MAn sAys Arrest in dAd’s 2009 killing ‘Bitter viCtory’
Arrest in cold case brings ‘bitter victory’ for family relieved to get sense of closure
The son of homicide victim Raymond Collison has called the longawaited arrest of a suspect in the case “a bitter victory.”
Tim Collison said his father’s violent death — one in a string of unsolved homicides in and around the small town of Morewood — has caused him enormous pain.
“I miss my dad with all my heart and soul, and the fact that my son never got the chance to meet his grandpa hurts deeply,” Collison, of Cornwall, said in an email exchange with this newspaper.
“My dad was a friendly and kind person who tried to be friends with most people he met. He was always the happy-go-lucky type.”
Raymond Collison, 59, a Winchester Springs handyman, was reported missing in September 2009, three weeks after he was last seen getting on his bicycle outside the McCloskey Hotel in Chesterville, south of Ottawa. His body wasn’t discovered until April 2014 when two people out for an evening walk came across a human skull in a drainage ditch in Morewood.
DNA testing was required to identify the body.
Ontario Provincial Police investigators have never revealed Collison’s cause of death, but their findings triggered a thorough reexamination of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry’s large archive of cold cases.
Late last month, four years into their investigation, OPP investigators arrested James Henry “Jimmy” Wise at a nursing home in Winchester. The 75-year-old was charged with first-degree murder in connection with Collison’s death.
Wise, 75, appeared by video link in a Cornwall court on Monday when his case was remanded to late June. A retired mechanic, Wise is in poor health — he suffered a stroke several years ago — and is being held in the health unit of the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre. His defence lawyers, Jon Doody and Ian Carter, have indicated that their client intends to plead not guilty in the case.
Tim Collison said his father might have known Wise, but did not speak about him. “At first it felt like a bitter victory as my dad is gone but the accused still draws breath,” Collison said. But the arrest, he said, has brought him a sense of closure for the first time since his father’s disappearance.
Other families in Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry are still hoping to find that kind of closure.
Randy Rankin’s brothers have waited more than 11 years for an arrest in his case. Rankin, 46, of Morewood, was shot in the back of the head as he sat at a computer in his basement at 5 a.m. on Feb. 12, 2007.
“I’d like to see the guy who did it get nailed,” Gary Rankin said Tuesday. “We think about Randy a lot.”
“Whoever killed him should burn in hell,” said his brother Jim Rankin.
Randy Rankin, a children’s clown, harness racing aficionado, and one-time mayoral candidate in North Dundas Township, lived less than two kilometres from the site where Collison’s body was found, on the same sparsely populated rural road.
During their cold case investigation, OPP detectives produced a crime map that plotted five unsolved homicides clustered around Morewood, along with more than 50 unsolved arsons and suspicious fires.