FATHER, SON, AND MR. BIG: THE MURDER OF CHELSEY ACORN

PART 1: THE GRAVE AND THE CONFESSIONS

This episode contains descriptions of the murder of a 14-year-old girl, the sexual exploitation of children, and drug use. I've kept it as non-graphic as I can, but some of it is hard to hear. If that's not something you can take on right now, please take care of yourself, and skip this one.

A note on names and sources. Everything in this episode comes from the written decisions of the BC Supreme Court and the BC Court of Appeal in the cases against Jesse Blue West and his son, Dustin Blue Robert Moir. There is a publication ban protecting the identities of the undercover police officers in this case, so I'll refer to them only by their roles. And several of the witnesses were teenage girls in foster care at the time. Their names are in the court record. I'm not going to use them.

INTRODUCTION

April 8th, 2006.

A group of day hikers are walking a trail near the Carolin Mines exit off the Coquihalla Highway, about 19 kilometres northeast of Hope. If you've ever driven the Coquihalla between Hope and Merritt, you've driven right past this spot. There's a pullout, a foot trail that winds down through the bush toward the Coquihalla River, and the remains of an old cabin. Hikers and hunters use it.

Just off the trail, a few feet into the trees, the hikers notice something that doesn't look right. A patch of ground with rocks piled on it. Smooth river rocks, the kind you'd find down by the water.

One of them takes a stick and prods at the dirt.

Bone.

The police are called. A forensic team carefully excavates the site. Under the rocks and a thin layer of sandy soil, they find the body of a young female, lying on her right side, curled up in a fetal position. She has no clothes on. No jewellery. Nothing at all that would tell anyone who she is.

It would take more than a month and her dental records to put a name to her.

Chelsey Acorn. 14 years old. A girl from Abbotsford who had been in the care of the province, who had bounced through foster home after foster home, and who had walked out the door of the last one 10 months earlier, carrying a Winnie the Pooh backpack.

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

Today's story is about the murder of Chelsey Acorn, and about the two men who were convicted of killing her: a man in his 50s named Jesse Blue West, who went by "Blue," and his son, Dustin Moir.

There were no eyewitnesses. There was no DNA linking either man to the grave. There was no murder weapon, unless you count a rock. The police had suspicions, a phone bill, a scrap of paper from a Safeway, and witnesses who put both men with her before she vanished.

So they did what the RCMP has done in a lot of cases like this. They built a criminal organization that didn't exist, and they invited both men to join it. Two separate undercover operations. Two separate "Mr. Big" interviews. And at the end of each one, a father and a son each sat across from a crime boss who was actually a police officer, and each of them described how Chelsey Acorn died.

The trouble is, they didn't tell the same story. Each one, eventually, pointed at the other.

And it would take three trials, a pair of appeals, and a change in the law from the Supreme Court of Canada before this case was finished.

This is Part 1 of a 2-part story. In this episode, we'll follow Chelsey from foster care to that grave beside the Coquihalla River, and then we'll go inside two undercover operations, right up to the moment each man confessed. In Part 2, we'll take those confessions into the courtroom.

CHAPTER ONE: A GIRL IN CARE

Chelsey Acorn was born on May 4th, 1991.

Her early life was hard, and the record doesn't sugar-coat it. In December 2003, her mother turned her care over to the Ministry of Children and Family Development. In May 2004, Chelsey and her siblings were apprehended. On April 5th, 2005, her mother consented to the Ministry taking permanent custody. From that point on, the province of British Columbia was her legal guardian.

Between March 2004 and June 2005, Chelsey was placed in foster homes 18 different times. That's 18 placements in roughly 15 months. She rarely stayed anywhere long. She spent much of her time on the streets of Abbotsford and Mission, and the court records say plainly that at 13 years old she was already involved in drugs and in prostitution.

The judge who ruled on the confession evidence years later put it in a way that I think matters. She wrote that it would be correct to call that sexual activity what it was: a form of exploitation, given Chelsey's young age and her troubled childhood. The court also noted that Chelsey was understood to be of Indigenous descent.

The trial judge in the father's case added something else. He described Chelsey as a girl who could be manipulative, who would tell people whatever worked to her advantage. Keep that in mind, because it meant the court was careful about what weight to give the things Chelsey told her friends.

On May 4th, 2005, Chelsey turned 14.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: I want to say something about who Chelsey was, because it shaped everything about how this case was investigated. When a 14-year-old girl from a stable home goes missing, people notice within hours. Her parents call. Her school calls. Her picture goes up. When a 14-year-old girl in care, with a history of running from placements, goes missing, the system has a different reflex. She's a "frequent runaway." She'll turn up. And very often she does. That's exactly the gap that predators look for. Kids like Chelsey are targeted precisely because the people who should be raising the alarm have seen her walk away so many times before. It doesn't mean nobody cared. Her social worker clearly cared. But the structure around her wasn't built to catch what was about to happen.

CHAPTER TWO: "BLUE"

So who was Blue?

