S10 E1: Jackie

into Richmond, Saskatchewan, with a fleet of RVs and set up her kingdom in an abandoned school.

“So the town banded together to get the cult out by any means necessary.”

My name is Rachel Brown, and in this season of uncover, I explore what happens when a conspiracy theory lands in your backyard. The cult queen of Canada, available now on CBC Listen, and everywhere you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. The following episode contains difficult subject matter, including references to suicide. Please take care while listening.

It's okay. This is my stuff here. It's in my door, it's for a year.

Okay, thank you. Hello, Dougie. Hello, Dougie.

So I take my shoes off? Oh, okay. I usually take all the shoes off. I don't know, but I get a lot of money, because I have a lot of money. And I'll be right back. Okay, thank you, Dougie. Thank you very much for meeting me here today, and I just wanted to meet you

and talk about Jack on, so whenever you're ready.

“Okay, I'm going to talk to you about Jack on, okay?”

Okay, I'm going to talk about it. No, Spanish. Oh, okay. Costa Rica, tiny, lush, rich in species, but as I found, people can disappear from anywhere. And there are many here who say they heard something or saw something or know something about a Canadian woman who did just that.

Gone with little trace. I'm David Rigion and this is the 10th season of someone knows something. The Jacqueline Furland Smith case. Episode one, Jackie. Okay, let's see.

I'm the youngest of three girls, and so Jackie is the male sister. Sorry, I'm already. You feel fine, and then you start talking and I'll send it just all. Come out, sorry. All right, let's start again.

Sure. Yeah, we grew up in a farm and habits for it out in Malaman. I've reached Candace at her home in the northwestern USA. She and her older sister, Jacqueline, or Jackie, as her family and friends call her, grew up in BC's Verdant Lower Mainland.

Jackie disappeared on August 17, 2021 at the age of 40, and she's never been found.

Growing up, we would play outside, I remember playing tag and water balloons and jumping on the trampoline. You know, we did all those outside fun things. We'll play sports, softball, Jackie ran track, played basketball, competitive sports. Jackie, she's really fast, good runner, and she was really dedicated to that.

So she took it seriously and watched what she ate and was always really healthy and just motivated to that. Jackie was able to try practicing her healthy lifestyle in this tropical place. She chose to move in 2019, several hours away by plain Costa Rica.

“What was the first communication you got or what was the first indication that you got that there might be something up down there?”

Well, my mom called me and she said that Jackie's missing. And he said, "Well, what do you mean? What does that mean?" And so my parents went down to Coco, and then I went down probably, I think it had been three weeks since she had gone missing with when I was there.

And it was just this feeling of, "What do we do?"

totally different system. Like, how do we find somebody here? What do we do? And how do we help?

“But you just kind of feel like needle in a haystack.”

What do you even start? Well, I've helped on thinking that was possible that maybe she was wandering in the jungle somewhere and ended up perishing there. But she would do that.

She would never go on jungle.

This is the first call of many I would do with Colleen and Gordon Smith, both on the line here from Abbotsford, BC. A farming couple in their mid-60s who raised cattle on a many acreed property. I first came across Jackie's case while preparing for a family trip to Costa Rica to look at moths, fish, beetles and birds, and try to focus on something that is not as KS. Jackie went missing suddenly, a Canadian in paradise, and had an agonized family separated by borders and language.

So after digging into some of what was online about Jackie's disappearance,

“a mixture of what looked like hope and conspiracy peppered with a bit of factuality,”

I called and Jackie's parents were interested in me taking a closer look. I asked them about the moment when they first heard that something was up. Yeah, I'm just wondering myself on the long get in the phone call and Sebastian, he just said, "Oh, Jackie, Jackie, you know, went out the night before it didn't come back." Sebastian Firland is Jackie's husband, age 48 from Quebec.

"You know, right away, we wondered we thought, well, she'd never go out in the dark,

and I'd not take her own car." Colleen in Gordon say it took them several days to get down to play Adel Coco. "We have a farmer, so it took us a number of days, like five days, to get things organized, that love a cattle friend look after it, and flights were at that time in August. There's not a lot of flights going there."

“A few days after arriving, they went to see detectives in Santa Cruz,”

detectives from the OIG or O-E-Hota, the Costa Reconversion of the FBI. "Yeah, I mean, we caught a fair bit of information." Information that I'll hopefully be able to look at. Once in Costa Rica, Colleen in Gordon stayed with Sebastian at the home he and Jackie built together, while some of the local volunteer and police searches for her were undertaken.

