HOUNDED OR HAUNTED?
There are more questions than answers surrounding the 1974 Rosedale fire investigation and subsequent suicide of Michael Morrison, accused of setting the blaze, writes Barb Pacholik.
A blazing Regina apartment. A decades-old cold case. A snitch who rekindled the probe into a suspected deadly arsonist. Michael John Morrison endured trial by fire through four decades — until his death. Some would call it dogged police work; Morrison’s family calls it persecution. Check out the final story of Barb Pacholik’s four-part series Suspicion.
My life has become HELL! Between the crack addiction and the criminal charges I am surely going mad. I plan, if I can get past the fear of the act and fear of failure, to kill myself very soon. It seems so cowardly and unnatural. I have contemplated this for several months. Weakness is nothing new to me. It has run my life … I seem to be afraid of everyone and everything. — letter dated July 4, 2010 by Michael Morrison
After penning this first of two notes, Michael John Morrison meticulously prepared to meet death.
On the bottom of his last letter, the 58-year-old wrote who should get his car, gave the location of the registration, noted his taxes hadn’t been done, and urged his siblings in whom he’d instilled his love for music and the finer things in life to “split any art and furniture you want.”
He took care to tape a note outside the door to his suite, a low rent apartment in Regina’s downtown. It alerted whoever came looking for him to call an ambulance because he was dead.
Then he stepped back inside, and closed the door for the last time.
Morrison’s suicide on July 9, 2010, is one more piece in a fragmented puzzle that’s defied a solution for decades. He died while on bail facing three counts of manslaughter for one of Regina’s deadliest fires.
But who sparked it — if indeed it was arson?
Was Morrison a guilty man dodging justice as he’d done for decades; or an innocent one worn down by years of unjust suspicion first ignited as a gay man in an era far removed from Pride parades?
The Feb. 10, 1974, blaze at Rosedale Manor claimed the lives of Rose Woznesensky, Gladys Christie and Alexander Kostichuk. Like Morrison, Christie and Kostichuk lived on the top floor at Rosedale. In death, they share the same Regina cemetery with him.
To Morrison’s siblings, the Rosedale fire had taken its last victim 36 years later.
To those who believe Morrison a deadly serial arsonist, he died with a guilty conscience.
When he was charged in 2009, the result of a cold case investigation, Gerri Woznesensky told the Leader-Post: “Hopefully justice will be served, and we can finally as a family put this to rest.” Her daughter Melinda was badly burned in the fire while sleeping over at the home of her grandmother Rose, who died trying to escape the burning building with the seven-year-old girl.
Contacted recently, a member of the Woznesensky family says they’ve moved on and don’t want to discuss it further. Police shared nothing with them of the evidence that led to Morrison’s charges. “I think we did get closure — as much as we can get,” she adds.
The truth and justice craved by all touched by the Rosedale Manor fire has proven elusive.
“I really feel bad for the victims, because I’m sure they had some satisfaction, that finally there was some sort of justice done,” says Morrison’s brother, Randall. “But I don’t see it that way.”
Morrison’s suicide took his Regina lawyer, Jeff Deagle, by surprise.
At the time they were preparing for a preliminary hearing on the three manslaughter charges, one count of assault causing bodily harm for the burns suffered by Melinda, and an additional charge of wilfully setting a fire at Pioneer Village, where Morrison worked as an orderly.
That fire is alleged to have occurred on Feb. 4, 1974, a week before the Rosedale blaze.
Deagle felt confident as the preliminary hearing drew near.
“I don’t think the Crown had any credible evidence to successfully convict my client. But at the same time, Michael, from Day 1, denied ever doing the offence,” says Deagle. “And (he) never wavered on that, not in the least.”
Morrison was a depressed, anxiety-ridden, 22-year-old hiding his homosexuality from his family when rescued from the top floor of Rosedale Manor. But he was out of the fire — and into the frying pan, grilled for hours by investigators. They were suspicious of, as described in eyewitness reports, the “fully dressed,” “queer” man who got home minutes before the blaze broke out in a basement storage closet and had been seen at other fires.
But a prosecutor, back in 1974, found there was insufficient evidence to charge him, even if investigators could prove the fire was the result of arson, which they couldn’t.
