‘SOMEONE KNOWS SOMETHING’
Truckers join bid to solve cold cases
Eight years ago, discouraged and unsure what more she could do, Marie-Claude Blanchard took a box out to her backyard, placed it in a pit and set it on fire.
In it were copies of newspaper clippings, pictures, autopsy results and a coroner’s report — everything she had gathered on her mother’s unsolved murder.
Suzanne Blanchard was last seen in Montreal on Aug. 9, 1982. A few days later, her body was retrieved from the water near a park in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue. The 37-yearold had been beaten and stabbed in the neck.
After years of seeking answers to what happened, Blanchard was frustrated and overwhelmed. The search had been consuming. She was only 12 at the time of the crime. Then, she was 40. As the flames turned to smoke in her backyard, she looked up at the sky and asked for a sign.
Two weeks later, an anonymous letter about the killing, written in English, was sent to the Journal de Montréal’s newsroom, then forwarded to the Montreal police’s cold case division.
It was the first major development in the case in nearly 30 years. Blanchard’s hope for closure was reignited.
Today, along with five other Quebec families burdened by cold cases, she’s hoping for another breakthrough.
In a partnership signed with three trucking companies, large posters of the victims or missing were installed last week on trucks that criss-cross Quebec and parts of Ontario. Each poster is assigned to a route matching the case.
“Whoever sent that letter, I believe they want to talk,” says Blanchard, now 48. “I want my mother’s case out there, so if anyone has anything to get off their conscience, maybe they’ll make that call. Someone out there knows something.”
The project was initiated by Stéphane Luce, head of the Meurtres et Disparitions Irrésolus du Québec group.
In 1981, Luce’s mother Roxanne, was beaten into a coma in her Longueuil apartment. She died a few days later, and the killing remains unsolved.
Luce’s poster, along with Blanchard’s, now hangs on trucks travelling between Montreal and Baie-Comeau.
“Thousands of drivers will see them every day,” Luce says, likening it to how missing children used to be depicted on milk cartons.
“There are a lot of people who assume these cases have been solved just because they haven’t heard about them for so long. Maybe they know something but haven’t come forward because of that,” he adds. “It’s important people know they’re not solved.”
The other cold cases, displayed on trucks driving through the Coaticook and Abitibi regions, are those of Tommy Clément-Pépin, who disappeared from RouynNoranda in 2006; Sylvain Bolduc, who disappeared from Cadillac in 2011; Marc St-Laurent, who disappeared from Lebel-sur- Quévillon in 2012; and Theresa Allore, 19, killed in Compton in 1978.
Since announcing the initiative last week, Luce says, eight more families have contacted him wanting to take part.
François Guy, president of Procam International de Laval, one of three companies involved, says he would be glad to add more posters to his trucks.
“The idea touched me,” Guy says. “When you see these families, everything they ’ve been through and all the work they ’re doing, why not help?”
Blanchard isn’t sure if she would have participated in the project or anything like it in the past. For years, she kept what happened to her mother inside.
Blanchard and her brother, who is two years older, were away at a summer camp when their mother was killed. They never returned home to Montreal, sent instead to their father’s place in Ottawa.
The effect was devastating, she says. Not only did she lose her mother — who she describes as independent and free-spirited — but also her friends, her school and her identity as a young teen.
“I became the girl whose mother was murdered,” she says. “I lost everything.”
It was only when she started having children of her own in the 1990s that she approached the Montreal police for details about the case.
The day she was last seen in the summer of 1982, Suzanne, who worked in advertising, was dropped off by a colleague near the intersection of St-Hubert and St-Grégoire streets. She was to pick up her car at a garage down the street, but never did.
Blanchard says police have always told her they have a prime suspect in the case. But some of the evidence collected at the time has been lost, she says, destroyed to make room at the Montreal police laboratory. Luce has been told the same about his mother’s case, as have others.
In 2003, Blanchard says, detectives started questioning witnesses again, but nothing came of it. Nor has the anonymous letter from 2010 brought any arrests. Other false starts and setbacks have occurred.
Two years ago, feeling that time was a factor, Blanchard started sharing what she knows of her mother’s death online through message boards and social media.
She has found comfort in the process, connecting with other families and no longer feeling alone in her search.
Last year, after always avoiding it, she visited the park by the lake where her mother’s body was found. She brought her own daughter along. When she sat down on a bench on a wooden deck overlooking the water, church bells rang in the distance.
“Every little step has been closure for me,” she says of the last few years. “It felt like my mom had been forgotten, and now it feels like she hasn’t.”
Beyond an arrest or criminal charges, Blanchard says what she really needs is to know what happened and why. She still thinks about it every day. In a sense, she says, having those answers could be enough for her.
And she hopes the posters can lead to them — if not in her mother’s case, then in someone else’s.
Every little step has been closure for me. It felt like my mom had been forgotten, and now it feels like she hasn’t.