Sebastian Furland and Jackie were married for a year before moving to Costa Rica in 2019 together. Before, they spent time in different Canadian cities, including Calgary. Sebastian had been a career vehicle technician in the Canadian Armed Forces from 2002 to 2019, and Jackie had trained at Simon Fraser University in Kinesiology. Jackie and Sebastian's relationship started in Canada,

but it's their time in Costa Rica I want to know more about. A glance online shows many accusations and much in-you-endos swirling around the case and particularly Sebastian.

It's obvious that you look at family first,

and Sebastian was with Jackie the night she disappeared from what I understand. I do wonder if he'll speak to me. Beautiful star-filled night. Think the moon is quarter moon there, waning in the northwest of the country.

Close to the border with Nicaragua. I'm just about to go meet with one of the people that knew Jackie, not a best friend of Jackie's, but somebody who knew Jackie and who communicated with Jackie's husband, Sebastian, in the wake of Jackie's disappearance and her name is Krista.

Front, back. I'm assuming it's you. Krista was a longtime administrator on the search for Jacqueline Facebook page, and she agreed to meet me here in Playa del Coco. She's taller and capable looking behind the wheel of her SUV.

She's just come from a night out with friends and is wearing a black dress. Well, I'm Krista Marshall, and I've been living here in Costa Rica since 2018. We first came here for the quiet, like we were both in the military and upon our release,

we were looking for some peace, and we had visited Costa Rica a couple times before,

I actually met Jacqueline on a couple of boat trips. I didn't remember her from the first one, but she remembered me, and then we ended up talking on the second one, and yeah, I thought she was very nice, very quiet girl, but super nice. She added me on Facebook,

and then there was a new vegetarian vendor at the local market, so I had sent her a picture of their menu, and I tried one of their items, and I let her know it was really good,

but we never ended up hanging out one on one.

“So this is going up the hill to where there are places, right?”

This is, yeah, okay. It is very dark here at night. Right. It is very dark. A two track asphalt road trailing off into nothing,

with fields and trees on both sides, not a lot of other cars at this time around 8pm. I describe it as a foothill or terrace above the main town of Cocoa below. There's no street lights on this particular road, which I think is leading to their house,

or to what the house that Sebastian and Jackie build. Yes. See, there's a little guard house here,

and I don't know if there's anybody in it right now.

Maybe, but I'm going to just park right here. There's people parked here all the time, so it should be very quiet. Okay. Christopheels over onto the side of the road far enough to be out of the way, next to a small concrete building she calls a guard house.

Nobody appears to be in it right now, and there's no gate or turnpike, but I've heard that guards who were working at this very place might have seen something on the day Jackie disappeared, and I need to find them and speak to them.

In Spanish. It's pitch black, but for a sodium light nearby, that bathes us in a lurid tone, within sex, providing what I find to be a life-affirming chorus in the background.

So the area that Jackie lived, can you just describe the area? What's it like?

“Is it a new development and how far from town is it?”

So it's a little remote, like it's on the mountain, in between place Delcoco and play Hermosa. And there's a couple different ways to get there. There's the main route,

and then there's a back road that goes up Kaseke Hill to the Kaseke development. There's some beautiful houses. It's pretty open. You don't see a lot of fences.

There's quite a bit of building going on right now, but in 2021, a lot of these houses that are built now weren't up here. Jackie and Sebastian lived in a condo for a while in Cocoa, but then, according to Gordon,

they tired of the condo life, and it was too busy with all the renters coming and going, and they wanted more space. So in 2020, they began construction of this new place, a house in the Kaseke development.

Okay. Okay, so if we can just go buy the house and see if Sebastian's there, that would be great. And if hopefully he isn't, I'll go see him tomorrow. Maybe he'll, you don't want to help.

Try to find out where Jackie is. That's amazing. The number one reason I want to talk to him. Right. I asked Krista how she found out that Jackie had disappeared.

So I saw a post on our local Chitchat group from Sebastian saying that she was missing. What day was that? I believe it was Tuesday or Wednesday, and he said that she had been missing for over 24 hours.

I believe at that time. So I asked what we could do to help, and Sebastian, he ended up meeting up with me and telling my husband and myself the circumstances around how she went missing.

For the first year after this happened,

“I was kind of a mess because how can a woman just go missing?”

And us put out all that effort to find her, and she's still missing. And it just doesn't compute to my brain.

