Authors: Kate Lines
I eventually went up to Kirkland Lake to meet with the Wilson family. As I drove north on Highway 11, north of North Bay, I noticed a large billboard off to the right with the picture of a young teenaged girl whom I recognized immediately. In 1996 fifteen-year-old Melanie Ethier disappeared from the nearby town of New Liskeard. She was last seen when she’d left a friend’s place around 2:00 a.m. to walk home. It was assumed that she hadn’t left the area voluntarily. I’d assigned Jim Van Allen to profile the case and he consulted with me on it. But all of the resources of New Liskeard Police Service and the OPP had failed to uncover any trace of her in the last fifteen years. Her smiling school picture on the billboard had a caption underneath, “You know what happened to me … so why don’t you help?” Another family was still waiting and wondering what happened to their daughter.
It was too early to check into my hotel when I arrived so I drove around Kirkland Lake for a bit, getting the sense that the town still had that “little rough around the edges” feel to it. Like many towns in Ontario it had the usual bingo hall, hockey rink and Royal Canadian Legion, bookended by two Tim Hortons donut shops. Chatting with a few locals over lunch at a pizzeria, I found out that in the early 1900s the town had literally been built on gold and the area had some of the richest gold mines in the world. They were equally proud of having produced a handful of hockey players who went on to play in the NHL. During the gold boom the town swelled to a population of twenty-five thousand from the more than thirty area mines, but now it was only about eight thousand.
After lunch I drove out to where Harvey Kirkland Road extended south from town and into the bush. Pavement turned into gravel and less than a kilometre into the pine bush was a clearing and small cluster of homes. The house that Kathy Wilson had lived in had long since burned down, but I found the address and retraced the route Kathy would have taken into town.
The next day Yvan Godin came with me to visit the only still-living members of the Wilson family, Kathy’s seventy-six-year-old mother and her little sister, Pee Wee, fifty. (Karen Wilson had died of a heart attack only a few months earlier.) We met at Aline’s apartment in town. There was more laughter than tears with stories of their early lives in Harvey Kirkland.
Pee Wee talked about what it was like to get the early-morning phone call from Yvan telling her that her cousin had finally been arrested. “It was better than winning a million,” she said. “I phoned Karen and then we went to tell Mom. I was so excited when I got there that Mom actually thought that we had won the lottery because we had bought some tickets just a few days before.”
Our conversation turned more serious when Aline recounted the day that Kathy went missing and how the investigation had initially been bungled. Once filled with so much ill feeling toward the police, she now had nothing but praise for all that the OPP did for their family. She told me that although she would have done anything to get her daughter back alive, she would die in peace knowing what happened to Kathy. She confided then that she had terminal cancer, and she passed away a few months after we spoke.
When driving into Kirkland Lake to first meet the Wilsons, I had stopped to look at a beautiful memorial to the more than 1,700 miners who had died in area mining accidents since 1914. The memorial was located in the middle of a small park with picnic tables nearby to sit and reflect on what had occurred to so many miners in the past and to honour their legacy. The names of each of the mines and the year and number of deaths were recorded on three magnificent granite headstones. Next to them was a monument with five life-sized bronze miner figures. Local artists designed and built the forty-ton, thirty-three-foot-high structure made of black granite at an estimated cost of $365,000.
Before I left Kirkland Lake to return home, I drove northeast of town on a gravel road for about twelve kilometres through dense woods of pine and spruce. I stopped at a clearing in the trees about the size of a football field. On the north side, barely visible through tall grass, was another beautiful memorial. This one was only about six feet square and framed in white, foot-high, vinyl garden edging. Inside was a homemade wooden cross on a tilt, faded plastic and silk bouquets of flowers, weather-beaten teddy bears, tattered silk butterflies atop sticks of wood, along with washed-out black and white photographs and poems in dollar store–type frames. Just outside the edging was a small stone ground marker inscribed, “Kathy Wilson 1958–1970.” Yvan Godin had bought the picnic table beside the memorial, a place where family and friends of Kathy had to come and sit and reflect on all that had happened at that location so many years ago.
