But not by much.

The new agency will have power to force witnesses to appear and testify, but will need to get the justice minister’s OK to initiate investigations. And there are Mack-truck-sized loopholes permitting the Mounties to withhold information.
Former complaints commissioner Shirley Heafey asks: “Where is the really big change that is going to make a difference in RCMP accountability across the country?” And answers: “I don’t see it.”
The new agency, of course, will also do nothing to resolve several ongoing, high-profile complaints, including one about the 2008 death of Nova Scotia Native John Simon on the Wagmatcook reserve.

On Dec. 2, 2008, an RCMP constable named Jeremy Frenette shot and killed Simon, who was alone inside his house, drunk and suicidal, at the time. By entering the house alone without a warrant, the junior RCMP officer violated his superior’s orders. Frenette claimed Simon—who was sitting on the toilet smoking a cigarette when he first slipped into the house—ran to the kitchen and grabbed a rifle. The officer fired three times, killing Simon. The rifle, which other witnesses didn’t see, wasn’t loaded.

The Mounties asked Halifax Regional Police to investigate. But its investigation was anything but arm’s length.

Gary Richard, the lawyer for the Wagamatcook First Nation, recently released emails he says show the Mounties were in the loop on the investigation and may have even influenced its final outcome. He also provided transcripts of interviews with potential witnesses whose evidence appears to have been ignored. Richard’s conclusion? The Halifax police department’s report was “incomplete and even, in some respects, indifferent.”

The current Commissioner for Complaints Against the RCMP, under pressure from First Nations groups, finally initiated his own probe this winter. But the commission’s powers are severely proscribed. Hence, the need to replace it.

Hence, the need for a provincial public inquiry. Nova Scotia Justice Minister Ross Landry, a 34-year RCMP veteran, refuses to call one.

But he does recognize the current police-investigate-police system is not the answer. Last fall he too announced plans for new legislation to create our own “independent” provincial unit to investigate allegations of police misconduct. But that legislation won’t be introduced until this fall. And it won’t look at old cases.

We need an independent inquiry—with teeth—now.
 

Because I follow most court cases from the comfortable periphery of my morning newspaper, I’ll confess this sordid story quickly slipped back beneath my radar as it wended its usual slow-cooker way through the judicial system.

Which may explain why I was shocked in late March to learn the judge in the case had acquitted Ryan because, he said, she was under “duress” at the time—even though she had admitted to agreeing to pay an undercover Mountie $25,000 to do the deed.

I wasn’t surprised when I heard, a month later, that the crown had decided to appeal the acquittal, claiming the trial judge had erred in law by failing to consider whether hiring a hit man was a “proportionate” response to whatever duress she was under.

But now that I’ve finally read Justice David Farrar’s 26-page decision, I have no problem with his conclusion. Instead, I have an entirely different problem—and question.

Let’s start with Michael Martin Ryan, He’s a nasty piece of business, “a manipulative, controlling and abusive husband [who] sought at every turn to control the actions of his wife.” He cut her off from family, friends, even co-workers, put a gun to her head on several occasions, threatened to kill her and their daughter, then “dig a trench and put them in and pile garbage on top.” When Ryan suggested a divorce, he warned: “Don’t test me, I will destroy you before I get a divorce.”

When she did finally move out, the threats only intensified. She charged him with uttering threats. The charges were dropped. She called the RCMP nine times, victim services 11 and 9-1-1 once. On February 17, 2008, her husband showed up at her school, sat menacingly in her car. The Mounties were called. They told her it was a civil matter; there was nothing they could do.

Instead, six weeks later, having failed Nicole Ryan at every turn, the RCMP decided to mount an expensive, sophisticated sting operation, using an undercover officer to entrap a desperate, frightened woman into committing a crime for which she could be charged.

Why?

Unfortunately, that question won’t be addressed during the upcoming appeal. But it’s a question that needs to the answered—if not by the Mounties, then certainly by the province’s justice minister.

****

Read the complete decision.
 

When American sailor Damon Crooks was killed on Argyle Street, police had a strong suspect but a weak case. Luckily for a city embarrassed by the murder, the suspect cooperated. Stephen Kimber finds out how pleading guilty became Corey Wright’s best move, right or wrong.

Corey Wright Photo essay by Aaron Fraser

My blood is my ink
My tears are my tales
I did a couple years in jail
But I shall prevail

He smiled. Big smile. “What you doing after?” It was nudging four in the morning on Saturday, November 4, 2006, closing time at Rain, the downtown Halifax nightclub where Corey Wright had spent his evening. He’d glimpsed her earlier. She served drinks in the bar. Hot. He’d made eye contact. Smiled. She’d smiled back. Now, he chatted her up. Got her name, her number.

“Got to clean up,” she told him.

“Do your thing,” he shrugged. But they agreed, in the way such things are agreed to, that he would wait outside for her.

As he bounced down the steps from the second floor bar to Argyle Street, Corey Wright couldn’t help thinking just how well all the pieces of his life were coming together.

Finally.

He and two friends had spent the early evening hours at Wright’s apartment “chillin’, freestylin’” and drinking a six-pack of Corona, lubrication for their night ahead. At around midnight, they’d made their way downtown to Rain.

Wright had heard that Madd Links, the new host of Black Entertainment Television’s Rap City, and Big Apple, an American-based rapper, would be at the club tonight. He’d printed out a copy of his portfolio, grabbed a couple of his CDs—Vinny Deniroz was his rap name, Hali Hustler the name of his CD—and “got all dolled up and pretty.” Corey Wright was going to make it in the music business, and tonight would be his opportunity to start networking his way to the top.

The night had gone even better than he’d hoped. He’d handed Madd Links his card, inside-joked about the Rap City host’s perceived weaknesses—“How come you don’t rap in the booth?”—and engaged in some similarly familiar chit and chat with Big Apple.

“What you drinking?” he’d asked Apple at one point.

“I’m not a big drinker,” Apple replied.

Wright went over to the bartender anyway. “Send over a couple of drinks,” he said.

Before the two American rappers left for the night, Wright had even gotten a few pictures taken him of himself with them.

Which may explain why he hadn’t been paying attention to the booze-fueled storm brewing inside the club between some visiting American sailors and a group of local blacks, most of them guys Wright knew from the hood. When one of them, the half brother of a buddy, told Wright about a “nice chain” he’d seen around the neck of an American sailor—“I’m gonna take it”—Wright tried to discourage him. “Don’t do that man,” he said. “You got a nice chain too.”

Now, however, Wright spilled out onto Argyle Street and into the messy middle of the seething tension. To his right, familiar faces, friends; to his left, American sailors. Everyone was circling, puffed up, strutting, acting hard.

Wright looked around, then back up the stairs, saw the the woman coming down. “Fuck this,” he thought to himself, “I’m going with her.”

But just then, something happened—who knows what—and people started beating on each other. Someone punched Wright. He swung back. He hit some people, got swarmed. He kicked, punched, fought back. Someone pulled his shirt up over his head. He felt something cold against his skin—a blade! He knew what a knife felt like, knew what it meant. So he “spazzed,” swinging ever more wildly. Down, up, down again. Swallowed by the crowd. On his knees on the sidewalk at one point, he eyed the spoils of battle: scattered wallets, cell phones, watches, even a shoe that had come off in the melee. He grabbed what he could, shoved them in his pockets. Except the shoe. Who needs one shoe?

