This episode contains descriptions of the murder of a 14-year-old girl and the sexual exploitation of children. 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 Moir, along with news coverage of the final verdict. The undercover officers are protected by a publication ban, so I refer to them only by their roles. And I'm not naming the teenage girls in foster care who were witnesses in this case.

INTRODUCTION

If you haven't heard Part 1, I'd really recommend starting there. But here's where we left off.

In April 2006, hikers found the body of 14-year-old Chelsey Acorn in a shallow grave beside the Coquihalla River, about 19 kilometres northeast of Hope. She had been in the care of the province of British Columbia. She'd been buried with no clothes, under heavy river rocks, and her skull had been crushed over her left eye.

The police focused on two men: Jesse Blue West, a man in his 50s who Chelsey called her "sugar daddy," and his son, Dustin Moir. They ran two separate undercover Mr. Big operations. And both men confessed.

Dustin told the crime boss his father choked Chelsey from behind in a tent, that Dustin choked her again when she moved, and that he was the one who threw a rock onto her head in the grave. "I did that."

West told the crime boss he strangled her himself, after his son told him he'd forced himself on her. Then he got in a car and laughed about how he didn't know the rocks would "float."

Neither man knew the other had talked.

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

Today, in Part 2, the two men find out about each other. And in the years that follow, each of them will take the stand and tell a brand new story. A story where the other man was the killer, and he was just the guy with the shovel.

CHAPTER ONE: THE SHERIFF'S VAN

Police kept Dustin busy and away from his father all winter. They put him and Brea up in a motel in North Vancouver. They swapped his phone so West couldn't reach him. Worried that Christmas would put father and son in the same room, they sent Dustin on a train to Toronto to pick up a suitcase. He left on December 24th and came back January 2nd. The officer met him with an Xbox 360 and $1,000.

March 16th, 2007. The undercover team arranged a meeting between Dustin and West, hoping to record it. The recording didn't work out. Both men were arrested for the first-degree murder of Chelsey Acorn.

The next day, both were interviewed. Dustin had already spoken to a lawyer, and for almost 4 hours he said nothing about the case. At one point he told the interviewer, "Yeah, but you only want me to feel comfortable so that I'll open up to you and talk to you." He called the primary undercover officer "a great guy."

West was interviewed by Detective Brian Kwak. He denied knowing any girl named Chelsey. He denied that he or his son ever had a red Sunbird. When he was shown video from his Mr. Big interview, he changed course: he'd only been repeating what his son told him. His son was trying to put the blame on him.

March 19th, 2007. A sheriff's van takes father and son together from the Langley RCMP detachment to court in Chilliwack. The van is wired for sound.

"It's a freakin' family reunion in here, eh?" Dustin says.

Then: "Some dads buy their kids a car. Mine sticks me in a fuckin' wagon full of bars." He tells his father his mom warned him to stay away, that he was a loser. "And I thought, 'No, man, he's my dad. I love him.' Now look where it got me."

A pause.

West: "It wasn't all me. You had a part in it, you know."

They talk about the undercover operations. "You gave a confession in a room with somebody you thought was somebody else," West says. "Yeah," Dustin says. "Mr. Big." "They got you the same way they got me," West says. "I shoulda seen it comin'. If we woulda been in contact, we woulda seen it comin'... There's how they got us."

As the van pulls in to the courthouse, West tells his son to watch himself inside.

"I'm sure there's a lot of people that don't like people that kill 14-year-old girls."

And Dustin answers:

"Yeah, but they're not gonna know that when we go in."

May 3rd, 2007. West asks to speak to police about other murders. Detective Kwak and Corporal Robert Page of IHIT meet him at the North Fraser remand centre. West says he can give them 3 other murders. In exchange, he wants out of segregation, he wants his son's charge reduced from first-degree murder, and he wants to be released to visit the grave sites and speak to people. The officers tell him that's not happening. He can visit grave sites, in custody, for re-enactments.

