RUNNING OUT OF TIME
RCMP unit chases cold cases
Shelly-Ann Bacsu’s file fills 147 banker’s boxes. About one-quarter of them are stacked along the walls of a conference room on the second floor of a Stony Plain Road office building.
Inside are files containing everything police know about what happened to the 16-year-old Hinton girl, who in 1983 disappeared while walking home from a friend’s house. A map of Hinton covers one of the walls, dotted with markers indicating where search parties found evidence, or where witnesses saw something suspicious.
A school picture of Bacsu, smiling, her dark shoulder-length hair falling on a white shirt, is pinned next to the map.
For months, RCMP Cpl. Melanie Riopel and Cpl. Darrin Lukay have been going through the file box by box, re-examining a case, like all historical homicides, that’s running out of time. Every so often, they’ll do field interviews, trying to dig up details that have eluded a long line of investigators. But many of the people they talk to are in their 70s. Memories fade and witnesses, even perpetrators, can’t live forever.
This is the life of a cold case investigator with the Alberta RCMP’s Historical Homicide Unit. Ten investigators are assigned to the Edmonton-based unit, which is responsible for reviewing more than 230 unsolved homicides across the province.
“This type of work brings in a special and unique kind of investigator,” said Staff Sgt. Jason Zazulak, the head of the unit. “You need to be very patient, you need to be methodical, you need to be the kind of person who will go down whatever path you may think of, however unlikely it may be.”
Police do not close unsolved homicide investigations, no matter how old. In Alberta, the oldest cold case in RCMP jurisdiction dates to 1935.
Alberta Mounties have always reviewed cold cases, but the dedicated Historical Homicide Unit is a recent creation. The unit was launched within the past four years as a spinoff of Project KARE, a joint RCMP-Edmonton police task force created in 2003 in response to the slayings of a dozen women dating back to the late 1980s, Zazulak said.
Earlier this year, the unit began a push to solve another three cases with female victims, including Bacsu. Police don’t believe there are connections between the three cases, which happened between 1983 to 2013, but all involve a woman who disappeared and whose remains have never been found.
Zazulak said the unit decided to take a fresh look at the Bacsu case at the request of the family. The boxes of documents were loaded onto a U-Haul and driven from the Hinton detachment to Edmonton, where Lukay and Riopel were assigned as lead investigators.
It’s never clear where a new lead may come from, but the surest place to start is the boxes. They contain all the statements, reports and disclosure RCMP have generated on the case — information civilian staff are working to digitize. Actual evidence in the case is stored separately.
Before joining historical homicide, Riopel was an investigator in the Hinton detachment and was well-acquainted with the Bacsu case. A 2013 copy of the Hinton Voice, featuring a photo of Muriel Bacsu with a framed photo of her daughter, was among the items in the conference room.
“She’s getting older ... and all she really wants to know is where her daughter is,” Riopel said. “That’s one of the major motivators.”
Police know that Bacsu was walking home from a friend’s house on May 3, 1983, a seven-kilometre route along Highway 16 she often travelled.
Investigators have marked Bacsu’s route on the wall map. A blue star marks her house. Locations where two suspicious vehicles were spotted — a green Jeep and a van — are marked with orange and green arrows.
Searchers turned up a number of Bacsu’s belongings in different places across town. Her grey jacket found along the Athabasca River. A smashed cassette tape was discovered on Highway 16, while along a leg of Highway 40, they found an envelope with her name on it.
Why the items were so spread out is “one of the questions we’re trying to answer,” Riopel said.
DNA plays an ever-increasing role in investigations, and detectives often send items to be retested as technology improves. But there’s a gap between what the public believes DNA can do and what it can actually tell investigators, Zazulak said, especially in cold cases
The unit is also using social media to remind the public that police are still looking for information on long-forgotten cases. Historical homicide investigator Cpl. Kerry Shima recently became the first rank-and-file RCMP member to get a personalized Twitter account.
It’s difficult to say how many cases the unit has solved, Zazulak said, because solves aren’t credited to a single unit. He said three or four cases have been put down due to their work — “we like to think we didn’t get it to the goal-line, but we like to carry it over,” he said.
But part of the job is accepting that evidence degrades, witnesses and perpetrators die. Zazulak said some of the oldest cases are simply unsolvable.
“Our efforts are always toward solving every case and we’ll apply ourselves to every case,” he said. “I think practically speaking, there are some cases that will never be solved.”
You need to be very patient, you need to be methodical.