Finally, he saw his escape. A few of his buddies were inside a nearby car. He jumped in. His hand stung. He looked down. He was bleeding from where the knife had sliced him. Before he could stanch the bleeding, a patrol car pulled up behind them.

“Get out of here,” Wright shouted at the driver.

“No, man,” his friend replied. “We ain’t done nothing.”

Wright knew that wouldn’t matter. I know how it goes. Besides, he was on parole, less than two months away from the end, less than two months from freedom.

From off in the distance, he heard someone shouting, “My friend’s been stabbed…”

He opened the car door, jumped out, ran for it.

***

The murder of Damon Crooks—he’d been stabbed four times, including once through the heart—shocked and appalled Haligonians.

For starters, his killing was just the latest, worst example of the crazily escalating mindless mayhem plaguing downtown Halifax. In June, The Coast had published a cover story about what one criminologist called Halifax’s “dirty little secret,” the reality the city “had the highest violent crime rate among the 17 Canadian cities surveyed.” As if to drive the point home, in the week before the murder the press had reported that four more people had been assaulted in two separate attacks near Pizza Corner, the traditional final pit stop for local late-night bar-hoppers.

To make this murder more reprehensible, the victim, Damon Crooks, was not only a visitor to the city—a 28-year-old US navy Petty Officer 1st Class from the USS Doyle—but also the soon-to-be father of a baby girl.

Not surprisingly, the story of his death had media legs, not only in Canada but also in the United States as well.

As if to atone for the sins of its city, the Chronicle-Herald quickly set up a “Damon Crooks Family Fund” to raise money for the child’s upbringing. The fund would eventually raise $60,000.

In the legislature, opposition leader Darrell Dexter introduced a motion to express Nova Scotians’ “deepest condolences to the family and friends and shipmates of Damon Crooks… and urge that every step be taken to ensure the safe enjoyment of Nova Scotia port cities by the visitors that we welcome to our shores.” The resolution passed unanimously.

Not to be outdone, Halifax mayor Peter Kelly promised to set up what would become the much publicized Mayor’s Task Force on Violence in Halifax.

In death, Damon Crooks became larger-than-life. His shipmates claimed his only role in the brawl had been as unlucky good Samaritan—coming to the aid of a sailor friend whose necklace had been ripped from his neck.

“He was a great man, a great person,” his grieving fiancee told CTV News. “He’s really going to be missed.”

***

If this narrative now had its hero, it also needed a villain.

Corey Wright—initially charged with first degree murder—fit that role perfectly. He’d been arrested within minutes of the stabbing fleeing the scene of the crime. Damon Crooks’ wallet was in his pocket. And he had a history of knife violence.

In 2002, Wright had been convicted of aggravated assault in connection with the stabbing of a man and his girlfriend. Despite the prosecutor’s plea that Wright be locked up for 12 years, the judge sentenced him to just five and a half years, which—thanks to time credited for the period he’d spent in jail before his trial and a positive recommendation from the parole board—meant Wright was on the streets, on parole, when Crooks was murdered.

That, predictably, transformed Corey Wright—described as an “unpredictable psychopath” and a “knife-wielding maniac”—into the poster boy for a justice system run amuck.

“If [the judge] had listened to a crown attorney two-and-a-half years ago,” thundered David Rodenhiser in the Halifax Daily News, “Corey Wright would still be safely behind bars in a federal penitentiary and Damon Crooks might still be alive and looking forward to the birth of his first child.”

Rodenhiser’s guilty-as-charged diatribe —widely shared—came just three days after Damon Crooks’ murder, one day after Corey Wright’s arraignment, and years before the facts of the case against Wright could be argued in court!

And yet…

Corey Wright was not without his supporters. During his second of many courtroom appearances, the court house filled with family and friends. Some handed out flyers showing a photo of “a beaming [Wright] with a toothy grin… cradling his newborn son” with the words: “Society Please Don’t Condemn A Man To Life Because Of His Past” and “Help An Innocent Black Man Accused By Halifax Police.” Others chanted, “Free Vinny D!” as sheriff’s deputies escorted the shackled Wright from the courtroom.

“He’s innocent,” a family member told reporters. “He said he didn’t do it.” Added a neighbour: “Corey is one of the sweetest guys I have ever known.”

***

I wouldn’t be this strong if it wasn’t for my moms
Discipline, dedication, determination and honour
This is what she taught me
Same for my stepfather

Corey Wright, named after his biological father, was born in Halifax on April 25, 1983, the middle of Valerie Wright’s three sons. His parents split when he was very young, and he never had a relationship with his father. He was raised instead by his mother. She calls him DeeWan.

“My mother was great,” Wright says from his prison cell today. “Growing up… I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

When he was 15, however, he got into “an altercation with my mother that changed my life.” It was, he admits now, a stupid teenager-thing. That morning, Corey was rushing around, late for school—“I had tests that day in math, in science, an essay due in English, and I always did things last minute”—when he saw his younger brother, Marvin, in the living room. Lounging around. Still in his pajamas.

“Get ready for school,” Corey ordered him.

“I’m not going,” Marvin replied.

“What do you mean, you’re not going?” One thing led to another and “I clipped him in the back of the head. He went all dramatic, crying to my mother and such.”

His mother admonished Corey not to hit his brother.

“Why do you worry about him?” Corey shot back. “You don’t worry about me.”

“As soon as I said it,” he says today, “I knew I was wrong. I hurt her feelings.”

Valerie lashed back, “slapping and hitting me” with little effect.

“I was smiling. I couldn’t help it,” Wright remembers. “But then she’s all, ‘Get out! Get out! Don’t come back!’”

Today, he shakes his head. “It was pride, stupid pride.” Corey stormed out, didn’t come back.

He ended up couch surfing. “I had three aunts and two best friends, so that was five couches and I just kept moving…” He stopped going to school. “I started smoking weed but I didn’t have any money.” One morning, one of his best friends showed up at the apartment where he was staying and began “to count his money. I figured he was selling weed, so I says, ‘Let me sell some too.’ And he says, ‘No, I don’t sell weed. I sell crack.’ And I thought, screw it, I’ll try it. I sold crack so I could smoke weed.”

He was 16.

Selling crack cocaine wasn’t just illegal; it was dangerous.

One night in July 2000, one of his best friends, Tyrone Oliver, who’d also allegedly been selling drugs, was gunned down on an outdoor basketball court. After that, Wright, in the words of his parole officer, would “drink the ‘hard stuff’ and continue to ingest alcohol until he could not drink any more.”

He was scared, but he wasn’t about to show it.

“I was always a fighter, you know, I was this skinny, short kid, but I loved to fight, especially the bigger guys who picked on the little kids or girls,” Wright says today. “When you’re a teenager, fighting is fun.” It’s less fun when others are carrying guns. “I’d never carry a gun,” Wright insists. “Guns make me nervous. But I got a knife. For protection.”