Asked to confirm how many people he'd killed, the conversation got confusing, and at one point West said, "3 in total."

He told Corporal Page the Tom Akey story was "bullshit." He said he'd invented a male victim so the gangsters wouldn't think he only picked on girls, and he'd picked Akey because he knew the man had a record and would get arrested again, which would prove he was alive.

And he said he wanted to go to Chelsey's grave with a camcorder.

"Because there's a couple of things you don't know that did take place. There's a couple of things you don't know, you couldn't possibly know. My son didn't even know. Explain it. Not just say this happened, which is gonna make me look bad, but explain what led up to it and why it happened."

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: The sheriff's van is one of the oldest tricks there is, and it still works because people can't help themselves. You arrest two co-accused, you put them in the back of a vehicle together, and you let them talk. They know that they might be recorded. But they've just been through the most stressful days of their lives, and the only other person on earth who knows what really happened is sitting a foot away. Listen to what isn't said in that van. When West says people don't like people who kill 14-year-old girls, Dustin doesn't say, "I didn't kill anybody." He says they won't know when we go in. When West says, "It wasn't all me, you had a part in it," that's not a man who stood by and dug a hole. That's a man dividing up responsibility.

CHAPTER TWO: THE CHRONOLOGY

Before we go into the courtroom, let me put everything in order, because there's a lot, and if you're just joining us, this will catch you up.

- May 4th, 1991: Chelsey Acorn is born.

- December 2003: Chelsey's mother turns her care over to the Ministry.

- May 2004: Chelsey and her siblings are apprehended. Over the next 15 months, she'll go through 18 placements.

- March 15th, 2005: Chelsey tells her social worker she wants to go to Vancouver with "Jesse West." The worker calls the number and reaches West.

- April 5th, 2005: The Ministry is given permanent custody of Chelsey.

- April 2005: Steven Dudley meets Dustin Moir. Arnold Horan begins seeing Chelsey with West.

- May 4th, 2005: Chelsey turns 14.

- May 18th, 2005: Chelsey buys a pay-as-you-go phone. Daily calls with West follow.

- May 24th, 2005, 1:43 am to 3:49 am: 5 calls from Chelsey to West as she and a friend travel to Surrey. The friend leaves West's suite and calls the Ministry at 5:10 am.

- Around June 4th, 2005: A second girl's night at the basement suite.

- June 10th, 2005, 11:30 pm: Chelsey leaves her foster home with her Winnie the Pooh backpack.

- June 11th, 2005: Chelsey is reported missing.

- Late June or July 2005: Chelsey visits Gladys Wertman to say goodbye. She's moving to the Interior with "Blue."

- August 1st, 2005: Horan reports to the RCMP that West says Chelsey is living with a biker in Mission.

- Late summer to early fall 2005: West's landlords still see Chelsey at his suite.

- September 2005: West borrows a collapsible shovel from Josh Gordon. It's returned within weeks.

- September to November 2005: West's trip logs show trips to the BC Interior.

- October 23rd, 2005: Last confirmed sighting of Chelsey, at Seven Oaks Mall in Abbotsford.

- Between late October and the end of December 2005: Chelsey is murdered off the Coquihalla Highway near the Carolin Mines exit.

- Late March 2006: Police come to Dustin's place about the red Sunbird, which has been reported stolen. Dustin calls his father. West comes over and paces.

- April 8th, 2006: Hikers find Chelsey's grave.

- April 11th, 2006: Autopsy.

- Mid-May 2006: Chelsey is identified through dental records. Her name is released at the end of the month.

- May 26th, 2006: "Mom makes plea to killer" runs in the Abbotsford News.

- June 28th, 2006: IHIT's undercover operational plan is written.

- August 10th, 2006: Dustin's Mr. Big operation begins in Whistler.

- September 6th, 2006: Dustin tells the primary officer about a "carry and bury."