Jesse Blue West was born in August 1952. In the spring of 2005, he was in his early 50s, living in a rented basement suite in Surrey, and he had a long criminal record dating back to 1972, some of it violent. He told people a lot of things about himself. He told some people he worked with a program like "Scared Straight," taking troubled kids downtown to show them the dark side of life. He told others he was involved with Child Find, looking for missing youth. He told a friend he had once worked for the RCMP, which was why he had surveillance equipment. His business cards were for something called Blue Star Cleaning.

His son, Dustin Blue Moir, was born in November 1985. West hadn't been around for much of Dustin's childhood, and by 2005 he had come back into his son's life. Dustin was 19 that spring, working at a coffee shop in Mission and living on 7th Avenue with a roommate named Steven Dudley.

Here's how the court pieced together the relationships.

According to Dudley, Chelsey was Dustin's girlfriend when the 2 young men moved in together in the spring of 2005. She would stay overnight with Dustin from time to time. Dudley said West, who he knew as "Blue," would come out to Mission to pick them up, and sometimes Chelsey too, and drive them out to his basement suite in Surrey. Dudley described a visit where Chelsey went into the bedroom with Dustin, then with West, and then with both of them. That evidence would later become a big problem at Dustin's first trial, and we'll get to why.

But the paper trail is what really tied West to Chelsey, and it started months before she disappeared.

March 15th, 2005. Chelsey's social worker records a conversation in which Chelsey says she wants to go to Vancouver with a man named "Jesse West," as part of a drug and alcohol program. She says the man runs Blue Star Cleaning, and she gives a phone number. The social worker calls that number. A man answers and identifies himself as Jesse West. It was West's cell phone, the same number printed on his business cards.

A Safeway receipt. Later, among West's belongings, police would find a Safeway receipt from March or April 2005. Written on it: the name "Chelsey" and a phone number. The number belonged to a Chilliwack foster home where Chelsey was living when she was still 13.

A red Sunbird. A girl who lived at Chelsey's last foster home testified that Chelsey talked about a man she called "James," who gave her cigarettes, money, and cards to top up her cell phone. One day, while the 2 girls were sitting outside, a red Sunbird pulled up, driven by an older man Chelsey clearly knew. Chelsey got in and left with him. Later, Chelsey admitted that James wasn't his real name, just a name he used, and that his son was her boyfriend or ex-boyfriend.

That same girl went with Chelsey to the Abbotsford Recreation Centre to meet "James." The red car was in the parking lot. The man introduced himself as "Blue." She told him she didn't believe that was his name. So he pulled out his driver's licence and showed her. "Blue" was right there on it. He put his arm around Chelsey. He wanted to take this girl's picture, and he made a crude sexual remark to her. Later, in a photo lineup, she picked out Jesse West.

A cell phone. On May 18th, 2005, Chelsey bought a pay-as-you-go phone at a drug store. For the next 10 days, every day except one, there were calls back and forth between Chelsey's phone and West's phone. More calls on June 2nd. The same phone was also used to call a phone Dustin was using.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: Notice that none of this is dramatic. A note in a social worker's file. A receipt. A licence flashed in a parking lot. Phone records. But this is the bones of almost every good case I've ever seen. Before you can prove anyone killed anyone, you have to prove a relationship, and you have to prove it with things that don't depend on the suspect telling the truth. A man who would later tell police he didn't know any girl named Chelsey has his phone number in her social worker's file and her phone number on his grocery receipt. Records don't have an agenda. They're the foundation everything else gets built on.

CHAPTER THREE: THE BASEMENT SUITE

What happened inside that basement suite in Surrey came out through two more girls in care, and I'll be careful here, because they were kids too.

The night of May 23rd, 2005. A girl who had lived at a foster facility with Chelsey went out with her for the evening around Abbotsford. They drank, smoked some marijuana, and then Chelsey said she wanted to go to Surrey to see "Dustin and Blue." They used some money to buy time on Chelsey's phone.

The phone records track exactly what happened next. Between 1:43 am and 3:49 am on May 24th, Chelsey's phone called West's phone 5 times. The first calls hit a cell tower on Mount Lehman Road in Abbotsford. Then a tower near the 160th Street exit off the freeway. Then a tower in Guildford. That lines up with the girl's story: Chelsey calling ahead, the two of them getting a ride to Surrey, walking from the freeway exit, and West picking them up in Guildford.

He drove them to his basement suite. Chelsey introduced him as "Blue." She seemed comfortable there, like she'd been there before.

The girl told the court West showed her pictures of young women with bare midriffs, some partially exposed. When she said she was tired and didn't feel well, he gave her a pill and told her she could lie down in the bedroom. She said she watched West straddle Chelsey on the couch and pop a pill into her mouth. The girl took her own pill, but didn't swallow it. She spit it out later.

The bedroom he sent her to had video recording equipment in it. Pornographic videos. A girl's bra on the floor.

She told them she wanted to leave. Chelsey wanted to stay. West drove the girl to a doughnut shop, and from there she called the Ministry's after-hours line. That call is logged at 5:10 am. A taxi was arranged to take her back to Abbotsford.

Chelsey stayed.

Around June 4th, 2005. A second girl, also in care, said Chelsey approached her about doing a "date" together, and told her they could make $1,000. Two young men picked them up. One was introduced as "Jesse," and in a photo lineup she later identified him as Dustin Moir. They drove to a truck garage where the young men spoke to an older man, who came over and introduced himself as "Blue." Everyone ended up back at a basement suite in Surrey.

