This episode deals with murder, domestic violence, drug addiction and sexual exploitation. Some of the testimony you're about to hear is graphic, and it involves the death of a mother in front of her own family. Please take care while listening.

INTRO

Imagine you're driving home from the airport with your husband and your fourteen-year-old nephew. It's early evening, July, the light going gold over the fields west of London, Ontario. You've just spent the day picking the boy up at Pearson, he's come all the way from British Columbia to spend the summer working at your family's nursing home. Everybody's tired. Everybody's happy. You're almost home.

And then, up ahead on the shoulder of Highway 402, you see a car pulled over. Someone in trouble.

Your husband slows down. He always stops for people in trouble, everybody in town will tell you that. He's the kind of man who built an empire out of nothing and never forgot what it felt like to have nothing.

So he pulls over. And a masked man reaches into your car, grabs you by the hair, and drags you out onto the gravel.

You will be dead within the hour. And the man who arranged it, the man who is about to watch you die and not lift a finger, is sitting in the driver's seat beside you.

This is the story of Hanna Buxbaum. Of the "Good Samaritan Murder" that shocked southwestern Ontario, of the millionaire husband who orchestrated it, and of the four-month trial that exposed cocaine, prostitutes, missing millions, and a marriage that was, in the words of the man who destroyed it, "the best friendship I ever had."

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

CHAPTER 1: The Good Samaritans

It's just after seven on the evening of July 5th, 1984. Highway 402, a few kilometres east of Strathroy, near a place called Komoka, a farm community of about eleven hundred people, the kind of town where everybody knows everybody, and where the Buxbaum name means something. Helmuth Buxbaum owns the nursing home here. It's one of the biggest employers in town.

A trucker named Colin Lawrence is heading down the highway when a man and a teenage boy wave him down at the side of the road. He pulls over. The man is frantic.

"My wife's been shot," he tells Lawrence. "Two guys with masks shot my wife."

The man, Helmuth Buxbaum, tells Lawrence that two men had flagged down his car, pretending to be broken down. That once he stopped, they pulled his wife from the vehicle at gunpoint, made him and the boy keep their heads down, and dragged her toward the guardrail. He says he heard three shots.

Lawrence climbs over that guardrail and finds a woman lying face-down in the grass and mud of a drainage culvert. She's been shot in the head. He can still detect signs of life, so he does what he can to stop the bleeding from her temple. About ten minutes later, a passing doctor stops to help too.

It isn't enough. Hanna Buxbaum, forty-eight years old, a mother of six, is rushed to Victoria Hospital in London. She dies a short time later.

The story police release to the public the next morning is the story everyone will believe for the next eighteen days: that this was a robbery gone wrong. That the Buxbaums, good Samaritans to the end, stopped to help two strangers who turned around and killed the wife for her money and her jewelry. The car sped off, a dark blue, mid-seventies Chevrolet Nova, tape over the licence plates.

The postmaster in the nearby village of Komoka, a woman named Winnie Marentette, tells a reporter she's now afraid to drive the highway home. "If you're in trouble," she says, "people won't stop to help." She says her own children are in a panic, terrified that someone out there would kill a person for nothing. A local eighteen-year-old who knew the family put it even more starkly: Hanna Buxbaum was so generous, she said, that the robbers "wouldn't have had to rob her, she would have given them the shirt off her back."

Everyone in Komoka knew the Buxbaums were wealthy. What nobody knew yet was how close to home the danger really was.

CHAPTER 2: Who Hanna Was

Before this story becomes a story about her husband, and it will, it deserves a pause here, because in four months of trial testimony that followed, Hanna Buxbaum got remarkably little airtime as an actual person. She became "the victim." "The wife." A line item in an insurance dispute. She deserves better than that.

Hanna Schmidt was born in Germany and came to Canada with her family after the Second World War, one of a wave of young European immigrants rebuilding a life in a country that wasn't home yet. She settled with her family in Kitchener, Ontario, and spent close to eight years working the line at a meatpacking plant, J.M. Schneider's, saving what she earned.

