Around 6:00 P.M., Miramichi Police Dispatch received a call from David Tanasichuk for Constable Seeley. He left a message saying that he would be leaving for Saint John in fifteen minutes to look for Maria, and he left his mother’s phone number in case Seeley needed to reach him there. Because clarifying the discrepancy in dates was important in initiating any inquiry, Seeley tried to return his call and when she couldn’t reach him she immediately returned to his apartment, which was dark and he was apparently already gone.
While she was at the residence, Dispatch received another call from David. About twenty minutes later, he called Seeley and reported he was en route to Saint John, because he wanted to be involved in the process of finding Maria. Seeley then asked him to clarify the date Maria had left for Saint John, and he responded that Maria had left on the 12th.
During her conversations with David, Seeley had informed him that while the police would be looking into the matter, her work schedule would be changing and she would next be at work several days later. He had responded by asking if it would be all right, if he had questions in the interim, to contact Detective Brian Cummings, with whom he and Maria had developed a relationship recently during the events surrounding the violent death of Maria’s only child. Seeley agreed that she would transmit the information to Detective Cummings.
Because Seeley knew that Detective Cummings had established a relationship with the Tanasichuks, she contacted him at home to inform him of the situation. She imparted some of the details of her conversations with David Tanasichuk and her concerns about the discrepancies in the date he said Maria had gone missing, as well as her observations about David’s behavior and impairment that suggested possible drug use.
By then it was Sunday night. Detective Cummings had just opened a beer and was about to watch the Super Bowl with a friend. He advised her to take good notes on her conversations with David and in any follow-up interviews she might conduct with any of the people he’d suggested might have information about Maria’s whereabouts. Cummings told her that he would review the file in the morning and begin looking into the matter.
The following morning, Detective Cummings was across the river at the courthouse (the main police station is located on Water Street on the Chatham side of the river and the courthouse is on the opposite side of the Miramichi in former Newcastle), attending to a case, when he saw David’s former sister-in-law in the lobby. Knowing that she was Tanasichuk’s former sister-in-law through a relationship with one of his brothers, he thought she might be familiar with the details of Maria’s departure, so he struck up a conversation. When Cummings asked what she knew about the Tanasichuks’ situation, she told him that she had stopped in at their residence a few days earlier, on January 24. Maria hadn’t been there and David’s appearance—slurred speech and “whacked” eyes—made her think he was high on drugs. During that visit, David had told her that Maria had gone to Saint John. David’s former sister-in-law also told Cummings that word on the street was that “something bad” had happened to Maria.
Although he didn’t expect to find David Tanasichuk at home, since David had told Seeley the previous night that he was on his way to Saint John, Detective Cummings headed right over to the Tanasichuks’ apartment when he was finished with his business at the courthouse. Much to his surprise, when he knocked on the door, David called out, “Come in,” and Cummings entered the apartment.
Cummings was shocked at what he found. The apartment was in an extreme state of disarray, a marked change from its usual tidy state and something Maria, who was a meticulous housekeeper, never would have stood for. He sat down with David and attempted to learn more about Maria’s departure, probable whereabouts and why her husband had been concerned enough to call the police and report her disappearance.
When Brian “Bull” Cummings (Cummings’s nickname, because of his shaved head and large size, was based on Nostradamus “Bull” Shannon, a character on the TV series Night Court) first came into Miramichi and joined the Newcastle Police Force, there was sometimes a kind of “wild west” feel to policing in the area. Drug dealing was rampant on the river. The custom of workmen celebrating the weekend’s arrival with heavy drinking was the norm; fights and brawls were common. A lot of police work involved breaking down doors to serve drug warrants. On Saturday nights, a constable could be reasonably certain that he was going to mix it up with someone before the night was over, and it was pretty likely that he’d wake up hurting on Sunday.
Early on, his fellow officers had warned him about the Tanasichuk brothers. They were a rough bunch, he was told, and one of them had expressed a deep desire to kill a police officer, so he’d better watch his back. Over the years, though, while one or another of the brothers occasionally crossed his path, he only had sporadic contact with David and did not know Maria.
Although Cummings had had little interaction with him, David Tanasichuk was well-known to the Miramichi police and to other police agencies in the province as a deeply angry man with an explosive temper and a reputation for violence. He was considered a bad man to cross, and many people were afraid of him. At the time he reported his wife missing, Tanasichuk was thirty-six, with a criminal record stretching back twenty years that included possession of stolen property, assault, breaking and entering, theft, escape, fraud, assault on a police officer and multiple convictions for possession of a restricted weapon.
In one significant case, his rage over an undercover drug operation which resulted in his prosecution had led him to plot the assassination of the presiding judge, the crown prosecutor and a police officer who had participated in the operation. Although, as a convicted felon, he was prohibited by law from owning a firearm, he had obtained a sawed-off shotgun to use in carrying out his plot.
In a rural hunting culture such as that on the Miramichi, guns are commonplace in most homes. Although, by law, guns are supposed to be registered, registration is considered a hassle and an expense, so it is common practice to simply fail to mention guns in the house, acting as though they don’t exist and thus the law isn’t violated, rather than go through the trouble of registering them. With guns everywhere and a ready supply of people in need of money, it’s not difficult for someone looking for a gun to obtain one. Sawing off a shotgun is an easy way to convert a readily available hunting tool into an easily concealed and extremely lethal weapon.
Once he’d obtained the sawed-off, David Tanasichuk had wrapped his altered weapon in a tarp to protect it and hidden it in the woods just inside the city limits, in a spot where it could be easily retrieved when he was ready to execute his plan. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for his intended victims, he had confided some of the details of his scheme to a fellow drug dealer who, it turned out, was working with the police as an informant.
As reported by the local paper, The Miramichi Leader, on October 27, 1993, the presiding judge, Judge McNamee, called the plot “a plan of wholesale slaughter” and, recognizing its lethal potential as an easily concealed weapon, he described the sawed-off shotgun as “the most sinister weapon imaginable.” Noting that it had the potential to do untold damage, he observed: “These individuals [the targets of the plot] would have no way of knowing the seriousness of this or the timing. One could only imagine what they must have gone through because of this threat…The thought of the use of this weapon almost makes one’s blood run cold.”2
David Tanasichuk was an on-again, off-again drug dealer who was suspected of having grown marijuana in the woods outside the city and of having a “back door” clientele who bought drugs from his house. Although he was prohibited from having guns and