A claims program for harmed Canadians has begun as a result of a landmark tobacco settlement. If you smoked regularly before November 20, 1998, and were diagnosed with lung cancer, throat cancer, emphysema, or COPD, you may qualify for a significant payment. To learn more, call 888-482-5852 or go to tobaccoclaimscanada.ca. In January 1968, a Canadian Forces Otter aircraft broke through the winter ice of Memphremagog and sank to the floor of the lake.
Several recovery efforts of the military aircraft were attempted, none succeeded. Then, in 1976, a five-man crew from Montreal managed to locate the wreckage and raise it 280 feet to the surface from the lake bed. Who were these guys? This is Who Killed Teresa.
This story was told to me while I was in a bowl of coffee in Sherbrooke. And when I first heard it, I didn't believe the guy. I thought he'd made it up. At best, he probably conflated a series of events.
When I got back to Canada and researched it, I was amazed to find, almost word for word, it was pretty much exactly as he told it to me. January 7, 1968, a Canadian Forces Otter aircraft from the 402nd Auxiliary Squadron 11th Wing out of Saint-Jubert Airport near Montreal was practicing ski landings on Lake Memphremagog in eastern townships of Quebec. An 18-year-old kid, Raelle Bernay, was on the wharf at Georgeville. Georgeville is a village about 12 miles south of Magog.
And he watched this aircraft go halfway across the lake. And when it suddenly then, one of the ski landings broke through the ice. The aircraft was sinking fast, but it slowed when the wings touched the surface of the ice. Flight Lieutenant Morrow escaped first, momentarily plunging into the frozen water before climbing back onto the ice.
The pilot, Flight Lieutenant Evans, wanted to stay with the aircraft. He then realized he couldn't get his door open. Morrow yelled at Evans to get out fast. By this point, the aircraft had sunk to its fuselage.
Evans managed to exit along the wings of the plane, joining Morrow on the frozen lake. Risking his life, the 18-year-old kid, Bernay, jumped on his snowmobile and rode out onto the lake through blowing winds and snow to rescue the men. They only asked me if the ice was safe before they climbed on, he later said. The snowmobile deposited the two airmen at the Georgeville boarding house, where owner Henry McGowan gave them a hot cup of coffee and a change of clothing.
McGowan was describing ways to salvage the plane with the two airmen when they heard a tremendous whoop, which rattled the windows of the boarding house. The men ran to the window and they saw the visible portion of the aircraft above the ice in flames. Henry McGowan said there was a terrific fire for a while, but within three or four minutes, the plane had disappeared beneath the ice. In the summers, Georgeville was a popular eastern township's tourist stop.
It still is. Because of the depth of the lake, McGowan doubted the wreckage would disrupt summer boating. The two airmen returned to Montreal the following day, leaving McGowan to wonder if he ever gets his clothing back. And for now, 1968, that was the end of the story.
Over the years, this aircraft became the focus of several salvaging operations, including one by Marine Industries out of Montreal, which reportedly spent $30,000 to locate and raise the aircraft. With that kind of money, one wonders if you could have bought your own aircraft. Then, in 1975, Lafitte Salvage, also from Montreal, located the plane and purchased the salvaging rights for $1,000. In June 1976, Lafitte sent a mysterious five-man crew to raise the wreckage and haul it onto dry land.
This latest crew appeared better equipped for the job using sophisticated closed-circuit television cameras for deep-water searching. This salvage crew refused to comment on the motives for attempting recovery. Some claimed the skis alone could fetch anywhere from $6,000 to $17,000 substantial money in the 1970s, but it hardly appeared worth the effort. After hauling a tail section of the fuselage of the de Havillen on shore in Georgeville, the wreckage was towed to a hotel parking lot in Magog.
Lead salvager Brian Power boasted, the best salvage company in Canada tried, and they couldn't do it, but we did. Power said he and his crew, Robert Chu, Michael French, Michel Villette, and Jean-Paul Saint-Michel took the, quote, routine job for the challenge, refusing to comment on unconfirmed reports of a safe still being on board in the fuselage. Brian Power is, of course, Brian Powers, and by now, if you listen to this podcast, you should recognize the names Michael French and Bobby Chu. And I wouldn't call anything undertaken by members of the Satan's Choice Motorcycle Club as routine.
If you've done your homework, recall that it was only about six months after this salvage operation that Powers, French, and Chu, and two others, a crew of about five, were involved in a bar fight where Bobby Chu stabbed two patrons of a mustache club near the Montreal Forum. There was also speculation that Michael French could have been the subject of a mysterious tattoo VF Frenchie I Love You carved on the stomach of the murdered 14-year-old girl Teresa Martin in 1969. This is all detailed in last year's series of episodes on the Teresa Martin case. Brian Powers would die two years later, gunned down outside his St.
Genevieve home in the summer of 1979, a victim of another biker war that pitted Satan's Choice slash the outlaws against their rivals, the Popeyes slash Hell's Angels. Chu died in 2018 at the age of 68 of chronic liver failure. What happened to Michael French is the stuff of biker legend. French was last seen at the Cavalier Motel bar in MDG in November 1982.
West End gang hitman Jackie McLaughlin lived at the Cavalier where his girlfriend tended bar. Montreal police suspected McLaughlin assassinated French. According to Eddie Collister of the Montreal Gazette, French was found dead with a bullet in his head near a South Shore Gunawaki graveyard. French's murder was rumored to be quote, a sort of community service for his allegedly murdering 16-year-old Sharon Pryor in late March 1975.
Other versions say French was killed for raping the daughter of a cop or possibly a mafia boss. In 1984, Jackie McLaughlin himself was murdered. His remains, alongside those of his bartender girlfriend and his pet dog, were found in a shallow grave outside St. John, New Brunswick.
