Catch Him if You Can
March came from nothing. Now, he’s the 1%. He made his fortune in oil and cryptocurrency. He’s sweet, handsome and charming. It’s hard to believe he’s still single. Only, it isn’t. Because March isn’t real. He’s a border-hopping Canadian con artist who’s tricked women and men out of over a million dollars. He thought he was untouchable, but now he’s messed with the wrong women. From Pink Moon Studio, this is Catch Him if You Can. The story of Marcel Vautour, his survivors' real time crusade to catch him, and the broken legal system that’s allowed him to get away for over 20 years – told in 7 parts. Written and produced by Emilia King and Maggie Reid. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @catchhimpod
Catch Him if You Can
So what?
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Emilia and Maggie give updates on the case since learning that Marcel escaped from rehab. They sit down with Jordan Heath-Rawlings of The Big Story podcast to break down the complexities of prosecuting serial fraud, how the justice system could do better and what comes next.
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SPEAKER_03I'm Amelia King. And I'm Maggie Reed. And you're listening to our four-episode update to season one of Catch Em If You Can. So this episode is going to be a little bit different. It's a little less structured. It's our last one for now.
SPEAKER_01Hey, Amelia. Hey Maggie. How are you doing? Good. Fancy meeting you here. I know. On the internet, as always.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, exactly. It's our home, I guess.
SPEAKER_01So we want to chat about a few things in this episode, I think. You know, we want to make it as conclusion-y as possible. As can be in this case, exactly. As can be. Obviously, we don't have the conclusion we necessarily want, but we do want to start maybe with some updates to the case since our last episode. Do you want to take us through those?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay. So last episode, what happened? Obviously, we heard that March left rehab and never came back. So since that episode aired, we were kind of in discussions in conversations with his ex-common-law wife. And she essentially told us that with this rehab, what had happened was he gained weekend privileges. Okay. So he was actually going out on the weekends because he had gained that privilege. And then he was coming back. That was the requirement, right? So she told us that uh he had been going out for at least a few weeks. He had actually been meeting up with his son, his youngest son. She thinks it's, you know, to have built trust with the rehab that look, he cares about his kid. He's going to come back. He's been coming back, and then one week, one weekend, I should say, he just never came back. Wow. And so that's what happened. Nobody knows where he is. We've been emailing back and forth this entire time, right? With the prosecutor in the case, or at least trying to, right? Haven't been getting too much communication. But we finally received a response from him. His name is Kevin. So he writes to us Hello, I know that you're all concerned about Mr. Vautour's case. Just to inform you that he's under warrant since May 1st, 2023. We will inform Marjolaine when he will be arrested. Have a nice day. Okay, so that was the big statement from the prosecutor. Like, hey, look, okay, he's under warrant again, even though the last warrant, right, this one that he's he's up against was from 2014. That's almost a decade. So it's like that doesn't leave us feeling very optimistic that they're necessarily going to get him. And mind you, Marjolaine has not heard anything, right, since then. Right. Also, just to point out again, like Marjolaine was the one to inform Kevin, the prosecutor, that Marcel was even missing. Like the courts had no idea.
SPEAKER_01Right, right. So he was already not really in the know. And now he's kind of informing us that there's a warrant. But we know when there's these warrants out, it's not like anybody's actively looking for him. No. Right? Like nobody's out there. Where would they even start to look? Like it's, you know. Right, right, right. But they're not actively looking for him. So there being a warrant out for his arrest. It could be another 10 years, essentially. Exactly. Which is just so infuriating. And so does Marcel's ex-partner does she think that he was essentially just using his son? Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_03She thinks, yes, absolutely. She thinks he was using the son again as a way to build trust with the rehab. Like, look, this guy has something he cares about. He's going to return. He's been having these successful meetings. And then obviously he just he used that and exploited it and never came back. Right. He did apparently tell his son that he was headed out to Manitoba, but that doesn't make any sense, we were all saying, because that's where he's got more warrants. So, anyways, it's all very confusing. But he's gone.