NOT THE LAST CHAPTER
“For retirement brings repose, and repose allows a kindly judgment of all things.”
—John Sharp Williams
IN EARLY FEBRUARY 2010, I TRAVELLED
to Belleville, Ontario, for what would be my last meeting with investigators who had at one time thought that all of their hard work and long hours would result in finding a missing young woman. I once again hoped my presence and words of support and encouragement would help them deal with their disappointment over the worst-possible outcome despite their efforts.
Marie-France Comeau, thirty-eight, a corporal at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, had been murdered in her home several months earlier. Another area resident, Jessica Lloyd, twenty-seven, had been missing from her home since January 28. Weeks earlier there had been two sexual assaults in the same area with similar modus operandi. On Thursday, February 4, the ViCLAS Unit was putting the final touches on linking all of the cases together back in Orillia, when at the same time a roadblock was set up near where Jessica lived, canvassing for information and possible witnesses. An SUV came through with tires that appeared to match tire prints taken near Jessica’s home. The vehicle was driven by Russell Williams, a part-time resident of the nearby village of Tweed and base commander of CFB Trenton.
Over the next several days the investigative team scrambled to get search warrants prepared for Williams’s Tweed home and the one he shared with his wife in Orleans, on the outskirts of Ottawa. All the while, he was under the twenty-four-hour watchful eye of mobile surveillance teams. Jim Smyth was summoned to Ottawa and when all the legal documents were signed and ready to go, he cold-called Williams at his Orleans home to request he come in for an interview. Williams didn’t ask any questions and showed up about half an hour later. While Williams at first feigned innocence, about four and a half hours into the interview Jim finally persuaded the colonel that the evidence against him was irrefutable. Williams confessed to the unsolved sexual assaults and the murders of Marie Comeau and Jessica Lloyd. He also identified the location of Jessica’s body and revealed where officers could find hidden evidence of these and other crimes.
Given William’s profession, the investigative team was in the international media spotlight for weeks following his arrest. It occurred all over again when Williams pleaded guilty to all eighty-eight charges—two counts of murder, two counts of break and enter and sexual assault, two counts of forcible confinement; and eighty-two counts of break, enter and theft, most of which involved stealing women’s and children’s underwear. He was sentenced to life in prison.
My office in Orillia was now on the third floor of headquarters with one full wall of windows providing the best view in the building—overlooking Lake Simcoe. A “me” wall no longer took up any space on my walls. I was at that “I am what I am, take me or leave me” stage in my career and no longer felt the need to hang my training certificates or “attagirl” plaques to impress. Along with the now-faded photo of Mr. De Niro, they’d all long been packed away in boxes and replaced with artwork and photographs of my family, including my stepdaughter, Cheryl, her husband and my two stepgrandchildren, whom I had stayed close with over the years. Most of my time was now spent doing paperwork or attending meetings trying to keep all the balls in the air with over five hundred uniform and civilian full-time and contract employees working throughout Ontario. There were the usual operational and HR issues to deal with, but I found most of my time was taken up with challenges related to managing an annual budget of over $45 million. (It bears stressing that, given the rough time I had with numbers while working in Anti-Rackets Branch years earlier, having a crackerjack financial assistant was a key component to the job.)
With more than thirty years of police service and over the age of fifty, I’d been eligible for a comfortable retirement pension for the last three years. Although I’d spent more than half of my life as a cop, it had never felt like it was the right time for me to hang up my uniform. That changed when a twenty-three-year-old OPP recruit walked into my office at the end of April. He’d dropped by to personally thank me for mentoring him through phone calls and emails over the last five or so years as he prepared himself for a career in policing. Luke Robillard was actually my cousin but we had never met before as he lived hundreds of miles away in Dryden, Ontario. We only talked for about a half hour but I knew he would make a great cop. He was mature for his years, well educated with the bonus of street smarts and, without a doubt, was motivated to succeed.