My old stomping grounds. S.J. At the time of the plane salvage in 1976, Satan's choice with Powers, French, and Chu as members were allied with the West End Gang, one of the most powerful organized crime outfits in Montreal. Their rivals, the Popeyes Motorcycle Club, were backed by the Dubois brothers.
The Dubois supplied the township region with drugs and controlled organized crime in the region. Lafitte's salvage appears to be a front. There's no record of any such company. I only know that Jean Lafitte was a French pirate who, along with his brother Pierre, ran a smuggling operation trading stolen coins and goods in 19th century Louisiana.
So, what were these rivals of the Popeyes and the Dubois brothers doing in Magog in the summer of 1976? I don't know. Maybe they were looking for Memphrey, the elusive serpent-like cryptid rumored to stalk the waters of Memphremagog. Maybe that was their game.
Better still, what were the contents of the planes safe that salvage outfits would risk time and energy and spend upwards of $30,000 in 1976 money to attempt to recover it? Better still, what was the Canadian military doing on the lake in the first place? If you cross the lake and you go a little further north toward the village town of Magog and come to Chemanguerre, the road off of which the body of Louise Camerona was found in 1977. Now, I've visited that place many times and on one occasion there was a bunch of us there and we came upon a, I swear to God, a cache of military documents stashed in the woods and I'm talking about like a small mountain of like purchasing records and other documents that someone had attempted to burn and destroy.
So, what was that all about? What was the Canadian military's relationship with Lake and the from Magog? This is who killed Teresa. New year, new me.
Welcome back. I've mentioned it on social media. We're going to focus for the time being back on although this was a mousse-bouche palate cleanser before we get into many things but we'll circle around the Quebec toilet for a while before we center on what ultimately will be more stories about sexual murders in the province in the 1970s, early 80s. If you like the podcast, there's a number of ways you can support us.
You can follow us on social media. We're on Twitter, Instagram, there's a Facebook page. If you look at Who Killed Teresa or just search my name. My personal Twitter is at JusticeGuy, J-U-S-T-U-S-G-U-Y, JusticeGuy.
And there's the website TeresaLaur.com T-H-E-R-E-S-A-L-L-O-R-E .com If you go there, and I urge you to go there because as always there's great visuals for this story including the original newspaper articles so you can see that I didn't make this up. There's a great postcard that I pinched from Mario on his side about the Montreal photos of the Cattellier Hotel Motel etc. The website has been revamped and I urge you to go to it. What I think is most interesting is if you go to the website it's just better organized and formatted but most intriguing for you will be if you if you go to the site and click on cases you are able to sort your information according to offender according to victims we've covered according to police jurisdiction and according to era take a considerable amount of time to catalog the information to properly catalog give it a category and also to tag it.
You'll also see there a tag cloud that gives you really a vocabulary of what we're talking about and that's important because if you go to the tag you'll see certain things rise to the top and what's slowly rising right now are names like Jean-Marc Bedard Dubois brothers will be rising Michael French will be rising I'm kind of tipping my hat here for where we're going Satan's choice these kind of things we'll slowly gravitate to the top of that of that tag cloud and that's all to help you because we're going to move relatively fast here and there's not going to be time to explain everything that we're talking about so all of the podcasts going forward have got extensive links so if you miss something and you're really interested in it you can go and look it out if you want more information on it you can go to the tag cloud and say who's this guy Jean-Marc Bedard it's justice minister I think I've heard him before you can click on it you can see all the stories that refer to him as I say building a vocabulary of Quebec in the 1970s is going to be increasingly important if you're just here for the entertainment that's cool I mean you can listen to a cool story about this salvaging operation by bikers in the 70s and that's it but if your interest is more investigation we're going to offer you more is what I say I hope you enjoy that there's several other things coming that I won't get into today I think we need to kind of build things here slowly which you will shortly see what I'm talking about I think the last place I'll point you to is there is a YouTube channel if you just search on my name John or or Teresa or you can find that YouTube channel I'd like you to subscribe I'd like you to subscribe to that I'm trying to get to a thousand subscribers on YouTube that would be helpful and finally what I'll say is as always I have a sub stack account uh it's john or slash substack all the stuff i'm talking about you can find on the website go there and you can pin and tag and follow and all that kind of stuff the substack is great because it's more of the the writing portion of the podcast and rather than if you don't like going to a website about true crime because you don't want to listen to your crime read about true crime if you subscribe to substack um you'll just get the narrative content in your you know your email box and you can read it there like usually post that stuff on a sunday morning for ease for ease so that's um that's where we're at right now um short stories uh we're gonna we're gonna end it right here we're not gonna go to a full hour i doubt we'll full we'll fill a full hour um for a while going forward i can't i can't think of anything we have in the hopper that's gonna take that long it's designed for your commute um it's not designed for a road trip um but if you are doing a road trip you can just save a bunch of them up and lose them all once something like that anyway enough of my yakin uh that's all for today this has been who killed theresa i'm your host john or have yourselves a great great tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak somewhere in this town see me and the boys we don't like it so we're getting up and going down hello looking like to left you see us coming i think it's best move away you hear what i say tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak somewhere in the town tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak so don't you be around don't you be around tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak somewhere in the town tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak so don't you be around tonight there's gonna be trouble i'm all about myself here tonight there's gonna be trouble so let me tell you where music break out tonight there's gonna be a breakout into the city zone don't you dare to try to stop us no one could go along search light on my trail tonight's the night all systems fail hey you i'm looking female come here tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak somewhere in the town tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak tonight there's gonna be trouble i'm gonna find myself here tonight there's gonna be trouble so let me escape i don't know you go you you you Thank you.