A Calgary woman accused of sending five emails that threatened former Alberta justice minister Jonathan Denis, his mother and several of his friends has seen those charges dropped after evidence was revealed in court that one of the emails was sent through an email-spoofing website based in the Czech Republic and police determined the other four were “not authentic.”
Andrea Petzold was acquitted on four counts of uttering threats in one trial and saw charges of extortion and uttering threats stayed, ahead of a second trial.
“I feel I was set up. I feel I was framed,” said Petzold, 45, who has always maintained she didn’t send the emails that led to her arrests.
The actual origin of the emails remains unknown.
The case reveals “a vulnerability” in the justice system, said Doug King, a criminal justice professor at Mount Royal University, who believes police services and Crown prosecutors need to be more diligent when dealing with digital evidence.
“Whoever was doing the investigation, it didn’t cross their mind that this could have been a fake email — a spoof email,” he said.
“Police agencies can’t be perfect in terms of keeping up with technology, but they still have to show due diligence.”
Key details surrounding the charges against Petzold remained under a publication ban for more than a year.
That ban lifted with the conclusion of her second trial in early November, which ended when she pleaded guilty to possession of a prohibited firearm and accepted a six-month conditional sentence to be served in the community.
The firearm charge was laid after Cochrane RCMP executed a search warrant at Petzold’s home in 2023, as part of their investigation into a threatening email they believed at the time to have come from Petzold. While investigators were in her home, they found a Glock handgun that she didn’t have a valid licence for, along with several magazines of ammunition.
Petzold’s lawyers told the court the gun belonged to someone else but, in an agreed statement of facts, she admitted she was “reckless or willfully blind” to the fact it was in her home.
Petzold faced two trials from two sets of investigations into threatening emails: one by Cochrane RCMP and one by the Calgary Police Service (CPS).
The RCMP case
The email that led to Petzold’s arrest by RCMP was received by Marguerite Denis, Jonathan’s mother, on April 1, 2023.
It read, in part: “I’m going to get Jonathan disbarred and burn his house down. I know where you live, and I will keep posting your address unless you pay me a substantial sum. I have more evidence that will make you want to leave the city and make all of your lives a living he’ll (sic) … You have no way but to pay me.”
On Oct. 1, 2024, a preliminary inquiry was held into all of the RCMP’s charges against Petzold, a standard process used to determine if there is sufficient evidence to send a case to trial.
The details from this hearing are outlined in more than 200 pages of transcripts obtained by CBC News, which remained under a publication ban until the conclusion of the trial.
Both Jonathan and Marguerite Denis testified at the preliminary inquiry that they had been friends with Petzold in the past and travelled in the same political circles.
Marguerite told the inquiry her relationship with Petzold soured in October 2021 over a disagreement related to the municipal election in Calgary at the time.
RCMP officers based in Cochrane, Alta., investigated the threatening email received by Marguerite Denis. (David Bell/CBC)
The lead RCMP investigator also testified at the inquiry that he had liaised with Calgary police and learned that, in the fall of 2022, Jonathan Denis, his mother and some of his friends contacted Calgary police attempting to get Petzold charged in connection with anonymous, antagonistic social media posts they believed Petzold was behind.
Cpl. Ramzey Abdelhameid said Jonathan provided RCMP with a list of names of other people who had been in touch with Calgary police regarding Petzold.
“He seemed upset with everything that he alleged had happened to him, and he wanted something done about it,” Abdelhameid said of his interaction with Jonathan in November 2022. “That’s when he was motivated to, I guess, seek justice.”
On April 24, 2023, Marguerite gave her laptop computer to an RCMP officer for a forensic analysis.
On May 17, 2023, before the forensic analysis of the laptop had begun, the RCMP executed a search warrant of Petzold’s Calgary home, where they found the prohibited firearm and ammunition.
Police also seized three electronic devices belonging to Petzold, but a subsequent analysis of the devices found no evidence on any of them that she’d sent the threatening email.
In July 2023, the RCMP completed the forensic analysis of the email found on Marguerite’s laptop.
In August, Petzold was arrested and charged with extortion, uttering threats and several firearms-related offences.
Ultimately, though, only the gun charges would make it to trial, in November 2025.
The ‘spoofing’ revelation
During Petzold’s preliminary hearing on Oct. 1, 2023, the Crown called RCMP digital forensic expert Const. Wilson Yee to explain his analysis of the email on Marguerite’s laptop.
Petzold’s defence lawyer Ian McKay then had a chance to cross-examine.
He asked Yee about the email “headers” — metadata contained in the digital file that is not typically seen by the end user unless they specifically go looking for it.
The email headers read, in part: “Received: From Emkei.CZ”.
That website, based in the Czech Republic, describes itself as a “free online fake mailer” and allows users to send emails that can appear to come from any sender.
A screenshot of the email-spoofing website referenced in the metadata of an email received by Marguerite Denis that threatened her and her son, former Alberta justice minister Jonathan Denis. (Emkei.cz)
“That email potentially could have been a spoof email, correct?” McKay asked Yee.
“Looking at it now, yes,” the RCMP constable replied.
“You were never asked to look into that?” McKay continued.
“No,” Yee replied.
Weeks after that courtroom exchange, Petzold’s lawyers were informed by Crown prosecutor Brian Holtby that the charges of extortion and uttering threats were being stayed, and Petzold would face only the firearms charges at trial.
A spokesperson for the Alberta Crown Prosecution Service told CBC News “additional investigation was conducted” after Petzold’s preliminary inquiry, and the Crown determined that the standard for prosecution on the charges of extortion and uttering threats was no longer met.