In 1960, their mothers decided the two of them should meet. Helmuth was working as a miner's assistant up in Elliot Lake at the time, and his mother thought Hanna would make him a good wife. He and a friend made the eight-to-ten-hour drive down to Kitchener to visit the Schmidt family for a weekend. Whatever happened on that visit, it worked. The two of them started corresponding regularly, and less than a year later, on June 10th, 1961, they were married.

By his own account on the witness stand, years later, their courtship was built on a "spiritual attraction" more than anything else. Both devout. Neither smoked nor drank. Hanna had savings from her years at the plant, enough that the newlyweds bought a house in Kitchener almost immediately, while she kept working and Helmuth studied nights for his high school diploma.

By 1967, the couple had pooled what they had to open a small rest home on a farm property in Komoka. Hanna wasn't a silent partner in that business. She owned forty-eight per cent of it, nearly half, and by every account from the people closest to the family, she was genuinely involved in running it. Their son Mark, nineteen when he testified in his father's defence, described his mother as "a very practical lady." "My father would often ask her questions," he said, "and they would discuss in a very open way what they should do about the business together." The family's longtime housekeeper, Gizella Toth, testified she never once heard the couple argue, and that Helmuth would kiss and hug Hanna goodbye every single morning before work.

She was also, by every measure that matters, generous almost to a fault. Dawn Arnold, an eighteen-year-old who worked at the local general store and knew the family, told a reporter in the days after the murder that whoever robbed her "wouldn't have had to." Hanna Buxbaum, she said, "was so generous she would have given them the shirt off her back." Her own will bore that out. She left two hundred thousand dollars to twenty-three different charitable and missionary organizations, working across Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and Europe. Three thousand dollars to each of her nieces and nephews, on top of everything she left her husband. She was, in the words of the prosecutor who stood up at her killer's sentencing two years later, "quite literally referred to as a saint" in her own community.

None of which means she was naive about her marriage. She knew about at least some of her husband's affairs, and by his own testimony, she forgave him, again and again, because her faith told her that was what a wife did. At one point she contracted a sexually transmitted infection from him, a devastating detail about what she quietly tolerated and stayed married to him anyway. When his cocaine use spiralled after his 1982 stroke, she didn't look away from that either. A longtime family friend named Christopher Browne, who admitted at trial that he'd also supplied Helmuth with drugs, testified that Hanna gave him "heck" for it. Robert Barrett, the dealer who would go on to arrange her murder, testified that Hanna was actively trying to get her husband into a rehabilitation program. And in May of 1984, only weeks before her death, she personally had Barrett fired from his job at the nursing home, because she knew exactly what he was and exactly what he was doing to her husband.

She was trying to save him. It cost her everything.

And on the evening of July 5th, 1984, with a gun to her head and two men pulling her toward a ditch, what came out of her wasn't a scream for herself. Witnesses testified she begged, "Please, I have five children at home." And in the last seconds of her life, she turned back to the man she'd married twenty-three years earlier and said, "No, honey, please, not this way." Right until the end, some part of her still believed he could stop it.

He didn't.

CHAPTER 3: Eighteen Days

For more than two weeks, Ontario Provincial Police work the case as exactly what it appears to be: a random, horrifying roadside robbery. And the public responds. Investigators interview more than two hundred people. A constable named Greg Calcott tells reporters it's "the most astounding murder in terms of unsolicited telephone response we've ever seen." Tips pour in. Everyone in southwestern Ontario, it seems, wants to help catch the men who murdered a mother of six in front of her family.

Then, on July 23rd, eighteen days after the murder, police make an arrest that stuns the province. Not two strangers. Not masked robbers who happened to be driving down Highway 402 at the wrong moment.

They arrest Helmuth Buxbaum. The widower. The man who had just buried his wife.

