Whose Story Is This Anyway? A Review of Dirtbag Climber, from CBC Uncover
On LinkedIn I stumbled across a post from producer Chris Kelly about how he had stumbled across the story of Dirtbag Climber at the playground...there are a lot of layers to this many layered story
Months ago I wrote that it was real, real quiet out there. And it was, I was not hallucinating. I even created a whole database to prove the point.
Somewhere near the end of the summer, that steady trickle of narrative shows began to pick up. And I’ve been very busy listening! Sure, I could combine them into one post, but they both demand their own space.
So here’s what I’m going to do….this week I’ll drop two posts, right before I head to Resonate Podcast Festival…hey, are you going? Want to connect there?
Dirtbag Climber
This CBC Uncover series Dirtbag Climber is one of the most compelling and complicated true crime yarns I’ve unravelled in a while.
Dirtbag Climber begins with the local reporter, and now host of the series, Stephen Chua. He was living and working as a reporter at a small town newspaper in Squamish, BC, when a strange and unsolved crime took place. He understates the fact that this was by far the most compelling and biggest mystery he had ever encountered.
In 2017, a man who is introduced as Jesse James, was found dead in his burned out van. The crime was unsolved for years until his DNA was finally tested in 2020. But that would prove to be the beginning, rather than the end, of this story.
In a way, this series is about the period of time between his death and when his true identity was finally revealed. But the path between these two events was as twisty-turny as the old road was between Squamish and Whistler was before the 2010 Olympics help build the Sea-to-Sky Highway. James is the dirtbag climber in question, where the namesake for this series comes from. But suffice it to say that’s not the whole story.
This show manages to follow both the classic model of true crime (host introduces a mystery and follows the clues to solve it). But before you get too comfortable in that story mold, it breaks the convention and becomes a quest that involves a whole team of reporters slash producers.
There’s something about having a personal connection to the actual place that a murder mystery took place. I’ve been to Squamish many times….plus here’s where I must admit here to my guilty pleasure of the TV show Virgin River, which is actually filmed in Squamish, not somewhere in Northern California. With the hometown curious angle covered here, I started to do some digging…
Chua establishes that he was living in Squamish at the time
He worked as a local reporter, back in 2017 when a badly burned remains were found in the back of GMC Yukon in 2017. So I figured out the name of the local paper (Squamish Reporter) and I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled back through their archives to find the original article that reported his death. The article does not have a byline, so it’s hard to know if Chua actually wrote or reported this. Once his identity was finally discovered, Chua wrote an article in November of 2020 in The Squamish Chief.
This is a small town. It does have two Starbucks, but there aren’t a lot of murders here. I’ll bet most of the town felt like they were living through it a strange episode of Clue as the facts began to fall into place.
It took days to discover the body, a week for the police to determine that this was a homicide, years to determine his true identity…and then maybe more years and a team of reporters with sharp investigative skills to find the true and conclusive backstory.
As I listened, I kept wondering if it weren’t for this podcast, would the murder ever have been solved?
In my digging, I found a Rolling Stone article which outlines the anything-but-typical life story of the man found shot dead, then burned out van (where all of his personal belongings also vanished as well…no computer, cellphone). The narrative spine of this piece covers much of the same ground of this series.
Jesse James, was previously known as Ethan Wolfgang Hawk. Back in 1999, the writer of this Rolling Stone article had spent a week with him when he was making a name for himself as a 20-year-old Neo Natzi student at Wofford College, in South Carolina, again for an article that featured him in Rolling Stone.
This Nazi history should not be confused with when Hawk emerged as the central character in the 2004 book Spam Kings, where the author Brian McWilliams dubbed him as the Spam Nazi. After the spam came a massive AOL lawsuit, the gold, and then the bitcoin….you will also find all of this in the podcast.
And then…perhaps improbably, he slipped into Canada. He adopted a new name, a completely new identity, became a prolific rock climber and posted social media missives about how the sport of climbing needs to diversify, and lived out of a van on a back road somewhere around Squamish….which is another way of saying that he found a way to fit right into Squamish.
So no, this series and its terrific reporting did not solve the crime itself; although it certainly might make you feel like this is the case. Impressively, they did manage to find all the voices and put this story into audio. Most notably, they found the father of this man, whose voice became the most compelling aspect of this series for me.
This series perplexed me because Chua had a real-life connection to James/Hawke. He admits that he didn’t know him personally, but, it’s a small town, where rock climbing is the common thread.
But when it came time to unravel the pieces, to stitch together a complicated identity, that involved a fair bit of door-knocking and cold-calling, Chua was not the voice you heard behind the microphone.
When the story took these turns, it was producers Kathleen Goldhar and Chris Kelly, both listed as producers on the impressively long list of credits for the show, who were now also behind the mic. By episode two, they were equal characters in the show, doing the interviews, discovering the pieces.
Chua, meanwhile, is the seamless narrator. He speaks in the present tense and narrates the journey of this most incredible tale of crime. Perhaps this was his choice, but after the establishing shot. Chua is just the Host; the narrator who was there to offer a tangible connection to a horrific murder of man with a curious and shady past.
The way this production came together left me with questions
Did the producers find this story, and then seek out Chua to narrate the piece, in order to give it that lived-through-it vibe? He had penned that original article in the local paper that made bare the connection between the corpse and the man.
Or did Chua take his pitch on the road, and in the process, his story proved to be just-that-good that the extremely experienced producers took it over, and gave him a short pat on the back as thanks, sending him home with a script to practice and a schedule for tracking sessions?
Or…was it the choice of Chua? He lived through this moment years before, and had already been wrapped up in this crazy, wild story, and really only wanted to be part of it, to just that extent, and not lose three years of his life to it? Maybe his life had moved on. Fair enough.
There are many ways to make a great story…and much of this is determined in the moment, when the pieces need to fall together. Perhaps we ask a lot of podcasts to be thoroughly transparent; but it doesn’t hurt to ask these questions when we look closely.
See you at Resonate?