She remembered certificates on the wall with the name Jesse Blue West on them. Cameras and tripods in the living room. There was crack cocaine. There was sexual activity between Chelsey and the older man. Then Chelsey gave her two pills she said were ecstasy. The girl doesn't remember anything after that. She woke up the next morning in the bedroom, with no clothes on. Chelsey told her she'd made $1,000.

The next day, Chelsey wanted her to go back. She refused. Chelsey left with the young man she knew as "Jesse."

This girl couldn't pick West out of a photo lineup, and she described tattoos on his arms that didn't quite match his. The defence leaned hard on that. But the judge looked at everything else, her identification of Dustin, the name on the certificates, the man calling himself Blue, the layout of the suite, and said he had no doubt the older man was West.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: When investigators later laid out their plan for this case, they put it bluntly in writing. They believed West used his son to attract young girls. That's a phrase worth sitting with. A 19-year-old is a lot less alarming to a 14-year-old girl than a man in his 50s. The young man is the door. The older man is what's waiting on the other side of it. Notice too the pills, the cameras, the money. The court never made findings about every allegation that police gathered about West, and I'm not going to either. But you don't need to be an investigator to see the outline of exploitation in that basement suite.

CHAPTER FOUR: GONE

Friday, June 10th, 2005.

Chelsey contacts her social worker. She says she's planning to move in with her 19-year-old boyfriend, who she calls "Dustin." The social worker tries to talk her out of it.

That night, at 11:30 pm, the girl from her foster home watches Chelsey leave with her Winnie the Pooh backpack. Chelsey says she's meeting some guys from Deroche, and that she'll meet up with James later.

The next day, June 11th, her foster parent reports her missing. Her social worker never hears from her again.

But Chelsey wasn't gone yet. Not completely.

A woman named Gladys Wertman had helped care for Chelsey back when she still lived with her mother, and Chelsey stayed in touch, visiting a couple of times a year, usually around Gladys's birthday on June 7th. That June, Chelsey visited a day or two after the birthday. Then she came back again, a few weeks later, maybe the end of June or into July.

This time she had a new outfit. She said she'd come to say goodbye. She told Gladys she had a friend, an older guy named Blue, who she called her "sugar daddy." She said he bought her things, that they were moving to the Interior, and that he was going to take care of her. She said she had a ride waiting.

West also brought Chelsey to the home of a friend of his, a man named Arnold Horan. Horan had seen Chelsey with West several times since April. Once, Horan, his daughter, and his niece showed up at West's suite and found Chelsey there in pyjamas and a housecoat. Horan told West it didn't look right. West said she'd shown up late the night before needing a place to stay. On the last occasion Horan saw her, West brought her to his house, said she was unhappy at her foster home, and asked if she could stay with Horan's family.

Then Horan heard Chelsey was missing. He asked West about it. West told him Chelsey was living with a biker in Mission. Horan passed that on to the RCMP, and police logged the call on August 1st, 2005. Later, West told Horan a different story. Chelsey was in Kelowna now.

West's landlords, a husband and wife who lived upstairs from his basement suite, saw Chelsey come and go regularly. They said she kept showing up there into the late summer or early fall of 2005.

September 2005. A young man named Josh Gordon, who was living in a foster home, had started hanging out with Dustin at the skate park in Mission. Through Dustin, he met West, who would sometimes take him out for coffee. The first time, West asked Gordon if he could get him a shovel. Gordon went to the shed at the foster home where he was living and brought back a green, collapsible camping shovel. West returned it a week or a few weeks later, and Gordon put it back where he found it, before November.

October 23rd, 2005. A friend of Chelsey's has recently moved back to Abbotsford. She runs into Chelsey at Seven Oaks Mall. Chelsey's clothes are tattered and dirty. She has bruises on her face, her neck, and her arms. She's upset, and the friend thinks she might be on drugs. There's a man around who seems to frighten her, but he doesn't match the description of West or Moir. 3 days later, on October 26th, the friend reports what she saw to police.

That's the last confirmed sighting of Chelsey Acorn alive.

That fall, West's own employment records and trip logs showed him making trips to the BC Interior in September, October, and November.

Later that fall, Dustin, his girlfriend Brea White, and Josh Gordon moved in together in an apartment on Old Yale Road in Abbotsford. While they lived there, West gave his red Sunbird to his son.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: Look at West's behaviour in this window, because it's textbook. A missing 14-year-old who'd been staying at his place, and his answer to the one person who asks is a story: she's with a biker in Mission. Then a different story: she's in Kelowna. A person who honestly doesn't know where someone is says "I don't know." A person who does know, and doesn't want anyone looking, gives you a destination. Somewhere plausible, somewhere far enough away that nobody's going to drive out and check. When I hear shifting, specific answers about a missing person's whereabouts, that's the moment a file stops being a missing person file in my head.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE GRAVE

Let's go back to April 8th, 2006, and look at that grave the way the investigators did, because every detail in it became evidence.

A forensic anthropologist named Diane Cockle supervised the excavation. Here's what she documented.

