“So Darlene and I figured it had been enough time, and the first thing I thought of was, “I’m calling Saint John. So here I am calling up Saint John…I think this was the 23rd or something. And I told mum Maria was supposed to have gone to Saint John, and mum said, ‘Funny, I haven’t seen her. If Maria’s in town, she’ll surely come to see me or [her brother-in-law].’ So mum said she’d get [the brother-in-law] and Billy to go around and check up with old friends if anyone had seen her. And nobody had seen hide nor tail of her.”
What investigators are looking for, in the case of a missing person, is whether she has departed in significant ways from her usual behavior. Nearly every aspect of the story David was telling them marked a significant departure. It seemed unlikely to the investigators that Maria, who spent days at a time huddling in her pajamas on the sofa and who was so strongly attached to her apartment, would suddenly decide to leave town. It seemed improbable that a woman who regularly spoke by phone to her sister, her niece and her close friends and visited with them frequently would leave town without a word to anyone, or that she would be gone for two weeks without being in contact with anyone she knew either in Miramichi or in Saint John, where she still had many friends.
It seemed suspicious that a woman who, only a little more than a week before her sudden departure, had consulted her doctor for medicine to help her with anxiety and depression would leave town without it; yet David had given the medicine bottles, one barely touched, the other empty, to Cummings and reported that she’d left them behind.
Investigators found no one who knew of Maria taking any trips without David; just a week before, despite her discouragement and depression and the fact that they had been arguing frequently, Maria had been fearful of leaving David alone when he might need her and she had refused to leave for a mere three days with her best friend, Darlene.
Given how attached to her jewelry collection her friends said that Maria was, they felt she would never leave her cherished jewelry behind. Even David had said she wouldn’t do that. Yet immediately after the last date on which anyone had seen Maria, David had been pawning pieces of jewelry that he specifically told Detective Cummings that Maria had taken with her.
And then there was that small, but telling, comment that Paul Fiander had noticed while monitoring Tanasichuk’s interview with Cummings from another room. During their discussion about Maria’s jewelry, her attachment to it and her habits about wearing it, Tanasichuk had said: “…See, Maria was the type where one week she’d wear them all and the next week she’d wear none or just a couple.” Maria was. David had not used the word is, suggesting a present connection, but was, suggesting that Maria, and her choices about what jewelry she would select and wear, was a thing of the past. This comment acquired greater significance when meshed with what they were learning about the fate of some of Maria’s jewelry. In his book on statement analysis, I Know You Are Lying, Mark McClish observes, “One way that people’s words will betray them is through verb tenses…It may also be that by talking in the past tense, a person will reveal he is being deceptive. Listen to the verb tenses being used in a statement. Inconsistencies in verb tenses can show you what a person is really saying.”7
There was another disturbing piece of information that was distinctly at odds with the story David was telling. While Cummings was in that interview room with David, the detective bureau had received an urgent call from the addiction counseling service at Miramichi Hospital.
In his initial statement to Constable Seeley, David said his counselor at the addiction counseling service had told the couple that they needed to spend some time apart. David Tanasichuk had reiterated that information during the formal interview, explaining in detail the discussion that he and Maria had had about who would leave and where they would go to gain the time apart their counselor had recommended.
Detective Sergeant Fiander, who received the call from the addiction counseling service, learned it was prompted by the newspaper article about Maria’s disappearance and the concerns it raised at the agency regarding Maria’s safety. The addiction counseling service director told Fiander that at the beginning of his treatment, David Tanasichuk had signed a contract with his counselor, agreeing that if his wife or his counselor saw signs of “relapse, agitated, restless temper, aggression of voice, missed appointments without calling to cancel or of risk to society,” he gave them permission to call the police.
The call was made pursuant to that contract and the counseling service’s “risk to third party” policy. The caller informed the police that at prior appointments, David Tanasichuk had stated that sometimes he got so angry he wanted to hurt people, sometimes to the point where he felt like killing someone, and one of the reasons for his drug use was that it took away those urges. The addiction counseling service had received calls from Maria twice during December, expressing concern about David’s drug use and her fear that he might hurt himself or someone else.
David had missed two appointments in January. When he did attend an appointment on January 23, he had come without Maria and didn’t want to talk about his wife, ducking counselor Sylvette Robichaud’s queries about Maria’s absence. At that appointment, Robichaud observed that David seemed like a different man. He discussed with her his interest in writing an article on his drug abuse and his hopes that such an article might be helpful to other drug users. Despite his statement that he wasn’t on drugs, Robichaud felt that he had been using that day and she terminated the session early because his impairment made further discussion futile. As he was leaving, he also violated the boundaries of such a session by attempting to embrace her. Robichaud further reported that she had never told the Tanasichuks that they needed to spend time apart, other than suggesting the occasional hour apart to give each other some space.
Because of the initial confusion about the date of Maria’s disappearance, the investigators had been diligent in trying to find witnesses who could establish the last date when she had been seen in Miramichi. In their interviews, investigators had identified three people who had seen or spoken with Maria on January 15. Her next door neighbor, John Paquet, had spoken to her that morning when she came outside to see if the mail had arrived. He was certain of the date because Paquet was waiting for his guide’s license, which arrived the following day. Maria’s niece in Fredericton had spoken to her on the phone that afternoon, a call that had been interrupted by someone at the door. Finally, Darlene had had coffee with Maria that evening, and at that time the two friends had arranged a shopping trip for the 17th.
The investigators then looked at the information David Tanasichuk had given them about the date of Maria’s departure. He had been very specific in detailing their conversations on January 11, the day before Maria left, and his activities on the 12th, the day she had allegedly taken the bus to Saint John. He had gotten up first and brought Maria her coffee in bed. She had not yet dressed at the time he was ready to leave for his friend Donnie Trevors’s house, where he was going to work on his ATV. She had her bag open on the floor and had begun to pack. David had asked if she was really going and when she said she was, they had embraced and promised to always be good to each other and then he had left. When he returned, Maria was gone.
Why was it, then, that in subsequent days, her friend Darlene would have visited her at the residence twice? Why would Maria have made plans to go shopping with Darlene if she was planning to leave town? Why would she have failed to mention her planned departure to her sister, her best friend, to Cindy Richardson or to her niece, when they spoke on the phone?
Perhaps more interesting was the question of why David had told Darlene, when she stopped by on the 16th, that Maria wasn’t home not because she’d left to go to Saint John, but because she’d gone to a baby shower. Why had he told her sister that she’d gone to Saint John on the 19th and would be back around the 25th? Why had he told another acquaintance that Maria had left on the 20th?
A question all of the officers raised, as they sat around the conference table, was why David had chosen the 26th, two weeks after her supposed departure for Saint John, to become worried enough to report Maria missing?
In part, their interviews suggested, the pressure had come from the increasing level of concern expressed