You know, I spent time with him during the search,

“and I walked away with not the best taste in my mouth”

because he talked a lot about her mental health. Kristen makes reference to messages that she says Sebastian showed her that we're from Jackie on the day she disappeared. Kristen doesn't have any copies, but I'd like to see them for myself.

Soon, I hope. Oh, and this is the host right here. It's sure it does. Okay. So what's the entrance that drive me right now?

Yes.

Before I undertake any interview,

I like to make sure I'm making the best possible approach for success, make the luck come to me. And knocking on a door late evening with a microphone, probably not the best good faith gesture.

“So the door is accessible through the front there somehow?”

Yeah, the door is right there. Okay, all right. I'll be knocking on a door tomorrow. Good luck. You want to send me to Michael Thompson, who buck the whole A.B.,

dropped out and testified against them. And you think I'm going to go there and convince him to re-can? He has created this illusion of who he is. I was just stunned that I would have a conversation like this

with an ex gang leader. The world would be a much better place with this man out. Blood memory, a new podcast series from love and radio. Search for blood memory, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to this very special edition of Pippito Life.

Actually, a special edition is nothing but a call for help. A video posted to YouTube on September 5th, 2021, by a radio personality named Eve Malette. His show called Pippito Life says it's purposes to serve the ex-pack community and to provide a live window on all the beauties and treasures

Costa Rica has to offer. But this episode is about Jackie. Today, we invite Sebastian Fella to share with us his story and his emotions concerning the disappearance of his wife. Sebastian Fella, thank you for recording this interview.

Your wife, Jatin Smith Fella, has now disappeared since August 17th.

“Yes. Put us into context and to what you remember and what happened.”

Okay. To make a long story short, I guess she had issues with too much stress and things like that. She had a lot of stuff happening.

She had a lot of stuff happening. She also insane.

But that British presser out and she started slowly to, basically,

I closed it literally. I wanted to die and that kind of stuff. I tried to reason her and she just lost it on me while I was in shower and by the time I basically came back to myself and what they all happened there.

And drive myself and get out of shower. She was just gone. As an investigative artifact, this video is the same as any news item documenting the aftermath of a disappearance or murder.

Some make a living dissecting videos like this for any inflective tell or error. Are the people making sense of a terrifying story that they experienced or is something else going on? Well, what we didn't know that I had a doctor on

material and they were there. In 2019, Jackie was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder by a Canadian doctor according to records. Schizoaffective disorder is diagnosed in people who show a mix of schizoaffective schizophrenia symptoms like hallucinations or delusions

along with mood disorder characteristics like mania or depression. According to the Mayo Clinic, a person with schizoaffective disorder may talk about

People diagnosed with schizoaffective can be treated with medication

“and get other supports that make life manageable.”

A report dated February 14th, 2019 by Dr. Antonio Basinski of Osaga Beach, Ontario, that Jackie's schizoaffective disorder is manifesting in hallucinations, paranoia and delusions. And goes on to say, in particular,

Jacqueline's stress levels are elevated in situations of requiring her to interact with strangers, social interactions, and any change to a routine environment. She does not adapt to changes to a routines and avoids interpersonal interactions when possible.

Medications for anxiety and depression and for schizophrenia disorders are mentioned in the documentation,

but I don't know what Jackie may

or may not have been taking at the time of her disappearance. Medications mentioned in the documentation include acetaloprim for anxiety and depression

“and era pip-resolve for schizophrenia and bipolar disorders.”

Jackie, she was a really eye-functioning person. You wouldn't know that to anybody around her. As somebody frems her, she was a nicest person. Besides for her, we interviewed neighbors and they all like Jackie. She said hi and hi to the kids.

She was a vegetarian going to Vegas and exercise every day. She did stuff. She had to write down what she's going to do. That day, paddleboarding, core work, bike riding. Maybe four things she'd do every day. And then she would cook up a special day

and vegetarian food there. And she really was healthy and looked after herself. Well, if you knew all the stuff that she accomplished, you can't be left ill if you're doing that. Right?

Get all of her safety. Yeah, psychiatrists. Get all of her safety skills with her or whatever. You know, so she wouldn't be going out in the dark without a bone. Right, you know, in a dark place there.

But a healthy active lifestyle doesn't mean that someone isn't struggling beneath the surface. Jackie's text messages could show a sunny demeanor. Jackie with texture parents sent them photos of trees in her backyard showing their growth was pride. Happy birthday messages, nature shots, lizards, butterflies, electric sunset photos. June 10th, 2021, 820 AM.

