Part 4: ‘Pull the trigger’
By the fall of 2025, Arron Linklater was feeling the squeeze. He was four months away from standing trial on five counts of drug trafficking — the first time in his career as a dealer that he faced a real risk of prison time. Threats against his life were ramping up
“I’ve been threatened after you guys left. I was threatened to, like, a bizarre level,” he said in a September phone call with the fifth estate producer Timothy Sawa.
Sawa and the fifth estate co-host Mark Kelley had visited Linklater in June. By September, he was being threatened in connection with the town’s latest killing.
“Is this related to the Emily Ogden thing?” Sawa asked.
“Yeah, but that even isn’t my responsibility either,” Linklater said. “That’s not me.”
“But does someone think it’s you?”
“Absolutely. The whole community does.”
Emily Odgen was a 24-year-old who became homicide victim No. 13 in April 2025. She had been missing nearly a month before her body was found on a rural road near Dawson Creek inside a pickup truck. Linklater and Ogden knew each other, but were far from friends. In February 2024, Linklater was in his home, on his knees, while he and his daughter stared down the barrels of several shotguns.
A masked gang lured Linklater to his door by claiming they were RCMP. After they burst in, he was forced to the ground at gunpoint.
To try to protect his daughter, Linklater said he tried to distract the posse who wanted drugs and money.
“I grabbed their shotguns and pulled them towards me and said, ‘F–king pull the trigger, pussy. If you can’t kill me now, you weren’t coming here to kill me in the beginning.’” One member of the gang stood behind Linklater and laughed.
“There was a girl … she’s laughing at me. I’ll never forget that laugh” Linklater said. “It’s this stupid ass person who thinks they can laugh at you for threatening to kill your daughter over a few ounces of drugs.”
It was Ogden.
Like Nolan Schmidt and Roy Isley, Ogden’s sad tale is one of a person transformed as she descended into the maw of the town’s drug trade. Like them, she began to associate with some of the players in Dawson Creek’s underworld, including the crew that raided Linklater’s home. Not in that gang was Odgen’s sometime boyfriend, Tanner Murray.
The gang in Linklater’s house slashed his face with the barrel of a shotgun and threw him down the stairs.
“I didn’t cry, I didn’t moan, didn’t bitch about none of it,” Linklater said. “I had an idea that, OK, I signed up, bro. You’re not gonna whine about it now.”
There was no cash or drugs for the posse on that day. They stole Linklater’s truck and made their escape. They did not get far. Ogden and two other people were arrested. Linklater’s truck was returned to him.
Ogden was out on bail when she vanished in March 2025. Her body was found in Linklater’s truck a month later. Linklater said his truck had been stolen a second time and he did not know anything about Ogden’s death. He was out drinking when she was killed, he said.
Linklater was brought in for questioning by the RCMP and released. He considers himself to be the “prime” suspect.
Part 5: ‘I don’t live scared’
In April 2025, Tanner Murray was holed up in a Dawson Creek motel hiding from police.
The RCMP were looking for Murray. They had a warrant for his arrest after he violated his parole conditions following that 2024 drugs and weapons bust. Police caught up with him in May, but not in his stomping grounds of Dawson Creek.
Just across the B.C. border in Grande Prairie, Alta., Murray and two others were arrested in possession of a guitar case filled with drugs, a drug weight scale and guns, including a semi-automatic rifle, a modified hunting rifle, a shotgun and a Glock 9-mm pistol, along with hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
He was denied bail and remains in custody on weapons and drug charges, with a pre-trial scheduled for June 2026. The fifth estate has been unable to reach Murray.
Linklater told the fifth estate that the RCMP informed him that Murray and his brother, Jesse Ray Stevens, were making threats against him.
In March, Stevens posted a photo of himself masked and pointing a Beretta pistol at the camera to his Facebook page.
Then in May, a week after Murray’s arrest in Alberta, Stevens posted a childhood photo of the pair and wrote how he “told everyone not to f–k with my brother.”
Stevens posted again on Oct. 29, complaining about “rats who talk and talk.”
“It’s your ass,” Stevens wrote.
The RCMP say the posts were not benign.
“I can’t speak to his state of mind, obviously. I don’t know what his intent is other than the words he’s presented, but that appears to be a direct threat,” said RCMP spokesman Staff Sgt. Kris Clark.
The threats got worse in September, Linklater said. He sent his family away as a precaution, and now they live in a place with an ocean view and sand between their toes.
Linklater refused to flee.
“I’m not scared of living. I don’t live scared. Fear’s a choice.”
Four days after his phone call to the fifth estate producer Timothy Sawa, teams of RCMP officers surrounded Linklater’s house.
They were not there to arrest him. Linklater was removed from his home by forensic officers on a stretcher, in a black body bag.
Police initially said there was no foul play involved, but a week later, the RCMP major crimes unit arrived at the house. Linklater’s death was now considered a homicide. They have not said what changed their focus or released the cause of Linklater’s death.
In his June interview with the fifth estate, Linklater said a popular method of assassination in Dawson Creek involves spiking a person’s drugs with carfentanil, an opioid 10,000 times more potent than morphine. Even a tiny amount of the drug can be lethal and may make a homicide look like an overdose.
“It’s an assassin’s drug,” he said. “If somebody owes some f–king massive amount of money, that’s all it takes to fix the problem, a little carfentanil.”
It was the third homicide of the year and the 14th unsolved killing since 2021 in Dawson Creek.
The RCMP continue to say they believe they can solve some of these cases.
Clark, the RCMP spokesman, said police cannot make a bust based on rumour. They need hard evidence.
“We can say that: ‘We know this person did it.’ But we need to prove that in a court of law and successfully prosecute that so that the families of the victims do get that justice.”
WATCH | It does not take much to kill someone:
‘An assassin’s drug’
October 31|
Duration0:58Career drug dealer Arron Linklater explains how carfentanil is used as a tool of killing in Dawson Creek, B.C.
Postscript
The job of finding justice got even harder for the RCMP on Oct. 16. On a remote patch of road known as Deadman’s Curve, near the Kiskatinaw River, north of Dawson Creek — the same area where Renee Supernant Didier was found — a body was discovered in a burned-out car.
The victim of homicide No. 15 was identified by the RCMP on Nov. 3 as Jesse (Teek) Twain, a 29-year-old from Edmonton. Sources say he was a friend of Jesse Ray Stevens. Twain last seen in Fort St. John, B.C., about 75 kilometres north of Dawson Creek, around Oct. 10.
No arrests have been made.
