Crime Seen (22 page)

As soon as he mentioned Kirkland Lake I knew what he was talking about. It was never a “whodunit,” but rather a “how do we get him.” It was the oldest missing persons’ case I’d ever approved for CIB to reinvestigate and had already been revisited in 1986, 1991 and again starting in 2006.

Back in 1970 twelve-year-old Katherine May Wilson went missing just outside Kirkland Lake, about six hundred kilometres north of Toronto. She was believed to have been abducted and presumed murdered. We were confident Kathy’s second cousin on her father’s side, Barry Manion, was responsible. There was just never enough evidence to lay charges against him.

Kathy went missing from Harvey Kirkland, just outside the Kirkland Lake town limit. It was a community of about seventy to eighty residents living in shanty-type homes, few of which had running water or indoor toilets. For many, raising their own animals, hunting and fishing, along with what they could grow in their own gardens, was what put food on the table.

Kathy’s father, Garnet, was a diamond driller at Adams Mine. Her mother, Aline, had got as far as Grade 5 in school and was married at fifteen. Aline started having children when she was eighteen and had five by the time she was twenty-two. In 1970 Kathy was the oldest at twelve. Karen and Bobby were next. Eight-year-old Aline, nicknamed “Pee Wee,” was the youngest. Their brother, Kenneth, died at three months of age from sudden infant death syndrome.

On Tuesday, October 20, 1970, the simple life of the Wilson family changed forever. The kids all left in the morning to walk one and a half kilometres into town to school. Aline told her husband that she wanted to go into town to pick up her government baby bonus cheque at the post office. Garnet persuaded her to go partridge hunting with him instead. They spent the early part of the day hunting and then Garnet went in to work the afternoon shift at the nearby mine. Aline didn’t have a chance to go into town before the children got home from school.

Kathy’s favourite pastime after school was riding her neighbour’s horses but that day she came straight home, anxious to know if her mother had picked up the cheque, since Kathy had been promised a new pair of shoes. Her mother told her she hadn’t picked it up yet and asked Kathy to walk back into town to the post office to get it and pick up a few groceries as well.

Kathy asked her little sister Pee Wee to come with her but she didn’t want to. Kathy walked into town alone, picked up the cheque at the post office and then walked to a small grocery store. She telephoned her mother from there at about 5:00 p.m., wanting to know if she could buy a pop and a snack. She was told she could have one or the other. It was the last time Aline spoke to her daughter.

After the call, Aline told Pee Wee and her older sister Karen to go meet Kathy. As the girls were walking on Harvey Kirkland Road toward town, they met Manion driving his boss’s pickup truck with “Brown’s Auto Supply” painted on the side. At the time he was twenty-two years old, married with a three-year-old son and infant daughter and lived in town. He stopped and asked the girls if Kathy was still living at home and they told him she was.

The girls continued on into town but couldn’t find Kathy and started back home. (It was later learned that Kathy stopped for a few minutes at a friend’s home to share a bag of Cheezies and missed running into her sisters when they were coming into town.) Karen and Pee Wee were on Harvey Kirkland Road when the same pickup truck drove toward them again, speeding up as it got closer. Pee Wee lost her footing on the road and fell as it went by them, but Karen clearly saw Kathy on the passenger’s side. Manion was driving and appeared to be pushing Kathy’s head down. Karen made eye contact with Kathy as they drove by and then the pickup sped out of sight toward town.

The girls ran home and told their mother what they saw. Aline walked up the road toward town to look for Kathy herself. Finding no sign of her, she returned home. As time passed, panic set in and she called Garnet at work and then called the police. Garnet was home by the time the OPP came to the house. Karen told the officer what she had seen and he realized the incident was not in OPP jurisdiction—Harvey Kirkland Road was in Teck Township and therefore the Teck Township Police Department were responsible for it. The Wilsons’ home was in Lebel Township and under the jurisdiction of the Kirkland Lake OPP. The OPP officer left the Wilsons and went to the Teck police office and gave them what information he had. A Teck officer completed a missing person report including that Kathy was four foot nine, had dark curly hair, weighed just over a hundred pounds and the description of what she was wearing. Police went to Manion’s residence later in the evening and told him Kathy was missing but Manion made no mention of seeing the girls earlier in the day. The officer talked to him for only a few minutes and then left.

The next morning Manion was driving on Highway 11 outside of Kirkland Lake in the same pickup and was involved in a serious single-car accident. When the police were again able to question him about Kathy’s disappearance, he denied any knowledge of her whereabouts or ever having her in his pickup the day she went missing. Apparently the police believed him and not Kathy’s sisters, as the police never spoke to Manion again and he moved away not long after.

Over the next several days vital time was wasted debating jurisdictional issues between the two police departments. The OPP detachment was also dealing with a fatal motor car accident and monitoring the nearby Quebec border during the infamous FLQ crisis. Meanwhile, in Kirkland Lake, a little girl was still missing and little investigating was being done.

Searches were conducted by the police with the help of many area residents, including some of Mr. Wilson’s workmates at the mine who got paid leave to help. Meanwhile Pee Wee and the rest of her family walked the fields and through the bush surrounding Harvey Kirkland searching for Kathy.

Kathy’s disappearance ended up being investigated jointly by the two neighbouring police agencies. Weeks turned into months and then years. All the while, the Wilsons were confident that Manion took their daughter but never challenged the inaction of the police. What Karen and Pee Wee Wilson told police they saw and who they spoke to while walking into town that day in 1970 was never formally documented in any police report. The information, scribbled on some rough notes and stored in a banker’s box, wasn’t found until a 1986 cold-case file review.

