcode to the trap phone. They didn't control what was on it. Both of them said it belonged to “him”

**The alias.** Laguerre had his own work name. He told the women to call him "Marcus."

**The quota.** This is the detail that turns "boyfriend" into “human trafficker." The women were given a nightly target. The figure that came up was a minimum of around $2000 per night.  Jane described nightly targets. Mary described the consequence of missing them: if she didn't work he would beat her.

**The money.** All of it flowed to him. The earnings, the cash, he held it. Neither woman had control over the money she generated. Which is why, when police arrived, both women were broke, and Laguerre's beige satchel was not. When officers searched him, they found roughly $4,100 in Canadian cash, another $100 US, and, this is not a detail you forget, a Swiss gold bar. Mary had told police he'd likely be carrying three to four thousand dollars in cash. He was carrying right around that.

**The drugs.** This is the engine underneath all of it. The evidence was that Laguerre supplied both women with cocaine and speed, and that he did it deliberately, to keep them working. The room itself told the story: officers documented a spoon, a syringe, powder, a scale. Drug dependency is one of the most effective control mechanisms there is, because the supplier doesn't have to threaten you. He just has to be the only one who can make you feel okay.

There were also false identification cards in that room, for Mary, and for other women.

 **POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** Look at how the labour is divided. He controls the phone, so he controls the clients. He controls the money, so he controls whether she eats. He controls the drugs, so he controls how she feels. And he sets the number she has to hit every night, so she's always behind, always working. That's not a relationship with a bad streak. That's an organizational chart. When I assess a file like this, I'm looking for exactly this: one person holding every lever, and the other holding none. When you find that, you've found exploitation.

CHAPTER FOUR — The Response: Exigent Entry, a French Caution, and a Big Man With a Satchel

Back to the afternoon of October 12th.

The first officers reach the Super 8 within about 15 minutes of the call. Constable Bolarinho finds Mary outside, in the black shirt and no pants, pacing, distressed, bruised on the face and marked on the arm. She talks to him in English, declines medical help, and tells him Laguerre is in Room 408 with another woman.

Sergeant Bennewitz, a 20 year veteran, is the supervising officer on scene. He makes a decision that the defence would later challenge and the court would ultimately uphold: with no warrant, officers get a key card from the front desk and go into Room 408. The legal justification is known as exigent circumstances.  They believed in the immediate aftermath of a reported assault  that a second victim was inside and in danger.

The room is empty. It's in disarray, belongings everywhere. The officers note a white powdery substance. But, and this is important for later, they don't search it and they don't seize anything. They make sure nobody is inside the room and they leave.

Minutes later, a radio call: a man in a red shirt, with a woman in a grey tracksuit, near the adjacent Esso station. It matches Mary's description. At 4:49 p.m., officers approach Wooldy Laguerre. He's calm. He doesn't run. He's a large man carrying a satchel, in loose clothing that could hide a weapon, standing near members of the public, so the sergeant walks him toward the cruisers before formally detaining him.

He's arrested for assault and breach of an undertaking, Laguerre was under a court order not to contact Mary. The cash is found in the satchel. And because Laguerre says he won't understand his rights in English, Constable Patricia Hunt, who is bilingual, delivers his right to counsel in French. He asks for a lawyer, names one in Montreal, and that request is honoured later at the station.

Meanwhile, Hunt is also the officer who, speaking French with the two women, starts to hear what this really is. When the officers ask whether the man was her pimp, she says yes, and confirms the relationship was both intimate and for money.”  Jane, frightened, brings up a man named “Julian", she says Julian was paid to harm her and has a gun back in Montreal.

At this stage, nobody has been arrested for trafficking. Bennewitz is clear about that, he says he had no grounds for trafficking charges yet. What he does have is a woman who's just told him she's an escort and that this man holds her money. So he does the right thing: he calls the Vice Unit.