- November 25th, 2006: Dustin confesses to Mr. Big and hands over the newspaper clipping.

- December 5th, 2006: West's Mr. Big operation begins in Esquimalt.

- February 10th, 2007: West describes killing a girl to the "Montreal gangster."

- March 10th, 2007: West confesses to Mr. Big in Calgary.

- March 16th, 2007: Both men are arrested.

- March 19th, 2007: The sheriff's van conversation.

- May 3rd, 2007: West's interview at the remand centre.

There's one more piece of that timeline I haven't told you yet, and it comes from Josh Gordon, who was living with Dustin and Brea that spring. About a month after police came for the Sunbird, Gordon and Dustin heard a broadcast about a female body being found, identified by the last name Acorn. Dustin called his father again. West came over a few hours later. The two of them talked privately. Dustin was quiet. West paced.

CHAPTER THREE: THE FIRST TRIAL

Both men were committed to stand trial after a preliminary inquiry in early 2008. Dustin was released on bail in May 2007, with his mother and Brea as sureties.

The joint jury trial began in late 2009 in Chilliwack, before Justice William Grist.

About 8 weeks in, it fell apart. The officer who played Mr. Big in both operations took the stand, and his evidence about what Dustin had told him was highly prejudicial to West. West's lawyers asked to have his trial separated. The judge agreed. Dustin's trial continued with the jury. West would be tried later, by the judge alone.

The Crown called 37 witnesses against Dustin.

And then Dustin took the stand in his own defence.

His story at trial overlapped with his confession in a lot of ways, with one enormous difference. He said he never knew his father intended to kill Chelsey. He said he watched his father choke her in the tent. He said his father had dug the grave by himself. At his father's direction, he carried her body to the grave, and they buried her, dumped her belongings, and went back to West's place. He was a witness, he said. An accessory after the fact. Not a murderer.

So why confess to Mr. Big? He said he exaggerated his role to stay in the organization and to keep the respect of the primary undercover officer, who he saw as his only real friend.

Dustin, Steven Dudley, and Josh Gordon all described West as domineering and violent, a man the younger guys were afraid of.

The Crown tried to back up the confession with two witnesses. Gordon, about the shovel. Dudley, about Dustin's relationship with Chelsey, which the trial judge left to the jury as a possible motive.

On February 16th, 2010, the jury convicted Dustin Moir of first-degree murder. The sentence is automatic: life in prison, no parole eligibility for 25 years.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE FATHER TAKES THE STAND

West's judge-alone trial ran from September to November 2012 in Chilliwack.

West testified too. And remember, his son had told a jury that West did the killing. Now West told the judge his son did.

His version went like this. He met Chelsey in February 2005 as his son's girlfriend. She was at his suite 2 or 3 times, only once overnight. They were just friends. Never anything sexual. He had no memory of Steven Dudley, the girl from the foster home, the girl from the night of May 23rd, or the girl from the truck garage. None of those things happened.

He said on a Friday in June 2005, he drove Dustin and Chelsey to a campsite near the Carolin Mines exit and left them there with his camping gear. He came back the next afternoon, June 11th, and found them arguing about whether Chelsey might be pregnant and wanted to move in with Dustin. He walked away along the river. When he came back, he saw Dustin swing his arm, and Chelsey fell on her back. She had a gash on her forehead. He checked her breathing and tried to find a pulse.

He decided she was dead. And he went into what he called "recovery mode." He said he had 2 choices: call 911 and turn his son in, or hide the problem as long as possible. He chose to hide it. He dug a hole in the fire pit in front of the tent with a machete, put her in it, put rocks on her, and filled it in.

Why tell the undercover officers he killed a girl? To look as big and tough as the Montreal gangster, he said. For the money. "The guy's going to hand me $50,000 in a few days, an Avalanche, a Harley-Davidson. Those are great incentives to say whatever you want me to say."

And "It wasn't all me, you had a part in it"? That, he said, was about burying the body.