It was the knife that got him into trouble. In the early morning hours of April 20, 2002, he went to a birthday party at an after-hours spot on Gottingen Street, where he ended up dancing with a girl who turned out to be someone’s girlfriend.

“Why you hitting on my girlfriend?”

“I’m not hitting on your girlfriend.”

Words led to words, and the other guy went outside to get something from his car. “’Hold on,’ he said to me, ‘I’ll be right back.’” He returned moments later. “I’m trying to leave and he says, ‘I got something for you.’… I thought he had a gun. I panicked. I pulled out my knife and started swinging.” Wright stabbed the guy 14 times and, when the guy’s girlfriend tried to intervene, he cut her too. Today, he shakes his head. “He didn’t even have a gun on him.”

Wright pled guilty to the assault—“Your lordship,” he told the judge at his sentencing, “I acknowledge what I done wrong, and the weight of my sins is greater than I can bear”—and began, it seemed, to turn his life around.

***

But I’m gonna rise to the occasion
I’m driven by my ambition

While in jail, Wright earned his GED high school equivalency and enrolled in Second Chance, a one-year program to provide entrepreneurial skills to young people who’d been in “conflict with the law.”

Wright had already launched his own small business, opening up a north end storefront with his mother—with whom he’d reconciled—and one of his brothers. “We’d go out to Costco and buy in bulk—toothpaste, coffee, jerseys—and sell them in the neighbourhood” to people who couldn’t afford transportation to shop themselves.

He and a friend also got into the party promotion business. “We’d pay for the flyers—$40 for a thousand—and organize the shows. The club would get the bar; we’d get the door. We made a lot of money.” But then they got burned in a deal with a San Francisco promoter who was supposed to do in a show in Halifax and didn’t, and Wright and his partner “decided to go our separate ways.”

Wright’s separate way was to begin making his own music. When he was still selling crack, he remembers going to a house party and seeing some kids he’d grown up with performing, pretending to be the gangsters he actually was. “I saw these guys rapping what I’m doing, but they weren’t really doing it. They were going to school. They were good kids. So I thought, I’ll give rapping a try. At least I’m doing it.”

Wright ended up at Village Sound, Stephen Outhit’s north end recording studio. “He was an exceptionally talented rapper,” Outhit recalls, and he remembers being equally impressed by Wright the person. “He wasn’t a thuggy, peer-pressured kind of guy. He was a smart businessman who’d been born in an unfortunate situation.”

Outhit’s encouragement “put something in me,” Wright acknowledges. “I thought, this guy doesn’t know me and he’s saying I’m good. Maybe I can do this.” He made a CD, got a manager, made plans for a tour. “Two thousand and seven,” Wright says wistfully. “That year was going to be my dream, going to be all music for me.”

And then, on the morning of November 4, 2006, the dream became a nightmare.

***

Well at least my pain
Is more than a rhyme to me
How can I complain
When he’s doing more time than me

From the beginning, there were questions about what really happened outside Rain that night. Even about what had started it. A fight over a girl? A chain?

Although the circumstantial case against Corey Wright was compelling, even overwhelming—he was caught running for the crime scene with blood on his hand and the victim’s wallet in his possession—there was little hard evidence to connect him to the actual murder. It had happened in the confusing middle of a sprawling brawl involving, by some accounts, more than two dozen participants. Virtually every one of them—not to mention non-combatant witnesses—was intoxicated, their memories fogged, their evidence unreliable. Some, perhaps understandably, weren’t keen to talk to the police.

Within hours of the incident, however, a very different narrative began circulating in the black community. Someone else, also black, had murdered Damon Crooks—and bragged about it. The alleged killer had a well-known fetish for knives and for other people’s gold chains. The night before the murder, or so the story went, the man had stabbed someone else and taken his gold chain. Valerie Wright began compiling affidavits to show her son was not Crooks’ killer. It wasn’t easy. Everyone, it seemed, was scared of the other guy.

According to emails between the Crown lawyers and police, detectives knew soon after the murder that “someone else confessed to the murder to a third party.” What police did with that information isn’t clear.

They certainly had the information from several sources. The summer after the murder, for example, Stephen Outhit, the producer who’d befriended Corey, wrote to mayor Kelly expressing his concerns about delays in the case, as well as explaining that he’d been told that someone else—he named the individua—had allegedly confessed to the crime. Kelly wrote back, “essentially thanked me for my letter and said he’d forwarded it to the police,” Outhit explains. “The police never contacted me about it.”

He says he knows several other people contacted Crimestoppers with similar information, but were never contacted either.

The crown’s case against Corey Wright was no slam dunk. Within months, the crown had reduced his first degree murder charge to second degree, and eventually settled for manslaughter. Wright’s preliminary hearing, which had been scheduled to run for 20 days, lasted only five. The case had dragged on for close to a two and a half years when, in March 2009, on the edge of the beginning of his trial, Wright surprised everyone by changing his plea to guilty of manslaughter.

To understand just how big a surprise—not to mention relief—Wright’s plea must have been for prosecutors, it’s instructive to read Justice Felix Cacchione written judgment.

“Having reviewed the evidence in this case,” he noted at Wright’s sentencing hearing, addressing his comments to Crooks’ family, “I can say to you with certainty that this case was not an open and shut case of either murder or manslaughter. The crown acknowledged to me the difficulty that it would have in proving the charge as originally laid… It is very possible that a jury hearing the evidence that the prosecution had available to it could have decided that they either could not decide who did what and hence… been hung as a jury… Or the jury could in all likelihood have had a reasonable doubt that Mr. Wright was the offender who caused Damon Crooks’ death.”

The flimsiness of the crown’s case was not the only surprise on sentencing day. The crown and defence lawyers told the judge they’d agreed on a joint sentencing recommendation: 15 years for manslaughter.

In the complicated ways of the criminal justice system, that meant Wright typically would have been credited with double the time he’d already spent in jail while awaiting trial, reducing his actual sentence to 10 years. And—normally—he would have been entitled to apply for parole after serving just one-third of his sentence, meaning he would have been eligible to apply for parole after roughly three and a half years in prison.

Instead, Cacchione—“mindful of society’s abhorrence of what occurred and the prevalence of these types of activities in our community”—allowed Wright to claim just four years of remand time instead of five and ordered that “you serve at least half the sentence before you are considered eligible for parole. That means, sir, that on the 11-year sentence you will have to serve five-and-a-half years before you can even apply for parole.”

***

Lookin’ in the mirror
when I’m all by my lonesome
Pictures getting clearer
Play the cards that I’m holding
Pornographic magazine keeps me with a pin up
But it’s the pen and pad that keeps me with my chin up
Still unsigned so they think I’m a beginner
But it’s my inner that’s telling me I’m a winner

“Do you mind if I turn on the tape recorder?” I ask. We are sitting in a small windowless room inside the Springhill Institution, the prison where Corey Wright is serving his sentence. It’s the first time I’ve met Wright. But I’ve been following his story almost from the beginning.

