Hey, it's Nancy. Before we begin today, I just wanted to let you know that you can listen to crime beat early and add free on Amazon music included with Prime.

A listener's note, the following episode contains course language, adult themes, and content of a violent and disturbing nature, and may not be suitable for everyone.

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In the summer of 1999, the RCMP in Central Alberta investigated a horrific case involving two children.

A father murdered his little girl and tried to kill his son. The case has haunted investigators for decades, but it was particularly traumatic for one officer

because it launched a completely unrelated series of events that ultimately led to him being wrongfully accused of rape, and it would leave his life torn in pieces.

I'm Nancy Hicks, a crime reporter for Global News. Today, I'll share part two of this special crime beat series and explain the mind-blowing twists and turns of this case.

This is the conclusion of scarred but not broken.

If you haven't listened to the first part of this story yet, I recommend stopping and listening to that episode first.

It's important to know the details from that high-profile case because if it weren't for that tragic and disturbing crime involving two children, today's story may never have happened.

In the summer of 1999, veteran RCMP constable John Houdak was called to the Rocky Mountain House Hospital to investigate.

A van pulled into the ambulance bay driven by a father of two. Inside the vehicle, an attending physician discovered a little girl who had been smothered to death, and a seven-year-old boy whose throat had been cut.

During the course of the investigation, Houdak dealt with a lot of staff at the hospital. They were treated as potential witnesses.

Things started unfolding. The case goes, you know, it's going to be going before the courts. This is pretty traumatic. You know, nursing staff, the hospital staff, the doctors that had to deal with this situation.

It's incumbent upon somebody to go back and talk to them and say, okay, look, here's what's happened. Here's where things are going.

And then with having been in the hospital on other matters, some of them would say, hey, what's going on on this file, where's that?

So I keep them abreast of where things were. And one of the things, and a tapping is I had a request to maybe go and talk to the hospital staff and let them know, because if things did go to a trial, some of them were going to have to come and testify as witnesses.

So I wanted to try to kind of try to minimize any of their concerns.

One of the nurses who was at the hospital on the day of the incident was Mildred Johnson.

Houdak said she stood out because she asked a lot of questions.

Well, she's trying to build a little bit of a bond. She tells me that she's...

Yeah, she understands this stuff. She worked in major trauma centers at emergency departments down near Houston, Texas for a lot of years.

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