Three decades later, a newly created Regina police cold case unit reopened the investigation. Charges resulted in May 2009.
“We’re all kind of curious about what finally got them to do the arrest,” Melinda said at that time. Police still won’t say. But a jailhouse snitch seems to be the key that cracked the case.
“The only difference between the 1974 case and this case is, I’ll call him, the unsavoury individual Kenneth Michael Vail. That’s it,” says Deagle.
“He was the case. The only evidence of any confession was through him,” he adds.
While in jail, Vail had met an inmate, nicknamed Red, who suggested that upon release, he look up Morrison, a man known to have money and drugs.
In early 2008, Morrison’s sister Margaret Scrivens first met Vail, whom the family and her brother later dubbed KMV. She had been banging on the door to her brother’s Calgary condo, trying to get his attention. When she finally got in, Vail and her brother were “not in a great state.” Morrison had struggled with alcoholism since his teen years, but by then had added crack cocaine.
Morrison’s condo had become a party house, and Vail a new fixture in it. Scrivens remembers the tall, 40-something-ish man with an athletic build as an “imposing” figure next to her brother, a slight man in poor health.
His old friends and siblings were soon shut out. “Mike wasn’t answering his door. And that’s how it was the entire time Michael Vail was there,” recalls Scrivens. “I phone Mike and say I want to speak to Michael, and Vail would say, ‘Speaking.’
“I’d say ‘Put my brother on the phone.’ Sometimes he would and sometimes he wouldn’t.”
Worried about his longtime friend, Bob Fairbairn drove to Calgary and showed up at the condo. He tried phoning and yelling up to Morrison — with little success. The one time his friend answered, he told Fairbairn not to come over. “Mike and I had been through too much for him to be like that,” he says.
According to Deagle, police were called to the condo several times. “There was something dysfunctional going on. That’s crystal clear.”
Less clear is whether police turned to Vail, or he to them. But living in Morrison’s condo, Vail knew his roommate was under police scrutiny because officers were knocking at the door and asking Morrison about the Rosedale fire. Morrison saw Vail suddenly take an interest in a cold case webpage that Regina police had created, with photos and stories of the Rosedale victims.
To Deagle, Morrison described his relationship with Vail “much like I would describe very much a spousal abuse-type situation — controlling husband, using drugs to keep him down, controlling all the money.”
The two men weren’t lovers, but Vail seemed to hold out the possibility — and Morrison the hope — that they could be, he later told his lawyer. When Vail subsequently spoke to police, he made it clear he wasn’t gay.
Deagle says it was after the two had a falling out, and Vail returned to jail, that he told police Morrison had once broken down emotionally and admitted setting the Rosedale fire. The admission had apparently been made when they were out in a field with some cows. “It was weak; it was general,” insists Deagle. He adds that Vail seemed to be teasing police, suggesting he had more information but needed to first talk to Morrison, who had by then cut ties.
Then on May 27, 2009, Morrison was arrested at a budget motel in Calgary and brought to Regina on the Rosedale charges.
A month later, a Regina police officer picked up Vail, freed on early release, from a Lethbridge jail and drove him to the police station to make a sworn, recorded statement. Then he dropped Vail off in Calgary to meet with his parole officer.
Because of trust conditions guarding disclosure of the Crown’s evidence, Deagle is barred from showing the video or its transcript to anyone but Morrison. But he’s confident Vail was going to help the defence more than hurt it.
“You would think if Mike would have this wonderful confession, that it would somewhat line up with the evidence. And (Vail’s) version of it didn’t,” he says. Vail also made what Deagle described as a “vague” reference to a fire at Pioneer Village a week before the Rosedale fire, but witness statements suggest the minor laundry room fire actually occurred a year later, and there was insufficient evidence to point to Morrison.
“Michael absolutely denied the conversation ever happened,” Deagle adds.
He told his client from the outset that he didn’t think much of Vail’s evidence.
“I cannot provide you with a copy of the transcript statements because of trust conditions, but I can tell you that in summary, it does not say a lot,” he wrote to Morrison in December 2009.
In a letter a month later to prosecutor Ryan Snyder, Deagle suggested Vail was all the Crown had for its case.