SPEAKER_01Right. He's gone and we and we don't know where he is. Yeah, exactly. Okay. That's not the update we wanted, but it's the update we have. So I guess for the rest of this episode, we want to chat through a couple of things. I think one of the things we want to talk about is really some of the complexities of prosecuting serial fraud, some of the bigger systemic issues that have really become clear in this case, but we haven't always been able to go into too much depth on in the episodes. So I think we want to talk about that a little bit. We also want to chat about some possible changes to the justice system that could maybe improve things to better prosecute serial fraud. And then also just talk about some of our own reflections on the case and on the podcast. And then, of course, some of you are also probably wondering, you know, what's next. So here to help us unpack some of this is Jordan Heathrawlings, host of The Big Story, which is another show on the Frequency Podcast Network. Hello, Jordan.
SPEAKER_00Hello, thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you're welcome. We're so glad you're here to help us debrief. Um, where do you want to start?
SPEAKER_00I want to start with an overview of this kind of fraud in Canada. You've obviously spent a lot of time on Marcel's case, but he's not the only serial fraudster out there. So, Amelia, just tell me about the extent of it. What kind of scale are we talking about here?
SPEAKER_03Okay, so last time we chatted, Jordan, we were really focused on um romance fraud, right? We kind of talked about um the scope and scale of general fraud in Canada. But actually, since launching the show, it's risen majorly. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Center received reports totaling nearly $530 million of losses from fraud in 2022, and that represents nearly a 40% increase over the historic 380 million in losses in 2021. And we obviously have to keep in mind that only 5 to 10% of cases are ever actually reported. So that number is so much bigger.
SPEAKER_00How often do people like March actually get caught and prosecuted? Clearly it's pretty difficult in his case. Can you give me some examples of other cases and if they've been more successful?
SPEAKER_03Oh, this is such a great question. And I think for me personally, I mean, and I'm speaking for Maggie as well. I think this was one of the most shocking takeaways from this journey that we've been on. But like, no, this is not an isolated case, not even in terms of the outcomes. Here are just like a couple of examples that demonstrate how tough this is. Okay, that were that was really shocking to us. Okay, so here's here's one example. There's this woman named Jane Elizabeth Moore of Alberta. She's been pegged the Queen of Cons by her victims. And this is from one of her um most recent schemes from 2020. She essentially told people, okay, that she was in line to inherit over 36 million from the late Doc Seaman, who was the previous owner of the Calgary Flames. Right. And she claimed she was like this big hockey heiress, okay? And just like March, you know, in these fantastical tales, her history of fraud dates back nearly two decades. And just like March, she goes by, you know, a whole bunch of different aliases. Uh she's faked cancer, she faked a disease that makes your eyes and ears bleed. Like we learned through a bit of digging that she actually used needles to poke her eyes and nose and ears. Anyways, this is all very shocking, like fantastical stuff. Her first conviction dates back to 2003. Okay. Even there, she was given like a suspended sentence, put on probation for two years. So again, like very similar to March. However, in this case, over a hundred more convictions she had since then, most involving fraud, okay. Um, she was initially charged with 399 counts of theft and of fraud for more than 350,000. She pleaded guilty, okay, to just one charge. And the judge accepted the plea. And because of credit for time served, she was actually able to walk away from the courthouse that day without spending any more time in jail. And then she was on probation for like I think nine months, and then she was ordered to pay back $40,000. But, anyways, okay, similarities to March here, right? Depth and breadth of the fraud, you know, business fraud, medical fraud, impersonation, romance fraud, defrauding close family, the persistence of this type of behavior, right? The pattern, but all similarly amounting to a slap on the wrist, right, in terms of sentencing. The difference here, though, is I think, you know, she she pursued most of her fraud in the same province, Alberta. And that's why we saw a larger number of convictions in that case. But still, right, the outcomes are not great in terms of the sentencing. So I'll just give one more example. And this is the 2020 case of Sean Rutenberg, all right? So just again, in his latest scheme, he married a woman, he stole over $500,000 from her, stole her entire life savings, you know, promised he would make good investments for her, similarly to what we heard of March doing, right? Especially in the Marjola Lane case that uh he's now being pursued for. But instead, he bought himself a BMW and paid off his gambling debts. His ex-wife found out about his real identity about 18 months into the relationship, reported it to police, and, you know, that's kind of how this all transpired. So essentially, similar to the March and Hockeyer's case, this guy also has a criminal history dating back decades. You know, he impersonated his prominent psychiatrist brother. He stole 1.8 million, frauded others close to him as well. Really extensive patterned history of this type of fraud. Okay, so he was found guilty. And again, the judge in this case wanted to make an example of him, right? To signal to fraudsters, like, hey, we're getting tough on this. And and even with that, he still only received six years. And remember again, the the max sentence you can receive for fraud over 5,000 is 14 years. And this is considered a very, very harsh sentence. So for me, that's really the part that's shocking, right? I think for us, Pink Moon and the ladies, right, Jody, Kim, and Andrea, I think we were all hoping that March would receive the max 14 years that you can get. But as just these two examples show, and and you know, based on what Andrew told us in that previous episode, it's totally unlikely that he's gonna get anything close to that.