Alongside him, they arrest a twenty-four-year-old London man named Robert Barrett. Both are charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

Over the following weeks, the arrests keep coming. Gary Foshay, picked up at Pearson International Airport just before he's due to board a flight to Bermuda. Patrick Allen, arrested at his home in London the same day. Terry Kline, tracked down in Calgary. Then a woman, Janet Hicks, thirty years old, charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy. Finally, a seventh suspect, a man using the alias Terry Lewis, whose real name is Terry Armes, arrested in Winnipeg.

Seven people. Charged with murdering one woman on the side of a highway.

At their first court appearance, the accused are led into a packed Provincial courtroom in London, chained to each other at the wrists. Reporters and spectators jostle for seats. Police run everyone entering through a metal detector. About a hundred and fifty people had lined up outside since eight that morning just to get a glimpse.

And slowly, through a preliminary hearing that will stretch on for five and a half months, from December 1984 into April 1985, the real story starts to surface. Not a robbery. A contract.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE:

I want to flag something here, because it comes up again and again in this case. Almost every one of the people who actually helped plan and carry out this murder ended up walking free years before the man who paid for it. That's not corruption, that's how these cases get made. You very often can't convict the person who ordered a killing without the cooperation of the people who did the killing. Prosecutors have to make deals with genuinely awful people to get to the person who's arguably worse. It's an ugly bargain, and in this case, it left the victim's own children furious for the rest of their lives. I understand why. I'd feel the same. But without those deals, there's a real chance nobody answers for Hanna Buxbaum's murder at all.

CHAPTER 4: The Millionaire's Double Life

To understand what the crown eventually built its case around, you have to understand who Helmuth Buxbaum was.

He was a self-made man, and by 1984, a very wealthy one. Born in East Prussia in 1939, the youngest of ten children of a Baptist minister, he'd come to Canada in 1958 with no money and one pair of shoes. He worked as a miner's assistant in Elliot Lake. He met Hanna Schmidt in 1960, their mothers had arranged the introduction, and they married in 1961. He studied at night, earned his high school diploma, then a university science degree, all while Hanna worked at a meatpacking plant to help pay for it. In 1967, with his brother, he opened a small rest home on a farm property in Komoka. Twenty-three beds, filled within weeks.

By the time Hanna was murdered, that rest home had grown into a chain worth an estimated twenty-eight million dollars, nursing homes across southwestern Ontario and one in Prince Edward Island. Hanna owned forty-eight per cent of it. Helmuth controlled the rest.

But in 1982, Buxbaum suffered a stroke. And according to testimony from his own doctors, it changed him. A neurologist told the jury he'd sustained lasting brain damage, memory problems, weakness on his left side. A psychiatrist testified the stroke had damaged the frontal lobes of his brain in a way that can trigger what's clinically called hypersexuality, an inability to restrain impulses that most adults learn to control.

Whatever the cause, the results were staggering. By his own admission on the witness stand, Buxbaum estimated he'd been with somewhere between thirty-five and fifty prostitutes in the roughly two years following his stroke. He became addicted to cocaine, supplied largely by a small-time London dealer and pimp named Robert Barrett, the same man who would later be arrested alongside him.

And according to a parade of witnesses at his trial, somewhere in the middle of all of it, Helmuth Buxbaum started talking about killing his wife.

A prostitute named Dawn Watson testified he'd floated three different methods to her: drowning Hanna on a boating trip at the family cottage, since she was afraid of the water; staging a robbery; or slowly poisoning her. Another prostitute, Susan Ambrose, testified he repeatedly asked her to find him poisonous herbs. Two motel maids at the Golden Pheasant, cleaning near a room registered to Buxbaum, testified they overheard a man and woman discussing exactly that, putting something in food, a slow process of dying. "What an awful way to die," one of them recalled thinking.

Barrett, the cocaine dealer, testified that in April of 1984, Buxbaum asked him outright to find somebody to kill Hanna. He said Buxbaum described his wife as "a pain in the ass" and told him he couldn't divorce her because she'd fight him for custody of their six children. The offer, Barrett said, started at fifty thousand dollars. It was later negotiated down to twenty-five thousand and a house in Prince Edward Island.