On cross-examination, the Crown put a series of suggestions to him. That it took 3 or 4 hours to dig the hole, not the 25 minutes he claimed. That Chelsey was in a tent about 50 feet away while it was being dug. That he and Dustin both dug. That he told Chelsey he was going to have rough sex with her. That he bound her hands. That he threw away what he used to bind her. That he told Dustin to throw a rock on her head and crush it.

West denied every one.

Where did those suggestions come from? It wasn't in the trial record then, but on appeal both sides agreed: they came from what Dustin told Mr. Big.

Justice Grist didn't believe a word of West's story. He called it "disjointed, improbable and inconsistent," and "an ongoing invented narrative being constructed during the course of the accused's evidence." He found it "totally incredible."

Here's why.

The campsite didn't exist. West described a row of about 5 campsites, each with a driveway off a gravel road, all full, with a big RV parked at the one next door. He said he drove right up to the tent and buried her in the fire pit about 15 feet in front of it. The officer who mapped the scene and took aerial photographs described a single pullout, a foot trail winding down through the bush toward the river and then running alongside it, and a grave in the trees about 3 feet off that trail, a long way from where you'd park. Nothing like West's description. And as the judge pointed out, it would have made no sense to bury a body in a shallow grave right in front of a busy campsite.

The injury didn't fit. West described a swing of the arm and a gash. The skull had a 7-by-7-centimetre area of fractures driven 2 centimetres inward. The pathologist said a hand couldn't do that.

The behaviour didn't make sense. By his own account, people were camped right next door, and he didn't call for help. He admitted he didn't really know how to take a pulse, yet he decided she was dead and stripped and buried her, and eventually said the blow was probably an accident.

And Chelsey was alive after June 11th. She left her foster home at 11:30 pm on June 10th, not in the early evening as West claimed. She visited Gladys Wertman weeks later. The landlords saw her into the fall. Gordon lent West the shovel in September. And she was seen at Seven Oaks Mall on October 23rd. The judge found the murder happened after that, sometime between October and the end of December 2005.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE EVIDENCE, AND WHAT IT MEANT

This is the heart of the case, so let me slow down.

Neither man was ever going to be convicted on forensics. There was no DNA, no fingerprints, no weapon, no clothing. The grave had spent a winter under snow. What the Crown had was what the men said, and the question was always whether to believe it. So in every trial, the court was looking for anything that could confirm the confessions independently. Here are the pieces, and what each one did.

The holdback evidence. All 4 holdback details came out of Dustin's mouth: no clothes, the big rocks including one on the head, the skull crushed (he said "caved her in," with the rock hitting her while she lay on her side), and the roots, "a lot of roots and stuff." And he didn't just name them, he explained each one. The clothes went in a dumpster. The serrated military shovel cut the roots. The digging took hours. The rock was thrown while she lay on her side in the hole. The other rocks were to keep animals out. The judge at his second trial, who we'll get to shortly, called those details "remarkably consistent" with the grave and the body. West, for his part, knew she was buried naked and that rocks were thrown on the body.

But there's a catch, and Justice Grist said so directly. Holdback evidence shows you know things only someone at that grave would know. It doesn't prove what you did there. Both men admitted being at that grave. So the holdback couldn't, on its own, tell the court which man killed her, or whether both did. For that, the court needed more.

The confession that led to evidence. Dustin told Mr. Big about a newspaper clipping in a safe at his mother's house. He went and got it. That's a confession confirmed by a physical object.

The internal consistency. Dustin told the boss the same core story several times: the hit offered the day before, the money, the digging while she waited in the tent, his father behind her, Dustin in front, the movement, the choking, the rock. He used his hands to show what he was describing. He wasn't distressed or confused. The judge said it came across as a recitation from memory, not a made-up story.

