JENNIFER’S STORY
Family and police revisit 2005 murder for truecrime TV series
Thirteen years after Jennifer Teague was abducted and killed on her way home from work, the lead detective who investigated her murder reflects on the case that galvanized the city. ‘It was so much more emotional’ than other cases, he says.
Jennifer Teague’s murderer had taken his mother’s car and prowled around Barrhaven for three consecutive nights in September 2005, patiently searching for a victim.
On Sept. 8, 2005, Kevin Davis found his victim. He abducted the 18-year-old girl as she walked home from working the late shift at Wendy’s and later killed her in his bedroom while his mother slept in the next room. Davis had felt slighted by women. He wanted to kill a vulnerable young woman and he didn’t particularly care who it was, says Greg Brown, the Ottawa police detective who was the lead investigator in the case that gripped Ottawa for almost 10 months.
“He had planned this out for some time.”
Brown will retire from the Ottawa Police Service early in the new year and is finishing up his PhD in criminology at Carleton University. He remains certain to this day that Davis didn’t feel any remorse for his actions and would likely have killed again. When Davis gave himself up to an off-duty police officer almost 10 months after he killed Teague, he was plagued by paranoia stirred up by the relentless attention on the case, not a guilty conscience.
“The motive he gave was that he planned to apprehend, sexually assault and murder a young woman,” says Brown, who took Davis’ confession on the day he turned himself in.
The Teague case will be featured Thursday night on the CBC crime series The Detectives, which combines interviews with the real detectives, file footage and scripted drama. Producer Petro Duszara says The Detectives’ team of researchers looks for cases that affect their communities profoundly, but at the same time the show offers an empathetic perspective on the victim and a look inside the process of detective work.
“This had all of those things,” he says. “One of the tricky things is that every one of these stories is very tragic. We need a compelling reason to reopen those wounds for the community.”
Teague’s father, Ed Teague, now 75, often tells his story at victimology conferences. Seeing the story on the screen will not reopen those wounds, he says.
“At first I was kind of hesitant. But then I thought, why not? Let people know what happened. If people don’t know, maybe they can glean something from it,” he says. “You’ll never forget the hurt, but there’s a point when your life has to go on.”
In September 2005, it appeared there could be a serial killer on the loose in Ottawa and the city was on edge.
Ardeth Wood, a PhD student visiting her family in Ottawa, had disappeared while riding her bicycle two summers earlier. Her body was found on Aug. 11, 2003, in Green’s Creek, but her killer had not been apprehended.
When Teague went missing, a fearful city hung on every new development, thinking the two cases might be linked.
About two months after Teague disappeared, police arrested Chris Myers and charged him in Wood’s murder. But he was not Teague’s killer. Myers had been in North Bay when Teague disappeared.
For police, the pressure was piling up from the public and the media, and every tip found a dead end. Investigators tried a number of unorthodox moves in the hope of flushing out the killer.
Police officers went door-todoor in Barrhaven, asking residents if they could look around their homes. It was impossible to get search warrants for every home in the area, and police relied on the co-operation of residents.
The backlash over invasion of privacy was very minor, says Brown. “It was extraordinary how the community rallied.”
Teague’s decomposing body was found two days after the canvassing started, near a hiking trail at Stony Swamp.
And this was when Brown tried another ploy.
He asked police to set up a decoy tent across the road from where the body had been found, a suggestion to the media and the general public that the body was found there. Only the killer would know where he dumped the body.
It was what Brown calls a “valuable holdback in the investigation” and would prove to be valuable later. Extensive forensic tests found not a trace of DNA on the body. Despite a $100,000 reward for information, there was still no break in the case.
On May 24, 2006, police took another unusual step, releasing photos of “potential witnesses” taken from a security camera at the Mac’s Milk store at the corner of Jockvale Road and Tartan Drive on the night of Teague’s disappearance.
And then, on June 9, 2006, came a bizarre twist to the story. Kevin Davis, a 24-year-old pizza-maker who lived in Barrhaven with his mother, stripped naked under the influence of magic mushrooms and rushed onto Fallowfield Road, screaming, “I killed Jennifer Teague.” He was taken to hospital to be treated for an overdose and later recanted, claiming he was under the influence of drugs and didn’t know anything about the murder.
Davis was released. And then, another twist. On June 26, he walked up to an off-duty police officer at a beer store near his home and turned himself in.
Brown, who had been a witness in another case at the courthouse that day, was called to take Davis’s confession. The confession had to be “absolutely ironclad,” he says. Davis was read his rights several times, police ensured that he was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs and the entire proceeding was videotaped. Brown’s strategy was to keep him talking.
Davis confessed to putting together a kit including a knife, ropes and a gag, and staking out the convenience store where Teague chatted with a friend before leaving for home. Davis made sure the car was safely out of range of the store’s video camera. He was simply looking for the girl who would take the most vulnerable route.
Brown took Davis to the swamp and asked him where he left Teague’s body. Davis placed a pen in the exact spot, far from the place where police had pitched their decoy tent. Davis recanted again while in jail, saying that he was overwhelmed with fatigue when he confessed.
“I don’t get angry very often,” says Brown. “But I was absolutely furious. I think he was just an evil monster who deserved to be locked up for the rest of his life.”
Davis admitted his guilt in court on Jan. 25, 2008, and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Brown remembers sitting in the front row that day. Everyone in the courtroom had tears in their eyes, except for Davis, he says.
It’s one of the reasons why he still believes that Davis felt no remorse. “He sat there with a smug look on his face.”
Brown continues to have a close relationship with Teague’s family. He would only agree to participate in The Detectives if Teague’s family agreed and the producers portrayed Teague and the Ottawa police in a positive light. Ed Teague also thinks of Brown as a friend.
“We were always kept abreast of what was going on. We were never in the dark,” he said of the investigation.
Brown has worked on a number of assignments in his 30-plus years as a police officer, including drug and organized crime. In 2006, he was awarded the Police Exemplary Service Medal by the governor general.
“Every case is tragic. I know it sounds like a cliché, but they all have human consequences,” he says. “This was a much different kind of case. It was so much more emotional. This could be your daughter, your wife.”
The Detectives premieres on Thursday, Sept. 20 at 9 p.m. on CBC, the CBC TV streaming app and cbc.ca/watch.