Barrett brought in a friend, Patrick Allen, to actually carry out the killing, for ten thousand dollars. And in June of 1984, before Allen was even fully committed, Barrett hedged his bets, paying a Quebec fugitive named Paul Ringuette and his girlfriend, Brigitte McCurdy, five hundred dollars and a photograph of Hanna Buxbaum to kidnap and kill her. The pair took the money and bought train tickets to Vancouver instead.

Then, on the very morning of July 5th, 1984, the day Hanna Buxbaum would die, there was a first attempt. Allen testified he was waiting at a prearranged spot with a plan to shoot her and drop her body down a drainage culvert. He said Buxbaum, driving his wife to the site, urged him to "hurry up and get her out of the car and get it over with." But an Ontario Provincial Police cruiser happened to pull up to check on what looked like a car with engine trouble, and the murder had to be called off.

Allen backed out of the plan that afternoon. A man named Gary Foshay picked up where he left off.

That evening, the Buxbaums drove home from the airport with their nephew in the back seat. And this time, nothing interrupted the plan.

CHAPTER 5: What the Jury Heard

The financial evidence told its own story. Five months before Hanna's murder, Buxbaum took out a one-million-dollar life insurance policy on her, in U.S. funds. An accountant testified that over the two years before the killing, roughly 1.1 million dollars had simply vanished from the nursing home's books, nobody could account for where it went. And in the days immediately surrounding the murder, Buxbaum made a string of unusually large cash withdrawals: nearly $5,500 on July 4th, the day before Hanna died, and more than $11,000 the day after.

Here's where it gets almost too strange to believe. While Helmuth Buxbaum was standing in a funeral home picking out a casket for his wife, accepting condolences, playing the grieving widower for the community he'd fooled for twenty-three years, the men who had actually killed her were furious that he hadn't paid them yet.

Robert Barrett called Buxbaum at the funeral home itself and demanded the money. It didn't come fast enough. So the very next day, less than twenty-four hours after Hanna Buxbaum had been shot to death on the shoulder of a highway, two of the men involved in her murder cornered Barrett in a room at the Westbury Hotel in downtown Toronto. They picked him up, hauled him to the balcony, and held him out over the edge, fourteen floors above the street, until he agreed to get them paid.

Patrick Allen was in the room. He watched it happen. "When I came into a room and watched Mr. Barrett hanging over the balcony by those two, I knew they were mad," he testified, a plain, chilling way of putting it. Under cross-examination, Allen also admitted he had his own reasons for wanting Barrett to come up with the cash fast, he was still owed his own cut. Even the man testifying about the terror on that balcony had a stake in how it ended.

The money did come, eventually, funneled down through Barrett from Buxbaum himself: a thousand dollars to Allen, thirty-five hundred to Terry Armes, and five thousand dollars, the single largest payout of all, to a third man who was never identified and never charged with anything. Somewhere out there, whoever he was, a man got paid more than anyone else involved in Hanna Buxbaum's murder and simply vanished from the story.

Hanna's purse, meanwhile, had been driven to Foshay's house, its coins buried in a jar in the backyard, and the purse itself weighted with bricks and dumped in the Thames River, where police divers recovered it weeks later.

And then there was the testimony from the people who were actually there.

Terry Armes, one of the men present when Hanna Buxbaum was killed, testified that as the gunman dragged her from the car, she looked directly at her husband and pleaded, "No, honey, please not this way." He testified that as the final shot was fired, Buxbaum "jumped up on his toes" to watch. "He didn't even flinch," Armes said.

The Buxbaums' own nephew, Roy, fourteen at the time of the murder, sixteen when he testified, told the jury he'd heard his aunt beg for her life. "Please," she said, "I have five children at home." Then he heard three shots.

Colin Lawrence, the trucker who'd stopped to help, testified that Helmuth Buxbaum stood by calmly while he tried to save Hanna's life in the ditch. "I was about to say, 'are you going to come down and help me or what?'" Lawrence told the court.