 **POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** Watch how this builds. The patrol officers handle this beautifully on the their end, they get to the scene fast, they make a defensible warrantless entry to check for a second victim, they don't trample the scene, and the second they hear the word "escort" and "he has my money," they stop and call specialists. That's the right instinct. A patrol sergeant on a Saturday night is not equipped to run a trafficking investigation, and Bennewitz knew it. Knowing what you don't know, and calling the people who do, is half of good policing. The other half, well, we'll get to where this investigation stumbled.

CHAPTER FIVE — The Evidence, and What Every Piece of It Meant

Here's where I want to slow all the way down, because this is the heart of it. Human Trafficking cases are notoriously hard to prove, and this one was won on a mosaic, many small pieces, none of which would mean much alone, but which put together left no other reasonable explanation, and paints the picture. Let me take you through the pieces one at a time, and tell you what each one actually did for the prosecution.

**The 911 call.** We started here, and the court came back to it constantly. Its value was twofold. First, as a snapshot of Mary's genuine fear and urgency in real time, that's admissible just to show her state of mind. Second, the spontaneous, under-stress parts of it were admissible for their truth under an old rule called res gestae, which is an exception to the rule against hearsay. It allows otherwise inadmissible out-of-court statements to be used as evidence if they are made spontaneously under the stress of an event, leaving no time for premeditation or fabrication

The call established the assault was just right now, his identity, the cable as a weapon, her flight, the other woman, the stolen money. It was the spine everything else attached to.

**The body-worn camera footage.** Every attending officer was wearing one. This is the modern game-changer. The cameras captured Mary's visible injuries, her distinguishing her own phone from his, her pointing out his car and the Quebec permit, her confirming Room 408, all on video, contemporaneously, from multiple angles. Crucially, it also captured both women saying things spontaneously, not in answer to leading questions. That spontaneity is what later made those statements admissible.

**The in-car and CCTV footage.** The motel's own surveillance was devastating. The fourth-floor cameras showed days of client traffic in and out of Room 408. They showed Laguerre accompanying or trailing the women. They showed him handling two phones, including one damaged device that later turned out to be the trap phone. They showed him counting cash. The station's CCTV documented the booking process. Surveillance like this does something a witness can't: it doesn't forget, and it can't be cross-examined into doubt.

**The trap-phone extraction and the Leolist data.** Police got a data extraction off the work phone and pulled the associated records from Leolist. The ads, the account data, the client messages,  all of it tied back to the phone number and email connected to the operation. And here's the kicker the court leaned on: the surveillance showed Laguerre holding that phone while the client messages were being created. The women didn't have the passcode. That's the link between the man and the machine. That's what turned "she does sex work" into "he runs it."

**The seized property.** The $4,100 Canadian, the $100 US, the gold bar, the phones. Lodged, bagged, tagged, later counted on camera with Laguerre present. The cash mattered because Mary had predicted the amount before they searched him. And there was an even finer point: a specific serialized US bill that Mary had handled was compared against the money found on him. The money trail ran straight from her work to his satchel.

**The injury photographs.** Officers photographed the injuries on both women, and the body-worn footage captured them too. Their value wasn't just "she was hurt." It was timing. Those injuries don't appear in the earlier CCTV clips, which corroborates that the violence happened when the women said it did. Photographs also let the court be careful: Mary herself clarified that one eye injury was not caused by Laguerre. That honesty actually made her more credible, not less.

**The room itself.** When Vice returned to Room 408, the body-worn footage showed a lived-in operation: sex paraphernalia, drug paraphernalia;  spoon, syringe, powder, scale,  liquor, and those false ID cards. The room corroborated the women's accounts of commercial sex and controlled drug use in one frame.

**Mary's later statements, and her text messages.** In the days after, Mary spoke with Vice officers and provided the trap phone, distinguishing it from her personal phone, and gave specific numbers and the advertising email. She said he'd given her cocaine and speed to keep her working, and told her to call him Marcus. She also, later, sent texts trying to pull back. We'll come to those, because they're their own chapter.

