How a sex assault victim became the secret agent in her own case | CBC News

Vienna Luke became an undercover RCMP operative to get a confession in a historic sexual assault

WARNING: This article may affect those who have experienced​ ​​​sexual violence or know someone affected by it.

On a Friday morning in 2021, just a couple of days before Halloween, Vienna Luke zipped up an oversized puffer jacket with a big hood, and put on sunglasses to hide her face.

In a SUV outside her home, plainclothes RCMP officers waited to whisk her away on a secret mission — a face-to-face meeting with the man responsible for the worst night of her life.

Luke, a fitness instructor and mother of two children, was the key undercover agent in an RCMP operation that — if successful — could lead to the rarest of outcomes: a criminal conviction in a sexual assault that that had occurred 14 years earlier.

If Luke failed, her case and the truth about what had happened that night would almost surely be lost to time. 

CBC has obtained the surreptitious recording of that mission. It shows an extremely rare instance of RCMP turning the victim into an agent in her own case.

The RCMP sergeant who led the investigation say it’s an approach that is almost never tried  — especially in sexual assault cases.

"For the victim to have the strength, and the investigative team [to have the] determination[...] is almost unheard of," said Sgt. Joëlle LaChance.

Facing the man who assaulted her, her estranged brother-in-law, "Agent Layla" presses him for answers over the course of 70 minutes. Luke ultimately elicits a confession that surpassed even the highest hopes of the RCMP team gathered in a nearby hotel room listening in over a wire. The breakthrough was so moving that it brought tears to a hardened undercover officer accustomed to working with drug dealers and murderers.

"She literally took her life back in her hands," said one of the officers from the undercover unit, working with LaChance.

That recording — along with interviews from Luke, her middle sister Shawnessy Luke, and the police officers involved in the sting — is part of a new four-part CBC podcast called Personally: Agent Layla.