The grave was small and shallow. 54 inches long. 24 inches wide. At its deepest, 15 inches. The highest points of the body, the hip and the left foot, were only about 4 inches below the surface.

The edges of the hole were sharp. Tree roots running into the grave had been cut through. A lot of them.

Large rocks had been placed on the body. The biggest was over the left shoulder and jaw. A sergeant at the scene estimated it at 40, 50, maybe 60 pounds, about 18 inches across, so heavy it was hard to lift off. Two more rocks were over the left side of the head. They were all smooth river rocks, covered over with loose, sandy soil. Not suitable for fingerprints.

There was no clothing anywhere. No jewellery. Nothing.

About 20 metres away, investigators found two pieces of old duct tape, one 6 inches long and one 2 inches long. Too deteriorated for fingerprints, no DNA. They also found bits of debris that may or may not have meant anything: a small red bike hook, a tire off a toy truck, a black shoelace, a Styrofoam cup, candy wrappers. The area was muddy with spring runoff, so who knows how far any of it had moved.

On April 11th, a forensic pathologist, Dr. Charlesworth, conducted the autopsy. The body was in a moderate to advanced stage of decomposition. Much of the soft tissue was gone.

There was one clear injury. On the left side of the skull, over the left eye, the temple, and the centre of the left side of the face, was a large area of fractures, about 7 centimetres by 7 centimetres, pushed 2 centimetres inward. Dr. Charlesworth said a blow like that would have been enough to kill her. He said it was far too much force for a fist; whoever did it would have broken their own hand. It would take something broad and heavy. Something like a rock.

Could she have been strangled first? He couldn't say. The small bone and cartilage in the throat that sometimes break during strangulation were intact, but that doesn't rule it out, and the soft tissue that might have shown it was gone. There were no bullets, no signs of stabbing, and no broken neck. Based on the decomposition, he estimated she'd been in the ground at least 4 months, likely since the fall of 2005.

In mid-May 2006, dental records confirmed it was Chelsey. The police released her name at the end of May. On May 26th, the Abbotsford News ran a story about Chelsey's mother visiting the grave site. The headline was "Mom makes plea to killer."

Now here's the part that would matter enormously later.

From the very beginning, the investigators decided to hold back 4 details from the public. Only the killer, or someone the killer told, would know them:

1. The body was buried with no clothes on.

2. Large rocks had been placed on the body, including on or near the head.

3. The skull was crushed over the left eye socket.

4. A considerable number of tree roots had been cut to dig the grave.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: Holdback evidence is one of the most valuable tools a homicide investigator has, and it's only valuable if you guard it. The moment one of those details shows up in a newspaper, or gets mentioned at a coffee shop by somebody who heard it from somebody at the detachment, it's worthless. The court specifically found that the holdback in this case was well secured and there was no suggestion it ever leaked. That's discipline, and it's not as easy as it sounds on a file with around 100 recorded witness statements and a lot of people working it. Every one of those 4 details was a lock. And somewhere out there were the only people who had the keys.

CHAPTER SIX: PERSONS OF INTEREST

The investigation was handled by the RCMP's Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, IHIT. The lead investigator described it as a large-scale investigation. They took about 100 audio statements. Several men associated with Chelsey were looked at, and some of them were given polygraphs.

But two names kept coming up.

Witnesses told police Chelsey had been spending time with West and with Moir right before she disappeared, but more with West. That she called West her "sugar daddy." That the relationship was likely sexual and that he may have given her drugs. That Dustin was her boyfriend, or had been, into June 2005. Police also had information from Horan, who told them he believed West had killed Chelsey. Horan said West had told him Chelsey was bothering Dustin, and Dustin didn't want her around anymore.

Police also pulled together what they had on file about both men. Some of it was older complaints and allegations, and it's important to be clear that none of it was proven in court. West had a long, partly violent record and was facing a sexual assault charge at the time. There was a 2003 complaint by a teenage girl who said Dustin had set up a meeting with her, and his father showed up instead and sexually assaulted her. The Crown didn't proceed with charges in that case. Dustin, at this point, had no criminal record at all.

In early June 2006, police put West under surveillance. They saw him with a 16- or 17-year-old runaway from Victoria. West was working as a long-haul truck driver by then, and she was riding along with him. The police were concerned enough about her safety that they staged a traffic stop on his freight truck so they could check on her. Neither of them was asked about Chelsey. The girl told police that Dustin had first approached her on the street in Victoria, and then West showed up. She described West as the father she never had.

Surveillance on Dustin began in late June. He was 20 by then, working odd jobs, smoking some marijuana, and living with Brea. Around August, he and Brea packed up and moved to Whistler, where they lived out of a van.

Brea would later testify about what led to that move. She said Dustin had a phone call with his father in which he was screaming, and afterward he was panicky. They packed what they could in less than half an hour and left.

By June 2006, IHIT had decided the best way forward was an undercover operation targeting both men.

Their written plan, dated June 28th, 2006, laid out why. If they approached West or Moir directly, they expected silence. West had an extensive record. And if the police tipped their hand to one of them, the two would talk to each other, and any chance of an undercover operation would be gone. The plan also noted that given what these two men were suspected of doing with young girls, it might take a long time to win their trust.