SPEAKER_00Why are these cases so hard to pursue and prosecute? What makes them different from, you know, tax fraud, securities fraud?
SPEAKER_03Oh, that's a really, really great question. Maggie, do you want to talk a little bit about that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of factors here. I think serial fraud's really hard. Romance fraud, more specifically, is really difficult to pursue because there's a lot of difficulty in proving intent, right? This is a criminal charge. It has to be established beyond a reasonable doubt that this person intentionally deceived the you know alleged victim for you know financial gain. And that can be really, really hard to actually prove in court. And I think because of this difficulty, a lot of prosecutors just kind of walk away from these cases. And as we heard with the prosecutor in Jody's case, who, you know, decided not to pursue the charges, he said to her specifically, like, I believe that he did these things you're accusing him of. He said that point blank, but it's not in the public interest to pursue these charges. They feel it's going to be too difficult or too costly, not worth the amount of court resources to pursue this case. And also, prosecutors, you know, they probably want a win, right? They don't want to be pursuing these cases for smaller sums of money that they might not win. And so this is a really, really difficult thing to get people to take seriously and actually, you know, spend the resources and the time to go after these people. So one part is the, you know, difficulty proving intent and the amount of evidence they have to mount. And this is true even when victims actually compile their own evidence and become, you know, detectives in their own cases. I think another difficulty is that oftentimes the victims just kind of give up. We already know that fraud is really underreported. A lot of times, victims go to report these crimes and they're kind of told that they're never going to get justice. And the police and the prosecutors are certainly not seeking these cases out. You have to be a very vocal person who's pushing for action on your case. As we've seen with the ladies from our podcast, they've been pushing and still been facing barriers. So if you're not doing that kind of pushing, um, you're probably going to get nowhere, basically, with these cases. So there's, I think that there's a lot of challenges on the side of, you know, resources, willingness, and then also taking these cases seriously, especially in romance fraud, we actually see a lot of similarities. We've been talking a lot, Amelia and I, about the similarities with sexual assault cases.
SPEAKER_00I was just about to say that. Yeah. It sounds a lot like uh unsubstantiated or, you know, he said, she said, et cetera, et cetera.
SPEAKER_01It does. And even what we hear from the victims, right? So picture you're someone that's just had romance fraud, like you've been in a relationship with someone for five, six months, you find out they've taken money and you thought you were in love, and you are completely kind of shattered. You go into the police department, and what happens? You're not really taken seriously. You're basically told this is going to be difficult to prove. Uh, you're kind of asking what you did, right? There's a lot of blaming the victim that happens here. Uh, to the point where when victims go forward to report these cases, they feel violated, they feel re-traumatized almost because they feel like, oh, something wrong happened. I can go to the police and report this. And then they don't get any feeling of you are on my side, you are going to take this seriously, and that I have any hope of justice. And so we really do see a lot of similarities between those cases and a lot of victim blaming, which is quite frankly why we wanted to kind of look at this case in the first place.
SPEAKER_00I want to ask one more thing about that because there's a term you used in a recent episode called rape by deception. And since we're talking about the small boundary between romance fraud and sexual assault, explain what that is, how it works, and if we'll ever see it in Canada.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So rape by deception is kind of what it sounds like. It's also sometimes referred to as rape by fraud. And essentially it's this legal concept where, you know, when two people engage in a seemingly consensual sexual act, the difference when it comes to rape by deception is that one person deceived the other person to make that sexual activity possible. Right. And the important point here, when you are considering what this means in a legal framework, is that the deception involved in getting this person to engage in sexual activity is deemed to negate the consent, right? So for example, you know, if I'm someone who only consented to a sexual act because you told me you were this person and you lied, you know, left, right, and center to work your way into my heart. Even though it looks like I consented, right? And I did willingly consent, I would have never consented had I actually, you know, known who you were. And this is a really different kind of understanding of if you look at kind of modern, you know, sexual assault laws, it's usually considered to be sex that is not consented to. You know, there's a little bit of a gray area here, right? I mean, when someone lies to get money from someone, there's a word for it. It's theft, it's fraud, right? When they lie to have sex with someone, what do we call it? And so in Canada, rape by deception doesn't formally exist, but there is some legal precedent that is related, including something that was upheld from the Supreme Court last year. So there's something that's called stealthing. Have you heard of this?
