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check responses for accuracy now brief with galaxy ai displays daily select information from select apps may require internet connection galaxy ai features by samsung free through 2025 and require samsung account login hi crime junkies i'm your host ashley flowers and i'm brit and the story i have for you
today is about how a young woman's senseless and violent murder shone a light in all the darkest parts of one small northern Manitoba community, and it put a whole town on trial.
It's a story that is just as important to hear today as it was over 50 years ago when it happened, and it feels all too familiar even in 2025.
This is the story of Helen Betty Osborne.
It's a coal gray morning in November 1971 and a 14 -year -old named Kenneth is fishing with his father on Clearwater Lake in northern Manitoba.
And of course, by fishing, when you're a kid, I mean, he's like sitting there and sitting there.
He's not moving, he's not talking, and it's for hours.
He's like just hoping they might get a fish.
So you can imagine, Kenneth gets kind of antsy.
So he tells his dad that he's just going to go for a walk, see if he can find any rabbit tracks in the snow or something like that.
Now it's about 11 .30 in the morning and Kenneth is next to this pump house on his way back down to the lake when according to coverage in the Winnipeg Sun, some strange tracks in the snow catch his eye.
He's a curious kid, so he follows the tracks into the thick bush.
The snow is crunching beneath him and that's when he comes upon the body of a woman.
She's naked with only boots on her feet and she's all bloody and badly beaten.
So Kenneth immediately runs back to get his dad, and the two of them jump in the car.
They drive to the closest place, which is, I think, this airport, to call police.
But as luck would have it, there's actually an RCMP officer, which we know, Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
He's on site when they get there.
According to Lisa Priest's 1989 book, Conspiracy of Silence, this officer doesn't have experience necessarily as a criminal investigator.
He's actually the pilot who's in charge of, like, the RCMP's air division or whatever.
Okay, so he's just, like, at the airport because that's where he is.
Yeah, but he still heads down towards the lake with them.
Like, he'll take a first, like, look at all of this.
And he's also keeping in mind, like, I need to be careful not to do anything that would disturb a potential crime scene.
Preserve things. Right.
And when he gets there, it, like, very clearly is a crime scene.
So he has to call in backup.
Now, it takes some time to get investigators all the way out to where they are.
But by 1 .45 in the afternoon, they have a team on site who is processing everything, gathering evidence.
The victim looks to be in her late teens.
She's small with kind of short, shaggy, dark hair that's kind of matted in clumps.
Her skin is swollen and purple.
And she is covered, I mean, chest, head, neck, face in dozens of these tiny stab wounds.
So it is clear that she suffered a vicious and brutal attack, one that went on long after she stopped fighting.
And this might get kind of graphic, so content advisory.
But investigators describe kind of this halo of blood that was around her head, almost like someone had stomped on her face and, like, made it so it, like, the blood was, like, going out of the tiny stab wounds that were made.
I mean, it was that bad.
The word that came up so many times over and over again in Lisa's book was the word frenzy.
Like, this was a frenzied attack.
It looked like whoever did this was angry and frantic, vicious even.
And what's interesting is they did take time to hide her clothing because several items of hers were hidden under some rocks down closer by the lake.
And the person who stabbed and stomped her and the person who's hiding her clothing might not be the same person because there are two sets of footprints, one on each side of the victim's body.
and there's even drag marks showing that they pulled her by her arm.
So it's not like it was her footprints and someone else's.
This is someone else there, a third person.
Now, she didn't look like she'd been out there very long, less than a day, which is a lucky break because unlike in the warmer months when folks spend time at the cabins surrounding the lake, this area is pretty much deserted in November.
Like, if not for Kenneth getting antsy, if not for his dad making them wait it out in silence, if not for the fish that day refusing to bite, she may not have been found until the next spring, if at all.
Which is probably what the killers were counting on.
Maybe, and if so, that means that the killers knew the area.
But the question is, did they know the victim?
Well, in order to find that out, they need to know who she is, which is a difficult task given the injuries to her face and her head.
Over the next several hours, police will end up bringing in a total of 31 people to try and identify their Jane Doe.
But no one can of these 31 people, like friends and family of potentially missing people.
Now, in this time when they're bringing in person after person, there is a missing persons report that comes in from the PAW.
The PAW is the nearest town, about 25, 30 minutes away from this lake where they found the Jane Doe.
Now, this missing persons report is for a 19 -year -old named Helen Betty Osborne, who goes by Betty, according to the woman who files the report, and that woman is Patricia Benson.