At that point, police considered West a suspect. Dustin was a "person of interest."

They decided to go after the son first. Not because he was the bigger fish, but because he was easier to reach. West was always on the road with the girl from Victoria. Dustin was sitting in Whistler. And investigators hoped the son might lead them to the father.

CHAPTER SEVEN: WHAT IS A "MR. BIG" OPERATION?

Before we go any further, let me explain what a Mr. Big operation actually is, because if you've never heard of it, it sounds like something out of a movie.

It's a Canadian invention, and the RCMP has used it for decades, mostly on cold homicides where nothing else has worked.

Here's how it works. Undercover officers build a fake criminal organization. One officer, the "primary," befriends the target. Over weeks or months, the target is invited into the organization and given "jobs": delivering packages, counting money, watching people. He gets paid, often well. He's taken out for dinners, put up in hotels. He makes friends. He starts to feel like he belongs to something.

And over and over, the organization drills in its values: honesty, loyalty, dependability. Never lie to the boss. And the boss, the target is told, is powerful. He has connections everywhere, including inside the police. He can make problems go away.

Eventually, the target is told there's a problem. The police are sniffing around him, and it's putting the organization at risk. He's brought to meet the head of the organization, "Mr. Big," who tells him, essentially: I know something about your past. Tell me the truth, all of it, and I can fix it. Lie to me, and you're out.

Mr. Big is a police officer, and the whole thing is recorded.

These operations have solved a lot of murders. They've also produced false confessions. In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada, in a case called R. v. Hart, said these confessions carry real risks. People will sometimes confess to things they didn't do when there's money, friendship, and belonging on the line. So the court created a new rule: a Mr. Big confession is presumed inadmissible unless the Crown can prove it's reliable enough to outweigh its prejudice. And if the police crossed the line into abuse, like threats of violence or preying on someone's vulnerabilities, the confession can be thrown out no matter how reliable it is.

Keep Hart in mind. It's going to matter a great deal for Dustin Moir.

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE SON

August 10th, 2006. Whistler.

The primary undercover officer "bumps" into Dustin Moir on a street. He shows him a photo of a young woman and says he's looking for his sister. Would Dustin help him look? He pays Dustin $50, gives him $20 to spend in the bars and restaurants they check, buys him lunch, and drives him around in a sports car. While they're together, the officer takes three phone calls about a package that needs to be delivered that night.

Dustin tells him he's done this kind of thing before, helping his dad look for people. His dad, he says, is a "tracker."

That was scenario 1. Mr. Big would be scenario 32.

The early weeks were about building trust. Help find the sister again, $50 plus expenses. Dinner for Dustin and Brea. The officer staged a phone call where he complained about a late employee and said he could find someone else to pay the $2,000 to instead. He offered a $3,000 reward if Dustin found his sister. When Dustin was nervous about doing "something risky," the officer offered him legitimate work pressure-washing a warehouse.

The officer also had a strategy. He kept talking about his own demanding, difficult father. And Dustin started talking about his.

In scenario 3, Dustin told him he didn't talk to his dad much anymore, that they'd had a blowout, and that his dad had gotten into "some heavy shit and criminal stuff." On August 19th, in scenario 5, Dustin said his father was being investigated for something heavy, and that he'd gotten Dustin involved, and that was part of why he'd moved to Whistler. When the officer made a pistol gesture with his hand and asked what would happen if his father found him, Dustin indicated his dad would probably "off" him.

On September 2nd, Dustin helped load a truck with liquor boxes and rode along to Squamish. The officer paid the driver $2,000 in front of him and gave Dustin $400. When the officer asked if he was okay with that kind of job, Dustin said something like: as long as he wasn't moving dead bodies.

The officer filed that away.

September 6th, 2006. Scenario 8. An overnight trip delivering fake contraband cigarettes to Nanaimo, then on to Victoria. The officer explains the organization has low-risk, low-pay jobs, middle jobs, and high-risk jobs that pay a lot. Dustin says he wants the high-level work.

Then the officer circles back. What did you mean, about moving dead bodies?

Dustin tells him about a "carry and bury." He says his father showed up one time with a body and needed help burying it. And it was still alive. His father said it was a contract hit, that he was being paid $18,000, and he offered Dustin $15,000 to help. But his father never paid him. He gave him a Jeep for the weekend instead, and Dustin smashed it up.

That was enough. After scenario 8, the police got judicial authorization to record their conversations with Dustin. Everything from then on was on tape.

The next day, on the ferry back, Dustin asked the officer about getting work as a "cleaner." The officer took that to mean a hit man. Dustin mentioned $20,000. He was told those jobs take a lot of trust. Dustin also said his girlfriend had information on him that could put him away for the rest of his life.

On September 20th, Dustin told the officer a bigger version. His father had killed 24 people. Dustin had helped "carry and bury" number 24. His father was choking the person from behind and thought they were dead, but the person came to, and Dustin grabbed them by the throat and finished it. The body had been found 5 months ago, he said, which is why he left Abbotsford. He'd kept a newspaper clipping about it, about the body being found and the family. It was in a safe at his mother's house.

In that version, the victim was a man.

