Unsolved murders still haunt families and police; After years of police work by a task force that spent millions, families of missing Calgary women still hold out hope for justice
Sherri Zickefoose
Calgary Herald
May 15 2011
After his mother was stabbed to death and dumped outside the city’s northeastern limits near Garden Road, Mitchell Maunder couldn’t bear the thought of her killer walking free.
He was only 11 years old when 26-year-old Tracey Lynn Maunder disappeared off the city’s downtown stroll in October 1992.
When no arrests were made, Mitchell launched an investigation of his own.
“I took it upon myself to look for answers at (the age of) 15. I wasn’t taking no for an answer; I investigated myself,” said Mitchell, now 30.
The determined teenager hit the streets, pointedly questioning those who swirled in the dark and dangerous world of cocaine trafficking and prostitution.
“I was more careless at that age, so I didn’t care about what happened to me. I just went to everybody who I thought could have been involved and I just started asking questions,” he said. “I didn’t have a childhood; it made me an adult.”
Mitchell’s sleuthing through the years leads him to believe his mother, who had only been in the city for a few weeks, knew her killers.
But 20 years later, without witnesses, a confession or arrests, Mitchell won’t see justice anytime soon.
“The bottom line is, that was my mother. I don’t know what’s going on with her case.”
Maunder’s 1992 cold case is one of many unsolved murders of young women during two of the worst sprees in our city’s history.
Four women met a sinister end between 1976 and 1977. Ten more females were found slain between 1986 and 1993.
Some were street teens, others worked in the sex trade. Although police ruled out the murders being the work of a single serial killer long ago, the cold cases remain in a deep freeze.
In the decades that have passed since the battered bodies of young women began cropping up on the city’s outskirts, there have been few answers to the troubling mysteries.
The cases, mostly under RCMP investigation, have been passed on to a variety of new investigators looking for loose ends.
Hope for resolution rose in 2003 when more than a dozen unsolved Calgary-area cases were forwarded to Project Kare -a Mountie-led joint task force originally set up to examine the deaths of several women whose bodies were found in rural areas surrounding Edmonton.
The project has expanded its mandate to include cases of murdered or missing high-risk victims from all parts of Alberta, including Calgary.
Despite its solid successes -the conviction of serial killer Thomas Svekla, two more suspects awaiting trial and a grid search last week for evidence in an Edmonton park -similar Calgary-area slayings of high-risk victims remain unsolved.
It’s not for lack of resources. Since 2006 -the year Svekla was arrested for murder -Project Kare has received more than $16.8 million in funding under the provincial policing service agreement. And the task force assures the dearth of convictions is also not due to a lack of effort.
“All the files within the Project Kare mandate are actively worked on throughout the province,” said RCMP Sgt. Val Lahaie, who heads up the task force.
“These investigations take us to many places all over Canada. It’s important for people to remember that these cases were already thoroughly investigated by competent investigators. It’s our job to go through them for things that may have been missed and analyze the information to see if there are any new strategies to help zero in on the persons responsible. It’s not an easy job because, as I’ve said, they were thoroughly investigated by competent homicide investigators in the first instance.”
Through the decades, homicide investigators claim they have been stymied by court acquittals, suicide, jailed suspects and time itself as victims’ decomposed remains were devoid of crucial forensic evidence.
“Investigators went to the ends of the earth,” said Calgary RCMP major crimes Sgt. Sandy White.
But due to a lack of manpower, investigators must turn their focus to fresh cases as they crop up.
“One of my big hopes is that we’ll get a large cold case unit soon: one in the north and one in the south,” said White.
“If you have that, you need resources to supplement that. With advances in forensics, we have the eliminator now with DNA.
“It’s only a matter of time.”
But too much time has already passed without convictions, say victims’ advocates.
“I can’t say that all those millions and one conviction sounds like a really good ratio to me. Is everything that could be done being done to solve those cases?” asks Suzanne Dzus, who heads Memorial March for Missing and Murdered Women Calgary.
She wonders how much effort is being expended on unsolved cases of marginalized local women.
“It doesn’t look like it. Although the database is really wonderful, it’s not solving cases.”
Families who lost loved ones remain frustrated by the lack of progress.
“I gave up a long time ago that they would ever really find anybody,” said Jim Rehorek, whose older sister, Melissa Ann Rehorek, was found murdered outside the city on Sept. 16, 1976.
“After a while you start to think ‘What are the odds?’ “
The 20-year-old chambermaid’s fully clothed body was dumped in a ditch about 20 kilometres west of Calgary near the TransCanada Highway. She had been strangled.
Friends said she set off to hitchhike her way to the mountains.
RCMP investigators suspect her killer might be the same man who strangled Barbara Jean MacLean five months later.
The cases remained stalled until an Edmonton sex offender committed suicide in 1994. That caught the attention of homicide detectives here.
Gary McAstocker, 34, hanged himself hours before he was to be questioned by police regarding the murder of a 14-year-old Edmonton girl.