She is who Betty was living with, and I'll touch on that in just a moment, like, the dynamic there.
Now, according to what Patricia tells police, Betty hadn't come home after being out the night of November 12th.
And when was the Jane Doe found?
She is found on the 13th, so this is, like, really soon.
Patricia's husband, William, is one of the 31 people, actually, who they brought in to potentially identify the Jane Doe.
But even when they bring him in, he can't.
I mean, that's how bad this is.
But they're so bad, he also can't say that it's not her either.
So they end up sending an officer to the Benson's house to lift fingerprints from Betty's school books to compare to the victim.
And that is when she's finally identified.
Now, when her full autopsy is completed, everyone is truly shocked to learn what this young woman endured.
I mean, it was almost unspeakably brutal.
She had been stabbed a total of 56 times.
11 of those were in the heart and the rest were to her face and the back of her head.
And according to Bill McDonald reporting for the Winnipeg Sun, he said that these stab wounds, I told you they were kind of like small, they were like a little strained, but he reported that they were most likely from a screwdriver.
Now one injury to the lower back of her head stands out from the others because it is over two inches deep And the weapon went through her skull and over an inch and a half into her brain.
This is how severe this is.
Her skull, her cheekbones, the roof of her mouth all broken.
Her lungs were damaged.
A kidney was torn. She has bruises all over her body, which may have been caused by someone beating her with their hands or their feet or some kind of blunt weapon.
And her injuries are so severe that it's impossible to tell exactly which one of these led to her death.
and when during the attack she might have died.
But this is, without a doubt, a homicide.
So the next day, the investigators go back out to the area where she was found with a police dog.
And about three quarters of a mile from the crime scene, they find gloves.
They find a couple pieces of a white cotton bra.
They find a paper bag.
All of this stuff is covered in blood.
And about a half mile from the airport in a ditch, they find a flathead screwdriver also covered in blood.
So this they're thinking has got to be their murder weapon or at least one of them because it turns out that another screwdriver had also been found by a civilian.
I guess this airport employee he'd been like driving in the area on the afternoon of the 13th and he'd found like a whole different screwdriver on the road which he had just like tossed in his trunk thought nothing of it until he heard about the murder.
So he brought that one to police.
He feels like, you know, this could be really promising lead.
There's actually a name engraved on the screwdriver, Hanson or Ransom, something like that.
And I assume that one wasn't covered in blood.
I don't think so. Or I would hope that he didn't just like.
I feel like that would be like a red flag situation.
Yeah, I would hope he didn't just like throw it in his car and be like, oh, now that I know about a murder, this screwdriver is blood.
But I don't know that for sure.
But either way, covered in blood, not covered in blood.
They obviously like see the potential in this.
And they collect this as evidence.
Is this a second murder weapon?
We don't know. Now, another lead that comes to police is in the form of this taxi driver named Phillip, who tells police that he was driving along that same highway where the screwdriver was found sometime after 4 a .m.
the morning of the 13th, after he had just dropped off two customers.
And he said as he's driving, he ends up behind a car that was like all over the road, just like zigzagging around.
He said the driver was very obviously drunk.
Like, the car almost went into a ditch at one point.
And he says the vehicle was a white or a light blue car.
And, oh, by the way, this doesn't happen in most cases, he got a peek at the license plate, which included the numbers four and two.
How close does that get them to somebody?
Like, how much does it narrow it down?
It helps. So they go from, like, you know, every Every car, every light colored car to a list of 5 ,000 cars, 5 ,000 plus people with a whiter light blue car and the numbers two and four somewhere in the license plate.
But while one option is to go down the list one by one and maybe you'll get there in a few years, like, you know, hopefully it's the first one, but, you know, you never know.
The other option is to do some investigative work and use this list more as like a cross reference, right?
which that's the route they decide to go in and they start by retracing betty's steps on the night of her murder i've been trying to cut back on coffee so i've been looking for substitutions that i can work in throughout the day and i give myself one cup of joe in the morning and then for the afternoon i've
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Now, quick backstory.
Betty is indigenous and she wasn't living with her family at the time.
She was living with the Bensons.
I told you I'd mentioned Patricia Benson.
She was living with them while she went to high school because she was born on a reserve where the schooling only went up to eighth grade.
So she was taking part in this government sponsored program where indigenous students could board with a local family to finish high school, which I can't even imagine.
Like that has to be so hard.
Like disruptive. You're already in this very like awkward time of your life.
But Betty was super ambitious.
