Behind the fear: The unsolved killings in Dawson Creek, B.C.

RCMP promised ‘success’ was coming a year ago, but no arrests have been made in 11 homicide cases

Social Sharing

WARNING: This story contains graphic content and vulgar language.

Part 1: ‘Crazy, crazy criminality’  

When Arron Linklater leaves his house, the essentials come with him: Wallet. Phone. Keys. Bullet-proof vest. 

For 30-odd years, Linklater has been dealing cocaine in Dawson Creek, a small town tucked within the sprawling farmland in northern British Columbia at the origin point of the Alaska Highway. 

Although he lives in a modest bungalow, Linklater boasts that his cocaine business can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. In all that time, the RCMP has only busted him once for drug trafficking. 

A member of the nearby Carrier Sekani First Nation, Linklater has deep roots in town. His grandfather was Dawson Creek’s mayor in 1951, during its first major population boom thanks to the area’s first gas plant and the arrival of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway. In those days, a Linklater didn’t have to worry about being shot while walking through town.

But this is no longer his grandfather’s Dawson Creek.

Death, by the needle or by the bullet, now stalks its streets.

“He’s turning in his grave right now,” Linklater said of his grandfather. “I’m his only grandson who would carry the Linklater name on. He’d just say: ‘You’re a f–king idiot.’ He’d probably slap me.”

Linklater has watched the town evolve from a farming community into a booming oil-and-gas region that spawned more clients for his wares. With more money came more drugs, from cocaine to fentanyl. And more drugs meant more crime and violence.

There have been 13 unsolved homicides in four years — 11 since January 2023. Like justice, an end to the killing seems elusive in the town of 12,500 souls.

For more than a year, the fifth estate has been investigating this cyclone of crime, answering an email from a viewer desperate for attention and help. Last year, the RCMP told the fifth estate they expected “some level of success” within six months in what were then investigations into 11 unsolved killings in Dawson Creek. 

• Watch the full documentary, “Dawson Creek: Behind the Fear,” from the fifth estate on YouTube or CBC-TV on Friday at 9 p.m.

The fifth estate discovered the justice system has been unable to keep the worst criminals off the streets and has found more connections between the killings and the local underworld.

While police say they remain confident they will make progress in some of those homicide cases, the killings have continued. 

“Get investigators here that will do something about it, get rid of the drug dealers,” said resident Laura Lambert, whose two nieces are among the slain. “We want our kids back.”

In the absence of justice, Dawson Creek is gripped in rumour and fear. Everyone has a theory about who is killing whom and why. 

“I think the biggest misconception here is knowing and proving are two completely different things,” said RCMP spokesman Staff Sgt. Kris Clark. 

• Why are so many people murdered or missing in Dawson Creek?
• Human remains found in burnt car near Dawson Creek, B.C

The rumours are sometimes fuelled by threats on social media with a singular message — opening your mouth might be the last thing you ever do. One of those threats came as recently as Thursday, as the fifth estate was preparing to broadcast its most recent investigation into the killings in Dawson Creek.

Not even those responsible for pushing drugs onto the streets of Dawson Creek are safe. When the RCMP came to Linklater’s door in the spring to tell him about threats made against his life, he reached for his Kevlar. 

But he won’t leave town. 

“I ain’t gonna f–king hide. I’m gonna stand in broad f–king daylight and I don’t really care where you live, what you do for a living, I don’t care who you think you are,” said Linklater.

Like many in town, Linklater has his own theories to explain the rising tide of crime. But before Linklater could expound upon them for the fifth estate, he needed to engage in his relaxation ritual — a snort of a few lines of cocaine and a swig from a bottle of vodka.

Last year, the RCMP devoted more resources to stem what they called “gang-related violence” in Dawson Creek. The idea makes Linklater laugh. There is no gang war in Dawson Creek, he said. Crime is of the decidedly unorganized variety, he said. Local drug dealers who don’t get along kill each other and those they find inconvenient. 

And then there are those who have fallen through the cracks in town.

“The minute you put a gun into [the hands of] a fetal alcohol, Down syndrome kid who’s never f–king had to earn his penny in his life, but he’s fought from every corner he’s ever been, and he has no chance and never did, you get the worst criminality,” Linklater said. 

“You get crazy, crazy criminality.”

Just how “crazy” can be found in the data. The town’s homicide rate is 14 times the national average, according to Statistics Canada. Overdoses in town increased five-fold from 2016 until 2023. 

In this environment, safety in town appears elusive for criminals and regular townsfolk alike. Residents complain criminals are arrested, but rarely spend much time in jail. People vanish without a trace. The lives of addicts crumble, with some becoming armed agents of a desperate chaos. No one seems able to stop any of it.

Welcome to Dawson Creek.

WATCH | The drugs are rampant in Dawson Creek:

Criminality in Dawson Creek

October 31|

Duration0:57Career drug dealer Arron Linklater describes why Dawson Creek, B.C., is a hotbed of crime and killing. (Warning: This video includes vulgar language.)