As a columnist for the Daily News, I’d written about the media rush-to-judgment after it was revealed that Wright had been on parole at the time of Crooks’ killing. I’d spoken to Outhit, who believed an injustice might have been done, and to Valerie Wright, Corey’s mother, who was his number one and, seemingly, sometimes his only defender. I’d followed the case as it worked its way through the courts.

After Wright’s sentencing, we’d begun an email and letter correspondence. “I really want to share my story, the trials and tribulations I have gone through,” he wrote at one point. “I’ve done a lot of wrong things, but who hasn’t?... I always knew when I was doing wrong, but I am not and was never a bad person… Sorry for talking about my past,” he added, “but everyone new I meet I try to shed light on me as a person. Just because the newspapers and the media painted me out to be something I’m not. Well, anyway, we will talk soon, I hope.”

Now we sit, face to face, both eying the tape recorder between us. Wright is a handsome young man with an easy smile, the slight gap between his front teeth making him seem more boyish than his 26 years. The intelligence that’s obvious in his conversation serves as a counterpoint to the muscles he’s been building, lifting weights in prison, and to his tattoos: there’s one on the back of each hand containing the names of each of his two young sons and another on his shoulder that declares he is “My Brother’s Keeper.”

“It depends,” he says finally in response to my question about the tape recorder. “How honest do you want me to be?” We don’t turn on the tape recorder.

The issue, it turns out, is practical—as was his decision last spring to plead guilty to manslaughter. He hadn’t been impressed by the performance of his lawyer, Warren Zimmer, during the preliminary hearing. “He just took my case for the publicity,” Wright argues. “I’m at the police station [after his arrest] and a cop says to me, ‘You’ve got a call.’ It was Warren. He told me he was going to fight for me. I take people at their word. But we did the preliminary and he wasn’t fighting. Some days he wasn’t even there.”

Which is why, about a month before his trial was scheduled to begin, Wright asked to speak to Zimmer. He’d been thinking about his prospects in court and about what a long stretch in prison could mean to his dream of a music career. “I’ve got a bright future,” he tells me today. “I can feel it. I’m destined for something. Give me a pen and a roll of toilet paper and I can make rhymes… Doesn’t matter where I am. I can do time. But I can’t do forever…

“So I said to him, ‘Honestly Warren, this is my life. Be straight with me. What are my chances?’ And he says, ‘Well, it’s 50–50.’ So a coin toss is going to determine my life. I said, ‘Warren, go to them, get them to drop it to manslaughter…’ And that’s what happened.”

After he went to jail, Wright appealed Cacchione’s decision to reduce his remand credit and force him to serve more time before he would be eligible for parole. Just last month, the appeal court reversed those conditions. Which means Wright can now apply for parole in 2012 instead of 2014.

Which may be one more reason Corey Wright isn’t keen to go on the record, arguing he didn’t kill Damon Crooks. Call it the Donald Marshall, Jr., conundrum. Marshall famously spent 11 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, unable to get parole because he refused to admit his guilt, and therefore, according to the parole board, wasn’t ready to be rehabilitated.

Wright’s situation is different, of course. He did plead guilty to being responsible for Crooks’ death.

But did he really do it?

There are those who remain convinced Corey Wright is innocent.

While Wright answers most of my questions about the events of the night of November 4, 2006, he steers clear of the key question about whether he stabbed Crooks.

“I can’t talk about that,” he tells me.

It would be easy to take from that that Wright is guilty. But he is also—not to put too fine a point on it—someone who understands the justice system well enough to know guilt and innocence often matter less than luck and cunning.

Having been branded for a stabbing he admits he did commit, what were his chances of getting a jury’s benefit of the doubt if he was on trial for something he actually didn’t do? And, if he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison?

Corey Wright would rather not go there. He can do the time he’s been given.

He fills his days working on his rhymes. Whenever he has something ready, he sets up a phone call with James McQuaid, aka Homegrown, his Halifax-based producer. While Wright raps to the beat of an unrelated song playing from his CD player into his earphones, McQuaid records Wright’s voice over the telephone and later marries it to a beat in his studio.

Wright says his new music is very different from his earlier, more gangsta-inspired raps. “It’s like a different me,” he says. “It’s more party, more chill. I’m now more conscious, more motivational.”

Corey Wright still dreams. Destiny calls. We turn on the recorder. He raps:

You be waiting a long time
If you think I’m going to fade out
Not in this lifetime
Check my lifeline
Known for the gap in my teeth
And writing nice rhymes…

Corey Wright laughs, shows the gap in his teeth.

Stephen Kimber, The Coast’s Senior Features Writer, is the author of eight books. He teaches journalism at the University of King’s College.

On Dec. 2, 2008, an RCMP constable shot and killed John Andrew Simon, a member of Cape Breton’s Wagmatcook First Nation. Simon, everyone agrees, was alone inside his house, drunk and suicidal, at the time he was killed. According to what police reportedly told Simon’s family, he was unarmed, sitting on the toilet and smoking a cigarette when Cst. Jeremy Frenette first entered the house. They claim Simon then fled to the kitchen where he grabbed his shotgun. Frenette fired three times, killing Simon.

What was Cst. Frenette doing inside the house without a warrant? And without backup? Especially considering that Simon, at that point, was no threat to anyone except himself.

The Halifax Regional Police, who led what was supposed to be an arms-length investigation into the shooting, concluded he only fired “after reasonably perceiving that John Simon posed a threat of grievous bodily harm or death and believing that he could not otherwise preserve himself from grievous bodily harm other than by using deadly force.”

Simon’s widow and members of the local band council would beg to disagree.

But that’s not the issue here.

Why are the Mounties now refusing to release the report into the incident? Just as importantly, why is it even the RCMP’s call whether to release this supposedly independent review?

RCMP Chief Supt. Blair McKnight told reporters in December the Mounties weren’t “permitted” to release the report under Canada’s privacy laws.

Whose privacy is being protected here? Simon himself is dead. His widow and the local band council—which contract the RCMP to police their reserve—both say they want to read a copy of the report.

Others have seen it. Nova Scotia’s Justice Minister, Ross Landry, for example—himself a former RCMP officer—told reporters this week he has read the report and believes the band council should too before he makes his decision on their request for a public inquiry into Simon’s death. His office, in fact, is trying to help the band get a copy.

But RCMP brass seem happy to hide the report behind the privacy veil.

Little wonder the Wagmatcook band council has decided to replace the RCMP when its policing contract expires at the end of next month. Little wonder too that the council has called for a public inquiry to determine why “policing hasn’t changed in our First Nation territories” in the two decades since the Marshall Inquiry report.

In my story for The Coast (November 19, 2009) on the city’s striking number of unsolved homicides, I’d quoted Martin, a respected retired homicide detective as saying: “To my knowledge, the cold case unit has not laid one single criminal charge in nine years.”

Not true, replied the chief. “They’ve laid charges in two murder cases,” he told interviewer Bob Murphy. But when Murphy pressed him for details on the outcomes of those cases, Beazley demurred. “I don’t recall,” he said.

Curious, I emailed HRP spokesperson Brian Palmeter to ask which murders the squad had solved.