The mundane details that checked out. The old Sunbird, used by both men, registered in someone else's name, later towed by police: all true. The duct tape: there really were 2 pieces of duct tape near the grave. The timing: the fall, with the body found 4 to 6 months later. The location: off the Coquihalla, on the right side heading toward Merritt. He got one thing wrong. He thought it was closer to Merritt than to Hope. It's the other way around.

The open door he didn't walk through. If Dustin's only crime was helping bury the body, he had every opportunity in that interview to say so. He was told not to take credit for his father's actions. He was asked directly about the rock: you or your dad? He said, "I did that." The judge found nothing about the interview pushed him toward overstating his role.

The shovel. Gordon's evidence was that West asked for a shovel in September 2005, weeks before Chelsey's last sighting. That was the key to proving planning. You don't borrow a shovel for an accident. West testified he borrowed it later that winter to deliver cement to Hemlock Valley. Gordon's evidence was that he'd put the shovel back at the foster home before he left there, before November. Justice Grist said the shovel evidence added "considerable support" to West's admissions that he prepared to kill Chelsey.

West's words to the Montreal gangster. Before he ever met Mr. Big, before anyone mentioned Chelsey's name to him, West volunteered that he'd killed a girl, taken her clothes and jewellery, dug a hole, and used a rock. The Court of Appeal called that an "unforced admission." Nobody had put it in his head.

West's correction. When the boss's assistant said "Kamloops-ish," West fixed it. Near Hope. The judge found that notable. A man inventing a story to impress gangsters doesn't usually stop to correct their geography.

What West said when he thought he was safe. In the car with his handler, the "situation" he "cleaned up," the rocks he didn't know would "float," the hole that wasn't deep enough. On the phone to his girlfriend, the "happy medium" that kept him from being fired. At the remand centre, wanting to explain "what led up to it and why it happened." None of those were said to Mr. Big. And all of them, the judge found, confirmed that West was telling the truth in that hotel room.

The sheriff's van. "It wasn't all me. You had a part in it." The judge found that was far more consistent with West being the main actor in the killing than with him being an accessory who only dug a hole. And Dustin's answer to "people don't like people that kill 14-year-old girls" was not a denial.

The parts that didn't fit. In fairness, there were plenty. West said the grave was 5 feet deep. It was 15 inches. The judge thought that was a defensive reaction to the boss suggesting he hadn't buried her deep enough. Dustin said 2 or 3 feet, "just enough." Dustin downplayed how long he'd known Chelsey, telling the boss he'd only met her a couple of weeks before and using an ugly word to describe her as his father's girl, when Dudley and the phone records showed otherwise. The judge at his second trial said there were possible reasons for that, including that he wasn't proud of his sexual relationship with a young girl, but none of those reasons undermined everything else he'd said.

So who did what? Here's where it gets genuinely difficult, and I want to be careful. Each man's confession put himself at the centre of the killing in some way. West told Mr. Big he strangled her, with the hold he'd demonstrated. Dustin told Mr. Big his father choked her from behind, then Dustin finished it, and Dustin threw the rock. The pathologist couldn't say whether strangulation happened, but said the skull fracture alone could have caused death.

Justice Grist found that the hold West described was capable of incapacitating or killing Chelsey, and that the crushing of her skull in the grave, if it wasn't itself the cause of death, happened soon after she died.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: People ask me whether Mr. Big is fair, and it's a fair question. Here's how I think about it. A confession on its own is just a story. Anybody can tell a story, especially to a room full of people they're trying to impress. What turns a story into evidence is what you can check. Did he know things only the killer would know? Did he lead you to something you didn't have? Did he say the same thing when he thought nobody official was listening, to his girlfriend, to his handler in the car, to his own son in the back of a van? In this case, the answer kept coming back yes. That's not one piece of proof. That's a dozen small ones, all pointing the same direction.

The law didn't require the court to pin down whose hands did the final act. That's an important point, so let me explain it.