Part 2: ‘The funeral people couldn’t put him back together’  

Dawson Creek’s official tourism website paints an idyllic portrait of the town. There are hiking trails, a farmer’s market, swing dance lessons and the iconic street sign marking Mile Zero of the Alaska Highway. 

“The Dawson Creek culture is very laid back and fun,” says DawsonCreek.com. “It’s a small town, it is a tight-knit and family-oriented community.”

That isn’t the town Jan Atkinson has come to know intimately. But she wanted to.  

An outreach worker by trade, Atkinson left Kelowna, B.C., for Dawson Creek in 2017 to escape the wreckage the opioid crisis had caused there. She was looking for respite in the family-friendly town and, for a time, she found it.

But soon Atkinson found a wreckage of a different kind.

“I think things were really set off with the first murders of Tina and Roy,” said Atkinson. “I think after that it really spiralled.”

Adam Roy Isley and Tina Nellis were slain in January 2023 in a trailer at the Mile Zero Trailer Park. 

Isley was in his mid-20s when he began earning a six-figure salary in the oil-and-gas industry. It was that career that eventually brought him to the town.

Everything changed after he arrived in Dawson Creek, his family said. Isley was caught in the undertow of Dawson’s Creek’s drug culture. His marriage broke down and he started using street drugs. In this new life, Isley began to go by his middle name, Roy, and his burgeoning fortune vanished with his career prospects. 

“He went from making big money to making no money,” his father, Quinten Isley, said. 

More than two years later, he doesn’t know why his son was killed. Sources in town told the fifth estate he and Nellis were killed over unpaid drug debts. But the RCMP, Quinten Isley said, has told him “absolutely nothing.”

What Isley’s family does know is that his death was incomprehensibly brutal. 

“They said you couldn’t have an open casket,” Quinten Isley said.

“The funeral people couldn’t put him back together again,” said Isley’s sister, Rachel Janke.

WATCH | A brutal death:

‘Couldn’t put him back together’

October 31|

Duration0:22The family of Adam Roy Isley describe what they know about his killing.

The deaths of Isley and Nellis marked the start of the bloodiest year in Dawson’s Creek’s recent memory and were part of an unprecedented wave of crime unlike anything the town had seen in decades.

According to Statistics Canada, which produces an analysis of crime labelled “the crime severity index,” in 2023 Dawson Creek had a serious crime score 3.5 times higher than the national rating.

“It’s always been a kind of Wild West. It has been rough. It’s always rough,” said Andy Tylosky, a life-long resident of the Peace River region, which includes Dawson Creek.  

“But the people just disappearing in the unexplained, burnt-out vehicles and things is just … it’s not something that we do in Canada.”

After the incident at the Mile Zero Trailer Park, seven more people would be killed in 2023.

Seven more families are still waiting for answers. Among them are the families of cousins Darylyn Supernant and Renee Supernant Didier, who were both killed that year. 

Darylyn Supernant’s father, Brad Supernant, told the fifth estate last year she had been shot in the head because she witnessed a double homicide. 

Outreach worker Jan Atkinson says she knows which killings they were. 

“Darylyn had come to me and told me … that if anybody hurt her, who it was,” said Atkinson. “It was just all in relation to the original killing of Tina and Roy.”

When Darylyn vanished in March 2023, her family began to search, including her outspoken cousin, Renee — who also vanished in December 2023. Asking questions about her cousin might have been enough to get her killed, her family said.

Their bodies were found in the spring of 2024, Darylyn in a ditch and her cousin close to the Kiskatinaw River, 30 kilometres northwest of Dawson Creek.

According to their families, near the end of their lives both women were talking to the same person — a man whose name many in Dawson Creek won’t speak aloud. Tanner Allan Murray. 

As the fifth estate investigated Dawson Creek, Murray’s name came up over and over again, connected to guns, drugs and violence.  

Darylyn was preoccupied talking to Murray on her phone the last day her stepsister saw her alive. And the day Renee vanished, she was in a hotel room with him.

Another cousin, Shyann Hambler, tried to reach Renee by video call that day. 

“Tanner Murray did answer Renee’s phone, and I’m not going to back down from saying it,” said Hambler.

Although she stands by her story, Hambler — who said she left Dawson Creek for a time because of threats to her life — would say nothing else about Murray.

“No comment,” Hambler said when asked by the fifth estate’s Mark Kelley if she believes Murray had something to do with Didier’s death.

“Are you afraid that commenting on that could get you more death threats?” Kelley asked.

“Yes,” said Hambler. “One hundred per cent.”

Murray is an infamous criminal in Dawson Creek who has cast a shadow over the town. He has not been charged in either homicide, but his past makes him the prime suspect in the minds of many people around town. 

The fifth estate was unable to reach Murray. 

CBC News alsoreached out to more than a dozen people who know Murray. Most would not speak about him, and those who did would not say much.

“I think he’s mostly just instilled a real sense of fear,” Atkinson said.

