A Free OSINT Lesson: "C'était une affaire terrible."
Why small town archives, and the people who work there, are the unsung heroes of OSINT.
This entry contains details regarding the shooting death of a minor, and may be upsetting for some readers.
I received a call from a woman named Michelle. She worked at this small brick-built library in a tiny little Quebec town about 45 minutes east of the Ontario border. I didn't know her very well, apart from some email correspondence. By her voice, she was French Canadian, probably in her early forties. My French was a bit rusty. Her English was a bit rusty. But we managed. She called me to tell me that she found some information for me regarding a botched suicide pact and a standoff with police that had taken place a couple of decades ago, in 1995.
It was a terrible affair.
I had been working on a case concerning a large scam operation being run out of Toronto, with victims across Canada, the United States, even the Middle East. The Queen of OSINT, Rae Baker, had put me on this story, and she and I have been chipping away at it ever since. This was one of those cases where you know that nothing will probably come of it, but you grow addicted to the people involved—the cast of characters.
This case was, to quote Chuck Palahniuk and his novel Fight Club, "the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you would stop tonguing it, but you can't."
As Rae and I kept going deeper into this scam's rabbit hole and, frankly, chasing the woman who would ultimately reside at the very bottom of said hole, we learned her real name through some interviews and a touch of social engineering.
Rae had been chasing this for a couple of years. I had just marked my one-year anniversary on the case, and we had been wandering the internet, searching for clues about her. Domain accounts, photographs, bank accounts, victim statements, email addresses, phone numbers, cryptocurrency wallets… all tied together, but to a whole host of fake names. But with her real name, her birth name, we finally made it into Wonderland.
Our conwoman had been running scams since she was 16. With the help of her mother, she defrauded the Canadian government out of about half a million dollars. She mastered the art of the con, both long and short. Though she was a criminal, I am oddly impressed by her abilities. In some bizarre way, I even respect them.
With her real name in hand, and with Rae and I both collecting as much data as possible, one curious little datum popped up. In an old social media post, she wrote that her brother and father had both died by suicide within weeks of each other back in the mid-90s.
Based on the lies she has told throughout her long criminal career, I began to wonder whether this was true. Moreover, from an intelligence perspective, was this a vital piece of data that could impact our understanding of her? Or was this just another con to drum up sympathy that could be used to bilk people out of their money?
I decided to look into it.
My phone rang. It was 1:00pm on March 5th.
“Bonjour, c'est Michelle. C'est MJ?”
"Oh shit. Oui. Yes. God, I hope you speak English. Salut Michelle…"
There was a laugh on the other end of the line, and in a Quebecois accent, "Yes, we can speak in English."
It was a proud moment for Canada as a nation. An anglophone and a francophone half-speaking each other's languages.
About two weeks prior, I began reaching out to municipalities in Ontario and Quebec that hugged the border between those two provinces. A string of little towns and villages, they shared much of everything, including larger local newspapers that reported on the "goingsons" across these hamlets.
Our conwoman was from one of these little towns. I was directed to two libraries that housed the archives for a couple of local newspapers that would have been active during the mid-90s. So I called the libraries.
I spoke to an older gentleman and an amazing, sweet older lady who invited me to her home for coffee. While wonderfully helpful and excited to help work on something akin to a mystery novel, they all came up empty-handed. Those particular newspapers had no articles mentioning anyone with the same last name as our conwoman that was tied to a suicide or a death.
Then I received an email from Michelle, who was my last hope. She had found the mention of a trial, a man with the same last name as our conwoman, and that he was charged in the murder of his son. She sent me a PDF scan of the newspaper. She asked for two weeks to keep digging. This particular local paper was only partially digitized, and she would have to do some of the work manually.
On that idle Tuesday in March, Michelle called me with some updates (I'll paraphrase in English).
"So I found another article about the incident for you. I'm afraid there isn't much more, but it lists the name of the boy who died. The son, I suppose. It also lists the courthouse and the prosecutor. The trial was in a Quebec court. It also lists some other names and addresses where the crime took place. It's a real tragedy."
"It was bad?"
“Very bad. C'était une affaire terrible.”
What Michelle found was an article in a small local newspaper that was written a week after the incident. In a small Quebec hamlet, right on the TransCanada highway, home to about 70 people, our conwoman's father, 38 at the time, and her brother, 16, rolled up in a stolen car, high and armed. It turns out the father's estranged mother lived there, and on a cold day in May of 1995, they kicked down the door of her house.
According to the article, the police showed up that evening after the mother was able to sneak out and alerted a neighbor. A tactical unit was called in. There was an exchange of words, threats, and what seemed to be a hostage situation. The standoff lasted 28 hours. Eventually, the police stormed the house.
The article mentions that police officers had found wills and farewell letters and the body of a 16-year-old boy who was shot in the back of the head. Police, at the time, believed this was a botched suicide pact hatched after the standoff began. Our conwoman's father was seemingly unable to take his own life after he murdered his son.
Our conwoman, who Rae and I had been chasing, was 18 years old at the time.
I suppose our conwoman was telling a version of the truth. Her father did die that day, too. At least, the man she’d known as her father became someone else that day. But as best I could find, he is still sitting in a jail cell in Quebec. That hunt is still ongoing.
From an investigation and intelligence perspective, I wonder what Rae and I would think about our target had we never discovered this dark moment in her past? So often, in OSINT, we seek out data sets and map them out on graphical timelines and maps. We write reports with bullet points and executive summaries and use digital tools that run code to scrape social media accounts.
How often do we utilize the sweet old ladies and women like Michelle in small-town libraries who have access to countless sets of useful data sitting on microfilm? Data that can lead to a dozen more selectors when we've exhausted those internet searches chasing a conwoman. Data that can lead us into the past, help us understand someone's future, and provide useful intelligence into an "affaire terrible."