The two incidents, Palmeter replied, involved “the 1988 murder of Smiley Bailey where Gerald Patrick Dow was charged in 2002, [and] the 2000 murder of Joe Murphy where Christopher Terriak was charged.”

The realities of those cases, however, are considerably more complicated—and less convincing—than the chief suggests.

Terriak was indeed charged with murdering Murphy, a fellow street person, in 2003, three years after the original incident. But the cold case squad appears to have had nothing to do with laying those charges.

Martin says the case “was solved and charges laid while I was still in homicide—by members of the homicide section.”

In 2003, Terriak was arrested for beating up another street person, a man he believed had “ratted him out” for Murphy’s murder. When Rev. Gus Pendleton, a local minister, heard about that beating, he went to police with an audiotape in which Terriak confessed to having killed Murphy three years before. Terriak’s confession to the minister was what got him charged—and convicted.

Hardly a triumph for the cold case squad.

The case of Arnold (Smiley) Bailey is even murkier. Bailey was gunned down on Creighton Street in Halifax’s north end in 1988 in what police believed was a drug-related murder. They initially charged Spryfield drug kingpin Terry Marriott Sr. with the crime.

Gerald Patrick Dow had been supposed to be one of the witnesses for the crown in that case. During Marriott’s 1991 preliminary hearing, in fact, Dow testified he saw Marriott shoot Bailey, and claimed that Marriott had then given him the gun with instructions to give it to Marriott's wife. Despite the fact Dow was granted immunity from prosecution in the case, he was never called to testify during the trial, and Marriott was acquitted in June 1991.

Eleven years later—for reasons that have never been fully disclosed—the crown revoked Dow’s immunity deal and police this time charged Dow himself with first degree murder.

By the time the case actually got to court, that charge had been bounced down to being an accessory to the murder. In the end, Dow pleaded guilty only to hiding the 9 mm handgun used in the crime.

To this day, no one has been convicted of Bailey’s murder — even though the case is no longer listed on the police department’s website among its 48 unsolved murders.

Much else about Beazley’s interview with the CBC, as well as his written response to the Coast article—”Frank Beazley: Setting the Record Straight,” Letters, November 26, 2009)—are equally problematic and incomplete.

While Beazley and Martin claim to respect one another—Beazley described Martin’s career-long contribution to the force as “valuable,” while Martin insists “I respect the chief and my opinion is he is a good chief [who was] given wrong information” for his rebuttals—they clearly see the issues through very different lenses.

Beazley, for example, claims the city’s homicide clearance rate isn’t nearly as bad as Martin portrays it. But when the CBC’s Bob Murphy pointed out that similar-sized cities such as London and Windsor, Ontario, had far fewer unsolved murders than Halifax, Beazley suggested the reason was that many of Halifax’s murders were more difficult to solve because they were “gang related, drug related.”

Martin doesn’t buy that. “Both those cities have very high profile gangs— the Rock Machine and the Hell's Angels,” he notes. “Neither of these gangs have a high profile in Halifax.”

“It is disappointing,” Beazley wrote, “that the [Coast] article brought into question the experience and professionalism of our officers, particularly those in the major crime unit.”

In fact, the focus of the article wasn’t on the experience and professionalism of the officers in the major crime unit themselves—whom Martin also went out of his way to praise—but the lack of murder-investigation experience and decision-making smarts among those, including Deputy Chief Chris McNeil, who directly manage those officers and make the critical decisions that affect the investigators and their investigations.

“The only point I am attempting to make known is Halifax Regional Municipality has too many unsolved homicides,” Martin says today. “The problem is not with the quality of investigators or the types of murders we encounter. The problem is management’s lack of experience in these types of investigations and, until this changes, the numbers of unsolved are only going to increase.”

One of the results of that lack of experience, Martin says, was the decision to shut down a special task force set up to look into the 1999 murder of Jason MacCullough because an informant turned out to be a liar. Beazley told the CBC the decision was made “with the best consultations with the best legal minds, not within the department but with outside people.”

Martin, who argues the task force had developed plenty of other information independent of what the informant had told them and was “very close” to being able to lay charges, says the chief’s claims simply don’t match the timeline. The investigators discovered the informant had lied on a Saturday afternoon; McNeil “shut down the file Monday morning first thing. At no time was there any discussion or explanation that the crown was consulted. It would have been physically impossible for a crown prosecutor to have the time to review the file and make such a decision… The investigation was shut down and the explanation given was because Deputy Chief McNeil said so, and there is no room for discussion. This is what investigators were told.”

Beazley also dismissed two other claims Martin made in the article concerning the Kimberly McAndrew missing persons investigation: that when Martin was a cold case investigator himself, he had been unable to get a copy of the RCMP’s files of its investigation into her disappearance, and that evidence he’d intended to send out for DNA testing in the case had disappeared.

“The simple truth,” wrote Beazley, “is that all exhibits are accounted for and the RCMP file referenced in the story has been in our possession for many years.”

Not so, replies Martin. There was, in fact, more than one RCMP file. Because McAndrew’s father was an RCMP officer, he says, the “RCMP were involved in Kim’s incident before Halifax police were even called. They went to her workplace, spoke to people and even went through her workplace. I was informed by several RCMP members after I was assigned Kim's file that the RCMP had their own file regarding Kim. That is the file I tried to obtain and was unsuccessful.”

As for the DNA evidence, Martin says it wasn’t there when he went looking for it. “I went looking for a certain piece of evidence, [the nature of] which I can not disclose,” he explains. “I was told by all the those that I made requests for this item that they did not have it and they could not locate it. To me that equals missing.”

“What is most disconcerting,” Beazley added in his letter to The Coast, “is the specific information about individual files that was contained in the article. This could very well jeopardize the integrity of those files and open up old wounds for the families involved.”

As for information jeopardizing the integrity of the case files, it’s important to make the point that Martin was very careful not to discuss specific investigative details of any of the cases with me. The detailed information about those cases in the story comes either from my own independent interviews or from previously published reports.

And Beazley’s concern about the story opening up old wounds—“We have reached out to the families in question to assure them that work continues on their loved ones’ cases”—would be more convincing if one of those families hadn’t told me they hadn’t heard from the department for at least five years prior to the publication of the article.

Did you even know we had police commissioners?

Perhaps that’s the problem.

According to city bylaw P-100, the board—six members appointed by regional council, one by the province—is supposed to “provide civilian governance” of the force.

How well does it do that job? That’s hard to know. What is easier to say is that the board doesn’t spend a lot of time on its duties. Most of its monthly meetings this year lasted less than an hour. The board considered and approved the force’s 2009-10 budget—$72.8 million—at a meeting that lasted one hour and nine minutes. The most recent posted minutes—for its Sept. 11 meeting—show that commissioners met for 29 minutes.

This entry shows up more than once: “a copy of the HRP reports for [Month] were before the commission. As there were no questions, the board accepted the HRP reports as information.”

In February, Commissioner Gloria McCluskey did ask why a letter “addressed to the board was not brought before the board.” Chairm Russell Walker—the answer to our first question—explained the letter had actually been sent to the province and only copied to the board, so it “was then sent to Chief Beazley for follow up.”

