S9 Trailer: The Dead File

[suspenseful music] Newspaper accounts at the time described the murders as brutal, savage, the crime scene one of the most gruesome the island has ever witnessed.

And yet, until I begin working on this case, I know absolutely nothing about it.

In June of 1959, in a quiet rural neighborhood just south of Nanaimo, Curly and Lizzie Kosteniuk are stabbed to death in their bedroom.

First Lizzie, and then six to 12 hours later, Curly.

It's a double murder, a knife slaying, and it's never solved.

When I begin researching the case, there is zero public information online, no TV news stories, no podcasts, no news articles, nothing.

For more than six decades, it's as if the case just vanishes.

But then I hear from a young woman named Shawna, Curly and Lizzie's great-great-granddaughter.

I found a box of letters that were my grandma's, and there's letters from her dad from prison in 1958, '59, and I was like, "Oh my gosh."

Curly and Lizzie live in a small home in the kind of community where everyone knows each other, the sort of place where doors aren't always locked.

So why does someone attack Lizzie and then stay?

Why would a, a person kill the woman and then hang around so long until a man showed up, unless the, the intention was to have both of them dead?

Police back then believe robbery is the motive, but the family long suspects something darker, and possibly someone closer to home.

But I bet you any money, I am 99% sure I know who did that.

So I'm reopening this dead file, chasing paper trails, reexamining evidence, and asking whether it could yet be possible to do what investigators in 1959 cannot.

I'm hopeful because I just feel like there's so much possibilities with technology and all of those things.

This isn't just a cold case.

It's an ice cold case, my oldest to date.

It would be really something to, uh, get that solved.

Everybody counts or nobody counts.

I'm Laura Palmer, and this is Island Crime, Season 9: The Dead File.

[suspenseful music]