Garnet and Aline eventually separated and divorced. Their son, Bobby, died in 1992 and Garnet passed away in 2002. Over the years people contacted Aline with information about her daughter, but when the police interviewed them they’d deny what they’d said to Aline. She thought they were looking for attention, but always let the police know just in case. A private investigator once contacted her advising he had somebody that had seen Kathy. She had him do some work but soon realized that every time he would call her with new information it was right before he was due more money. Aline ended up having to sell her home to pay him off.

In 2006, when Ken Leppert transferred to CIB, he was already familiar with the still-unsolved case and asked that it be assigned to him. Despite previously unsuccessful re-investigations, Ken was convinced that the case could still be solved. He said, “The reality was two different forces kept passing the buck. No one wanted to take responsibility. There seemed to be no ownership of the case and a lack of accountability all around. The two girls had seen who had taken their sister. It’s like no one believed the girls or just didn’t care.” Ken wanted the OPP to try harder.

Ken and UHIT discussed a number of strategies that hadn’t been attempted before and the fourth-round investigation proposal was approved by me. The last hurdle was to get OPP deputy commissioner Vince Hawkes to approve it.

The bosses in the “Ivory Tower” or “Puzzle Palace,” as the boots on the street called headquarters, were often painted with broad brushes of criticism. According to some, we were supposedly too far removed from the real world of policing and therefore incapable of making good decisions. I have to admit I’d thrown a few darts myself earlier in my career, but as I made my way up the ladder I learned that bureaucracy had a play-book. You needed to know the rules and how to make them work to your advantage. Some days getting in to see Vince to get something approved was like taking a number in a Saturday morning deli line. I was usually queued up with suits in front and back of me, all with the same goal of getting the purse strings loosened in their favour for terrorism, organized crime or whatever mayhem they thought more important than mine.

You couldn’t tag Vince with having his head in the clouds. He was a twenty-five-year veteran in charge of all of our technical and specialized investigative services, as well as the major case management program. He’d worked his way up through Ident to become the OPP’s first bloodstain pattern analyst. He had an international reputation and court-recognized expertise. (He became the fourteenth commissioner of the OPP in 2014.)

I certainly knew I wouldn’t get funding for a case that was thirty-six years old unless Vince was convinced it could be solved. He required little persuasion on this one and Ken was designated as the team commander of “Project Tribute.”

Ken went to see Aline and her daughters in Kirkland Lake to tell them about the re-investigation. He said, “The Wilson family had been let down before. I didn’t want to give them false hope. I listened to their concerns. I couldn’t defend how they had been treated in the past so just apologized for it. Today this case would be investigated very differently. But it had happened in 1970. It was what it was.”

Ken assigned a born-and-raised Kirkland Lake officer, Yvan Godin, as the lead investigator on the case. Josée Sabourin, from the neighbouring South Porcupine detachment, would look after file coordination. Keeping everything organized in a thirty-six-year-old case may not be the most exciting task, but it was one of the most important, and Josée was up for it.

Yvan and Josée found that virtually no officer notes were available from the initial investigation and no formal statements had been taken. The only documents available were police reports containing few details. Files from the more recent re-investigations contained notes from interviews but the two of them could see that witness memories were fading and there were discrepancies each time they were re-interviewed, which could be problematic in court. Some witnesses were now quite elderly so they needed to be videotaped and swear their statements under oath in case they died—not an easy topic to broach with a witness.

Civilian administrative assistant Karen Marshall had worked on the 1986 and 1991 re-investigations and she was back again. Karen and Josée worked together to input and update all information being gathered by the team, yielding a clear chronology of events and timeline for the October 20, 1970, activities of Kathy and her cousin. A total of twenty-six people had seen Kathy walking into town or on her way back home. Twelve people witnessed Manion in the same area that Kathy was walking around the time she went missing. Some of the witnesses were only now being interviewed for the first time.

Doug Bradley, a teenager in Kirkland Lake at the time that Kathy went missing, was the last addition to the team. He too had been involved in earlier investigations. He said, “Policing was done differently back then. You weren’t hired in this town as a police officer on your ability but rather your size. You were given a uniform to wear and you wore it whether it fit you or not. In the early 70s there was no police training or police college. There were no police procedures or investigative manuals. There was no training whatsoever. Even though the officers were likely doing the best they could, this investigation was way beyond their ability back in the 70s. The way we do business today, Manion would have been locked up in the first day or two.” Doug also had a special advantage: he knew Manion personally, having worked with him at the car dealership in Kirkland Lake in the late 60s.

When Ken came into my office that day and sat down, he seemed a bit nervous. He told me that he and the Project Tribute team had been brainstorming about strategies to bring the crime to the forefront of Manion’s mind again. They were considering making a confrontational approach on him. Manion was twenty-two at the time of Kathy’s disappearance and was now almost sixty.

Ken said, “We’d like to orchestrate someone to go face to face with him in a public place. The confrontation hopefully would embarrass him. It would also signal that we are still on the case and that we know he is the one that killed Kathy. He needs to know that we are not going to give up this investigation.”

Ken shifted in his chair across from me and continued, “We’d like to do the confrontation with someone similar in age to Manion.”

Now I knew where this conversation was going.

“Oh, so you’re looking for an old undercover broad like me?”

Ken hesitated, “Well, it would be nice to have someone with your experience … and those are your words not mine.”

Ken had a reputation for being a strategic investigator. Having a boss directly involved in the investigation could be helpful in keeping resources focused on his case. I didn’t care—I was thrilled with the potential of returning to an era in my career I’d left over twenty years ago, no matter how small the role.