Is there a cozy relationship between the board and the force it’s supposed to manage?

When the grandfather of Jason MacCullough—one of 48 unsolved homicide cases on the books—wrote to the justice minister last year complaining about the lack of progress in that investigation, he copied his letter to the chief and chair of the police commission. Deputy Chief Chris McNeil and Walker did come to see him, he told me, but McNeil did all the talking. “Walker didn’t say a word.”

I recently wrote an article for The Coast asking why Halifax has so many unsolved murders. In it, Tom Martin, one of Halifax’s most experienced and respective detectives, complained the force’s most senior officers lacked on-the-ground experience in criminal investigations. Another recently retired senior officer wrote a letter to the editor supporting Martin’s arguments.

Has the board of police commissioners invited either of them to meet with it to discuss their concerns? I don’t know. I emailed the board’s chair a week ago telling him I wanted to ask some questions about why Halifax has so many unsolved murders. He hasn’t gotten back to me.

Kimber Lucas was murdered. She was seven months pregnant at the time of her death. Her case is one of 48 murders in Halifax that currently remain unsolved.

Kimber came from a good home, loved sports, did well in school and, at one point, considered a career as a fashion model. But somewhere along the road, she became addicted to crack cocaine, and that led her into prostitution and petty crime. Before she was murdered, she had talked about getting off the streets.

The question today is whether one of the reasons Kimber Lucas’s case remains unsolved 15 years later is because she was a prostitute, a woman who, in the parlance, was “known to police.”

Last week, I did a story for The Coast on Halifax’s unusually high number of unsolved homicides. As part of my research, I spoke with Chris McNeil, the deputy chief of the Halifax Regional Police.

Essentially, McNeil argues there will always be unsolved homicides and these can usually be “categorized…many of them deal with individuals involved with the criminal subculture.”

In fairness to McNeil, his point was that such cases are harder to solve because potential witnesses won’t talk to police. But the reality is that there also does seem to be a double standard.

We hear a lot about investigations involving victims the police refer to as “pure victims”—people like 19-year-old Jason McCullough, a straight-arrow kid who shoveled snow for the elderly, and was killed in the summer of 1999 simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or Kimberly McAndrew, a 19-year-old RCMP officer’s daughter who punched off work as a Canadian Tire clerk one afternoon in August 1989 and disappeared forever—but very little about what the police are doing to solve cases like Kimber’s.

When was the last time investigators dusted off her file and began asking questions? When was the last time anyone talked with Kimber’s family about the progress of their investigation? When was the last time police made a public appeal for assistance in the case?

The fact is—as this week’s Herald In Memoriam makes clear—Kimber Lucas was someone’s daughter. And her family still misses her.

Why is our police department one of the worst in Canada at finding killers? Stephen Kimber investigates.

OK, boys… Pack it up… Back to what you were doing… We’re done here…

Tom Martin had known it was coming. Call it his experience, or—perhaps, more to the point—his boss’s lack of experience. Whatever, Martin had guessed this morning’s outcome even before Bill Hollis, the staff sergeant in charge of major crimes, descended from the department’s executive offices to personally deliver the message from above.

The Halifax Regional Police task force set up to re-examine the August 28, 1999, murder of Jason McCullough was being disbanded.

Pack it up… Back to what you were doing…

It was the summer of 2005. The re-investigation had begun the year before after an informant had come forward with new information about what happened in the park off Pinecrest Drive the night Jason McCullough was murdered, information the investigators had since “qualified” independently. Was this the break they needed to finally close the five-year-old murder investigation?

They desperately wanted to. Jason McCullough was what cops like to call a “pure victim:” a straight-arrow 19-year-old kid. He shoveled snow for the elderly, volunteered with the local Boys’ and Girls’ Club. He’d just ended up in the wrong park at the wrong, late hour on a hot, wet summer night.

Investigators were convinced they knew who’d murdered Jason. The problem was they hadn’t been able to prove it, at least not to the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt certainty the courts rightly required. Maybe this witness carried the key to unlock a conviction.

Days after the witness came forward, Chief of Police Frank Beazley authorized setting up a task force to take another look at the case.

The group included Martin, other members of the department’s cold case unit, and officers seconded from regular duties. They were a “fantastic team. Everyone had a key role. And everyone did their job.” Operating out of makeshift quarters in a cavernous room in the department’s Gottingen Street headquarters, the group gathered around a shoved-together collection of tables in the middle of the room each morning, and sometimes again in the afternoons. They discussed and dissected what they’d learned that day, then figured out what to do next.

During its re-investigation, the task force had progressed far beyond the thin gruel the informant had had to offer, putting together important new pieces of the puzzle of who killed Jason, independent of what the witness had told them. They were, Martin believed, “close, very close, extremely close” to being able to lay charges.

But then, two days before it was disbanded, investigators caught their informant toying with truth, “remembering big.” The investigators had had no choice but to cut him loose. Liars don’t make good courtroom witnesses.

It was a blow, but not lethal. Martin says every experienced investigator knows informants are notoriously unreliable. They’re usually criminals, with deals to make or axes to grind. So you never depend on an informant alone to make your case. The task force hadn’t. Which was why catching their informant in a lie, Martin believed, was just another “bump in the road” of their ongoing investigation.

But he wasn’t sure their bosses weren’t experienced enough to know that.

Tom Martin looked around the room. There was disbelief, anger. The other cops knew this was bullshit. Still, there was no point in confronting their staff sergeant. He was just the messenger. The message had come from two floors above, from Deputy Chief Chris McNeil, a man who’d never run a murder investigation.

We’re done here…

“You’re making a mistake.” Martin tried, with varying degrees of un-success, to keep his voice neutral. He knew he had a reputation for being one of management’s “biggest pains in the ass.” He preferred to see himself as a guy “who wasn’t afraid to piss off the bosses” in the interests of solving his case. Now, he stood just inside the door of McNeil’s office and tried to explain why the deputy chief shouldn’t do what he’d already done.

McNeil wasn’t listening. He simply stared at his computer screen while Martin made the case for continuing the task force. McNeil didn’t look up. All he said was, “It’s done.”

And it was. The task force was disbanded. Two weeks later, Martin suffered his first heart attack. He was never able to return to work. In 2008, he officially retired from the force.

***

It is a crisp fall morning in 2009. Tom Martin and I are having breakfast in a booth in a corner of the Athens’ restaurant on Quinpool Road. Two years before, while he was still on disability, I’d interviewed Martin for a Coast feature (August 24, 2006) called “The Last Best Hope” about his ongoing obsession—even after his heart attack—with solving the city’s many unsolved murder cases.

But he was still a cop then, which meant there were things he couldn’t say. I’ve come back today to ask about some of those things, including his views on why there seem to be so many unsolved murders in Halifax.

The Halifax Regional Police website currently lists 48 unsolved homicides, dating from the December 9, 1955, execution-style murder of Michael Leo Resk to the May 11, 2009 killing of Tanya Jean Brooks, an aboriginal mother of five.