CHAPTER SIX: THE LAW, EXPLAINED

Both men were charged with first-degree murder. In Canada, murder becomes first-degree in a few specific ways. The one that mattered here is that the killing was planned and deliberate. That means it was thought out in advance, not impulsive. A shovel borrowed weeks ahead. A grave dug before the victim was killed. A tent to keep her occupied while the hole was dug. Those facts are what separate first-degree murder from second-degree murder.

The Crown had to prove 3 things against West: that he caused Chelsey's death, that he meant to kill her, and that it was planned and deliberate.

And under the Criminal Code, you don't have to be the one who strikes the final blow to be guilty of murder. A person who commits the act, a person who helps someone commit it, and a person who encourages someone to commit it are all guilty of the same offence. So if two people plan a killing together, dig the grave together, and kill the victim together, it doesn't matter, legally, whose arm was around her neck when she stopped breathing.

What's the alternative? An accessory after the fact. That's someone who, knowing a crime has been committed, helps the person who did it escape justice. Helping bury a body after someone else kills, without any part in planning or carrying out the killing, is that. It's a serious crime, but it's not murder, and it doesn't carry a mandatory life sentence.

That was the whole fight. Both men, in court, claimed to be the accessory, and both blamed the other for the murder.

The W.D test. When an accused testifies, Canadian judges and juries follow a 3-step test from a 1991 Supreme Court case called R. v. W.D  One: if you believe the accused's denial, acquit. Two: even if you don't believe it, if it leaves you with a reasonable doubt, acquit. Three: even if you reject the accused's evidence completely, you still have to ask whether the evidence you do accept proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Justice Grist applied that test to West. Step 1: he didn't believe him. Step 2: West's account was so incredible it couldn't raise a doubt. Step 3: the Mr. Big confession, confirmed by everything we just walked through, proved every element.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE VERDICTS, AND THE COURT OF APPEAL

January 2013 was a strange month in this case.

On January 21st, Justice Grist found Jesse Blue West guilty of first-degree murder. West was 60 years old. Life in prison, no parole for 25 years. The judge's written reasons were released on January 30th.

That same day, January 30th, 2013, the BC Court of Appeal threw out Dustin Moir's conviction and ordered a new trial.

Here's why, in plain language.

Josh Gordon's shovel. On the stand, Gordon first said he gave the shovel to West. After reviewing his old police statement, which said he gave it to Dustin, he said he didn't remember who he gave it to. Then he said he was "positive" he gave it to West. In his instructions, the trial judge told the jury Gordon wasn't sure whether he gave the shovel to West or Dustin, as if that were simply a fact. The Court of Appeal pointed out that was the only evidence, outside the Mr. Big confession, pointing to Dustin's guilt of a planned killing. And a witness's old statement can't be used as proof of what happened unless the witness accepts it as true on the stand. That's a decision for the jury, and the jury needed to be told how to make it. They weren't.

Steven Dudley. Under cross-examination, Dudley admitted that in his original police interview he'd said he knew who Chelsey was but never talked to her, and that no girls were at West's place when he stayed there. He agreed that police had pushed him hard, and that he'd felt pressured to connect Dustin, Chelsey, and West. Then, in re-examination, the Crown asked him one blanket question: were the details he gave police correct? He said yes. Legally, that meant he'd adopted his entire statement, including the parts that contradicted his own trial testimony. The jury got no guidance on how to sort that out.

Motive. The trial judge told the jury Dudley's evidence could give Dustin a motive: Chelsey might report him for having sex with her when she was underage. The Court of Appeal said there was simply no evidence Dustin was ever worried about that. Any inference was speculation. Even the Crown hadn't argued it.

The rebuttal witness. After Dustin testified, the Crown was allowed to call another young woman to contradict him on side issues. The Court of Appeal said that should never have been allowed.