The RCMP declined to comment on the case.
In a statement to CBC News on behalf of her family, Marguerite Denis said the family has been concerned for their safety for years as a result of threats they had received, “particularly since the illegal firearms charges were laid” against Petzold.
She added that “online harassment has also persisted” against her family.
At this point, she said: “We are focused on putting this behind us and looking forward to renewed peace in our lives.”
The Calgary police case
In the spring of 2023, while the RCMP were investigating the threatening email received by Jonathan Denis’s mother, officers with the Calgary Police Service (CPS) were conducting an investigation of their own.
The CPS case centred on four emails received by three people Jonathan has previously described as “friends” — Mike Terrigno, Maurizio Terrigno and Alexandra Brayne — between March 20 and April 1, 2023.
McKay said these emails led the CPS to charge Petzold with four counts of uttering threats, but — unlike in the RCMP investigation — original, digital copies of the emails were not provided to his defence team as part of the disclosure process.
On Oct. 9, 2024, McKay said he requested digital copies of the emails at the heart of the CPS charges, including metadata containing the email headers that could reveal their authenticity.
McKay said Crown prosecutors never provided that information and instead informed the defence they planned to simply give up on the case.
“We went into court and they called no evidence,” McKay said. “As a result, she was found not guilty.”
Ian McKay is a criminal defence lawyer with Calgary-based McKay Ferg LLP. (Submitted by Market House Ltd.)
Court records confirm all four charges of uttering threats were dismissed on Oct. 24, 2024.
“We can confirm that it did come to our attention that the emails were not authentic and that they did not originate from the person charged,” the CPS told CBC News in a written statement.
Mike Terrigno provided CBC News with a statement on behalf of his family, saying they are “glad to learn that the charges related to the threatening emails have been resolved, as this provides some clarity on what was a deeply concerning and distressing situation.”
He also noted ongoing civil litigation he has against Petzold and an unnamed “John Doe,” which includes a default judgment in 2023 that saw Petzold ordered to pay him $80,000 for defamation and “cyber harassment.”
A default judgment occurs when someone is sued but never files a defence in court.
‘I find it egregious’
Now that the second trial is over, Petzold is free to speak about the threatening messages she was alleged to have sent.
Petzold says she is “unaware of any civil litigation” filed against her by Mike Terrigno.
“I am in the process of obtaining legal guidance to verify any such civil suit and will vigorously defend myself against any related default judgment. At no time have I ever criminally harassed or defamed Mike Terrigno.”
Petzold also confirmed that her relationship with Jonathan Denis, his mother and the Terrignos began to unravel after the 2021 municipal election.
She noted that, up until last month, Mike Terrigno was under a no-contact order to stay away from her as part of a one-year peace bond he entered into on Nov. 19, 2024.
That order stemmed from an incident at a downtown restaurant on March 23, 2023, which initially led Calgary police to charge Mike Terrigno with assaulting and harassing Petzold. The charges were withdrawn as part of the peace bond agreement.
A sign outside the Calgary Police Service headquarters is seen in this file photo. In the spring of 2023, while the RCMP were investigating the threatening email received by Jonathan Denis’s mother, officers with the CPS were conducting an investigation of their own. (CBC News)
As for the charges of extortion and uttering threats laid against her, Petzold said she’s upset that police and prosecutors didn’t notice — or look for — metadata revealing the authenticity of the emails until her own defence lawyers pointed out at her preliminary hearing that the email received by Marguerite Denis had come via the Emkei.CZ spoofing site.
“I find it egregious,” Petzold said in an interview. “I find it unbelievable that it passed through the hands of so many officers, so many people within the police department, the Crown prosecution office, that nobody flagged this at any point in time.”
She wants police to conduct further investigation into who sent the emails.
Neither Calgary police nor the RCMP would say whether they have done or are doing that.
Petzold’s lawyer says that’s not good enough.
“If there hasn’t been any investigations done,” McKay said, “I would ask why.”
Spoofed emails and the law
King, with Mount Royal University, says the issues in Petzold’s case appear to have originated with the RCMP obtaining a search warrant without first confirming the authenticity of the emails.
“It sounds to me like the RCMP missed a step in this investigation,” he said.
He also noted police and judges need to factor in the urgency of an investigation when applying for and granting search warrants, and said every application is “very much situational.”
Doug King is a justice studies professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary. (Francois Joly/Radio-Canada)
Police services and prosecutors elsewhere have been tripped up by emails that turned out to be spoofed as well.
In 2016, a police officer in Bellevue, Wash., was arrested and spent 49 days behind bars on several charges that stemmed from a relationship with a woman he had met online. But prosecutors later admitted they had been taken in by “a sophisticated ruse” that the woman had concocted, which included the use of the Emkei.CZ email spoofing site.
And in 2023, both police and journalists in Hamilton, Ont., were fooled by a spoofed email that was sent to reporters, ostensibly from the email address the Hamilton Police Service uses to communicate with the media.
The email told a false tale of a joint investigation between Hamilton police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force in a multimillion cryptocurrency scam.
In that case, police mistakenly believed the email was real and even forwarded it along to additional reporters before realizing it, in fact, did not originate from them.
King believes police and prosecutors need to “sharpen up training in this area” to reduce the risk of being fooled again in the future.
“Given the nature of changing technology, it does mean that there are obligations on law enforcement, and then the Crown also, to check up on the evidence, to do a more rigorous assessment of the origin of an email.”