Now, none of these pieces is a confession. None is an eyewitness to a beating. But stack them up, and watch what happens. The cash matches her prediction. The phone is in his hand in the footage. The injuries match the timeline. The room matches the story. The ads match the email. The serialized bill matches the satchel.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** This is what a real trafficking prosecution looks like, and I wish more people understood it. There's rarely one silver bullet. There's a hundred small, boring, verifiable facts that all point the same direction. A defence lawyer can offer an innocent explanation for any single one of them, sure, the cash could be from something else; sure, the ads could be hers. But the more independent strands you have, the harder it gets to find one story that explains all of them at once except the true one. The judge in this case said it plainly: by the end, the only likely explanation left standing was that the women told the truth. That's not built on one piece of evidence. That's built on the convergence.

CHAPTER SIX — The Confession That Vanished

Now I have to tell you about the part where the police hurt their own case. Because this is a true-crime show, not a recruiting poster, and the honest version of this story includes a serious misstep.

After the arrest, Laguerre was taken to 12 Division to be booked. And during the booking, the exact window where his legal jeopardy was about to change from a simple assault to human trafficking, and where his right to a lawyer needed to be re-administered, the booking officer, on the direction of a staff sergeant, turned off the audio on the body-worn camera.

So for that critical stretch, there is only silent CCTV. No sound. At the precise moment the case got serious, the recording went quiet.

Then, late that evening, a Vice detective, Detective Constable Douglas, sat Laguerre down for an interview. And before re-cautioning him on the new, far more serious charges, the detective ran what he called a "template": a series of supposedly routine booking questions. Full name, date of birth, address, phone number for the seized phone, social media, email, tattoos, immigration history.

Here's the problem. Those aren't innocent administrative questions in a human trafficking case. The phone number and the email and the social media accounts are exactly what you'd use to tie a suspect to online sex ads. The detective himself later admitted the information was investigative, not just paperwork, and admitted he "went with the flow" instead of re-advising Laguerre of his right to a lawyer first, because the accused seemed anxious about the new charges.

Laguerre even asked him, mid-template: that's a new charge? And the detective deferred, and kept asking questions.

The trial judge did not let this slide. The judge found that Laguerre's rights under sections 10(a) and 10(b) of the Charter, the right to be told promptly why you're being detained, and the right to counsel, were breached. And under section 24(2) of the Charter, the judge excluded the entire video statement.  From the moment that interview began until a proper caution was finally given well into it, the statement was ruled both involuntary and unconstitutional. It would not be be considered as evidence.  Also, purposely disabling body-worn cameras and audio is very concerning.  

The Crown lost the confession. And still won the case.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** I'm going to be blunt, because the court was. Turning off that audio was an error, and the "template" questions before the caution were worse. Whatever the intention, the effect is that a court looked at it and said: this smells like an end-run around the right to a lawyer. And the cost was the confession, thrown out, gone. Here's the lesson I'd want every young officer to take from this: the rules around the right to counsel aren't red tape. They're load-bearing. You cut a corner to get a quick admission, and you can hand the defence the keys to your best evidence. This case is the rare one where the rest of the file was strong enough to survive losing the statement. Most aren't. Don't bet on being the exception.

CHAPTER SEVEN — The Witnesses Who Never Came

And now we arrive at the question that makes trafficking cases so uniquely hard.

Both women were subpoenaed. Both were legally required to come to court and testify.

Neither one did.

In fact, Mary went further. She contacted the Vice detective and told him she no longer wanted to provide a statement. She wanted to remove her past comments. In the detective's words, she said she'd “like to retract everything.” He was careful to add that she wouldn't say she had lied, only that she didn't want to pursue it anymore.

To a lot of people, that sounds like a case falling apart. The star witness recanting? In most TV courtrooms, that's the end.