Forty eight unsolved homicides? What’s that number really mean?

Well, the most recent figures I could find—from the Centre for Justice Statistics—compared homicide clearance rates from 1976 to 2005 for Canadian jurisdictions with populations of 150,000 or more. Halifax ranked 32nd out of 38 police forces with a clearance rate of just 80.3 per cent of 157 homicides. By contrast, the city with the best clearance rate was London, Ontario, a similar-sized city. London’s clearance rate for 139 murders was 97.8 per cent. Even the RCMP, which had 4,713 murders during the same period, solved 91.2 per cent of them.

Although those statistics are dated and include years that were kinder and gentler for violent crime, more recent numbers make Halifax look even worse. According to its own figures, HRP’s clearance rate for the 31 murders committed between 2005 and 2008 is just 64.5 per cent.

Martin pins much of the blame for that on his former department’s senior managers who, he says, lack the training and experience to effectively manage major criminal investigations.

The department’s own website, in fact, touts Frank Beazley’s most significant career accomplishment prior to becoming chief in 2003 as serving for six years as officer in charge of human resources and training. His deputy, McNeil—the man who shut down the McCullough investigation—is a law school graduate with what the website describes as “a broad range of policing experience in operations, communication and automation, and administration.”

“Chris McNeil is a smart man,” Martin says, “but he’s book smart. He’s not investigative smart. There’s a difference.” He pauses, considers, points. “Talking to him that day was like talking to that plant over there.”

***

Tom Martin isn’t just any disgruntled ex-cop. By the time he retired last year, he was the force’s most experienced criminal investigator with more than 500 major case investigations under his belt, including as lead investigator in 25 murders. In 2001—a year in which he helped make arrests in two murders, an attempted murder and a kidnapping, not to mention nailing serial abuser William Shrubsall for assault and robbery and three sexual assaults, which helped convince a judge to officially label Shrubsall a “dangerous offender”—his fellow cops voted him officer of the year. In 1993, he was investigator of the year.

In 1999, he helped create a four-level criminal investigator’s course, which he then taught not only to fellow officers but also to the RCMP and military police.

In addition to training other cops in the art and craft of criminal investigation, Martin took specialized courses himself, including in death and crime scene analysis, and in cold case investigations—both of which were jointly offered by the Jacksonville, Florida, Medical Examiner’s Office, the U.S. military and the FBI. (Martin is one of only two Halifax officers to have taken the cold case course; both are now retired.)

Experience counts, Martin says, because repetition is how investigators learn “to fine tune, to tweak, to attain that magic point of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ It’s why young cops get partnered up with experienced ones.” And why you need cops with investigative experience making decisions about investigations.

None of that is to suggest it’s easy to solve any crime, let alone murder. Consider the force’s best known 20-years-and-counting missing person’s investigation. Though almost no one expects to find Kimberly McAndrew alive or doubts she met with foul play, her case is, ironically, still officially listed as a missing person. That means it isn’t even counted among Halifax’s 48 unsolved homicides.

McAndrew’s case has involved informants, false leads, fortunetellers, riddle-talking psychic tipsters, dog bones, well bottoms, too many bodies that weren’t hers, weird suspects who turned out to be just weird, eyewitnesses who probably weren’t, turf wars, a task force, missing evidence, egos, twists, turns… and there’s still no end in sight.

The long version could fill a book; this short version should give you the flavour of why experience matters.

***

At 4:20 p.m. on Saturday, August 12, 1989, Kimberly McAndrew, a 19-year-old cashier at the Quinpool Road Canadian Tire store, punched off work, walked into the parking lot and… disappeared.

Tom Martin was a young undercover drug squad officer at the time, but he—like virtually everyone else on the force—pitched in during the investigation’s early stages, in part, because McAndrew—like McCullough—was also a pure victim and, in part, because her father, Cyril, was a Mountie, a fellow cop.

It was an RCMP informant who initially convinced investigators Kimberly had been abducted by pimps. While that tip had to be pursued, Martin says that, with the benefit of hindsight and experience, it’s clear investigators quickly fixed on it to the exclusion of other possibilities. “Investigation 101. Don’t believe your informant too much.”

Or well-meaning, supposed eye witnesses. One woman insisted she’d seen Kim in a Penhorn Mall flower shop the afternoon she disappeared. That tip became so embedded in the investigation it’s still listed on the department’s website as her last known sighting.

Martin says that doesn’t make sense but believing it again kept early investigators from considering other possibilities.

In 2004, when Martin finally officially got the McAndrew cold case file—“I’d been working it anyway; it was the case everyone wanted to solve”—his first step was to sit down with Kim’s family.

“Let’s go back to square one,” he told them.

He wanted to know everything about Kim—from the fact Bryan Adams was her favourite singer to the reality she was still a small-town girl so nervous of the big city she would rather go home to her parents in Parrsboro than stay overnight alone in the Halifax apartment she shared with her sister.

“This was not a girl who was going to go on a safari to Dartmouth,” Martin says. Besides, if she wanted to buy flowers—it was her boyfriend’s birthday—there was a flower shop along the most logical route from work to her apartment.

“My instincts and experience tell me Kim never got of that parking lot,” Martin says today.

But that raises a question. Given Kim’s skittishness, wouldn’t she have screamed if someone had tried to abduct her in a parking lot filled with Saturday afternoon shoppers?

She would have. Unless…

In October 1997, police in Nanaimo, B.C.—following up on complaints that a man driving a Pontiac Gran Am with Nova Scotia licence plates had been posing as a police officer to lure young girls into his car—arrested a former Halifax resident named Andrew Paul Johnson. They found a developmentally-challenged 20-year-old woman locked in the back of his car, along with what police described as a rape kit: pornographic magazines, a Halloween mask, handcuffs, a meat cleaver, lubricating gel and packing tape.

Halifax police had been looking for Johnson too. In 1992, Johnson had pleaded guilty to confining and sexually assaulting his Halifax girlfriend. In 1997, he’d been caught masturbating in his car while watching girls at play in Hammonds Plains. There was a warrant for his arrest for making harassing phone calls to a 12-year-old White’s Lake girl while posing as a teen fashion representative. And, shortly before Johnson turned up in B.C., he had disappeared from a Dartmouth sexual offender treatment program—but not before turning in a chilling assignment. Psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Gabriel asked participants in the program to write an essay about a sexual assault from the point of view of its victim.

Johnson had written his about the rape and murder of Kimberly McAndrew.

Gabriel notified the Halifax police, who quickly set up a task force to investigate. Although Martin—who was busy with several other major investigations himself at the time—wasn’t directly involved with that investigation, he says its members did a “phenomenal job” putting together the puzzle pieces of Johnson’s life.

Intriguingly, at the time of Kimberly’s disappearance, the local telephone directory lists Johnson’s girlfriend as living in an apartment in a complex across from the Canadian Tire parking lot. “If someone had identified himself to Kim as a police officer,” Martin suggests today, “she—being the daughter of a police officer—might have gone with him.”

The task force uncovered other evidence in its investigation too—including some which linked Johnson to other unsolved murders in Halifax.

