Crime Beat puts focus on the victims
Show adapted from podcast explores Canadian cases
There are recurring questions in the first episode of Global’s Crime Beat, a television adaptation of the popular Calgary-based, true-crime podcast created by Nancy Hixt.
They are not questions of guilt or innocence.
Meika Jordan — The Broken Princess, which debuts on Global on Saturday, tells the horrifying and infuriating story of how a sixyear-old Calgary girl was tortured and murdered by her father and stepmother in November 2011. It follows the investigation, the trial and lengthy legal wranglings that would eventually take the case to the Supreme Court of Canada, where it would make legal history.
But throughout the episode, the lead investigator, the crown attorney, Meika’s mother and stepfather and even Hixt herself are all haunted by questions of why and how. Why would somebody do this? How could somebody do this? Nearly a decade after first reporting on the case, Hixt still struggles with those questions.
“She wasn’t just killed, she was tortured for four days,” says Hixt. “The abuse and torture that she suffered, most people wouldn’t even let their mind go to that. How someone is capable of doing it is really difficult. We do delve into some of those questions and ask those questions. I think it’s just natural of human nature that we would ask those questions. How could somebody do something like that to another human being? And that’s a question we ask in each and every episode that I deal with.”
The heartbreaking case of Meika Jordan would eventually lead to her father Spencer Jordan and stepmother Marie Magoon being convicted of first-degree murder, but not before an agonizing sixyear ordeal that found the case going to the Supreme Court of Canada. Jordan and Magoon were originally convicted of second-degree murder. The Alberta Court of Appeal upgraded the convictions to first-degree murder in 2016, which were eventually upheld by the country’s highest court. It was the first time that unlawful
confinement, an aggravating factor that upgrades the severity of a murder offence, had been used in a child homicide trial in Canada.
It was just one of the legally fascinating aspects of a horrifying case. The harrowing episode includes everything from touching home videos of Meika, to recordings of the original 911 call, to footage of police interrogations and oneon-one interviews with homicide detective Mike Cavilla, crown prosecutor Hyatt Mograbee, and Meika’s mother and stepfather, Kyla and Brian Woodhouse. It also includes footage from a “Mr. Big ” sting operation that was key to the case, which found both Jordan and Magoon relaying disturbing details of the murder to an undercover police officer who they believed was a crime boss.
Meika’s case was also the basis of the first podcast for Crime Beat, which Hixt launched March 4, 2019. Since then, the podcast has been downloaded 3.7 million times around the globe. Over two seasons, there have been 22 episodes, all focusing on cases that Hixt covered in Calgary or central Alberta. The television version, of which Hixt is a producer and writer, will be more national in scope. Hixt will provide six episodes — the deadly 2013 swarming attack on Lukas Strasser-hird is among the other Calgary cases presented — while the work of fellow Global journalists across the country will be featured in other segments.
“The cases I’m sharing are (ones) that have impacted me greatly through my career as a crime reporter,” Hixt says.
Hixt has been covering crime for more than two decades. The stated goal of both the series and podcast is to “shine light in dark places and give a voice to the voiceless.” That includes people such as Kyla and Brian Woodhouse, whose pain, frustration and anger with the Meika Jordan case is evident throughout the episode.
“Somebody commented the other day, saying ‘Well, your stories scare people. People won’t want to leave their house,’” Hixt says. “That’s not the intention of sharing these stories. All of the stories are very much about sharing the impact on the victims. This is not glorifying crimes, this isn’t sensationalizing crimes at all. I have never taken that approach.”