Murray’s long rap sheet goes back to 2021 and includes convictions for assaulting police officers, drug trafficking, possessing illegal firearms, robbery and more than a dozen violations of parole and bail conditions. Murray has been in and out of custody at least five times and often returns to the streets of Dawson Creek. 

He is closely linked with his half-brother, Jesse Ray Stevens, a man with a face covered in tattoos who was charged with attempted murder in 2023. That charge was dropped in 2024 after the Crown’s only witness refused to testify. 

Murray’s criminal career marched onward in 2024 and included an arrest on more than a dozen gun and drug charges. After his arrest, the RCMP warned Dawson Creek they couldn’t keep Murray behind bars. 

“Police have applied to keep Tanner in custody, however, it is expected he will be released back into the community,” said an RCMP media release.

Part 3: ‘Blood’s gonna be on your hands’ 

The new year was less than a month old when the all-too-familiar crack of a muzzle blast marked a new killing in Dawson Creek. On Jan. 20, 2025, Joel Johnny Freeman became the town’s 12th homicide victim in four years. This time, though, the RCMP laid a murder charge. 

But the arrest of 23-year-old Nolan Schmidt did little to tamp down fears in the community. He was a known whirlwind of trouble who was expected to meet a bad end — or end someone badly.

“I had written a letter to the judge being like, you know, blood’s gonna be on your hands,” said Atkinson, the local outreach worker who was once Schmidt’s case worker at a Dawson Creek homeless shelter. “My fear is that he would murder somebody.”

• Dawson Creek, B.C., declares state of local emergency amid record drought
• Dawson Creek, B.C., seeks to extend state of local emergency over record drought

Although Schmidt has been in and out of jail for years, often for weapons or drug possession charges, he is not a criminal kingpin. Some men, like Linklater, profit from the drug trade. Others, like Schmidt — addicted, angry and spiralling — are the creations of it. 

Atkinson’s fears about Schmidt were not the first time a Dawson Creek resident had reason to fear the release of a dangerous person. One of the town’s most well-known criminals, Tanner Murray, has repeatedly violated his release conditions while on bail or parole.

The failure of the police to bring the chaos to heel has eroded the townsfolk’s faith in the justice system, turning people away from the police service that is supposed to protect them.

“Until we can trust the system, people aren’t going to have trust in coming forward,” said Jan Atkinson, the longtime outreach worker. “Nothing is going to happen.”

Schmidt portrayed himself with a gangster flare on his Facebook page, where he goes by the alias Douglas Devine. And Douglas Devine, as it happens, is friends with Tanner Murray. 

On his page, he shows a tattoo over his heart in memory of his mother, Kelly Schmidt, who died in 2019.

“He found her,” said Andy Tylosky, someone who knows Schmidt. “It just wrecked him. He totally lost his sense of hope.

“He told me at the funeral, he just started drinking because that was the only way that it kind of numbed the pain. And he never really stopped.”

Tylosky believes hopelessness lies at the heart of the town’s troubles. 

“Having that lack of purpose or having lost a sense of why they are here or what their purpose in life is overwhelms people,” he said. “And that’s how we end up with a situation like Dawson Creek.”

In the winter of 2023, Schmidt — frequently using street drugs, according to court records — went on a crime spree, assaulting his aunt, threatening to kill her and trying to rob a cabbie in town. 

Initially released on bail, Schmidt violated his conditions, at one point threatening Atkinson, resulting in his rearrest. 

At the behest of the RCMP, Atkinson wrote two letters to the court imploring it not to release Schmidt.

“I am begging the courts to remand Mr. Schmidt into custody,” she wrote. 

WATCH | A plea to the judge:

‘Blood on your hands’

October 31|

Duration0:37An outreach worker in Dawson Creek, B.C., talks about her encounter with Nolan Schmidt.

Schmidt was denied bail, but when his sentencing hearing came a few months later, he was released with time served after being convicted of assault, threatening bodily harm and possession of a firearm. He served six months in jail, while the maximum sentence he could have been given was two years. 

As part of his parole, Schmidt was to reside with Tylosky, who thought he could provide the young man with the means for a fresh start. 

But the arrangement was fraught from the start. Tylosky said what money Schmidt had was consumed in his crack pipe. Thirty-five days after he was released, Tylosky accused Schmidt of stealing money. Schmidt threatened him at knifepoint. The RCMP defused the situation, but much to Tylosky’s surprise, two hours later Schmidt was once again a free man. 

Tylosky knew he could no longer help Schmidt and last saw him when he dropped him off in Dawson Creek near a homeless shelter. 

Two days later, Joel Johnny Freeman lay dead, Dawson Creek’s 12th homicide since 2021. Another man, shot in a room at the Mile Zero Hotel shortly after Freeman was killed, survived.

RCMP officers arrested Schmidt and charged him with aggravated assault and second-degree murder — the first murder charge the RCMP laid in 12 killings.

While Tylosky and Atkinson both say Schmidt told them his mother died of an overdose, an autopsy report shows that she died of bronchial asthma.

Schmidt had pleaded not guilty and remains in custody awaiting trial.