On January 1, 1992, a 22-year-old Vancouver woman named Andrea King had arrived at the Halifax International Airport with dreams of enrolling at Dalhousie Law School… and disappeared. Her body was found nearly a year later. During their investigation of Johnson, police found Andrea’s eye shadow compact.

Police sent several pieces of evidence for DNA testing, but the science wasn’t yet sophisticated enough to give them what they needed to charge Johnson.

Confronted with what they knew, however, investigators hoped Johnson might confess. By that point, Johnson, who’d pleaded guilty to abduction charges in the Nanaimo case, was facing a dangerous offender hearing that could—and did—put him behind bars indefinitely. Johnson refused to talk to the Halifax investigators.

In May 2001, days after a court in B.C. declared Johnson a dangerous offender, HRP disbanded its task force, without explanation—and without laying any charges. Why?

Three years later, when Martin—now officially a member of the cold case unit—began his back-to-square-one re-examination of the McAndrew file, he went looking for a piece of DNA evidence he knew the task force had collected. Martin hoped advances in testing procedures might produce a breakthrough. But the evidence was missing. He shakes his head. “No one could find it.”

He also asked the RCMP for a copy of the file from the “unusual” parallel investigation it had run at the time into McAndrew’s disappearance. “I asked for it, but I never got it.” Martin doesn’t know why—“I didn’t just ask once”—but he believes there may still be lingering turf wars left over from the integration of the local major crimes units with the Mounties’ squad following municipal amalgamation in 1996.

“Whatever,” he says, “I never did get the file.”

***

“From where I sit, in charge of operational policing,” Chris McNeil begins, “one unsolved murder is too many for me.” We’re sitting in a boardroom near his office in police headquarters. Though he says he isn’t familiar with the clearance rate statistics I’d asked him about, the city’s deputy police chief insists his force’s clearance rate for the past two years—10 of 14 homicides in 2007-08—is a “very respectable” 70 per cent.

“There’s always going to some ex-somebody telling me how I should do my job better,” he says of Tom Martin’s criticisms. “But some of the very cases you’re talking about happened at the heyday of when Tommy and other very experienced investigators were here. They didn’t solve those cases.”

McNeil does concede Martin’s point that the department has lost a lot of experienced investigators in the last several years, but he sees that as a positive. “We’re a younger force today. There’s a whole new energy, and people are getting opportunities that weren’t available to me as a young officer. And now we’ve lived through that period of transition. I have a lot of young but very experienced investigators.

He says he’s “not one to look back with rose-coloured glasses… We will always have unsolved homicides.” Many involve bad guys killing bad guys, cases where investigators smack up against that subculture’s brick wall, an unbreakable code of silence. Or investigators may be hobbled by “procedural protections” built into new Charter of Rights and Freedoms. “Things that were done 20 years couldn’t be done today.” While he doesn’t dispute the legitimacy of some of those new protections, the result is that solving cases has become “10-fold” more complex than before.

McNeil acknowledges financial incentives—the province is offering up to $50,000 for useful information in a number of specific cases, including McCullough and McAndrew—provide investigators with “another tool” but he adds “the reward system has not led us to solve a single serious crime so far.”

Neither, in truth, has the force’s cold case unit.

The unit was unveiled amid much fanfare in 2000. The five-member squad was initially going to focus on 15 homicides and eight missing persons cases, including McAndrew. Today, its murder caseload has more than doubled to 34—now including McCullough—but no one will say how many officers are assigned to it. “We don’t give information on our deployment numbers,” HRP spokesperson Brian Palmeter told me. Neither will the department indicate the unit’s budget.

Tom Martin suspects that may be because there’s no one besides Sgt. Jeff Clark, the officer nominally in charge, minding the store. “You need to go out and pound the pavement,” he says. “Re-interview. Re-think. That’s how you solve cases. And you can’t pick and choose the cases that ‘deserve’ to be investigated. A case where bad guys kill bad guys is no less important and should have the same resources as a case involving an innocent victim, perhaps even more because solving it will often lead to solving more murders… It’s about results. To my knowledge, the cold case unit has not laid one single criminal charge in nine years. To me, that’s unacceptable.”

For his part, McNeil says the public may simple expect too much from cold case units. “I call it the CSI factor. People think you find a piece of forensic evidence and, 40 minutes later, case solved. There’s no panacea like that.”

Even if a cold case investigator finds new evidence worth pursuing, he adds, the department then has to put together a “resource-intense” task force like those in the McCullough and McAndrew cases.

“There’s always a challenge deciding which ones you work on and which ones… there’s no point in pulling off the shelf,” McNeil acknowledges. “It’s not like you’re ever guaranteed results but I have to believe there’s something here that can be pursued and that there’s a likelihood that this is going to produce results.”

Or else?

OK, boys… Pack it up… Back to what you were doing… We’re done here…

***

When I ask Tom Martin about McNeil’s argument that some of what are today’s unsolved murders occurred on his watch, Martin is quick to fire back. “Investigators,” he says, “can only do what their bosses let them do. Investigators didn’t shut down the McCullough investigation. The deputy chief did.”

As for being an ex-somebody, Martin points out, “I’m an ex-somebody with experience.”

He say McNeil is a “micro-manager” who makes critical decisions about cases “even though he has never been involved in a major investigation himself.” To make matters worse, he adds, the other key players in the chain of command making day-to-day decisions on murder investigations—Superintendent Mike Burns and Staff Sergeant Frank Chambers—have “little or no” investigative experience either. He shakes his head. “These are the bosses makings the decisions on these cases.”

One more example. On January 6, 2003, 61-year-old businessman Larry Rhynold died during a mysterious fire in what news accounts at the time described as his “expensive, plantation-style home” in the city’s south end. Rhynold, who had been through a messy divorce, faced a myriad of “financial, legal and personal troubles.” Days before the fire, friends say, he’d been beaten up by two men outside his own home. Within days, fire investigators concluded the blaze had been deliberately set.

After weeks of on-scene investigation, witness interviews and forensic analysis, police investigators, perhaps not surprisingly, ruled the incident a homicide. The brass disagreed. “I argued with Staff Sergeant Frank Chambers for weeks trying to prove to him that this was a homicide,” Martin says. “The department’s policy is that every death is to be treated as a homicide until proven otherwise. I was just trying to convince my boss to follow the department’s own policy. In my career, I don’t recall Chambers ever being the lead investigator in a homicide case or even being assigned a homicide case. But he was my boss.”

Eventually, Martin says, he did win his point and Rhynold’s death was designated as a homicide. Shortly after he left the department, however, the case disappeared from the list of murders.

Not listing it as a murder, of course, makes the department’s clearance numbers look better.

***

Why is Tom Martin saying all this now? He says he has nothing to gain by going public, but “I have spent too many years sitting with the families of murder victims promising them we would do all we could to solve their case, and that’s not happening. The numbers of unsolved just keep getting higher.”

Forty-eight.

Plus Kimberly McAndrew…

Plus Larry Rhynold…

And getting higher.

___

Stephen Kimber, The Coast’s Senior Features Writer, is the author of one novel and eight books of nonfiction.