The Court of Appeal summed it up this way: there were two versions available to the jury. In one, Dustin was an active participant in murder. In the other, he was "a fearful bystander and accessory after-the-fact." The jury hadn't been properly equipped to choose between them. New trial.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: I know how this lands with the public, and I know how it landed with Chelsey's family. A jury heard this man describe throwing a rock on a 14-year-old girl's head, and he gets a new trial because of jury instructions about a shovel? But here's how I've come to see it. The rules about prior statements exist because witnesses get leaned on. Look at what Dudley admitted: that he felt pushed in his police interview to give investigators something connecting these men. Sometimes that pressure produces the truth. Sometimes it produces what the person thinks you want to hear. The jury has to be told the difference between what a witness says on the stand and what a witness signed off on in an interview room. If the conviction is right, it will survive a properly run trial. And if it can't, that's exactly what an appeal is for. A conviction that can't withstand a fair process isn't worth much.

West's appeal was heard in November 2014, and by then the law had changed. The Supreme Court's decision in Hart had come down that summer. West argued his confessions should now be thrown out under the new test. He also argued the porn-industry scenarios, especially the simulated violence against a female officer, made the whole operation an abuse of process.

On September 14th, 2015, the Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal on every ground.

The court pointed out West was a career criminal, not socially isolated, not destitute. The police hadn't taken over his life. And unlike in Hart, there was confirming evidence: his knowledge of the holdback details, his unforced admission to the Montreal gangster before anyone in the operation had mentioned Chelsey's name, the call to his girlfriend, the sheriff's van, and the camcorder comment. On the porn scenarios, the court noted it was West, not the officers, who brought up supplying "female talent." Given that the police were investigating the murder of a 14-year-old girl, the court said, it was understandable they'd want to create an atmosphere where West wasn't shy about discussing violence against women.

West's conviction stood.

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE SON'S SECOND TRIAL

Dustin's road was longer.

He got bail again in August 2013, pending his new trial. The Crown opposed it. The judge characterized the Crown's case as "a good case but not an overwhelming case," because it depended so heavily on the reliability of the Mr. Big confession. The Crown pointed to the two witness contacts from the first trial, and to an incident in October 2012 at Kent Institution, where 67.5 grams of hash oil was found in a sock belonging to Brea during a private family visit. Dustin admitted the drugs were his. The judge still granted bail. A month later, his application to move the trial out of Chilliwack because of pretrial publicity was dismissed.

Then came Hart. Because of the new rule, Dustin's confession was now presumed inadmissible, and the Crown had to win it back in a hearing called a voir dire, a trial within a trial, held in front of Justice Griffin of the BC Supreme Court in 2016.

The defence fought it hard. They argued Dustin was young, broke, homeless, unsophisticated, and desperate to please the people who'd become his friends. That he was a braggart who'd already told the primary officer his father killed 24 people. That he'd simply taken what his father did and made himself bigger in it to impress the boss. A psychologist tested Dustin and found his intellectual abilities in the borderline to mildly impaired range. Overall he functioned academically at about a grade 3 level, though his verbal skills were much stronger. His wife, Brea, testified he tended to exaggerate stories to make them bigger.

The judge took a lot of that seriously. She found Dustin's circumstances called for "enhanced scrutiny." She found the inducements, $8,450 paid to him before the confession, about $12,500 in total, roughly $29,000 in expenses on meals and hotels, plus the $31,000 promise of the big score, were "very powerful" for a young man in his position. She noted that when Dustin complained about his father being with 13- and 14-year-old girls, an undercover officer told him he had no problem with that and liked it himself, to make Dustin feel he wouldn't be judged. The judge said the community would generally disapprove of any police officer saying that. She noted it would have been better if every scenario with a hint of violence had been recorded.

But she admitted the confession.

She found the boss never confronted Dustin with a version of events and never told him what he'd done. That Dustin had every chance to say he only helped bury her and chose not to. That if he was boasting, it was hard to find a single exaggeration in his account of the murder that conflicted with the physical evidence. That his account included details, like digging while Chelsey waited in the tent, that served no purpose for a braggart and that he'd never told the primary officer. And she wrote something I think captures the whole case in one line: there was no other explanation on the evidence for how Dustin ended up at that burial site with his father and Chelsey while she was still alive, if he didn't know the plan was to kill her.

