HER NAME WAS CARRIE PATON AND SHE WAS MURDERED

You have a right to know — and police have no business keeping victims’ names a secret

Her name was Carrie Shannon Paton.

She was passionate about her garden. Primroses were her favourite spring flowers.

She was fascinated by the Middle Ages. She’d been a member of both the Knights of the Northern Realm and the Knygts Erraunt, living history clubs where she dressed in medieval gowns, engaged in swordplay and learned to make her own soap.

She was interested in politics. She was a conservative, who disliked the New Democrats and supported Brian Jean. She also followed Don Iveson on Facebook, and liked to talk to her hairdresser about the political and social issues of the day.

Thursday, the police found the bodies of two people at a house on a quiet street in Blue Quill, a house with a beautiful garden. The Edmonton Police Service refused to identify the dead. All they would say was that the woman was a victim of homicide, and that the man’s death was non-criminal.

A land titles search revealed that the home belongs to Carrie Shannon Paton, 38. Monday, friends and family confirmed that she was the person who had been killed there. The CBC, citing unnamed sources, identified Lance Vargas, her boyfriend, as the person who had killed her.

The news left her friends stunned.

“There was not anything about her that anybody could dislike,” said Donna Cucheran, president of the Knygts Erraunt, who’d known Paton for more than a decade. “She was elegant. She was soft spoken. She did an awful lot of smiling and was very quick to giggle. This should not have happened to her.”

Annette Lee had been Paton’s hairdresser for years.

“She was a very nice person, very mature, very logical,” said Lee. “She was very interested in social issues. She had a big heart.”

It’s a horrific tragedy. But the aura of mystery created by the police made it all the more surreal. And problematic.

Because in this case, Carrie Shannon Paton was a member of the EPS family — her father, Rob Paton, had been a long-serving EPS detective and staff sergeant.

Which makes the decision to protect the privacy of the victim more troubling.

In recent months, the Edmonton Police Service has taken it upon itself to decide, on a caseby-case basis, whether and when to release the names of homicide victims, and the names of those accused of killing them.

There’s nothing in Alberta’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act that requires or directs police to keep such information private. Quite the opposite. The act states government agencies have a positive duty to release information in the public interest. For years, the EPS did just that. But 18 months ago, it made an abrupt change.

Police now pick and choose when and if we get to know who was killed. There’s no appeal. And that’s outrageous.

Judges have the power to impose publication bans subject to appeal. But when police take it upon themselves to act as arbitrary arbitrators, they overstep their bounds. And they put the even-handed administration of justice in peril.

Monday, the police insisted Paton’s family connections had nothing to do with the decision to keep this case quiet.

“We evaluated all the evidence and circumstances of the file and found that, since no charges were pending and the case was coming to a close, there was no investigative need to release the names. The victim’s family had nothing to do with that decision,” said Michael James, acting director of communications for the Edmonton Police Service.

But that’s not the test. It doesn’t matter whether police felt there was no investigative need to release the information. This information isn’t made public because it’s useful to investigators. It’s made public because it’s useful to the rest of us to know when homicides, especially domestic homicides, are happening in our community. How else can we work together to fight the plague of deadly violence?

Jan Reimer is executive director of the Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters, and a former Edmonton mayor. While she agrees it’s important to respect grieving families, especially when there are young children, she’s concerned about this new police secrecy.

“I do think domestic violence victims need to be named and identified,” she told me. “We can’t track domestic violence if we can’t name it as what it is.”

Exactly.

Domestic homicide isn’t a private embarrassment. It isn’t something to keep quiet, for fear of embarrassing or shaming a family. It should make us shout. It should make us rave.

Secrecy does nothing but whip up fear and leave an information vacuum that can end up being filled by gossip and rumour.

It shouldn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, if you’re wellconnected to people in power, or someone without connections. Your death should matter. Because your life mattered. As did the life of Carrie Shannon Paton.

Domestic violence victims need to be named and identified. We can’t track domestic violence if we can’t name it as what it is.