Swiping right on Canada’s worst murderers, cop killers, gangsters, & sex offenders

Some are shocked at Kingston woman’s website for inmates, others say it’s rehabilitative for incarcerated individuals to connect with pen pals 

There is something incongruous about reading website posts from men describing hobbies, likes, dislikes, what they are after in a female partner, when those men have committed some of the most heinous crime imaginable.

I first wrote about Canadian Inmates Connect in 2016 when the website was brought to my attention because of the worst pedophile I’ve written about in 20 years. I looked at the site and also quickly found a neo-Nazi murderer, a gang assassin, and a man involved in the infamous Surrey Six slaughter, all looking for female pen pals. 

A decade later on the site there is a posting from Richard Ambrose (who now goes by Bergeron), one of the last men to be sentenced to hang in Canada back in 1975. Ambrose’s death sentence was commuted when capital punishment was abolished by the federal government in 1976.

“The majority of these people are coming out some day,” the founder of Canadian Inmates Connect Melissa Fazzina told me in a telephone interview from Kingston in 2016. 

Life in prison can be boring and lonely so it’s not surprising that inmates would like to receive mail from the outside.

Here are some of the nostly murderers with listings who were on the website in 2016:

• Tyler Sturrup is a neo-Nazi murderer handed a life sentence in 2013 who enjoys camping, hiking, swimming, and dogs.

• Matt Johnston was looking for a special girl to share his love and strength while he was surving time for murdering two innocent men and four rival gangsters in the notorious Surrey Six slaughter in 2014.

• Infamous murderer Luka Magnotta had a listing on the site back in 2016 looking for his “prince charming” until it was taken down, apparently because he found what he was looking for.

• Momin Khowaja was the first person found guilty under the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act who was looking for “women/girls who are health conscious and fitness oriented.” 

Worst of the worst

What sent me to the website for the first time by an upset reader was about a man I can only identify as K.D.C. He can’t be named because that could identify his victim, his toddler stepdaughter that he was violently sexual assaulting before being caught in the act by RCMP officers. 

He was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2013 for those crimes.

I asked Fazzina how she felt about this violent pedophile’s inclusion on her website knowing what he did. She said she didn’t know his crime until I told her.

“As a mother, [K.D.C.’s] charges do not sit well with me whatsoever,” she said when forwarded my story about him, but added that she allows any inmate to join regardless of their convictions.

“I’ve seen the results, the transformations and the success that this website has created for these inmates.”

I asked Fazzina to reach out to K.D.C. to ask him if he had anything to say about his desire to connect with women after what he did to his last partner’s daughter. In a hand-written letter, the then 33-year-old complained in 2016 that my news coverage made him “look like a monster,” which forced him to constantly look over his shoulder at Mountain Institution in Agassiz. 

“There are many individuals in prison that would love to beat the shit out of me, or even kill me if they could, and you know what, I deserve it, but it causes so much stress knowing that,” he wrote.

Called a 'repugnant website'

Many people are outraged at this site’s existence but it does represent free expression. Also, from a practical criminology perspective, even the worst of the worst could get out one day so it is at least arguable that society benefits from allowing these men to make connections, explore their personalities, and maybe, just maybe, become something more than murderers. 

Chilliwack-Hope MP Mark Strahl predictably took a cliché tough-on-crime approach when I asked him to comment calling the site “repugnant.”

“Why should a maximum security inmate have access to this sort of website?” he said. “This has the potential to hurt the victims of crime again when they and their families see the criminal who harmed them using that crime as a way to attract people online. The rights of the victims of crime should always come before the rights of criminals.”

Fazzina is adamant that one misconception about her site needed to be cleared up: inmates serving federal or provincial sentences in Canada do not have access to the Internet. She is the intermediary via snail mail.

Locked in a cell 22 hours a day

I wrote about Canadian Inmates Connect again in 2019 when Chilliwack double-murderer Aaron Douglas posted on the site. 

On Aug. 7, 2014, Douglas killed Tyler Belcourt in cold blood and tried to kill Penni White in a downtown Chilliwack apartment. He was convicted on June 26, 2017 by a jury that did not come to a verdict on his guilt in the killing of Richard Blackmon in the same incident.

“I enjoy listening to music, working out and playing cards,” according to his profile on Canadian Inmates Connect. “Considering I’m locked in my cell 22 hours a day I also watch a lot of T.V. as well.”

Douglas’s profile includes the mailing address at Kent, his date of birth and what he was convicted of. He listed his expected release date as 2027 and that he is interested in corresponding with women.

“I would love to be able to talk to someone about how their day went and hear about what’s going on in the outside world. Maybe I can bring some happiness into your life and vice versa.”

Since then the website hasn’t missed a beat. 

“One thing I have learned in five years is there’s no such thing as bad publicity when it comes to the limitless topics surrounding this website,” Fazzina told me in 2019.

Who’s on the site in 2025?

