Hunting Warhead Introduces | Uncover: Calls From a Killer

June 3, 2025·34 min·2 clips

Olson states on tape that he 'deliberately' planned to 'pick these persons up, have sex with them, then kill them' year after year.

The first call starts with a phone charge. A prison operator asks whether Bynum will accept a call from Clifford Olson. She says yes, and the tapes begin. The call moves fast from routine procedure into something wrong, because Olson was not supposed to be talking to media from prison. He tells her to keep quiet. Bynum remembers being stunned, and the exchange makes clear how much the conversation depends on rules, workarounds, and secrecy. Olson explains how he got through. The call, he says, is being routed through his lawyer's office, which makes it feel both technical and off-limits. Bynum keeps her questions plain. She wants to know what drove him, whether he could have been stopped, and what secrets were still buried. The questions are blunt without being theatrical. They sound like the ones left over after authorities decide a case is finished. Olson had chosen her, and the episode stays with that choice. A first contact becomes the start of years of recorded jailhouse conversations. Peter Worthington comes into the story too. With him, Bynum spent hundreds of hours on the phone with Olson while the calls stayed hidden from prison guards. The tape has pressure built into it. Olson asks whether she is doing a story, then sets the boundary that keeps the call alive. Bynum keeps coming back to motive. Her questions about hatred, forgiveness, inner thoughts, and living with oneself press against Olson's version of himself without treating explanation as forgiveness.

As heard by us

A sober look at Clifford Olson's calls and the unanswered questions they still leave behind.

Arlene Bynum looks back on the jailhouse calls Clifford Olson made to her more than three decades ago, and the story has a grim habit of refusing to stay buried.

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Why you'd press play

You hear Clifford Olson's jailhouse calls before the case opens back up around them.

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