Dustin told the officer a lot of wild stories about his father: a jail escape, a bank robbery, a 3-hour high-speed chase with police, 24 murders. The officer scoffed at some of it. The judge later called some of those tales outlandish, at least to an outside observer.

Over the next two months, the operation deepened. Dustin delivered what he was told were counterfeit credit cards, $26,000 in cash, and firearms. He did surveillance. On September 25th, the "sister" was found in a Squamish hotel with a man, and the primary officer stormed in and confronted them. When the man tried to leave, Dustin slammed the door and blocked him. He was rewarded with two nights at the Westin in Whistler and $500, and told he was at the top of the list for an upcoming "big score."

In October, an employee who'd lied to the organization was fired at night in Stanley Park. His phone was snapped in half and thrown in the bushes. Dustin suggested he should be "erased." The officer said, "We're not going to erase anyone just yet." On November 2nd in Calgary, Dustin was used to create a false alibi on casino cameras for a fictional employee who said he'd lost his temper and killed a man. Dustin was told he'd get $5,000 if police ever asked him about it, and $10,000 if he had to testify. On November 23rd, he sat in on a loan to a man who had to hand over the name of his teenage daughter's school.

The message running through all of it: the organization is powerful, it protects its own, and the boss can fix anything, as long as you're honest with him.

There was also the big score. If the boss approved him, Dustin was told, he'd make $27,000 plus a $4,000 bonus.

And the operation changed him. The primary officer took him shopping, and Dustin started dressing like him, dress shirts and dress pants. The officer had to show him how cufflinks work. He'd never been on a plane. He didn't know the SeaBus existed. Brea testified he started wearing cologne, changed his hair, and tried to impress the man.

November 24th, 2006. Scenario 31. Dustin and the officer meet with an investor in the big score. The investor suddenly says he's spotted police surveillance. The meeting breaks up. The big score is on hold.

The boss wants to see Dustin.

CHAPTER NINE: "I DID THAT."

November 25th, 2006. Scenario 32.

Dustin is brought into a room by the primary officer. There's a large, soft-spoken bodyguard the boss calls "Fred," who pats Dustin down and takes his phone. The boss sits in a chair. Dustin sits on the couch across from him. Dustin had turned 21 just days earlier.

The boss is an experienced officer who has played Mr. Big many times. He's confident, not overbearing.

He tells Dustin the heat isn't on the organization. It's on him. He tells him he could just let Dustin walk away and have a nice life, since Dustin doesn't know anything that could hurt him. But the primary officer has vouched for him and asked the boss to help. The boss isn't sure Dustin is worth saving. He wants to know if he's honest.

The boss says he knows Dustin told the primary officer something about a hit. He says he knows it was a young girl. He knows Dustin's "old man" was involved. And then he lays down the rules:

"I don't want you to fuckin take credit for shit you didn't do or lie about what you did do, 'cause I got to know what happened. I want to know what you did or didn't do. What your old man did or didn't do."

Dustin starts talking.

He says his dad told him about a hit on a girl, and that it could make him some money. They drove out somewhere. He says that on the way out there, he and his father had sex with her. She was 14. His father dug a hole. Then his father grabbed her from behind, and when she hit the ground, she still moved. "So, I choked her," he said, "and then she was done." Then he did what his dad said, put her in the hole, and they buried her and left.

As he describes the choking, he puts his hands out in front of him.

The boss asks him to describe the burial. "With a shovel," Dustin says. "There was a lot of roots and stuff." He thinks they went down 2 or 3 feet. "Just enough."

Then: "My dad told me to grab a big rock, and I did, and then he wanted me to throw it on her, so I crushed her head."

The boss asks: "You did that, or your dad did that?"

"I did that."

"Was she alive when you did that?"

"Nope."

The rock hit her, he said, "right on the head. 'Cause she was, like, laying on the side, and that hit her right on the head and, like, caved her in." He used his hands to show the size of the rock.

Over the course of the interview, Dustin told the story several times, and the core stayed the same. Here's the full version he gave.

His father came to his place the day before. He said he had a hit to do and it could be profitable if Dustin wanted in. Dustin said sure. His father promised him $15,000. The next day, his father picked him up in the old Sunbird, and Chelsey was already in the car. They drove out the highway, first to Merritt, then back to a spot off the Coquihalla where they set up a tent. On the drive, they were joking around, keeping her happy.

While Chelsey waited in the tent, unaware of what was happening, Dustin and his father dug the grave. It was hard going. He said a couple of hours at one point, 4 hours of hacking at another. They took turns. They used a military shovel with a serrated edge to cut through the roots. To keep Chelsey occupied, they gave her a beer, and his father went into the tent with her.

Before the killing, his father put duct tape on her wrists. She didn't object, because his father told her it was for sex. He even put toilet paper under the tape so it would be comfortable. They took the tape off when they put her in the hole.

His father told him to go walk around and make sure nobody was nearby. When he came back, Chelsey was sitting in the tent. His father said: "Okay, this is what we're gonna do. You sit down and I'll go behind her." His father got behind her and choked her with his arm around her neck, for maybe 2 minutes. Her eyes rolled. She dropped. Then she moved a little. Dustin said he "jumped on her" and choked her from the front for a couple of seconds. He said if there were any hand marks, they'd be his, because his father had used his arm.

