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.
The police referred to Luke using a code name: Agent Layla.
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.
“There wasn’t a dry eye in that room,” said 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.
The podcast details how Luke managed to get the truth, put the man who assaulted her behind bars, and begin to heal from an incident that left her traumatized, detached from her own body, and at odds with members of her family who at times failed to take her side.
A night with only one memory
At 20 years old, Luke was living at home with her family in the Vancouver suburbs after attending a Bible school overseas. Her life had been sheltered; she says she had never been kissed, or even held hands with a man.
While she contemplated her future, she decided to move in with her eldest sister, brother-in-law and their sons in the small B.C. town of Fort St. John — a 14-hour drive north from where she was raised.
Her brother-in-law, Justin Sewell, was a respected veterinarian who was active in a local Christian church. Sewell was 11 years older than her and he had been a trusted member of the family since Luke was a child.
During a week when Luke’s sister and nephews were out of town, Sewell proposed a plan. He suggested she get drunk for the first time at home with him, in what he described as a “safe place.”
Luke says she had heard of another Christian girl who had done something similar to experiment for the first time with drinking, so she went along with his idea.
WARNING: This story contains graphic details about sexual abuse.
According to testimony presented in court and extensive interviews conducted by the CBC, Luke only sipped the cocktails he made — one of them a Kahlua-based “Brown Cow.”
As she and Sewell danced to country music in the living room, Luke remembers her legs buckling. As the world went black, she felt nauseous and thought to herself that drinking alcohol didn’t seem so fun after all.
Aloud, she spoke a phrase that only drives home how naive she was to what was about to happen.
“I just love Jesus,” she said. “I just love Jesus. And then I was out.”
For Luke, everything about the rest of that night is blank, except for one memory that would both torment her and propel her to seek accountability in the almost two decades to come: a brief moment when she says she awoke mostly naked in her bed.
“I was looking at myself, from above, to my brother-in-law taking off my underwear,” she said.
‘We gotta tell mom and dad’
In the aftermath of that horrible evening, Luke says she tried to “shelve” what happened. For months, she fought what she described as a war between her body that remembered, and her brain trying to forget.
She moved back home to her parents’ home near Vancouver and didn’t come face-to-face with Sewell again until half-a-year later at Christmas when the entire family went to Florida for a cruise. But when they said their goodbyes at the airport, her middle sister, Shawnessy Luke, noticed something was off.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Shawnessy Luke said. “The way he hugged her. And I think that’s strange. That’s prolonged. And I knew something was going on.”
Shawnessy Luke describes herself as a person with great intuition and “like a dog with a bone.” She waited until she and Vienna Luke got back to their parent’s home to ask questions. She was doing her laundry in the family’s narrow utility room when she insisted that her sister explain.
“She definitely pulled it out of me,” said Vienna Luke. “I did not volunteer.”
Vienna Luke told her sister what happened in the days leading up to the drinking game, facts that were accepted in court: How Sewell had held her hand, how he called her up from her basement bedroom to watch a lightning storm and then massaged her back, and how he told her he loved her.
Then she shared how Sewell proposed she get drunk, and how she couldn’t remember much more than that.
“In my moral compass brain, the minute I heard those things, I was like, I don’t need to know anymore, I believe you,” said Shawnessy Luke. “We’ve got to tell someone about this because […] whatever happened to you […] was wrong.”
Shawnessy Luke says she insisted they tell their mom and dad.
The night in question had happened in June 2007, about 10 years before the #MeToo social movement. As Vienna Luke told her parents about Sewell holding her hand and massaging her back, she stopped short of sharing the most damning memory of all — that she woke up to Sewell removing her underwear. She felt like her parents didn’t know how to handle what she was saying, and didn’t have the vocabulary at the time to talk about sexual assault.
“I knew that I couldn’t share more,” she said.
Her father called Sewell right away. She didn’t overhear their conversation, but she recalls her father handed her the phone and she found herself suddenly on the line with Sewell.
Vienna Luke pleaded with Sewell to tell his wife what had happened, hoping her oldest sister would take her side. She still doesn’t know if that happened, only that her oldest sister has continued to stand by her husband and is still married to him today.
Her parents declined to be interviewed for this story. In a victim impact statement filed in court, they wrote: “Our effort to uncover the full story was unsuccessful. Lacking information and clarity, we had no path forward. We felt uneasy about what we knew, but did not pursue this matter further.”
Years of numbing
In the years that followed, the Luke family struggled with the divide created by that night: Vienna’s oldest sister and Sewell on one side, Shawnessy and Vienna Luke on the other, and their parents trying to walk a line between all three of their daughters.
“It was easier to take Justin for his word,” Vienna Luke said. “He was the one that knew what happened. He got to write the story.”
With no clarity about what had actually happened and that one horrific memory of him removing her underwear replaying in her head, Luke says she spent years feeling like a robot trying to numb her pain.
She also moved out of her parent’s house and moved to Vancouver, got a job, and met a man who she credits for showing her how to love herself again.
When they started a family, Luke says something inside her started to shift. She knew she’d have to tell her children the truth someday, and something about birth reconnected her to her body.
“My body wasn’t just laboring,” she wrote in her journal. “[It was] waking up.”
Twelve years after the assault, and weeks after she delivered her second child, Luke called up her sister Shawnessy.