I appreciate the good things you have done for me. I'm also sorry for my reactions that hurt you. Love you, too. June 20th, 2021, 1020 AM. Happy Father's Day, have a nice day.

Hard to moaty. August 1st, 2021, 139 PM. Hi, happy birthday to dad. We were busy landscaping this morning just cooling off in the pool now. If you have time to skype, let me know.

August 6th, 2021, 429 PM. We are in Drake Bay, almost at the Panama border on the Pacific coast. Green parrots, Scarlet McCaws and two cans were in the trees beside our patio this morning. August 15th, 2021, 1037 AM. The bananas, law, they were shorter than me.

Gordon replies, "Wow, that's unreal. We'll be great to have the fruit from everything." Jackie, yes, thumbs up emoji. Sebastian makes claims that Jacqueline suffered from mental illness of some sort and paranoia and he mentions that.

They would only get out to be way worse. He worse, it was. So, to those people who may say or think that you have something to do with her disappearance, what do you respond? I would just have to say to those people.

Obviously, they don't know me, okay, but I have nothing to prove to them. They can just come here instead of complaining and let's see the efforts for doing. So, just come here and see.

Sebastian has always denied having anything to do with Jackie's disappearance.

So, Jacqueline's peak single. So, if by any chance Jacqueline would see this video about saying, "What would you like to tell her now?" I would like to tell her that I just wanted her to be at he, okay. And if being at he for her, like he is not with me, okay, it's fine.

“I think that's the definition of law right there.”

The rough notions so far is that Jackie left her house on her own at night and didn't return. If Jackie just left when Sebastian was showering, like he says, it apparently wouldn't have been the first time that she walked out. According to information I have found, Jackie had left the house before, and stayed at Tamarindo Sheraton, and once that coes in Haco, a beach town in Costa Rica.

Well, he said she's done this before, but she never did it for two nights.

She did it a few times for one night, I guess they had an argument. She would go with the hotel, and then the phone and the station was okay. Sebastian served in Afghanistan in 2009, 2010, and sometime upon return began a process of claim related to PTSD, ultimately retiring in as mid 40s in 2019 on long-term disability.

He received the general campaign star, Southwest Asia Declaration, and the Canadian Forces Declaration for serving 12 years with good conduct during a service. Some feel Sebastian may know more about what happened to Jackie. Others who know him well say "heart of gold". Where is the truth, and how can you find it?

She might have went to a hotel for a night, but she always called that and told Sebastian, she's okay and she'll be back in the morning. At this time she didn't take her car, and where they live up there, it's really dark and away from town, you just don't go out. Right, I'm walking on the road, so we started not to believe the story.

“Had Sebastian ever called you before when Jacqueline had left the house like that?”

No, we just heard about it later or something. So if this happened the year earlier, you say, and he says in the YouTube video, Sebastian that it happened before going to a hotel, I'm safe, you know, she would call.

He never called you and said, "Oh, Jacqueline's left, I don't know where she is."

Or this happened, she left and she called, "She's okay." He never called to reassure you or to tell you that she had disappeared before this. No, no, no. Okay, I mean, do you ask what made this occasion different? And your head, like, why would he call this time, do you think?

Now, I don't really thought about that angle of a time, like, called that not time. Yeah, I guess because she hadn't come back. Jackie disappeared sometime in the latter part of August 17th, 2021. Sebastian called Jackie's parents late day on the 18th, and a missing report was filed with police on August 19th.

Jackie had said, left behind her cell phone, her credit cards, and her wedding ring at her house on the evening of August 17th, 2021. I'll need to get into those details and confirm that. I kind of had two thoughts go through my mind. Jackie's sister, Candace, upon hearing that Jackie was missing.

One was that she'll be back. She'll be back. She's probably just mad and she'll be back. Or maybe she killed herself. Those were the two things that only two options in my brain that I thought at the time.

I was thinking that we would find her, and then physical evidence would go from there. That, yes, the suicide was still an option, but that there were other options. And so I think I was just focusing on the finding part.

She never really wanted to be on medication.

She also wasn't happy because the medication made her gain weight, and so she was heavier than she had been, probably ever.

“So, you know, it's just like anybody, you know, you have the side effects of medication you have to deal with,”

and then you have to decide whether the side effects are worth the medication. And so she was on medication for a while there. Things seemed like they were going well. But she decided that she didn't like the side effects of the medication, and so she did go off after a while.

