SASKATOON — Police in Saskatoon are looking for a woman on a video in which she claims responsibility for the deliveries of several suspicious parcels in the city last spring.
Crime Stoppers is asking for people's help to identify the woman who may have unwittingly confessed to sending out white powder packages.
The woman is believed to sell video testimonial services on the website fiverr.com or another site similar to it. Investigators do not believe she is responsible for any criminal activity.
Crime Stoppers says the search for the woman is “the greatest Where’s Waldo internet challenge.”
“It’s a hunch. That’s why it’s a ‘Where’s Waldo’ hunt,” Const. Ryan Ehalt, co-ordinator for Crime Stoppers in Saskatoon, said Monday.
The video was sent to several individuals and select media on April 9 and was accompanied by a handful of emails saying that Alexa Emerson was innocent.
Emerson — also known as Amanda Totchek — was arrested last spring and faces 83 charges related to packages and email bomb threats sent to several businesses, schools and the Saskatoon Cancer Centre.
“We made those packages together with the cookies and rockets and tissue paper ... She said, ‘People will think the baking soda is anthrax,’” the unidentified woman says in the video.
It was determined the powder in all the deliveries was not dangerous.
The charges against Emerson are connected to five suspicious package deliveries in late November, several deliveries in March and April and more than half a dozen bomb threats over the last few months.
Ehalt said the “working theory” is Emerson paid the woman to create the video, but investigators aren't sure where the woman lives.
“There was information on Alexa Emerson’s Facebook and social media profiles that she had spent some time in Hollywood,” Ehalt said.
“So it was a working theory that she could have hired somebody there.”
Anyone with information about the woman is asked to contact Crime Stoppers. No reward is being offered since the woman isn’t facing criminal charges.