“Hey, I’m ready to deal with this,” she said.
So the two sisters made a list.
The sister detectives
Together, they wrote down all the names of people they suspected had soured on Sewell after he had disclosed to his wife and friends two extramarital affairs five years earlier.
Shawnessy Luke’s first call was to one of those ex-lovers, a female veterinarian who had worked at Sewell’s clinic.
In a recording of that phone call shared with CBC and in court testimony, the woman said she and Sewell were discussing previous sexual experiences when he said something shocking.
“So what he told me was that he put ketamine in [Vienna’s] drinks,” the ex-lover revealed during a phone call Shawnessy Luke recorded. “But he didn’t know how much was enough to like, make her forget.”
The sisters say this new information validated a hunch they had come to believe: that Vienna Luke had been drugged.
It also gave her a little piece of evidence to march into the Vancouver Police Department and report.
‘I do my job for the victims’
Vienna Luke’s file was transferred up to the small RCMP detachment in Fort St. John. Against all odds, it landed on the desk of Sgt. Joëlle LaChance, a female officer with a special commitment to cases that many officers would simply dismiss as too hard and too old.
“My whole life I have been a champion for the underdog,” she said. “Being able to stand up for the victim … it’s why I do my job.”
LaChance said she knew Sewell — with his stellar reputation in the community, had a lot to lose. So instead of going directly to the veterinarian to question him, she called on other RCMP units for help, including the undercover unit.
Together, they hatched a plan.
Court records show Sewell had emailed Vienna Luke several times in the years since the night of the drinking game, asking her to accept that he had changed and hoping that the extended family could be together again.
Luke showed the police those emails. Together, they crafted back emails that suggested there could be a possibility for family reconciliation, but first Luke would need the whole truth and they’d have to meet face-to-face.
They pitched Sewell on a plan to fly to Vancouver to meet Luke.
Unbeknownst to Sewell, Luke would be prepared.
For weeks, she trained, preparing to grill him for the facts. She spent a couple of days in a hotel room, sitting across from an undercover RCMP officer who role played with her. The officer worked to get her comfortable asking tough, direct questions, using words like “vagina” and “ejaculate” — specific terms that would be necessary for charges to be laid.
“This isn’t a trained hitman,” the undercover officer said. “She’s very polite, very soft-spoken. And I knew that was exactly the opposite of what we were going to need to do.”
On the day of the sting at Vancouver airport, everyone involved held their breath. RCMP had laid the groundwork, but as soon as the tape started recording and Sewell walked in, it would be entirely up to Luke to get the truth.
For the plan to work, Luke would need to be both victim and hero. The RCMP believed it was the best chance at bringing charges. Luke knew it was her only chance to get answers.
“You think I’m exactly the same,” Luke remembered thinking. “You think I’m gonna play your same little game, but we’ve got a new game and I’m writing it.”
An extraordinary encounter – and as much truth as she’ll ever get
In the recording, Sewell sits down across from Luke and quickly tries to take control. He claims pornography and a culture that objectifies women is part of why he assaulted her that night.
“Okay, but you’re not actually telling me what happened,” Luke replies. “Let’s get back to the night and what actually … happened.”
The undercover officer who had spent time coaching Luke for this moment felt proud.
“Take control of that conversation,” he said in an interview while listening back to the recording. “Don’t just accept a two-minute fluffy bullshit answer.”
Luke persists, peppering Sewell with questions seeking specific details, seemingly undeterred by the fact she’s learning this information about the worst night of her life for the first time.
On tape, Sewell confesses to drugging her, removing her clothing, masturbating and ejaculating twice on her body, and taking 30 photos, including ones where he is spooning her naked body and one where his penis is near her face.
As Luke prepares to wrap up, she lobs an open ended question.
“Is there anything that I’m not asking?” Luke said.
“No reason for me to disclose this. But I took pictures of you at other times,” Sewell replied.
His response allowed the RCMP to recommend another charge, this one for voyeurism.
A rare conviction in a historic sexual assault
In the morning of April 26, 2022, Fort St. John RCMP arrested Sewell as he left his home for work.
Sewell pleaded guilty to one count of sexual assault and two counts of voyeurism — one for the photos he took of her the night he assaulted her and one for times he had watched her through her bedroom window. Crown agreed to stay a charge of administering a drug with intent to commit a sexual assault.
In the courtroom, Luke’s mother, father, and Sewell’s supporters listened to the recording from the airport.
A provincial court judge sentenced Sewell to house arrest. Crown appealed and the Court of Appeal judges determined the lower court judge had overstated the mitigating fact of Sewell’s confession.
They issued a sentence of 33 months less a day in prison for his crimes.
Luke asked the court to remove the publication ban on her name — something that is standard in cases of sexual assault to protect the victim’s identity.
As she began to tell friends and acquaintances her whole story, that she was the unnamed victim, she says she realized how important it was to her that she could also say she was the secret agent.
“It took this … experiment of the police saying, ‘Hey, how about you go undercover as yourself’ for me to realize, whoa, look at the advocate I can be for myself,” she said.
“I was Agent Layla. That’s me.”
The CBC podcast Personally: Agent Layla is available wherever you get your podcasts.
If you’re in immediate danger or fear for your safety or that of others around you, please call 911. For support in your area, you can look for crisis lines and local services via the Ending Sexual Violence Association of Canada database.