SPEAKER_00Yes, it's removing the condom, right?
SPEAKER_01It's removing the condom. It is, yeah. And so there was a unanimous decision from the Supreme Court of Canada, the top court that ruled that stealthing, so the act of either pretending to use a condom or removing one during sex without the partner's consent, can actually violate the grounds for consensual sex. So even though you consented, you didn't consent to that, right? And this kind of does plant the seeds for understanding consent differently than just okay, yes or no, right? As you would see in these kind of romance fraud cases, okay, well, yes, you did consent to this. There was no physical coercion, right? But at the same time, when someone is frauded out of money, like for example, okay, so Jordan, if I ask you to invest in my like shady snake oil business, and I'm like, we're gonna make a lot of money, right? And I say, you know, give me 50 grand, and you say, okay, I trust you. This, you know, the financial plan is sound. I take your 50k. And it turns out it was all a sham. Well, you willingly gave me money in that context. So you consented. However, it was under false pretenses. So in our legal system, we have mechanisms for negating consent in that context because you were lied to. So why can that not apply to sex? And I think for us, and Jodi was pushing for this in her case, and why we think this is such a promising potential framework, is that it's a lot more serious. And I mean, it should be serious because I don't think people understand how, and I don't even fully understand how it feels to be violated at that level, you know, not only financially in terms of your, you know, emotional relationship, but physically, letting someone like that into your bedroom, like these women feel so incredibly violated, and we need to take it seriously. And maybe if we were taking it more seriously, there would be more of a deterrent for people like Marcel.
SPEAKER_00So, as cynical as it is to look at it this way, I can understand why police, at least from their point of view, as wrong as it might be, choose not to prosecute some of these cases or or make it difficult on the victims. This is a story we've seen time and time again. But once we get to the court stage and in particular the conviction stage, why do these people only tend to get slaps on the wrist then? You know, especially given, you know, everything you've outlined about how difficult it is to prove, you would think that once you've got someone in a courtroom dead to rights, that would be the time to send a message. Why not?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that's a really, really good question. And I think there's a few challenges. One, and especially Marcel's case, it's really difficult because we're not seeing all of his cases being presented at once. They're all seen in isolation, especially when they're happening in different jurisdictions, right? So when he is going up for charges in Quebec, uh, we're not seeing that, you know, there's all of these other cases or charges that are being pursued against him in other places. That's actually not a factor that the judge can or will look at. So we're not even looking at any of those potential charges. They might look at his past convictions, but right now, someone like Marcel, his past successful conviction was from over 20 years ago, right? And so when he's coming in and saying, listen, I have addiction problems, I've changed, I'm turning my life around, that can be kind of a believable story for someone, maybe. I think the other thing is something that Amelia pointed to in the case with the hockey heiress, which is that oftentimes serial fraudsters will plead guilty to one charge or maybe a couple of charges, but not everything, and then get sentenced based on what they plead to, so not the totality of their crimes. And again, we're looking at police resources here, uh, court resources. Taking them to trial would be lengthy and expensive if they choose to plead not guilty. So they essentially plead out to get a lighter sentence, which means they are free sooner and able to get back to business, essentially, which seems to happen in most cases. And I think because they aren't violent offenders, they often get time served, early parole, or even things like house arrest instead of actually serving a jail sentence. So I think it's just not seen to be maybe a good use of court resources because of those reasons.
