Someone Got Away With Murder is the story of Andy Rose – tried and convicted twice for a double murder. The problem all along was that Andy Rose didn’t commit the murders.

It was August 1983 when two young German tourists, Bernd Goericke and his fiancée, Andrea Scherp, set out on a western Canadian hitchhiking adventure. That trip would end for both of them with their murders on a remote trail near Chetwynd, British Columbia.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police spent weeks canvassing local residents for clues, but it was six years before they finally got a lead – a breakthrough that came not from B.C., but from the other side of Canada. Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland was home to a group of people who were working in the Chetwynd area at the time of the murders. One of those workers was Andy Rose. Another was Andy’s friend, Madonna Mary Kelly.

In 1989, Andy Rose was living in northern Manitoba, was in a solid common-law marriage, and had a ten-day-old son. But, about that time, a strange story reached the RCMP. Madonna, having left B.C. and returned to Newfoundland, told them about a night, six years before in Chetwynd, when Andy, drunk and covered in blood, arrived at her doorstep claiming to have killed two people.

Before long, vigorous attempts to pin the murders on Andy were underway, with the RCMP wire-tapping a phone call between Andy and Madonna hoping to record a confession. There was no confession, but just hours after the call with Madonna, Andy was arrested for murder. “I told them they’re nuts, crazy”, Andy Rose tells the fifth estate’s Linden MacIntyre, “In order to do something like that, you’ve got to be robbing banks, a lot of gun involved crimes and stuff like that…You don’t just one night decide you need some dollars, you’re gonna kill two people.”

But, that’s exactly what the Mounties thought Andy had done and Madonna Kelly’s story would become the lynchpin in a murder prosecution.

During the next twelve years, Andy endured two trials and, with powerful testimony from Madonna, two guilty verdicts. Both verdicts were set aside on technicalities, but he still spent almost ten years in prison. Determined to get a confession, the RCMP then organized a “Mr. Big” sting operation, secretly videotaping meetings with Andy, urging him to confess. Andy Rose’s third trial collapsed and the charges against him were stayed. Forensic evidence eventually discredited Madonna Kelly’s story.

CBC Current Affiars program Fifth Estate broadcast Someone Got Away with Murder, in which Linden MacIntyre uncovers the story of a relentless police investigation, spanning more than a decade, that snared the wrong man and, to this day, leaves a terrible crime unsolved.