Statue honours missing couple

After her parents went missing in 2010, Trudy Holder would cope with her grief by plucking the petals of a single rose, thanking her parents for a touching memory as she let the petals slip through her fingers.

“Thank you, Dad, for being my hero, and thank you, Mom, for being my best friend,” she said Sunday, holding back tears as she addressed an audience gathered for the unveiling of a memorial statue in their honour at St. Albert Place, two more petals fluttering to the floor.

Lyle and Marie McCann were last seen leaving for a road trip July 3, 2010. Travis Vader was identified in 2010 as a person of interest, but it would be six years before he would be convicted of two counts of manslaughter and given a single life sentence for their presumed deaths. Vader will be eligible for parole after serving seven years.

Despite repeated searches and pleas from their family, the couple’s bodies were never found and a $60,000 reward for information raised by members of the community went unclaimed.

On Sunday, a statue was unveiled in Grandin Pond EcoPark in St. Albert, commissioned with the unclaimed reward money to serve as a lasting tribute to the couple.

“This is definitely the end of a chapter for me,” son Brett McCann said. “The years of legal issues, all the things that we’ve gone through over the last six years, to me this is a real milestone. We’re turning the page, and we’re moving on to the next chapter.”

The piece — created by Vancouver artists Paul Slipper and MaryAnn Liu — is two soaring bronze loons soaring above a 1,200-kg granite base etched with words and phrases chosen by family members in their own handwriting that remind them of who Lyle and Marie McCann were in life.

“Mom and Dad were kindred spirits and these two loons really evoke to me and to our family their loving relationship,” said their son.

Titled Darling, after Marie and Lyle McCann’s favourite term of endearment, the statue will serve as a permanent place to reflect on their lives in a park just blocks from where the couple lived since the 1960s.

Brett McCann said his parents would often walk along the pond’s edge holding hands. “My grandparents saw the beauty that radiated from these birds. A loon call on a still lake was something they had always cherished,” said their grandson, Russell McCann.