Readers may remember some widely publicized stories, such as the brutal 1983 rape and murder of nine-year-old Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan. The only suspect in her murder, Dennis Melvyn Howe, remains at large. The search for Howe was one of the largest in Canadian history, taking police to remote locations across North America, from mining camps to a cemetery in Sudbury, Ontario, to exhume the remains of a man believed to be Sharin’s killer. Although Howe has not been caught, his face is etched into the minds of many Canadians through wanted posters and news coverage, and Toronto Police continue to receive tips about the case to this very day.
Some cases, such as the unexplained disappearances of fourteen-year-old Ingrid Bauer in 1972 and eight-year-old Nicole Louise Morin in 1985, remain unsolved despite massive searches by police and volunteers, age-enhanced photos and illustrations depicting what they would look like as adults, rewards, and the distribution of thousands of missing persons posters. At the time they disappeared the Internet was many years away. Today, their names and the details of their cases are being kept alive through video re-enactments on YouTube, and information posted on police websites, the Doe Network, and Child Find, to name a few.
One of the greatest challenges in writing a book about unsolved crimes is deciding which cases to include. And what happens if a case you’re writing about is solved? As someone with a keen interest in true crime since childhood, I grew up reading about a number of the crimes in this book and have wanted to write about them for a long time. Others were suggested by police officers and representatives from missing persons organizations. I also received numerous emails from friends and families of murdered and missing persons who heard about my upcoming book via the Internet, and have tried to include these cases where possible.
A number of cases I originally intended to include in Unsolved were, in fact, solved during the time I was researching and writing, most notably the May 2007 murder of multi-millionaire and philanthropist Glen Davis. I originally intended to contrast the Davis homicide with another case, the unsolved 1998 murder of businessman and Obus Forme founder, Frank Roberts. Both men were enormously wealthy but came by their millions in entirely different ways. Davis was the son of Argus Corporation chairman Nelson M. Davis and inherited a vast fortune when his father died in the pool at his Arizona home in 1979. Roberts was a self-made man who, following a tennis injury, invented a unique back support that found its way into thousands of homes and offices across Canada.
Both Davis, sixty-six, and Roberts, sixty-seven at the time of his death, were enormously rich but had completely opposite public personas. While Roberts embraced the limelight, Davis eschewed it completely, except on those rare occasions when it helped to promote awareness of his favourite environmental charities, like the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Fund. The thrice-married Roberts was the father of two sons, a daughter, and had thirteen grandchildren; Davis was married to the same woman for years, and had no children. Tragically, the larger than life Roberts and the shy, unassuming Davis both met their ends violently. Roberts was gunned down in the West Toronto parking lot of his factory, while Davis was shot to death in a North Toronto underground parking lot. Immediately, the lives of both men were plastered across newspaper headlines and stories were a muddied mixture of fact, rumour, and innuendo. Were the murderers dissatisfied business associates from the past? Did a jealous husband order the hit? Were large corporations, whose very existence depended on logging, mining, and other activities that destroy wildlife behind the slaying of Glen Davis?
In both cases, the line between fact and fantasy quickly became blurred in the media and online, as reporters exposed the professional and personal lives of Davis and Roberts. In many ways, Davis was the world’s luckiest man. Left with an empire worth $100 million, he cheated death. The first time was in 1983, when he survived an airplane fire that claimed twenty-three lives, including Canadian folk musician Stan Rogers. The second was in 2005, when he was savagely attacked outside his Toronto office by a man wielding a baseball bat. The third occasion, in the parking garage on the afternoon of Friday May 18, 2007, Davis’s luck ran out. As a youngster I knew Davis — albeit not very well — and remember speaking to him at length soon after he survived the fire that broke out aboard Air Canada flight 797. Davis was a soft-spoken and decent individual, and as of this writing several men, including Davis’s first cousin once removed, have been charged in connection with his senseless homicide. In the end, it appears the motive for his murder had nothing to do with conspiracy theories about big businesses versus environmentalists, but money, which he willingly gave away in the millions to help causes to benefit humanity.
Unsolved crimes present us with a kaleidoscope of emotions. Intriguing and infuriating, I believe that some of the cases in Unsolved still have a chance of being solved, even years after the murder or disappearance took place. Time and technology can sometimes be an advantage in cold cases. As the years pass, witnesses may recall details that seemed unimportant at the time or feel more comfortable approaching police with information because they no longer fear reprisal. Scientific advances, such as DNA technology, have given new life and renewed hope to solving many cold cases, as seen in the case of Susan O’Hara Tice and Erin Harrison Gilmour. In life, Tice and Gilmour never knew one another and had very little in common. A recently divorced mother of four children, Tice moved back to Toronto from western Canada in the summer of 1983, and was brutally murdered soon after. Just a few months later, attractive, single socialite Erin Harrison Gilmour, just twenty-two, was murdered in her Yorkville apartment. Both women were raped and semen recovered from the crime scenes was subjected to DNA testing seventeen years later in 2000, revealing the same man was responsible for killing both women. The murders of Tice and Gilmour remain unsolved, yet their killer’s genetic fingerprint is on file.
Technology has dramatically advanced the way police search for suspects, going far beyond the days of wanted posters papering the walls of police stations and post offices. Just as criminals have kept pace with technology, so have police agencies, which frequently use the latest tools to apprehend criminals. It is not uncommon for police to incorporate social networking websites like YouTube and Twitter to inform the public and the media about murder or bank robbery suspects, or help locate missing children. As technology progresses, friends and families of murder victims also pay tribute to their lost loved ones through websites like MySpace and Facebook.
This book has been an emotional experience from the beginning, and I cannot say “from beginning to end,” since there is no end, at least not yet. Unsolved crimes don’t reach their conclusion with the death or disappearance of a loved one, they reach their end with the perpetrators being caught. Even in cases like the murder of Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan where there is only one suspect: Dennis Melvyn Howe. For many people, the case will never be closed until he is located, alive or dead.
My intention with this book is to keep the names of the murdered and the disappeared alive, and possibly resurrect memories from someone, anyone, who has information in whoever committed these crimes so that they can be brought to justice.
Every effort has been made to paint as complete a picture as possible, from the times the crimes took place to the present day. In a number of cases new information was made available shortly before the book was published and