It wasn't. And to understand why, you have to understand why trafficking victims so often refuse to testify, even after they've already told the police everything.

Let me give you the reasons, because they're not the ones people assume.

**It's not because they lied.** That's the first and most important point, and it's the one the court made directly. A refusal to testify is not a confession that the original story was false. The judge said a desire not to participate can come from fear, from inconvenience, from inability, from exhaustion, from a hundred things that have nothing to do with whether the original account was true.

**Fear of reprisal.** Remember Julian, the man Jane said was paid to hurt her. Real or exaggerated, that fear is the climate these women live in. Testifying means putting your name and face into a room with the person who controlled you, and sometimes with people connected to him. The threat doesn't end at arrest.

**The trauma bond.** This is the hardest one for outsiders to accept. Mary believed she loved him. When you've been emotionally bonded to your trafficker, when part of you still experiences him as your partner, getting on a stand and helping send him to prison feels less like justice and more like betraying someone you love. Traffickers cultivate that bond precisely because it buys their silence later.

**Dependency that doesn't switch off.** The drugs, the money, the lack of stable housing, the substance issues, those don't resolve the day police show up. A woman who is still struggling, still unhoused, still using, is not in a strong position to take days off, travel to another province, and relive the worst thing that happened to her in front of strangers.

**Sheer logistics and distrust.** These women lived in Quebec. The trial was in Ontario. Jane had an outstanding warrant from Sherbrooke and conditions that kept her out of Toronto. Imagine being asked to travel into a jurisdiction where you yourself might face legal trouble, to help the very system that's caused you problems before. Many won't. Many can't.

**Re-traumatization.** Testifying means describing, out loud, in detail, the sexual exploitation and violence you endured, and then being cross-examined on it, having your drug use and your choices and your inconsistencies picked apart by a lawyer whose job is to make you look unreliable. For a lot of survivors, that's not a path to closure. It's a second injury.

Now here's the legal twist that makes this case important. The Crown didn't need them to testify. Because the law has long recognized this exact problem.

The court reached back to a 1992 Supreme Court of Canada decision, R. v. Downey, which said something that was true in 1992 and is true now: because of the parasitic and coercive nature of the relationship between a pimp and the person they exploit, these victims are extremely reluctant to come forward and testify against their traffickers. The system has known this for over thirty years.

So Canadian law allows, in carefully limited circumstances, for a victim's earlier statements, the 911 call, the body-worn footage, the recorded police statement, to be admitted even though the victim isn't there to be cross-examined.  It's called the principled exception to the hearsay rule, governed by a framework from a case called Bradshaw. The Crown has to prove two things: that the evidence is necessary (it is, because the witness won't or can't testify), and that it's reliable (because it's so thoroughly corroborated by all that independent evidence we walked through earlier that cross-examining the witness wouldn't realistically change the answer).

The judge did exactly that analysis, piece by piece, and admitted the women's statements. On Mary's attempt to retract everything, the judge concluded it was far more consistent with fear, inconvenience, and her circumstances than with fabrication, and pointedly refused to hold her non-attendance against the truth of what she'd said.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** I want to say this as plainly as I can, because it's the single biggest misconception about these cases. A victim who recants is not a victim who lied. Nine times out of ten, she's a victim who's still in the power of the person who controlled her, or who simply cannot survive the cost of testifying. Early in my career, I took recantations as the case dying. I learned. The smart investigators build the file so it doesn't depend on the victim ever taking the stand, they get the 911 call, they get the body-cam, they pull the phone, they seize the cash, they photograph everything, so that if she walks away, and she often does, the truth is already locked in on a dozen surfaces that can't be intimidated. That's what happened here. They built it to stand without her. And it did.

