Hm... not sure it would have. Something simple like overwriting freed memory with an identifiable pattern wouldn't have helped, because by the time the crash happened, the actor's memory had been reallocated and was being used for something else.
This was on the Wii, which had some pretty bare-bones development tools, so it wouldn't have been real easy to try to use something like valgrind to do more sophisticated memory debugging or anything. It was basically single-threaded, too, BTW (I think audio and input were based on interrupt handlers), and I made it more so with the repeatable build.