He had just been released from prison after serving an 11-year sentence for a 1982 rape and a subsequent sexual assault committed while on parole in 1988.
McAstocker was a person of interest in MacLean’s murder, and was also reportedly the prime suspect in the Aug. 2, 1976, murder of an Edmonton teenager, Marie Judy Goudreau, 17.
MacLean and Goudreau were both sexually assaulted and strangled.
McAstocker had been working for an Edmontonbased moving company and was in Calgary at the time MacLean was killed.
The firm’s employees often stayed at the Highlander Motor Hotel when in town. MacLean disappeared from the motel’s parking lot.
Now, 35 years later, Rehorek’s family members say it’s doubtful anyone will pay for the crime.
“I have some sympathy for the police. It’s going back a long ways,” said Rehorek.
Police were equally frustrated by the acquittals of three men charged with first-degree murder for separate killings, including that of 17-year-old Joanne Shaver in 1990.
Helen Shaver has all but given up hope her daughter’s killer will be found.
But she worries that others will fall victim to a killer on the loose.
“They were thinking that it was so well planned; he knew what he was doing.
They were thinking he had done this before,” said Shaver.
A troubled street teen, Joanne was easy prey. Her body was found dumped on the side of a remote country road on 88th Street S.E. near Sheppard Road on Jan. 10, 1990.
Police charged James Arthur Link with first-degree murder, but he was acquitted and it was upheld by a Supreme Court of Canada ruling.
Three of Shaver’s hairs were found in Link’s truck along with a fibre from her sweater, and a hair found on her sweater matched Link’s, but a Calgary judge ruled the Crown had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Link strangled Shaver.
A week before Shaver was killed, Link had been released from jail after serving time for sexually assaulting a prostitute.
“Afterwards, the police said the case was closed. There was just not enough evidence,” said Shaver.
“But at the back of my mind, if not him, who is it?”
An inmate in a British Columbia prison serving a life sentence for murder knows the answer to the question families want answered.
Did he have a hand in the unsolved slaying of teenage Calgary girls?
The body of 16-year-old Jennifer Janz was unearthed Aug. 13, 1991, at a construction site off Valley Ridge Road near Canada Olympic Park. Jennifer Joyes, 17, was found two months later on Oct. 17, in a wooded area just west of the city.
The bodies had been dumped two kilometres apart.
When Keely Pincott’s remains were found in a shallow grave in 1992 and Rebecca Boutelier disappeared in February 1993, panic set in.
Experts from the RCMP and FBI were called upon to review the cases at a summit in 1993.
“I was satisfied there was a link in two of the Calgary cases,” said former investigator Ron McKay. “There was enough there to behaviourally link them.”
According to an expert who reviewed a series of unsolved Calgary homicide files from the 1990s, there’s a strong chance a B.C. convict serving a life sentence for killing a Vancouver sex trade worker struck here first.
Through the years, different investigators had various opinions of which victims may have been slain by the same killer.
“Now, with these Calgary cases from the ’80s and ’90s, there’s no suggestion that the offenders are currently active. Where do you find witnesses to support cases that old?” said McKay.
Relatives of Joyes fear her once high-profile case has slipped away from public memory.
“We thought we’d hear of more success. It seems so quiet,” said cousin Dawn Pepper.
“Unless there is a solid lead, we’re now looking at almost 20 years,” she said.
“We’re feeling on the periphery. Everything’s in the vault. We feel compelled to access more,” she said.
“Some of the emotion is reduced, now it’s information and knowledge that we seek. We’re simply not getting that.”
The Calgary Police Service has 85 unsolved homicides dating back to the early 1900s.
Detectives assigned to old cases cross-check them with new data and technology.
But human instinct is just as valuable.
“I still talk to the guys in the cold case squad regularly,” said Al Brown, a former homicide detective who retired in 2008.
“I phone the guys over there and say, ‘what about this,’ whenever things come to mind,” he said.
“You think about it all the time. Even when I’m in the southwest there’s a certain house I still drive by and think about it.”
Retirement hasn’t allowed Brown to close the books on unresolved cases. He estimates he investigated 120 homicide cases during his 29-year career.
“I know all those cases. And there’s always that thing in the back of everybody’s mind that doesn’t get documented in the files, just a feeling you have for the case.”
The grief suffered by victim’s families and the frustration of not solving the cases haunts him.
“You want to see justice be done for the family so they can have some kind of closure.
The family wants to know why something happened,” said Brown.
“Those old files didn’t get solved and not because of lack of work. We just didn’t get the right break.”
Acceptance that Tracey Maunder’s murderer will never go to jail is a long way off for her son.
“There’s a part of me that’s still really upset. It hurts me how torn up my grandmother is. All this money and the resources and technology can’t be applied to this case,” said Mitchell.
His mother’s murder took a heavy toll on the family and his efforts to investigate suspects mired in street life brought him close to the brink.
“Thank god I’m a good person; I could have gone one way or another,” he said.
“I took it upon myself to become a gentleman and a good person. I didn’t want to be a part of what took my mother out of this world.”