She found no abuse of process. She wrote that the community has a great interest in investigating the murders of youth, especially Indigenous women and girls and those who are sexually exploited, and that the interest in solving the murder of such a vulnerable victim significantly outweighed how intrusive the operation was on Dustin.

The retrial went ahead in New Westminster in early 2017. Dustin had the right not to testify. During the trial, the defence tried to introduce a recorded phone call he made to his mother the day after his arrest, an hour and 22 minutes long. In it, he cried, asked her for money for a lawyer, said he'd tried to seem like a bigger man than he was with Mr. Big, and said he was afraid of his father. The judge ruled he couldn't put that call in front of the jury without taking the stand himself and being cross-examined on it.

In 2017, the second jury convicted Dustin Moir of murdering Chelsey Acorn.

EPILOGUE

I keep coming back to that moment in the sheriff's van.

A father, who had driven a 14-year-old girl in foster care around in a red Sunbird, who had her phone number on a grocery receipt and her calls on his phone bill, who told a friend she was living with a biker, and then that she was in Kelowna, and who by his own account dug a hole for her before she died. And a son, who had kept a newspaper clipping about her mother in a safe. 2 men, sitting a foot apart, each now knowing the other had confessed to a police officer.

And the father says: "It wasn't all me. You had a part in it."

That's really the whole case. Each of them spent years trying to make it all the other one. Each of them, at different times, in front of different people, told a story where he was just the guy with the shovel. And a judge and 2 separate juries looked at everything they'd said, everything they'd done, and every rock in that grave, and decided it wasn't all either one of them.

It was both.

We never got a clear answer to the question West himself said nobody cares about: why. West told Mr. Big his son had forced himself on Chelsey and might go to jail. Dustin told Mr. Big it was a paid hit, and even the boss pushed back on that. The Crown suggested it might have been about the threat of Chelsey exposing what West had been doing with her, or protecting his son. The Crown didn't have to prove a motive, and no court ever settled on one. Anything I could tell you would be a guess.

What I can tell you is what the record says about who Chelsey was. A child in the care of the province. 18 placements in 15 months. A girl who was supposed to be protected by a system and was instead found by 2 men who seemed to know exactly what kind of girl nobody would come looking for quickly. When she told a woman who'd cared for her since she was little that she was going to the Interior with a man who would take care of her, she believed it.

Her mother made a plea to her killer in the paper. It took months for anyone to find Chelsey in that grave, and more than a decade for the courts to finish with the men who put her there.

I want to take a moment for the people who did this work. The hikers who saw something wrong and didn't walk past it. The forensic team who excavated that grave carefully enough that every detail survived to become evidence. The investigators who took about 100 statements, guarded 4 details for more than a year, and built a case that held up through 3 trials and a change in the law. And the Crown prosecutors who carried this file for over a decade, through a conviction overturned and a case they had to win twice. To them, and to the dispatchers, officers, and first responders who carry cases like Chelsey's with them long after the file closes: thank you. It matters.

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 2 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, 2013 BCSC 1696 (CanLII) (bail); R. v. Moir, 2013 BCSC 1750 (CanLII) (change of venue); R. v. Moir, 2016 BCSC 386 (CanLII) (expert evidence ruling); R. v. Moir, 2016 BCSC 1720 (CanLII) (admissibility of Mr. Big confession); R. v. Moir, 2017 BCSC 1006 (CanLII) (admissibility of telephone call); Global News, "Father of convicted killer also found guilty in murder of Chelsey Acorn" (January 21, 2013); Abbotsford News, "Dustin Moir convicted at second trial for Chelsey Acorn murder" (2017). The identities of the undercover officers are prot