A friend of the family, meanwhile, testified that on the night of the murder, Buxbaum couldn't bring himself to sleep in the bed he'd shared with Hanna, so he spent the night in the family's basement bomb shelter instead.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE:

I've sat through my share of witness testimony over the years, and I want to say something about Terry Armes and Robert Barrett specifically, because the defence spent a huge amount of time trying to destroy their credibility, and honestly, they weren't wrong to try. These were not good witnesses in the traditional sense. Barrett was, by his own admission on the stand, a lying, thieving, drug-dealing pimp who cut a deal to avoid a life sentence. Armes had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder to avoid a first-degree conviction. Both had every reason in the world to shade their stories in whatever direction kept them out of the worst possible outcome. That's exactly why the physical evidence in this case mattered so much. The insurance policy, the missing money, the cash withdrawals, the purse in the river. When the paper trail lines up with what your unreliable witnesses are telling you, that's when a case stops being "he-said, she-said" and starts being something a jury can convict on.

CHAPTER 6: The Trial of the Century

By the time Helmuth Buxbaum's murder trial opened in St. Catharines on October 15th, 1985, moved there from London because of what the courts agreed was overwhelming local publicity, three of his co-accused had already pleaded guilty to lesser charges and been sentenced. Terry Kline had walked free entirely, all charges against him dropped after a hundred and forty-three days in jail. Gary Foshay and Terry Armes had each been committed to stand trial separately.

That left Helmuth Buxbaum alone in the prisoner's box for what would become a sixty-eight-day trial, nine weeks of crown evidence, three weeks of defence witnesses, in front of a jury of ten men and two women. Eighty-nine witnesses. Prostitutes, drug dealers, con men, bankers, accountants, doctors, police officers, and murderers, all called to the stand in the same courtroom.

Crowds lined up outside the courthouse before eight in the morning, waiting patiently until ten to be let in. Between sixty and seventy spectators showed up nearly every single day for four months. When Buxbaum finally took the stand himself in January of 1986, spectators lined up through their lunch hour just to guarantee a seat for the afternoon.

His lawyer, the legendary Toronto defence attorney Eddie Greenspan, built a defence around one blunt idea: that his client was, in Greenspan's own words, a "wimp," "ignorant and immoral," "immature and thoughtless and silly," a man ruled by his "unfortunate appetites" for sex and drugs, but not a murderer. Greenspan spent five full days on his closing argument alone, arguing it was Robert Barrett, not Buxbaum, who had the real motive to want Hanna dead, since she'd been trying to keep the drug dealer away from her husband and his money.

The crown attorney, Mike Martin, answered with a single question he returned to again and again: if Helmuth Buxbaum hadn't arranged this murder, how did two armed men know exactly where and when to be waiting for his wife, not once, but twice in the same day?

When Buxbaum finally testified in his own defence, after three months of silence, the hushed courtroom leaned in for the question everyone had been waiting for.

"Did you hire Rob Barrett to kill your wife Hanna Buxbaum?" Greenspan asked.

"No. No," Buxbaum answered quietly, with a faint European accent.

He spent days on the stand telling his life story, the refugee camps, the miner's job, meeting Hanna, building the business, and insisting that despite everything, he had loved her. "She was the best friend I had," he testified. He admitted to the affairs, admitted to the drugs, admitted, when pressed, that he'd probably been with somewhere between thirty-five and fifty prostitutes. But he denied ever discussing murder with any of them. He said the prostitute who claimed he'd asked her for poison was lying, that it had been her idea, not his. He said the five thousand dollars he gave Barrett was for cocaine, not a contract killing.

Along the way, the jury also heard, almost as an aside, that Buxbaum had spent his time in jail awaiting trial cooking up escape plans, including one, described by his own eighteen-year-old son Phillip on the stand, that involved smuggling in explosives to blow a hole in the wall of the Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre and fleeing to Brazil.