She didn't fight, he said.

Then his father told him to wrap her in a blanket. Dustin threw her over his shoulder and dropped her into the hole. Then came the rock. Then they piled more rocks on the grave so animals wouldn't dig her up, and dirt over that. They even pulled a small tree out of the ground and replanted it on top.

He said she wasn't bleeding before she went in the hole, only after, from the head.

They took her clothes and threw them in a dumpster, and threw Dustin's shoes in a different one. They cleaned out the Sunbird, pulling out the back seat, vacuuming it, and putting it back. His father later gave Dustin the car, which was insured in a friend's name, and it eventually got towed from his yard. His father had brought a machete that day, maybe used it on the roots, and later spray-painted it black.

He said it happened in the fall, because his father was worried about the ground freezing and preserving the body.

He knew her name was Chelsey Acorn. He knew she was from Abbotsford. He knew she was 14 or 15.

He also said he'd seen an article about the girl's mom in the paper, cut it out, and put it in his safe at his mother's house.

When the boss asked why his father would make up a story about a hit, Dustin said it was because otherwise he wouldn't have done it. "If he's just gonna kill her to kill her, you wouldn't do it then?" the boss asked. "Well, hell no," Dustin said. "I thought there was some money in it for me."

As the interview went on, Dustin relaxed. At one point he laughed when the boss borrowed Fred's glasses. "I can see fine," Dustin said, "but I love the look of glasses on me."

At the end, the boss told him he'd have to sit out the big score, that they'd look after him, and that he needed to stay away from his father. He also told him to go to his mother's house with the primary officer and get that newspaper article.

Dustin did. He thanked the officer, told him he was indebted to him, and confirmed he'd told the boss the truth. Then he went to his mother's house, retrieved the clipping, and handed it over.

It was the May 26th, 2006 Abbotsford News story. "Mom makes plea to killer."

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: I want to point out two things about how that interview was run, because the judge who later ruled on it relied on both of them. First, the boss never told Dustin what he'd done. He didn't say, "Why did you kill that girl?" He left the door wide open. He specifically warned him not to take credit for something his father did. When he asked about the rock, he asked, "You did that, or your dad did that?" If Dustin had only helped bury the body, he could have said so right there and lost nothing. The organization would still have needed to fix his problem. Second, the clipping. That's a confession leading police to a physical piece of evidence they didn't have. In a Mr. Big case, that's gold. It's the difference between a story and a story that checks out.

CHAPTER TEN: THE FATHER

With Dustin's confession in hand, the operation turned to the father.

December 5th, 2006. A parking lot in Esquimalt. West was unemployed by then, living in a small motor home on Vancouver Island with his 16-year-old girlfriend. A primary undercover officer introduced himself.

West's operation would run 39 scenarios. The early ones were staged vehicle repossessions, then moving bags of what was supposedly contraband. He was paid cash, $9,000 over the course of the operation, plus expenses.

His operation went somewhere Dustin's didn't. On February 1st, 2007, at a strip club, the primary officer introduced West to an undercover officer playing a pornographic video producer. A female officer was there posing as an underage girl. The "producer" talked about bringing in teenage girls from Russia. And West offered to supply "female talent" for the producer's movies, at $2,000 to $2,500 per girl. He showed the producer photos of his 16-year-old girlfriend and suggested she could be used. He handed over one of the photos.

On February 7th, at a hotel room set up to look like a porn shoot, the primary officer argued with the producer over a $40,000 debt, grabbed a female officer playing an actress by the hair, took her to the floor, and threatened to kill her.

The officer who directed the operation explained this later in court:

"It was directly to show Mr. West that violence against women was accepted in our organization. The investigation was a homicide on a female, and we wanted to show him that... to conduct violence on women is not a big deal."

February 10th, 2007. West's job that day is to drive a visiting gangster from Montreal, another undercover officer, around Metro Vancouver. The gangster is gruff and unfriendly, collecting money at every stop. By the end of the day, he warms up. They talk about women. About what you do when a girl becomes a threat.

West says: "I've been there done it."

"You got rid of a girl before?"

"I've been and done it."

"I hope you're not saying that just for..."

"No, I don't try to impress people. I don't do that."

Later that day, the gangster asks if anything was left behind. And West says this:

"Oh no. When you do something, if you have time to plan, you take all the clothes, you take jewellery, you take everything. You dig a hole. You do it right."

"Nothing. Not even a cigarette butt. Nothing."

He said he "breaks the neck," because that way there's no blood. He demonstrated it: approaching from behind, the victim's neck between his forearm and biceps, his other hand pushing her head forward. He held it 4 or 5 minutes, he said, "just to make sure." The gangster recognized it as something like a carotid control hold, a sleeper hold.

Then he described what came after. "I put it in the hole." He'd dug the hole beforehand. "And then you take a rock, this big," and he held his hands about the size of a soccer ball, "and you crush the..." The recording is inaudible on the next word. "But it's in the hole," he said. And was she still down there? "Still there."