“It strikes me that in the event the Crown is not going to be relying upon Kenneth Michael Vail or his testimony, there really is no reasonable likelihood of conviction,” he wrote.
“There is no definitive conclusion from 1974 that this was even arson. Although they ruled out wiring as a cause, the reports do not state any further potential cause of the fire. Their testing shows that there were no accelerants used. The only thing that can be definitively said is where the fire originated from.”
Asked earlier this year what he could recall of the Crown’s case, Snyder said it didn’t hinge on Vail. “He was sort of one more piece,” he said, describing the case as largely circumstantial.
“Anytime you prosecute something 40 years old,” he added, “it becomes difficult.”
“I knew there was enough evidence we were going to have a preliminary hearing,” he said. That preliminary hearing would have tested the evidence to determine if it was sufficient to warrant a trial.
Deagle was, in his words, “chomping at the bit” to get Vail on the witness stand. “I didn’t believe a word he said.” The four-day preliminary hearing was to open Oct. 4, 2010.
Although Morrison seemed relieved to be headed toward his day in court, Deagle had noticed changes over the months. “He was thinner. He looked like he aged at three times the normal rate,” he adds. “Tired would be a good description.”
Morrison was not only grappling with criminal charges, but addiction and HIV.
Then the lawyer got the phone call that changed everything.
His client was dead.
Morrison’s siblings, who rallied around him after he was charged, thought their brother was coping, with the assistance of a counsellor and AA meetings. Like Deagle, they were shocked by his suicide.
“I remember thinking, ‘Mike, why couldn’t you have fought for longer?’ ” says his youngest sister Lora.
His death launched the family on a quest that continues to this day.
Morrison and Scrivens, his sister who was just 15 at the time of the Rosedale fire, forged a deep friendship as adults. Since his death, she has written several letters to officials on behalf of the family.
They sympathize with the victims who died or suffered at Rosedale Manor. “The fire was tragic,” Scrivens wrote in a letter to Saskatchewan coroner Kent Stewart in May 2011.
But the family contends the cold case investigation was built on a shaky foundation — the failed 1974 probe in which their brother’s closet homosexuality was a factor — and sealed years later with information from a snitch with questionable motives.
I don’t think the Crown had any credible evidence to successfully convict my client. But at the same time, Michael, from Day 1, denied ever doing the offence.
In his suicide notes, Morrison says he was a depressed, lonely alcoholic when he found drugs. “I had more money than most — more money than brains. I didn’t even know what crack really was. What a perfect MARK, an easy MARK.
Those poor addicts really hit the jackpot. I fell for every game, I was stunned and in disbelief at how far they would go, how much nerve they had, and how stupid I was.
“If I wasn’t sick enough, I was drugged — medication in coffee or whatever to keep me dependent. I thought I was near death but I was just being controlled. It was like being in a movie. A horror movie — along came KMV and things got even more bazaar (sic).”
The family’s quest for an inquiry has gone nowhere.
The coroner responded that his office wasn’t the appropriate forum, and suggested the family try the Saskatchewan Public Complaints Commission.
But the commission told Scrivens it had no jurisdiction to receive her complaint. It suggested she try the Regina Board of Police Commissioners.
In June 2012, Scrivens wrote to the board to request a public inquiry. “It is my hope and the hope of all Michael’s family and close friends that further inquiry into the matter will investigate what, if any, role biased attitudes toward homosexuals may have played in the investigation, arrest and prosecution of Michael Morrison,” states her letter.
After seven months, she got her answer: “The Board has determined it does not have the jurisdiction to order an inquiry in these circumstances.”
Writing next to Christine Tell, then Minister of Corrections and Policing and a former Regina police officer, Scrivens requested a special inquiry into the “past investigations, arrest and prosecution of my brother.”
Tell’s letter of reply says, “such an inquiry would not be appropriate when there are other means at your disposable (sic).” One option she suggests is going to the police board, which had turned Scrivens down four months earlier.
“We still want an inquiry,” she says today. “They don’t want to talk about this.”
When a case goes to court, the evidence and investigation is tested and scrutinized. But Morrison took his life three months before a preliminary hearing, when details of investigations spanning nearly four decades would have been put on the public record for the first time. With his death, the case and the evidence remains behind closed doors.