On February 13th, 1986, after ten and a half hours of deliberation over two days, the jury returned. There was a loud, audible gasp from the spectators' gallery as the foreman read the verdict: guilty of first-degree murder.

Buxbaum showed no reaction. Asked by the judge if he had anything to say before sentencing, he replied, "Yes, my Lord. I am not guilty of the charges." He was sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of parole for twenty-five years. He would be seventy-one years old before he could apply.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE:

What strikes me most about this trial isn't the verdict, it's what it took to get there. Sixty-eight days. Eighty-nine witnesses. A jury asked to sit through testimony about cocaine, prostitution, poison, insurance fraud, and a husband's affair, all just to answer one narrow legal question: did this man arrange for his wife to be killed. The trial judge, when he gave his final instructions, told the jury flat out not to let their disgust at how brutally Hanna died cloud their judgment on that one question, and not to sit in judgment of anybody's "morals or sex life." That's a genuinely hard thing to ask twelve ordinary people to do. It's easy, watching a case like this from the outside, to think the sensational details are the story. They're not. They're noise the defence and the crown both use to their advantage. The real story is always in the paper trail and the pattern of behaviour, and in this case, both of those pointed the same direction the whole way through.

CHAPTER 7: Appeals, an Insurance Fight, and a Wedding

Buxbaum's lawyers filed notice of appeal almost immediately, eventually citing forty-eight separate grounds of error. Greenspan called it, bluntly, "a pure formality," he'd admitted in court, arguing against the trial judge's closing instructions to the jury, that the case was likely "irretrievably lost."

That spring, the insurance company that had issued the one-million-dollar U.S. policy on Hanna's life sued to have it declared void, arguing Buxbaum had taken it out with the specific intention of murdering her and shouldn't be allowed to profit from his own crime. Meanwhile, back in Komoka, Buxbaum's siblings were publicly wrestling with what their brother had become. His sister Lydia wrote an open letter, published in a local paper, that read in part: "Are you the son of my parents?"

And then, five months into a twenty-five-year sentence, Helmuth Buxbaum decided to get married again.

A thirty-three-year-old London divorcee named Liza Dikih, who, remarkably, had first been introduced to Buxbaum by Hanna herself, through mutual friends at their church, only months before the murder, began writing to him during the trial. She started visiting him twice a week at Millhaven Penitentiary. In an interview with The Toronto Star that summer, she called it "a beautiful love story."

"He didn't do it," she insisted. "I don't have the slightest doubt about it."

The Ontario attorney-general's office reviewed the application and, in August of 1986, cleared the way for the marriage, finding no legal reason to block it. All that remained was approval from the prison warden.

Weeks later, before the wedding could take place, Buxbaum withdrew the application. No public explanation was ever given.  Nearly 3 years later, in February 1989, Helmuth and Dikih were married at the Kingston Penitentiary.  

Around the same time, Buxbaum reported being attacked in the prison yard, telling staff that fellow inmates had tried to inject him with battery acid. Prison officials, more cautiously, described the injury as a pinprick and a scrape, and noted Buxbaum was being kept under watch, tied to his own bedsheets, because he seemed despondent. A spokesman put it simply: "I think starting a twenty-five-year sentence would be depressing to anyone."

Helmuth died in the Kingston Penitentiary in 2007.

CHAPTER 8: The Man Who Pulled the Trigger

There was still one piece of unfinished business. Gary Gilbert Foshay, the man the crown had always maintained actually fired the shots that killed Hanna Buxbaum, hadn't yet stood trial on his own first-degree murder charge. His case was moved to Toronto, again because of publicity, and it opened in September of 1986.

Security was extraordinarily tight. Word had reached investigators that an escape attempt might be staged, possibly involving a hostage taken from the courtroom gallery. Everyone who entered was scanned with a metal-detecting wand.

