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She was the adventurous daughter of Canadian hockey icon Bob Gainey and when Laura Gainey was swept overboard from the deck of the tall ship, the Picton Castle, last year it was reported as a tragic accident.

But, Gillian Findlay and a fifth estate team have investigated and found that there are disturbing questions about the safety conditions on the ship and about two conflicting reports about what happened the night Laura was swept into the Atlantic Ocean.

It's a fantasy most of us have indulged in. A lucky break that sets us up financially for life. When one young woman hit the jackpot and won more than $12 million, she got another lucky break. When there were questions about how she got her lucky lotto ticket, the crown corporation looking into it was too disorganized to get the answers. Linden MacIntyre reports.

He was one of the greatest skiers Canada has ever produced. But, of all the Crazy Canucks, Dave Irwin was also known for something else: his spectacular crashes. In 2001, while training on a ski slope in Banff, Irwin crashed again, compounding the concussions of years before.

But, this time, when he opened his eyes, there was nothing and no one he recognized or remembered. Bob McKeown has the miraculous story of Dave Irwin.

When a woman leaves her home in Nova Scotia to travel to England, it isn't usually cause for an international criminal investigation. But, the script for Heli Munroe's trip is straight out of Alfred Hitchcock. Heli's husband, Sandy, says she simply vanished one day and that her own brother was her kidnapper. Now, he can't get her back.

With a story like that, Sandy reaped a lot of public sympathy. But, what really happened? Hana Gartner investigates.

The launch of Brian Mulroney's volume of memoirs was the publishing event of this year. But, in more than 1,000 comprehensive pages of anecdote and information there is one notable name missing--Karlheinz Schreiber--the German dealmaker at the centre of the darkest chapter of Mr. Mulroney's life.

Linden MacIntyre and a fifth estate team report new revelations about the relationship between the two men as well as details about the attempt to cover the trail of the $300,000 cash the former Prime Minister received from Schreiber.

In the past few years, a rhetorical firestorm has engulfed the debate about global warming, pitting science against spin, with inflammatory words on both sides. That debate only intensifed recently when former Vice-President Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize for his populist environmental campaign.

Last season, the fifth estate's Bob McKeown investigated the roots of another kind of campaign--one to negate the science and the threat of global warming. You can watch The Denial Machine again, more timely than ever, with new, updated information.

It seemed like and open and shut case for the police and the prosecutors. A carload of dubious characters, a blast from a sawn-off shotgun, a body and then a trial that delivered Erin Michael Walsh to a penetentiary to serve a life sentence. For more than 30 years, the convicted killer proclaimed his innocence.

Now, Linden MacIntyre reports, recovered evidence has put vindication within Erin Walsh's grasp, but there is a new urgency to have his name cleared: doctors have given him another kind of life sentence.

This is the next chapter in the fascinating story of the notorious polygamous community of Bountiful, British Columbia. Since the fifth estate first visited the town and met its leader, Winston Blackmore, much has happened both within and without this break-away sect of Mormons. Authorities, in the United States and Canada, are investigating them and a bitter, potentially dangerous, power struggle has developed between Winston Blackmore and the sect's self-proclaimed prophet, the American Warren Jeffs.

The story of two journeys--a .45 calibre handgun from Jonesboro, Georgia and a young boy from Jamaica--and how their fates collide tragically in a home in suburban Toronto, is the subject of the fifth estate's season premiere. The Firestar .45 that killed six-year-old Michael James is just one of the illegal handguns that flood across the U.S. border and end up in Canadian cities where they become weapons of mayhem and murder. Bob McKeown takes us from the gun dealer to the violent streets of American cities, through the halls of power in Washington and into the heart of America's gun industry, a National Rifle Association convention, and illuminates a story that is filling today's headlines.

Since the US-led invasion four years ago, the fifth estate has covered Iraq and the war on terror from virtually every angle--the military, media, intellligence, politics--revealing aspects of the story that you didn't find anywhere else.

Now, as the White House warns about the latest threat in the region, this time from Iran, we go back to examine the deception, suspect intelligence, even lies that convinced the world of the rightness of targeting Saddam Hussein.

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