The Weirdest Serial Killers Iceberg Explained

In the early 1980s, Canadian serial killer Clifford Olsen—known as the Beast of British Columbia—made a deal with police that still provokes outrage decades later. He would show them where he had hidden the bodies of the eleven children he murdered, in exchange for $10,000 Canadian per body, deposited into a pension fund for his wife and infant son. The police agreed. The public only learned of the arrangement at trial, and by then it was too late to undo. Olsen died in prison of natural causes in 2011, but not before trying to convince a parole board that the United States had granted him clemency for warning them about 9/11—a claim that was entirely false.

The Beast of British Columbia and the Boozing Barber

Olsen's case is one of several in this tier of the serial killer iceberg that the host describes as "the weird ones." The details are so strange that the episode covers only this single tier, rather than the usual two or three. Olsen's parole hearing in 2006 was not his only post-conviction controversy. After turning 65, he began receiving Canadian old-age pension payments, building up roughly $30,000 in an account he could access if released. Authorities eventually shut it down, but the fact that a child murderer had twice received government money—first for revealing his victims' locations, then through a retirement fund—left a lasting stain on the system.