The same cast of witnesses took the stand again: Robert Barrett, Patrick Allen, Terry Armes, Janet Hicks, this time pointing directly at Foshay as the man who'd grabbed Hanna Buxbaum, pressed a gun to her head, and pulled the trigger while she pleaded for her life. Armes testified again to her final words: "No, honey, not this way."

An exotic dancer named Tracey LaRocque testified that Foshay had confided in her in a downtown London bar, telling her he "didn't want to kill a woman who was pleading for her life" but did it anyway, and that he'd turned to Helmuth Buxbaum during the killing and told him to "shut up or else I'll do you, too." Foshay's own estranged wife, Robin, had told police he'd admitted the killing to her directly, but under Canadian law, a wife can't be forced to testify against her husband, so the jury never heard it.

Foshay took the stand in his own defence and denied everything. "I never did it," he said flatly.

The jury deliberated for nearly thirty hours across four days, sequestered overnight in a hotel. On October 9th, 1986, they returned a verdict: not first-degree murder, but the lesser charge of second-degree murder.

It still carried a mandatory life sentence. The only question left for the judge was how many years Foshay would have to serve before he could even apply for parole. Prosecutor Al MacDonald pushed for the maximum twenty-five. The trial judge, Mr. Justice Patrick Galligan, settled on fifteen, five years above the legal minimum, telling the courtroom that "all right-thinking members of the community feel disgust and shock" over the murder of a woman he said had been considered "quite literally a saint" in her own community.

With Foshay's sentencing on October 14th, 1986, every person charged in the murder of Hanna Buxbaum had finally been dealt with. Helmuth Buxbaum: life, no parole for twenty-five years. Gary Foshay: life, no parole for fifteen. Terry Armes: life, no parole for ten. Robert Barrett: ten years for conspiracy. Patrick Allen: eight years for conspiracy. Janet Hicks: fifteen months as an accessory. Terry Kline: no time at all.

Buxbaum's own children were left to reckon publicly with how light some of those sentences were. His son Paul, twenty-two years old, told reporters it was a "travesty of justice" that men who had confessed to plotting their mother's murder could be eligible for day parole within a year or two, while their father sat behind bars for a crime he still, to his last breath in that courtroom, denied.

EPILOGUE

Hanna Buxbaum stopped on the side of a highway because that's who she was, a woman, by every account from the people who knew her, who would have given a stranger the shirt off her back. Her husband knew that about her. And according to a jury of twelve of his peers, he used it to kill her.

What this case leaves behind isn't really a mystery, the facts were never seriously in question by the end. What it leaves behind is a question about how well any of us can really know the person lying next to us. Hanna Buxbaum's own housekeeper testified the couple held hands and hugged in the kitchen. A pastor who travelled with them to Europe just weeks before the murder said they seemed more affectionate than the average couple. By every outward measure, this was a loving marriage. And underneath it, for at least six months, one half of that marriage was shopping for someone to kill the other half.

If there's a lesson here, I think it's this: the warning signs in a case like this are rarely loud. Nobody around Helmuth Buxbaum saw a monster. They saw a generous, church-going, self-made man who'd been through a rough patch after his stroke. The people who did see something, the prostitutes he confided in, the maids who overheard him, didn't come forward until it was already too late, because who's going to believe them over a millionaire.

This episode was written, researched and produced by me, Ryan Dell. If this is your first time listening and you liked what you heard, please take a moment to leave a five-star review, it helps the podcast grow and helps other people find these stories.

I love hearing from you. If there's a case I should cover, send me an email at canadiancrimecast@gmail.com.

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

Before we wrap up today, I want to take a moment to thank the police officers out there. Every day, you put on your uniform not knowing what the shift will bring, and you do it anyway.  For your loved ones, for your neighborhoods, for people you’ve  never met.  Our police officers sacrifice so much, most of us will never fully understand. So to every officer listening, thank you. For those that are listening, next time you see your local police officer, give them a nod, or say thanks. It goes further than you'd ever know

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*Sources: The Toronto Star, July 6, 1984 to October 15, 1986 (staff and Canadian Press reporting).*