Colin Thatcher and the murder of JoAnn Wilson [2]
Canadian True Crime
Kristi Lee
4.7 • 5K Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2026
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
[Part 2 of 3] As she recovers from her gunshot wound, JoAnn Wilson decides to back down from the custody fight with her former husband.
Colin Thatcher has won this battle, but his fixation is far from over. A series of witnesses would later come forward with information almost impossible to believe...
*Additional content warning: this episode contains mentions of domestic abuse.
— This series is a carefully selected replay from our archive.
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See the page for this episode at https://www.canadiantruecrime.ca/episodes/135
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Canadian True Crime is a completely independent production, funded mainly through advertising. |
| 0:04.7 | The podcast often has disturbing content and coarse language. |
| 0:08.3 | It's not for everyone. Please take care when listening. |
| 0:11.7 | This is part two of a three-part series. |
| 0:15.7 | Where we left off, Joanne Wilson had divorced Colin Thatcher and remarried, but their custody and property settlement had turned into a bitter fight that lasted several years, because he refused to compromise. |
| 0:29.6 | After Joanne was shot in the shoulder in her own kitchen, she realized the personal cost she was paying to stand up to her ex-husband was becoming too high, |
| 0:39.6 | and she backed down. Colin had outlasted her in the battle, and he was rewarded by getting what |
| 0:46.7 | he wanted by default, custody of both of their boys. In the following year's provincial election, |
| 0:55.6 | not only was Colin Thatcher re-elected as the MLA for Thunder Creek, |
| 1:00.5 | but the incoming Premier Grant Devine named him Minister of Energy and Mines, |
| 1:06.4 | a prestigious government position. |
| 1:09.7 | Five months after that, Colin arranged an abandoned farm meeting with his associate, Gary Anderson, |
| 1:16.9 | who would tell police that Colin gave him a magnum revolver and asked him to have a silencer made for it. |
| 1:24.3 | That was October of 1982. |
| 1:31.4 | Music That was October of 1982. Gary took the revolver and enlisted the help of a welder friend to make a silencer. |
| 1:37.4 | After the first one was produced, they test fired the revolver, but it didn't really silence anything. |
| 1:44.2 | They made a few more, but none of them worked that well to reduce the noise of the gunshot, |
| 1:49.7 | so they threw them away. |
| 1:52.0 | Gary then moved up north for a while to find work. |
| 1:57.3 | At the end of 1982, Colin took his sons Gregory and Regan to Palm Springs, California, |
| 2:04.4 | to spend Christmas a new year. |
| 2:06.8 | By this point, he'd been Minister of Energy and Mines for about seven months, |
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