Classified murder case files found in city library
Stéphane Luce was 13 years old, spending the night away in a dormitory, when his mother was beaten into a coma in her Longueuil apartment in 1981.
Roxanne Luce, 36, was found on her bed the next morning and died in a hospital days later. Thirtyseven years later, the case remains unsolved.
Last year, Luce founded a nonprofit called Meurtres et Disparitions Irrésolus du Québec, bringing together families affected by cold cases.
In early June, he had an idea. He asked volunteer researchers who joined the group to dig through public archives to see what they could find on his mother’s case. He expected them to come back with a few newspaper stories and a coroner’s report.
But what they found instead, Luce said Tuesday, left him numb.
“I have no words …” he said of the discovery. “It’s completely unacceptable.”
Available to all at the Old Montreal building of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) was a cardboard box containing 304 pages of documents Luce had always been told were classified.
The entire police investigation into his mother’s unsolved killing, including evidence, was there for anyone to see: interrogation transcripts, police notes, photos of suspects, fingerprints, possible leads to verify, and the addresses and signatures of Luce’s entire family.
“How can an unsolved murder case, that’s still active, be archived and made public?” Luce asked. “I’m trying to stay positive, but there’s nothing positive to say about this.”
Luce, 51, has long fought to have the right to access the police work done in his mother’s case.
He has learned through the years police have lost key evidence in the case, including a hair and fingerprint found on the weapon used — a wooden stick wrapped in a garbage bag, held together by five pieces of electrical tape.
But every request he has made, he says, has been met with the same response: it’s against police protocol to share details of an ongoing investigation. So why were the files available at the BAnQ?
Luce initially suspected it was the police force who handed the documents over to the BAnQ once the case went cold, but a clearer picture of what happened emerged Tuesday.
In a statement, the Longueuil police denied having anything to do with the situation, reiterating that the case is still open and that the force doesn’t divulge evidence of an ongoing investigation.
In an interview, spokesperson Jean-Pierre Voutsinos said the force was unaware until recently that the case was available at the library. He said it keeps all its archives internally.
“It’s worrisome,” Voutsinos said of Luce’s case being public, “because it could hurt the ongoing investigation.”
Voutsinos said the force still has the original case documents at its offices and only ever shared them with its “legally authorized partners.”
According to Hélène Laverdure, keeper and director general of the BAnQ’s national archives, the root of how the file ended up in the public archives could be traced back to 1986, the year a law came into effect that created the Quebec coroner’s office.
Before then, coroners’ reports were archived at local courthouses throughout the province. When the provincial office was created, all coroners’ reports from before 1986 were gradually sent to the BAnQ, which is mandated to archive judicial documents.
The coroner’s report into Luce’s death, along with its annex (the 304 pages detailing the police investigation) were sent to the BAnQ in 1993 by Quebec’s justice department.
According to Laverdure, the file arrived without any note about special restrictions — a measure often requested — despite the police files being part of an ongoing investigation.
Laverdure said the BAnQ doesn’t have the “responsibility or the capacity” to verify every file it re- ceives, document by document, to make sure there isn’t anything in it that shouldn’t be public.
It’s the organizations that send the files to be archived — in this case, Quebec’s justice department — that are in charge of flagging restrictions, Laverdure said.
Reached for comment Tuesday, the department said it needed more time to verify what happened.
Laverdure called the incident “eye-opening” for the BAnQ, which has temporarily restricted access to the documents.
“There will be verifications made,” she said of the possibility of other confidential police documents being available in the archives. “Now that we’re aware of this, we’ll analyze the situation with our partners and take the needed actions.”
Luce, for his part, has argued for the creation of a specialized police unit, led by the Sûreté du Québec, that would handle all murder and disappearance cases in the province. He says he has gradually lost faith in a municipal police force’s ability to handle a murder investigation.
Finding out his mother’s case files have been public for 25 years, he said, without the police even knowing, is the last straw. He worries who might have accessed the documents through the years.
“Anyway you look at it, the police are the ones responsible for the case,” he said. “They should have been following up on where it was and making sure it didn’t end up in the wrong person’s hands.”