CBC drops a new true-crime podcast with Squamish roots.
When Steven Chua moved from Montreal to Squamish in 2017 to take a reporting job at the local paper, he looked forward to a mellow, small-town gig in a beautiful natural environment, maybe get into rock climbing or biking or something.
What he wasn’t expecting, three months into the gig, was a murder, a mystery and an eight-year investigation that would bring him into a world of neo-Nazis, online scams and buried gold.
“The crime stories I covered when I arrived were stuff like kids skateboarding or fireworks and graffiti,” Chua says. And then, on the road to Cat Lake, a burned-out SUV containing a body. A body with a bullet hole in it. A murder.
“That jolted me,” Chua says. “Like, whoa…stuff really happens here.”
“The crime stories I covered when I arrived were stuff like kids skateboarding or fireworks and graffiti.” And then, on the road to Cat Lake, a burned-out SUV containing a body. A body with a bullet hole in it. A murder.
The body belonged to a somewhat mysterious local climber who went by the name of Jesse James, but almost nothing else was known. Who was Jesse James? Who killed him? And why?
The answers, some of them, took years to arrive. Others remain a mystery. In 2020, the RCMP released a statement no one expected: DNA evidence had revealed that Squamish climber/van-lifer Jesse James was actually Britt Greenbaum, an American fugitive with a long history of aliases and a dark past, including a stint as the head of an online white-supremacist organization (albeit short-lived, after his Jewish ancestry was publicized).
“This guy had a well-documented life and did all kinds of crazy things,” Chua says. “Nazis, bitcoin, buried gold, multiple fake names…one reveal after another. I couldn’t believe it was real.”
International media flocked to town but Chua, by then an avid climber with real local contacts, got the scoop and his reporting quickly caught the interest of numerous true crime podcast producers. In September 2025, the CBC released Dirtbag Climber, a five-episode true crime podcast hosted by Steven as he dives into one of the wildest mysteries in Sea to Sky history.
“It was a process,” Chua says of turning his investigative print stories into a full-on audio feature. “Audio and video take so much longer. There are so many logistics around getting good tapes that can bring you into the moment. We had an amazing production team working really hard. With print journalism, it’s so nimble. A single reporter with a cell phone can get a story.”
Eight years after he covered the biggest news event of his young career, Steven Chua is still climbing rocks, returning to Squamish often from his new home in the lower mainland. With the release of Dirtbag Climber, he says he’s not sure what the future holds: “On to the next adventure, I guess. One thing I’ve realized is you can never predict how things are going to go.” –Feet Banks
Featured at the 2025 Tribeca Festival in New York, Dirtbag Climber is available anywhere you get your pods or on the CBC True Crime YouTube account.
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