Asked for an interview about the case, a senior Ministry of Justice official referred inquiries to the Regina Police Service. Anthony Gerein, director of prosecutors, says the information the Crown acts on comes from police, so it’s for that agency to disclose any information about the investigation.
But Regina police spokeswoman Elizabeth Popowich says the force won’t discuss anything about the case or the family’s criticisms — out of fairness to Morrison.
“It would not be appropriate for us to comment on this case. With the death of the accused, there is no opportunity for Mr. Morrison to defend against the accusations,” she wrote in an email.
Back in 2009 after Morrison’s arrest, Det.-Sgt. Brent Shannon, then the cold case officer that led the investigation, told the Calgary Sun, “There was a pile of good police work that went into this file — but it wasn’t quite there until now.” It’s been 42 years since firefighters rescued Morrison from his window ledge as flames consumed Rosedale Manor; 11 years since he opened an anonymous envelope to discover police were again investigating him for the fire; seven years since he was charged; and six years since he took his life.
Why not leave the past in the past?
“Because it’s wrong,” say Scrivens and her brother Randall in unison.
Scrivens says her brother “struggled with who he was all his life. But he made a great life for himself for quite a few years. And he had a problem with alcohol and drugs, but he was a valuable and contributing member of society and a loved member of our family. To just walk away and say, c’est la vie? No.”
Deagle, president of the Saskatchewan Trial Lawyers Association, says Morrison was certainly under pressure by police but he doesn’t see any tactics here that haven’t been used in other cases or that “crossed the line.” But he does wonder if tunnel vision that began in 1974 focused the investigation so narrowly that other possibilities were ignored or missed.
Months before the deadly Rosedale blaze, a spate of fires in the Rosemont area had been attributed to a couple teens. And while some Rosedale tenants pointed the finger of blame at their oddball neighbour, a few raised suspicions about others perceived to be acting strangely while watching the fire that night. One woman walked the hallways around 2:30 a.m. — two hours before the fire alarm and while Morrison was out — because her son thought he smelled smoke. The outer doors to Rosedale didn’t lock, so entry wasn’t restricted to those with a key.
Suspicion fell early on Morrison and never wavered. It was driven, in part, by burns to his hands.
One of the lead investigators in 1974 estimated Morrison should have been able to get from the door of his third-floor corner suite, down the stairway and outside in seven seconds. But Morrison insisted he tried to leave by the front and back stairways but was pushed back by the extreme heat. He’d also been out to the bar most of that evening and was intoxicated when a cabbie dropped him off about 15 minutes before the fire alarm.
Through the years, police formally questioned Morrison at least a half-dozen times about Rosedale. The interviewers were experienced officers with reputations as skilful interrogators who got confessions from hardened killers — but not from Morrison.
An investigator once described Morrison’s non-responses as “stone cold silence by a stone cold killer.” His lawyer sees it differently. “What struck me, to be honest, is his version and his story from ’74 at no time changed,” says Deagle.
When Morrison died, many assumed he took his life to avoid a trial that would expose his crimes, that his suicide was perhaps even an act of contrition by a guilty man.
His family says it was an act of desperation by a man hounded — not haunted.
Like so much of the Rosedale fire investigation, Morrison’s final words beg more questions and answer few.
“I am so lonely and sick and tired of my life. I see no possibility of happiness or any kind of success in the future. I’m so tired of saying I’m sorry — no, so tired of being sorry — truly sorry, I have let so many people down,” Morrison wrote.
“Even as a child I knew I was different, very different. I was so shy, so self-conscious and began to dislike myself. It has been a long and lonely road. Somehow I did happen to make a few friends. They are so long gone. I think about them every day those few good years so long ago.”
He writes of his sadness and of the suicidal feelings that he tried to keep to himself, and of his deep love and appreciation for his family “under these trying circumstances.”
Morrison speaks about his struggles with addiction, about stealing his resolve, and of his readiness to die.
“Feelings will be hurt but I need to find peace the only way I can. I’m not selfish — I’m desperate. If people could only know my pain and I can’t tell anyone. They would try to stop me.”
Of the Rosedale Manor fire, Morrison is silent.
I am so lonely and sick and tired of my life. I see no possibility of happiness or any kind of success in the future. I’m so tired of saying I’m sorry...