CHAPTER EIGHT — The Verdict

It was a judge-alone trial before Justice S. Robichaud of the Ontario Court of Justice. The defence put up a real fight — Laguerre himself took the stand and offered an alternative explanation, claiming he was in Ontario for unrelated criminal reasons, not to traffic anyone. The judge rejected it as internally inconsistent and flatly contradicted by the surveillance, the digital evidence, and the women's consistent accounts.

The defence floated every reasonable alternative: maybe the injuries came from a fight between the two women; maybe they were doing sex work independently and just blamed him; maybe the cash was from something legitimate; maybe the ads were the women's own. The judge worked through each one and found that none of them survived contact with the evidence.

On the central question of exploitation, the judge applied the test the law requires and found it proven beyond a reasonable doubt: that Laguerre's conduct, taken as a whole, was reasonably capable of making each woman believe her safety would be threatened if she stopped providing sexual services. Violence and intimidation. Control of the money. Control of the drugs. Emotional leverage. Isolation in a province where they couldn't even ask for help. Constant monitoring. Not one of those things alone, but woven together into what the judge called a coherent and sustained pattern of coercive control.

The verdict came down. Guilty.

Guilty of trafficking in persons, two counts, one for each woman. Guilty of receiving a material benefit from that trafficking. Guilty of exercising control and influence over both women for the purpose of facilitating the sale of sexual services. Guilty of receiving a material benefit from those sexual services. Guilty of knowingly advertising sexual services. And guilty of the assaults, the assault with a weapon, that phone and phone cord, the uttering of threats, and the breach of his undertaking.

He was convicted on every count he faced.

EPILOGUE

I keep coming back to one thing about this case.

He never confessed, or rather, the confession he gave got thrown out, because the police cut a corner they shouldn't have. The two women he trafficked never set foot in the courtroom. One of them asked to take it all back. By the ordinary logic of a criminal trial, this is a case that should have collapsed. No statement from the accused. No live witnesses. A complainant on record saying she wanted to retract everything.

And he was convicted of all of it.

Mary may never want to be found again. That's her right, and after what she lived through, I understand it completely.

Human trafficking is not rare, and it is not far away. It happens in motels off the highway in cities like Mississauga. The victims are most often women and girls, frequently moved between provinces precisely to isolate them, frequently controlled not by locks but by debt, drugs, distance, and affection turned into a weapon.

If you ever find yourself wondering why someone doesn’t “just leave”, remember Room 408. Remember a woman with no money, no phone, no language, no car, and a man who held all four, and who told her he loved her. Leaving was never the simple thing it looks like from the outside.

If you or someone you know is being trafficked or exploited, help exists. In Canada, the Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at 1-833-900-1010, confidentially, in multiple languages. You don't have to be sure. You don't have to have proof. You just have to call.

There's a cost to this work that never makes it into the headlines. The officers who handle trafficking and abuse cases carry images home with them that they can't unsee. They miss their kids' bedtimes, their anniversaries, their own holidays, so that strangers can have theirs in peace. The prosecutors lose sleep over files like this one, knowing a single misstep could let a guilty person walk. They choose that weight, willingly, in service of people they'll often never meet and rarely hear thanks from. To the officers and the Crown who saw this case through, and to everyone in those jobs listening right now, I see the sacrifice in it, and I'm grateful. We all should be.

This episode was written, researched, and produced by me, Ryan Dell. If you liked what you heard, please take a moment to give the show a five-star review. These episodes are ad free, leaving a review will take less time then the listening to the ads other podcasts have.  Please leave a review, It helps the podcast grow, and helps other people find these stories.

I love hearing from you. If there's a case you think I should cover, send me an email. My address is: canadiancrimecast@gmail.com.

I'm Ryan Dell, and this is *Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.*

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*Sources: R. v. Laguerre, 2025 ONCJ 694 (CanLII); R. v. Laguerre, 2026 ONCJ 255 (CanLII). Complainants' identities are protected by a publication ban under s. 486.4 of the Criminal Code and have been replaced with the pseudonyms "Mary" and "Jane."*