There is Dale Sipes, one of five members of the Greeks gang in Vernon who tortured and murdered three men who crossed them in 2004 and 2005. They were convicted after what was then the longest trial in B.C. history at 19 months ending in 2012. The case was held in the high-security courtroom built specially for the Air India bombing case.

The sadistic gang killer Sipes says on the website that he now goes by Moses, the name received at his baptism, and his Orthodox Christian priest encouraged him to reach out. 

Yes he tortured a man with a hammer and a blow torch before killing him in cold blood, but if you are an Orthodox woman, buckle up, “Moses” is looking for love.

“I should be clear that my faith is central to my life and while you, whoever you may be, you do not need to be an Orthodox Christian to be my friend.”

Then there is Robert Sand who killed an RCMP officer in December 2001 during a confrontation after a 10-day crime spree across the three Prairie provinces.

By the time he came across RCMP officers he fired at them with a sawed-off shotgun, then they chased the officers Const. Dennis Strongquill and Const. Brian Auger he and his brother Danny and 21-year-old Laurie Bell had a dozen weapons and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition. 

The two officers pulled them over and Robert Sand fired at them with a sawed-off shotgun. The three then pursued the officers and rammed their SUV outside the detachment in Russell, Manitoba.

Strongquill was trapped in the vehicle. Auger was thrown from the SUV and fired back hitting Danny Sand twice as Bell yelled “Kill him! Kill him!”

Sand executed Strongquill with four shotgun blasts into the vehicle.

He also assaulted a junior member of his own defence team during the trial. 

Presumably without irony and a lack of self-awareness about his past, according to his post on the website, Robert Sand is “excited to discover who is out there” and learn about them.

“I believe myself to be insightful, interesting, assertive, creative, open-minded, accountable, handy, considerate, principled, compassionate and passionate.“

But maybe the worst offender on the site in 2025 is 76-year-old Richard Bergeron (formerly Ambrose) who has been in jail for 50 years, and is one of only a handful of Canadian inmates to have narrowly survived the death penalty, something he brags about in his posting on the website.

Ambrose and James Hutchison kidnapped 14-year-old Raymond Stein, son of Moncton restaurateur Cy Stein on Dec. 13, 1974 demanding a $15,000 ransom, which Stein did pay. 

While investigating the case two days later, Const. Michael O'Leary and Cpl. Aurele Bourgeois reported they were following a suspicious Cadillac. The two were never heard from again, their bodies found in shallow graves.

On April Fool’s Day, 1975, Ambrose and Hutchison were sentenced to hang. Lucky for them, Canadians were engaged in a fraught public dicourse about abolishing capital punishment and the two managed to escape the noose.

“Even though the perpetrators elicited little public sympathy, their case was used as both an opportunity to champion hope and forgiveness in the cause of abolition and an example for retentionist calls for retribution and punishment.”

That from a 2020 article in the University of Toronto’s Canadian Historical Review entitled Cop-Killers, Emotion, and Capital Punishment in Moncton, New Brunswick: The Ambrose and Hutchison Case.

Bill C-84 was passed by Parliament in 1976 abolishing the death penalty for civilian crimes replacing the sentence for first-degree murder with a mandatory life sentence without chance of parole for 25 years.

In 1998, the death penalty was removed from military law ending capital punishment in Canada completely.

Hutchison died in prison in 2011, weirdly claiming to the end that he was the reincarnation of James Cagney.

Ambrose changed his name to Bergeron and has been a difficult inmate who refuses to address his crimes. He claims now to have a brain injury that conveniently lets him not address what he’s done.

“Many women may be curious about my original crime in 1974 but because of my brain injury [damage] I don’t and can’t remember my crime,” he said in a 2019 version of his posting on Canadian Inmates Connect that he has changed several times over the years.

“I am a very unique Métis Canadian Death Row survivor who has Frontal Lobe Axonal Diffusion,” his post says in 2025. “You may have to ‘Google’ that to know what it is. Write to know me.”

He lists his expected release date as “unkown,” which is a safe bet since he has repeatedly had parole applications denied. Since conviction, he has escaped from prison and been returned. He was actually out on parole but in 2005 that was revoked when he was accused of assaulting his wife and trying to choke another family member.

He was denied day and full parole by the Parole Board of Canada several times since then, including in 2018.

"You have demonstrated a capacity for violence at the highest end of the scale and you are assessed as a moderate-high risk to reoffend. You have a failed conditional release and have continued to demonstrate problematic behaviours since your return to custody."

The son of one of his victims, former NHL player Charlie Bourgeois, told the Monton Times & Transcript in 2017 that he wouldn’t ever support Bergeron’s release. Bourgeois has lived in the U.S. for many years “where a life sentence is actually a life sentence.”

“I don’t support him receiving parole any time,” he said.

“My mom [Genevieve] lost her husband and four children lost their father,” he said. “She never remarried and raised four children without a dad. She displayed great courage.”

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Paul J. Henderson
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