The Mysterious Uncle Abe

September 5, 2022·48 min·4 clips

John Nuttall stumbles into a mosque drunk, asking about 9/11, years before he and Amanda convert to Islam.

A podcast promo gives way to John Nuttall's memory. He is in Victoria in the mid-2000s, in a studded leather jacket and army boots, and he has been drinking before he walks into a mosque. Amanda Caroti waits outside in a miniskirt. This is before they convert to Islam, when the relationship is still new and John's grasp of the religion is shaky. Then the story turns. A man comes up to John with a photo of a teenage girl. He says his niece is missing and asks if John has seen her around. John says no. The man pushes him to look again, so John studies the photo a second time and still does not recognize her. Her name is Sophia. The man says she is rebelling and does not want to wear the niqab, then asks John to show him where teenagers might hang out. John gets into the truck. Inside the shiny black Ford F-150, he spots a Quran the man tries to hide. John greets him as a brother, and the mood changes. Once the man knows John is Muslim, he starts sharing details about Sophia and the family fight around her defiance. They drive through the neighborhood, checking a high school, a park, a strip mall, and train tracks where John has seen teenagers smoking weed. Sophia never appears. What does appear, fast, is John's eagerness to talk. Within the first 20 minutes, he tells Abe he is mujahid and starts laying out political grievances. He talks about Palestinians, Israeli occupation, and fighting behind enemy lines in Canada, then names what he says he needs: money, guns, a plasma cutter, a welder, and metal.

As heard by us

A patient, locally grounded story about how a simple help request opens into something far more unsettling.

The episode follows John Nuttall back to a mid-2000s moment in Victoria, where a first visit to a mosque, a missing teenage niece, and a black Ford F-150 turn an uneasy meeting into something more revealing.

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Why you'd press play

If you want one encounter to keep widening into something darker, start here.

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