Much of what he told the gangster that day was fantasy. He said he'd killed the girl because she saw him deliver 5 kilograms of cocaine. That he'd rented a Hummer and promised her $1,000 to go shopping. The judge later called those details fanciful. But the core of it, the hold from behind, no clothes, no jewellery, the hole dug in advance, the rocks, would come back again.

February 13th. West is told the Montreal gangster put in a good word. He's being considered for the big score. His cut: $32,000. He calls his girlfriend to brag. February 28th. The primary officer shows him $32,000 in cash and puts it in a safety deposit box in West's name. The officer keeps the key.

March 10th, 2007. A hotel room in Calgary.

The boss tells West he may have to cut him loose. He's heard what West told the Montreal man, and he doesn't need someone else's baggage. His assistant comes in with notes. West's date of birth. His son's name. And then:

"Chelsey Acorn, 14 years old, murdered 2005, somewhere off the Coquihalla, which is... Kamloops-ish."

The assistant says there are two witnesses and DNA. There wasn't any DNA. That was part of the act. It's disturbing, he says, but manageable.

West's response: they don't have his DNA. And only one other person knows.

The boss tells him to tell it straight, no exaggerating, because they need to know what happened to manage it.

West tells him that a year and a half or 2 years earlier, his son and a girl named Chelsey stayed at his place while he was out of town. When he got back, his son told him he'd forced himself on the girl. West was worried his son would go to jail. So he decided to kill her.

He took the two of them to the mountains by Hope. And notice this: the assistant had said "Kamloops-ish." West corrected him. It was near Hope. While his son took Chelsey for a walk, West found a soft spot and dug a hole with an army shovel he'd just bought. Lots of rocks and gravel. When they came back, he strangled her. He used the same hold. He removed her clothes and her personal effects. His son put her in the hole. They threw big rocks on her to keep the animals away, then dirt on top. He threw her clothes in a dumpster and the shovel in the ocean.

He was positive she didn't bleed. If there was any blood, he said, it could only have come from the rocks being thrown on the body.

When the boss suggested the hole couldn't have been very deep, West said, "About 5 feet." It was 15 inches.

He also told the boss he'd killed a man named Tom Akey near Kingston, Ontario, 30 years earlier, slit his throat and buried him with a backhoe. Police checked. Tom Akey was alive.

At the end, the boss said he might bump West's cut up to "an even 5-0." $50,000.

Then West got in the car with the primary officer, and he talked. He said normally he would have lied, but the boss already knew so much he figured he might as well know it all. "There's a situation 2 years ago, 2 and a half years ago, where I went to clean up somebody's mess." "My son brought this to me. I took care of it." He'd "buried somethin' in a hole" and "threw a lot of rocks on it." He talked about going home afterward, cleaning the car and the apartment, and telling his son to keep his mouth shut.

And then, laughing: the problem was it didn't stay in the hole. "Fuck, I threw a lot of rocks on it. I mean, fuck, I didn't know they float."

When the officer said West had a good head on his shoulders, West said if he did, he wouldn't be answering questions. They'd still be buried in a hole. He didn't go deep enough.

He also said this: "Just between me and you, I was actually lookin' around and sayin', fuckin' what is this, where's the camera?"

There was a camera.

That night, on a phone line the police were intercepting, West called his girlfriend. "Most stressful day I've ever had so far in my life," he told her. "I almost got fired." Why? "They checked out my past. There's a couple of things in my past they didn't like. But we sat and discussed it, and we ended up comin' to a happy medium where I'm not fired." What was it they didn't like? "Oh, I can't talk on the phone about stuff like that."

END OF PART 1

So here's where we are.

March 10th, 2007. Two men. 2 separate undercover operations. 2 recorded confessions to the same crime boss, who is actually a police officer. Both men know things only the killers could know. And their stories don't match. The son says his father choked Chelsey from behind and he finished the job, and that he was the one who threw the rock. The father says he strangled her himself, and that his son was the reason he did it.

Neither of them knows the other one has talked.

In 6 days, they'll both find out.

In Part 2, we go from the back of a sheriff's van into the courtroom. A joint trial that splits apart 8 weeks in. A father and a son who each take the stand and blame the other. A conviction overturned on appeal. A Supreme Court of Canada decision that changes the rules for Mr. Big confessions right in the middle of the case. And a judge who has to decide whether a young man who tested at about a grade 3 level academically was telling the truth when he looked at a crime boss and said, "I did that."

Before I go, I want to say something about the people you heard about in this episode. The undercover officers in this case spent the better part of a year living as people they weren't. They sat across from men they believed had killed a 14-year-old girl, laughed at their stories, bought them dinner, called them friends, and never let it show. That work costs something, and it follows you home. By law, we can't know their names. But what they did is the only reason anyone ever heard these confessions. Thank you.

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 5-star review. These episodes are ad-free, and leaving a review takes less time than listening to the ads on other podcasts. It helps the show grow, and it 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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Part 1 sources: R. v. West, 2013 BCSC 132 (CanLII), Reasons for Judgment of Justice W.G. Grist; R. v. West, 2015 BCCA 379 (CanLII); R. v. Moir, 2013 BCCA 36 (CanLII); R. v. Moir, 2016 BCSC 1720 (CanLII). The identities of the undercover officers are protected by a publication ban under s. 486.5 of the Criminal Code.