Dirty Deed: The Inside Story of Canada’s Most Notorious Murders and Missing Persons,” one of the country’s most experienced and trusted investigative reporters examines the long-buried secrets of two notorious murders and one missing person.
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In the case of 22-year-old Elizabeth Tracey Gough, a former model in Kamloops, B.C., who went missing in March 1984, police didn’t know her true identity for months. Ms. Gough wasn’t reported missing by her father for another six months, by which time the police had identified her — through a dental match — as the victim of a violent and sexual murder.
In 2009, after an investigation with the help of the provincial Integrated Homicide Investigation Team and DNA testing by the RCMP’s Forensic Identification Unit, police finally announced her murder, revealing that she had been slain by a serial killer, William Ronald Albert Nelder, who later was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
At the time, Ms. Gough’s father said he was “profoundly upset” about the discovery and that, for him, the pain “never goes away.”
In the case of the “Bosnian Boy,” a young male Bosnian refugee, aged 11 or 12, and a teenager or young man from the same ethnic background as the boy, discovered in June 1988 near the intersection of Dundas St. W. and Weston Rd., near Highway 404 in Toronto, the police said they also didn’t know his true identity, believing him to be a runaway child from the Greater Toronto Area.
But by fall, they knew the identity of the “boy” — it was a homicide victim. He was only identified by the media at the time. Police would release more information about him only in 2011 after a coroner’s inquest, three years after he had been reported missing, and six years after his remains were found. He’s believed to be a witness of a violent murder that occurred in May 1988.
And as to the unidentified woman, believed to be a victim of a sexual homicide, her remains were discovered in April 1986 in a park near Yonge St. and Sheppard Ave. W., near the University of Toronto.
Police would not identify her until 2009, 12 years after she was reported missing.
“All these years they were just never identified,” Mr. Blade said. “For the families, they are missing and they don’t know what happened to them. And they can’t have any closure. They can’t go to their loved one’s grave because they don’t know who it is. It’s hard to put into words how much suffering that causes, and the agony that goes on.”
At least these cases ended with no more questions than being raised by grieving relatives and the public. Mr. Blade says he’s seen other cases where families have to live with unanswered questions, including the remains of a woman who was dismembered in her home and a man found in a suitcase near a ravine near the St. Lawrence River. Police believe the man could have been a murder victim or a drug smuggler, but he’s never been identified.
The families aren’t the only ones who suffer, says Det. Sgt. Peter Leon, who leads the missing person’s homicide investigation team for the Toronto Police Service and is the province’s only homicide investigator whose job is to investigate missing people’s cases.
“Some of these families have been waiting for 25 years,” said Sgt. Leon. “I can tell you, when you finally meet a mother whose child is dead, you get this, like a gut punch. It just never goes away. It never leaves your heart. You carry that with you.”
The investigators feel for the families. But they are bound by the law to ensure they conduct their inquiries properly, “the very same way we would a cold case murder investigation,” he said. “And because it’s a missing person we cannot release any information.”
Investigators have two different types of cases.
Some are the so-called “open cases” — the unidentified bodies where the cause of death has already been determined, such as the four skeletons found in a box near Dundas St. W. in 2013. All four victims were male, aged between 13 and 17 and were all connected to St. Michael’s Hospital. It was believed the remains could be from as early as 1975 and as recent as the 1990s.
“These are ones where we believe there is someone who is very, very close to having closure, and we can’t get them to come forward,” he said. “We believe we know who they are, we just need to be able to identify them and get that closure. In some cases that would make their family’s lives a little bit easier.”
Others are classified as cold cases — where police believe a person has been murdered but have never found the victim, and may never be identified. In these cases, police try to figure out who the victim is, whether he or she died of natural causes or by another person.
The investigation of cold cases is more difficult, Mr. Blade said.
“The family needs to be on board for this,” he said. “We have to know who they are so we can figure out who killed them and where they were killed, and to what extent they might have suffered. That’s a tough one.”
Det. Sgt. Leon says it’s easy to say such cases should be tried as murder. But police also have to investigate each case on its own merits and consider the circumstances of each case. They have to consider the family’s willingness to have the body identified, but also the potential that it could cause further anguish and distress for the family if their loved one isn’t identified.
“Some things are just going to be open for the rest of your life,” he said.
It’s easier for police to look into cold cases than unidentified bodies, he said. In such cases, police talk to family and friends about their loved one, look at newspapers of the day to see if there is a story that may have something to do with his or her disappearance or death, and police also try to get help from retired detectives or officers, friends of the family and even people who were in their community at the time of death.
Police are also constantly on the lookout for other victims’ remains in cemeteries around the city.
At any given time, police might be looking at 150 cases that remain unsolved.
Det. Sgt. Leon says he’s asked one family for their consent to exhume a body to make sure they didn’t find any family of their own.
“I think it was in the ’80s and it was a young boy whose mother had died,” he said. “We asked if she would be willing to look into whether she might know the identity of the young boy, but she would not. She said, ‘You cannot do this, there are many missing persons and you need to look into them.’ We were shocked. There are so many unidentified remains. We have to leave no stone unturned.”
Police will not always be able to solve a case. What they can do, Mr. Blade said, is get families closure and help them with their grieving process. And knowing, even if there is no resolution, is an important part of healing.
“The family gets this big weight taken off their shoulders,” he said. “It’s a huge weight to carry. It’s like a death sentence and they are never able to move forward. That’s not right.”
About 30 families have agreed to go to the RCMP lab to have DNA samples from the missing person identified in their son or daughter’s body. And about 10 people, mostly from family members, come each month to see if they can help with such identification. The RCMP is also able to conduct DNA testing on the missing person’s remains.
Mr. Blade says police will never give up, and that no case will ever be closed.
“Sometimes you just need that closure and you never know what could happen,” he said. “You never know if they could turn up one day, and maybe this woman is sitting at home and hears that an old case was resolved today and that they identified the body and found out who it was. Now that’s closure.”
What else?
Mr. Blade says the question people always ask him when they hear about these cases is, what can be done to prevent this. He says that’s the $64,000 question, but one he doesn’t have an answer to.
“This is something that’s going to continue to happen,” he said. “Until we can somehow identify who did it and identify them somehow, it’s just not going to go away. It will go on.”
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