MOTHER FEARED WORST AFTER STRANGE VOICE MAIL
‘It sounded like her voice … but it wasn’t her,’ court hears at Allan Shyback’s murder trial
She somehow knew, but didn’t want to know.
When Peggy Mitchell received emails that seemed to have come from her daughter, Lisa, in the fall of 2012, there was so much that set off alarm bells, she probably should have alerted police sooner. “It wasn’t her, there was something off,” she says.
Still, the possibility her 31-year-old daughter — with whom she spoke three or four times a week — had met a tragic end was something she likely didn’t want to contemplate. When two weeks later she received a voice mail in the middle of the night, she finally decided to act. “It sounded like her voice … but it wasn’t her.”
On Tuesday morning, that disjointed, nonsensical voice-mail message is played in a Calgary courtroom before Justice Rosemary Nation, while Mitchell is on the witness stand. Everyone in the nearly full courtroom knows that the mother’s worst, unthinkable fears had likely already played out before she got that message.
Nearly two years after she made the call to the RCMP, the body of Mitchell’s daughter was found buried in the basement of the home she shared with her common-law husband, Allan Shyback. It was in this same house that Shyback was living with his and Lisa’s two young children.
Five years after she was reported missing, the trial in Lisa Mitchell’s death is finally under way. Shyback is charged with second-degree murder and improperly interfering with human remains. Between Oct. 28 and Nov. 3, 2012, the Crown contends, Shyback killed Mitchell and later buried her in the basement.
After a year-long “Mr. Big” sting operation, in which police pretend to be criminals to develop a relationship, Shyback confessed, says the prosecution.
At the start of the trial expected to last two weeks, Shyback is read the charges against him. Dressed in a grey dress shirt and grey pants, he wears an emotionless expression before quietly answering “not guilty” to each charge.
Court then hears from Peggy Mitchell about her close relationship with her daughter, a young woman in an admitted “volatile” 10-year union with Shyback.
“She said she was gesturing with a frying pan and accidentally hit him,” says Mitchell of an argument the pair had earlier that year. Their abusive relationship included “pushing and shoving” from both sides, a situation clearly unhealthy for all family members.
On the last day she saw Lisa, Mitchell was at her home in Longview. Lisa had brought a male acquaintance over that night — defence lawyer Balfour Der would later refer to him as a “one-night stand.” The next morning, she left for Calgary earlier than planned, after a call from Shyback. She never saw her daughter again, except for those impersonal emails and that strange phone message, one the accused would later tell undercover officers he had created using old messages from his wife.
Despite not calling the police right away, Mitchell’s suspicions were in overdrive. A few days later, she drove to the couple’s home and confronted him. “Where would someone go without their shoes and coat?” she asked Shyback when she saw her daughter’s belongings in the front hallway.
On cross-examination, Der focuses on Lisa Mitchell’s story about the frying pan, and asks how many relationships she had with other men. “A couple that I know of,” says her mother.
He asks if it’s true she never liked Shyback and disapproved of the relationship. “Yes,” is the reply.
The questioning doesn’t last long and soon Mitchell is free to sit in the courtroom gallery for the rest of the trial. She takes her spot in the front row with friends and family, to hear a medical examiner describe how, two years after those emails and voice mails, her daughter’s mummified body was found in two tubs in Shyback’s basement, covered in salt tablets and kitty litter.