Two women seek answers to sister’s death 34 years on
Sisters in regular contact with officers tasked with investigating cold cases
As Deirdre Goudriaan watches her children grow, she sometimes thinks about the milestones her little sister Delaine Goudriaan missed.
“It kind of brings a tear to my eye, because she never got those opportunities: to graduate high school, go to university, be married, have her own children — none of those opportunities,” she said.
Thirty-four years after Delaine Goudriaan’s body was discovered in a field across the freeway from Edmonton’s maximum security prison, Deirdre Goudriaan and another sister are redoubling efforts to figure out who killed her.
Delaine Goudriaan’s life was cut short at age 13 when she was killed after going missing on July 14, 1983.
She had lived in the city for just 10 months.
Her badly decomposed body was discovered fully clothed, hidden beneath a large signboard in a field along Manning Drive, across from Edmonton Institution, on Aug. 16, 1983.
The death was ruled a homicide but investigators soon hit a wall. A cause of death could not be determined due to the state of the body, according to a police report on the case, and the amount of physical evidence was limited due to decomposition. An RCMP lab examined the girl’s clothing but found no unusual damage.
Deirdre Goudriaan and her other sister, Deanne Souvie, remember Delaine Goudriaan as an independent girl with a sharp sense of humour who liked telling stories and got up early each weekday to deliver the Edmonton Sun. She was the youngest of four siblings.
On the phone from her home in White Rock, B.C., Deirdre Goudriaan said she last saw her sister on a trip between Hinton and Edmonton a few weeks before she went missing. The family had moved to Edmonton from Hinton the year before.
Souvie said her sister had been sexually abused by a man close to the family in Hinton. She had started suffering seizures, possibly due to the stress of the abuse, she said.
Living with a single mother in a new city in a full house was stressful. But while police said Delaine Goudriaan had been reported missing before, Souvie said her sister was not a runaway.
A 1989 Edmonton Journal article said she had gone to Atlas Pizza,
It wasn’t taken seriously. It’s, ‘Oh yeah, it’s another runaway.’ DEIRDRE GOUDRIAAN
a hangout a few blocks from her home at 13512 66 St.
“There was nothing to run away from,” Souvie said. “I think she just went to go see friends ... she left my mom a note on the kitchen table to say she was coming back later.”
Delaine Goudriaan brought with her two pills for her seizures, which were found in her pocket.
Detectives identified “a number” of persons of interest during the initial investigation who were cleared through alibis or following a polygraph test. Police said the case is still being regularly reviewed. The file was not one of the 11 unsolved homicides placed under the microscope in the lead up to the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women. Delaine Goudriaan was not Indigenous.
Over the years, Delaine Goudriaan’s family have asked for file reviews and updates on the case. In the past year, the sisters began to work “full-on” to find out what happened.
“Our kids are grown now and we have some time, we can actually work pretty hard on this,” Deirdre Goudriaan said.
The sisters have met with investigators three or four times and talk to detectives over the phone almost every week. Five Edmonton police detectives are tasked with solving historical homicides, police officials said last month.
Goudriaan also obtained materials about the case through freedom of information requests and said she found “balls that were dropped” related to evidence handling, forensic testing and followup with suspects.
“It wasn’t taken seriously,” she said of the disappearance. “It’s, ‘Oh yeah, it’s another runaway’.”
When she thinks of her sister now, she tries to remember a day the family spent on Sylvan Lake, “just hanging out at the lake and having fun together as a family.”
“That’s one of the things that comes back to me.”