Before Luke left that day he asked me if I would present him with his badge at his graduation ceremony a few months later. At that moment I knew I’d found my right time to make my exit gracefully. If I was going to pass a torch to the next generation of officers, this was the guy I wanted to give it to. On September 10, 2010, I attended Luke’s graduation and presented him with his badge—it was my last assignment on my last day as a police officer.
Each of my career postings had their own unique challenges and those that I initially struggled with provided me with some of my greatest satisfaction. I was most proud of achieving the number of Canadian firsts in the multidisciplinary Behavioural Sciences Section and all its various units. I am particularly honoured and touched that each year since I’d left BSS they’ve given out an annual award for leadership in my name.
I’d left BSS in good hands. With the establishment of the Ontario ViCLAS Centre in 1996, all cases meeting ViCLAS criteria were analyzed daily and compared to other similar crimes across Canada in an effort to identify suspects and serial offenders, such as David Snow, Paul Bernardo and Russell Williams, at the earliest opportunity. There were over 185,000 cases on the Ontario database and 479,000 on the national database. ViCLAS was now used for crime linkage analysis by police in Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, resulting in success stories around the world.
Since the 2006 launch of the Missing Persons and Unidentified Bodies website, fifty-six missing persons and nineteen unidentified remains cases were solved either directly by the MPUB Unit, or by way of them passing on tips and information to investigating police agencies. One of the solved unidentified human remains cases dated back to 1968. The faces of missing children, like Michael Dunahee, Kristen French, Leslie Mahaffy, Christopher Stephenson, Tori Stafford and Kathy Wilson were no longer plastered on milk cartons, the back of commercial trucks, or mailed out to neighbouring communities on posters. Many cases were cracked with the assistance of members of the public accessing our Internet site and providing tips that led to locating a missing person or identifying a deceased person. Some cases had the best possible outcome and reconnections with family members and friends were facilitated by police. In other cases, searchers were advised that the person they were looking for had been located but didn’t want their contact information or whereabouts given to the searcher. Their right to privacy always prevailed. And for those deceased persons who were subsequently identified, like Russell Pensyl, there were no happy endings, but at least some level of closure for family and friends. (Following Ontario’s lead, in 2013 the federal government opened a National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains, operated by the RCMP.)
The Ontario Sex Offender Registry today holds over 17,000 files for 158 Ontario police agencies to directly access. Offender-residence information is not released to the public as do some registries in the United States and elsewhere and I am confident this is one of the reasons why our offender registration compliance averages 98 percent. (It’s important to note that Ontario police chiefs have authority under other provincial legislation to notify the public of persons who pose a risk to public safety. Police are unobtrusively keeping track of them above ground, and if any do go underground, they use whatever means possible to find them.) Although Canada’s national registry was established in 2004, Ontario continues to operate its own due to its additional features not available with the national registry, such as direct database access by police agencies.
The Threat Assessment Unit was receiving over three hundred cases annually, involving such crimes as domestic, school and workplace violence, as well as all types of harassment. More and more cases demonstrated the dangerousness of social networking websites and oversharing personal information. The officers assigned to the unit were recognized for their expertise in victim safety planning and also for providing threat/risk assessment at all levels of court in Ontario, testifying at bail, sentencing and dangerous offender hearings. Working with the Research Unit and mental health professionals, they developed the Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment (ODARA) tool, an empirically validated risk assessment tool that provided a risk level for recidivism in partner assaults. The ODARA was now used across Canada, as well as the US, New Zealand, Switzerland and Austria.
The Research Unit was a sought-after collaborator by some of the most prestigious research institutions in North America. Partners included the University of California (threats against justice officials), Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care (domestic violence), Royal Ottawa Health Care Centre (child pornography and child sexual exploitation) and Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (offender recidivism). Their findings were published in high-impact journals, and cited in court cases, policy statements, etc., all over the world. It naturally followed that their research was relevant to the criminal justice community as a whole, including mental health practitioners for assessment and treatment, as well as probation and parole officers when supervising offenders after their release. All were benefiting from a better understanding of criminal motivation and violent, or potentially violent, criminal behaviour.