SPEAKER_03To jump in too, like we have to remember that the max sentence for fraud over 5,000 is is just 14 years. And they rarely ever, I mean, we haven't seen from our digging a case where somebody actually got the maximum term.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell And this is what happened with Marcel in Quebec, right? In Marjolaine's case is lack of a will by the prosecution to factor in past convictions and all the alleged crimes and just focus on the one in front of them and listen to pleas about turning my life around, getting addiction help, et cetera.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I guess it's one of the things that we realized because the ladies were so persistent in putting together materials, you know, to send to the prosecutor about all of Marcel's, you know, alleged crimes in other places and this whole detailed timeline of everything that he's done. But when we talk to a lawyer who kind of gave us more context about how this actually works, none of that is being factored into Marcel's case. Any of his alleged conduct. So there's something called relevant conduct in the US, where some of that would be taken into consideration in, you know, his current sentencing, but it's not in Canada. There's no relevant conduct. They're only looking at past convictions. And, you know, while obviously inconvenient for our case, we also do understand why that exists, right? Considering relevant conduct that hasn't been proved in a court of law can be really damning for people. But it's also challenging when you don't have a legal system that's taking any of these things seriously because it's really difficult to get convictions. So you just end up being stuck in this loop where, you know, you're not getting justice and then you're trying to say, look at all this stuff that's happening, and they're saying, we can't. And yeah, it's just so frustrating. It's so frustrating because, you know, there's so much evidence in these cases, but nobody's actually pursuing it.
SPEAKER_00Is there one thing that could maybe not fix all this, but could make it significantly better? Like if you could change something about the way our justice system deals with this kind of stuff specifically, what would it be?
SPEAKER_01For me, I think it would start with at the point of, you know, when people report these cases, I think we need to have police be better trained to report these cases, like to actually have intake of victims. And I would never say put more resources towards policing. I don't know that we should do that, but perhaps diverting resources or better training officers to, you know, deal with victims of these cases. Because I think a big challenge here is that again, we're having this vicious cycle of victims go in, they're kind of turned away by police. So they just let these cases go. And then we're not actually seeing the full extent of how many people are out there that have had this happen to them that need justice. And then we're not really seeing the justice system compensate for how prevalent these crimes are. So I really think it needs to start at that point. Of course, there are other things like, you know, jurisdictions talking to one another, you know, having perhaps a lower threshold for Canada-wide warrants would probably be a good thing in cases like this. But I really, really do think it starts at the point of the victims coming forward and how they're treated and whether they are taken seriously, because that really it really sets the tone for what happens next.
SPEAKER_00So last question for both of you then. Do you guys, now that it's all over, I know Marcel is not currently in custody, but now that this season of the podcast is over, what are you gonna take away with you from the making of this that you would like people to understand a little better?
SPEAKER_02You want to go first, Maggie? I've been talking a lot. I think you go first. All right, yeah.
SPEAKER_03I think for me the biggest realization is he's gonna keep doing this. He's gonna keep doing this. And like we've been, like you know, Maggie has been talking about you and Jordan, you've been talking about like the system can be made better, but there needs to be like a will to fix it. I think that's what I'm taking. It's like a very sober realization. I I just I didn't think I imagined it to have gone this way. I I think I thought he would get 14 years. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. What about you, Maggie?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, just to kind of to tag on to that, I think we came into this doing this investigation, not liking this narrative of blaming the victim. We didn't realize that it was going to open this whole can of worms to, you know, how the justice system handles these cases. But I want to say we came into this looking at the way, you know, other true crime shows, particularly portraying romance fraud, the entertainment was really how dumb the women are, right? So the audience can kind of feel detached from the victim because they feel like it's a situation they would never see themselves in. And when we came into this, we wanted to flip the script on that because even if you think you could never be in that situation, and even if that's true, why are we blaming the victims rather than focusing on the perpetrators? These women feel violated, traumatized. It has an ongoing, lasting impact on their lives, their relationships, their ability to trust. And so I'm kind of taking away that I just feel like proud that we were able to tell this story and hopefully change some people's minds about victims of this crime. And, you know, I hope that we can just also expose some of the malfunctions of the criminal justice system.
SPEAKER_00Maggie, Amelia, thank you both for chatting with me about this and also uh for all the work you guys have done on this case.
SPEAKER_03Thanks so much, Jordan. Thanks, Jordan. All right, listeners. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on this incredibly wild ride. It's been a twisty, turny tale that none of us really could have predicted. But this isn't gonna be the last you're hearing from us.
SPEAKER_01No, this is not the last you'll hear from us on this case. I mean, we're definitely gonna keep following it. We'll give you updates as we have them. But we're also planning our next season. We've got a new case that we've been digging into. And it's a juicy one. So buckle up.