I asked Candace for her thoughts on Sebastian. He was the right word. Somebody who came across when you first met him, you were like, okay, very opinionated and confidence, self-assured, arrogant, but I didn't think anything,

or horribly negative about it at the time. It just was like, wow, he's really opinionated. I would get messages or phone calls about fights that she had with Sebastian or problems that maybe she or a fight that she had with Mom and Dad. I don't remember hearing any physical part.

She would talk about the things that they would say to each other, and it was sounded really low, low, horrible fights. It sounded like they both were having issues.

“Things like, you know, you should kill yourself.”

You know, I hope you die, just horrible things that you would never once, somebody in a relationship to be in a relationship like that.

she was experiencing with Sebastian. This one from October 14th, 2019.

“Yes, we always fight now because we don't agree on a lot of things,”

but they never get resolved because he just loses it,

often leaves, but he has never left all night or for good or ignored me. And a final one from April 28th, 2021. Sebastian has told me at least a hundred times that he will kill himself and that the only good thing is that it will be my fault. There is no way to know if Sebastian actually said these things,

and I hope to ask him about it when I see him, along with the timings of everything that happened. Colleen in Gordon say that soon after there arrived to look for Jackie, things got weird. They had been staying with Sebastian and had even helped him clean up the place. When police, Colleen in Gordon say, took them aside and told them to leave the house. That's when they told us it took us in separately, obviously, from Sebastian.

Said get out of the house now. When but really, get out of the house now. We're not scared of him. Even so, Colleen in Gordon say they took the advice of the police and left the house that day. Gordon then says the OIG told him something else.

That interview, Sebastian then interviewed us and the boss, they're looking forward and said to us that Sebastian was involved in her disappearance.

“And I think that Tom Osmond, Sebastian was involved.”

I'll try to talk to police and get their opinions first hand, maybe get my hands on their investigative file.

Sebastian was never charged or arrested and it's over two years later, so time to go find him and see if he can help me solve

what happened to Jackie. And it's the next morning heading to see Sebastian at the house I was at last night. Then we can start the process of getting all the questions out and seeing if there's any answers to them. It's hot here, nice, I don't know, but 28 degrees already. He met on the Pacific coast.

And we'll see what Sebastian has to say. Does the car have a flat tire as my next question? So we're just on my way up into the sort of foot hills around Playa Coco. It's a nice dog, nice black and white dog on the street here.

“That's a lot of stray or unhomed other animals here, dogs and cats, but I think Costa Reakens.”

Continue from one and a half kilometers. Care for them quite a bit, even if they are stray. I'm not sure Sebastian's going to want to talk to me. There's many reasons why he might not want to talk to me. This case has happened 2021. He may not want to talk about it at all because he feels like he's gotten past Jackie's disappearance.

Or there might be other reasons and we can never really guess those.

So if Sebastian does not want to talk to me, it doesn't necessarily mean anything. If he doesn't want to talk to me, it's lots of reasons not to say something. There's one of the guardhouses on occupied. This development has guardhouses and this one here is on occupied. I'm just pulling up too. Now I'm just going to do a drive via the house here and just sort of see what I can see from the house as is my practice.

Get 200 meters if your destination will be on the left. Some guys look on up in there. Get my business cards ready here. Take off your sunglasses. Just listen for check. Check hello.

Hi. Hello. Oh, shit. My batteries are going low, crap. Okay, I'm going to have to change the batteries.

Check, check. Hello. That's good.

“Let's go on my go over a mission over here.”

Let's have a look at what's threatening. Check, check.

Good morning. How are you?

It's Sebastian here. [Music]

“Someone knows something is hosted written and produced by me, David Richen.”

The series is also produced by Maria Jose Burgos, sound designed by Evan Kelly.

Natalia Ferguson is our transcriber. Emily Cannell is our digital producer. Chris Oak is our story editor. Our executive producer is Cecil Fernandez.

“Tonya Springer is the senior manager and RF Nurani is the director of CBC podcast.”

You can binge all episodes of someone knows something early on the CBC True Crime YouTube channel or for early and add free listening, subscribe to the CBC True Crime Premium channel on Apple Podcasts. Just click on the link in the show description. If you're looking for more investigations, check out the past seasons of someone knows something. There are nine cases you can binge listen to now.

Season 8 investigates the disappearance of Angel Carlek, a young indigenous woman from Whitehorse, Yukon. Season 9 revisits my investigation into the murder of Christine Herron and the conviction of the man who confessed to her murder. Find someone knows something on the CBC True Crime YouTube channel or wherever you get your podcasts. [Music] For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts