> Editorial note: truecrime.news is currently unable to verify all details about Season 2 through official CBC sources. This article is based on discussion within the Reddit community r/TrueCrimePodcasts, as well as confirmed information about Season 1. We will update this article as further information becomes available.
Canadian public broadcaster CBC's podcast Hunting Warhead is reportedly returning for a second season, titled Hunting the Suicide Salesman, with host Daemon Fairless investigating a man who allegedly targeted vulnerable people online — often young individuals struggling with mental illness — and helped them plan and carry out their own deaths, either for payment or other motives.
The first season of Hunting Warhead, released in 2020, made an immediate impact on the international true crime landscape. The podcast followed a team of investigators — including Canadian and Danish law enforcement — as they hunted down the administrators of one of the world's largest child sexual abuse material distribution networks. It earned widespread praise for its journalistic depth and its ability to humanize both victims and investigators without resorting to sensationalism.
With the new season, Fairless shifts his focus but not his standards. The subject matter now sits in one of the most legally and ethically complex corners of online crime: a category of offending that is extraordinarily difficult to investigate and even harder to prosecute.
So-called "suicide coaches" — individuals who actively encourage and assist vulnerable people in taking their own lives — are not a new phenomenon. But they have become significantly harder to combat as encryption and online anonymization have advanced. In the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, there have been prosecutions of individuals who, through chat platforms, forums, and direct messages, manipulated vulnerable people into suicide.
The legal landscape varies widely by country. In many jurisdictions, assisting or encouraging suicide is a criminal offense, but legislation often struggles to keep pace with the dark web investigations reality in which a perpetrator may be located in a different country and operating behind multiple layers of anonymity. When money changes hands and victims are groomed over weeks or months, the crime takes on an additional dimension of predation that courts are only beginning to grapple with.
According to the Reddit community that first surfaced details about the new season, Hunting the Suicide Salesman will examine how one individual was able to operate in this space over an extended period — and how investigators eventually closed in.
Daemon Fairless is a Canadian journalist and author with a background in science journalism. In the true crime world, he is best known for Hunting Warhead, which set him apart from many peers in the genre by consistently centering the perspectives of investigators and victims rather than dwelling on perpetrators, and by grounding the storytelling in research into what drives people toward extreme criminal behavior.
CBC has a long tradition of invested documentary journalism, and Hunting Warhead stands as one of its most high-profile demonstrations that public broadcasters can produce true crime podcasts that are both commercially successful and journalistically responsible.
While an official release date and episode structure have not yet been announced by CBC, early discussion in the true crime community suggests the season will follow a similar investigative format to the first — immersive, carefully reported, and attentive to the human cost on all sides of the story.
Suicide facilitation online remains one of the most urgent and underreported challenges facing digital platforms, telecoms, and law enforcement agencies globally. If Hunting the Suicide Salesman matches the ambition of its predecessor, it could do for this issue what Season 1 did for awareness of child sexual abuse material networks: bring a largely invisible crime into sharp, uncomfortable focus.
truecrime.news will update this article when CBC publishes official information about the season's release date and episode structure.
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