MISSING FOR 11 YEARS
Still no clues in Rutter case
Full of mischief, kindness and energy, Justin Rutter was just 14 when he left his Lowertown home in October 2009, never to return. Tips and reported sightings proved fruitless. The search for Justin was like chasing a ghost. His family has been shattered by his unsolved disappearance, living with perpetual uncertainty about his fate.
Ottawa met Justin Rutter through a police description of the last time he was seen.
On Oct. 10, 2009, a Saturday story in the Ottawa Citizen told readers that the 14-year-old had never before stayed away from home overnight. They were asked to keep an eye out for the slim, caucasian teenager with light brown hair and brown eyes, last seen by a friend Thursday night before they parted ways on Côté Street near St. Laurent Boulevard.
Justin told the friend around 10 p.m. that he planned to stay out late, or perhaps all night. He did not say why, the report reads. It was the first unanswered question in a case that would generate countless others.
Though it began with an all too familiar story — a young person is reported missing, police ask the public for leads, loved ones pray they're located safely — the mystery of Justin's disappearance has deepened and darkened with the passage of time.
Police say they've received dozens and dozens of tips, and have spoken with hundreds of people. An unprecedented cash reward was offered for information. For a time, every youth arrested in Ottawa was asked if they knew where Justin was.
The cold case is now more than a decade old, and the narrative surrounding his disappearance has shifted. Every possible theory about what happened to the 14-year-old has disturbing implications. His family has been devastated, and his mother left to question her son's fate and how his case was handled.
Perhaps, as police theorized for so long, Justin really did run away. It's a possibility that offers hope, however slim, that he could be alive somewhere. But if he is, what's keeping him from coming home?
Or, maybe there's nothing to be hopeful about. And that grim conclusion opens the door to countless other questions. Did he take his own life? Did someone take his? Was there some kind of accident?
All horrible and heartbreaking and possible, in the absence of a body that could answer, once and for all: What has become of Justin Rutter?
Public interest in Justin's case grew in the days that followed his disappearance. If you kept up with Ottawa news, you got to know him and his family. Posters papered the city, Facebook was ablaze with information, and hundreds helped search for the friendly kid known to frequent some of Ottawa's roughest neighbourhoods.
But for a few moments, when the case began, it was a private matter between a mother and her son.
On Oct. 9, 2009, Jaye Rutter woke up before the rest of her family. She looked in on her children. Justin wasn't in his bed.
“Immediately I knew that there was something wrong,” said Jaye, who recalls picking up the phone and calling police.
“The second thing I did is I called my mother and I apologized. I never knew what that felt like.”
Like her youngest son, Jaye didn't have a picture-perfect childhood. Her dad left and her mom, a single parent, worked a lot, prompting a teenaged Jaye to leave home without explanation on more than one occasion. Her mother used to go downtown with pictures of Jaye, searching for her daughter. As a mother, Jaye experienced firsthand the feelings that set in when one's child is suddenly, unexplainably, absent.
For Justin, this wasn't a pattern. But it wasn't entirely out of character, either.
Affectionately, Jaye describes Justin as “a pain in the butt.”
“If he could do something to frighten me or get a rise out of me, he did it.
“He was a very active child, he was not a gamer. He was definitely a nature kid: outdoors, climbing, getting into mischief with his siblings or friends, probably doing something he wasn't supposed to.”
And trouble wasn't hard to find in the Rutters' Lowertown neighbourhood. They lived on Murray Street, “in the projects,” as Jaye called it. “We saw a lot of broken people. But even those broken people knew my son and thought he was an amazing kid.”
Justin was a bit of a paradox: Streetwise but soft-hearted, mischievous but also empathetic, and devoted to his family. Still boyish-looking, yet capable of putting on the swagger that seems to belong uniquely to teenagers. At age 14, he was still figuring out who he was.
“That night, I was driving around looking for him,” Jaye recalled. “I was so consumed with this overwhelming feeling that I would never, ever see him again.
“I don't know ... what that meant. But that's how I felt.”
October marked 11 years since Justin disappeared. Ottawa has moved on, and it's once again a mystery that few outside the family give any thought to. But for his loved ones, there's been no closure.
Jaye hasn't decided what fate she believes befell her son.
“Probably not as bad as I imagine. I have nightmares every night, I don't sleep. I haven't slept in 10 years, like really slept.”
But there's one thing she never really believed: that Justin ran away.
Early on, this seemed to be the working police theory. The officers assigned to his case were from the force's youth intervention and diversion section, an OPS branch that investigated juvenile missing persons reports at that time.
“Those investigators from the youth section, they're used to dealing with troubled kids and runaway teens and that kind of thing. When they see an investigation, they tend to think a certain way, they're used to dealing with it that way,” said Jean-Luc Bonin, a patrol sergeant with the Ottawa police.
Previously, Bonin spent about two years as a detective in the missing persons unit, beginning in 2014.
He dove into Justin's case around the five-year anniversary of his disappearance, and brought himself up to speed on the work that had been done before him.
“From the flavour of the reports that I read about it, it seemed like the focus was to find a runaway.”
Objectively, it's the most common explanation for the disappearance of a young person, said David Finkelhor, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire, and the director of the school's Crimes Against Children Research Centre.
“The big challenge with teenagers, of course, is that being missing in a voluntary way, what gets sometimes called runaway kids, or as a result of family conflict is statistically the most common reason for kids being missing, and so much more common than foul play that it does tend to be the hypothesis of choice among law enforcement and other people trying to solve it,” he said.
“It sounds like there was even a fair amount of evidence that this was, at least initially, a voluntary absence.”
Indeed, Justin had some street smarts, living where he did. He'd started high school and, according to his mom, was having a hard time with it. He wasn't going to class,
and she suspects now he was smoking pot. Jaye was trying to get him back on track, but there's only so much control a parent can exert over their teenager.
“I never tried to be on a line where there was no give with any of my kids. I tried to always have some flexibility with choices that they made, even bad ones. Because you never want your kids to think that they've gone so far that there's no coming back. There's always a door here.”
Then there's the friend's account of Justin's parting words the day he disappeared. His plan to stay out late, maybe all night, may have suggested the beginning of a break from his household.
In the days that followed, the runaway theory only got stronger. Police and the media discussed reported Justin sightings: in Vanier, Lowertown, the ByWard Market.
In one instance, confirmed at the time by police and reported in this newspaper, a witness said he was seen “in good health” and told a friend he didn't want to go home. It was enough to convince family at the time, despite their instincts that the runaway explanation just didn't fit with the Justin they knew.
“Obviously, there's a reason he doesn't want to go home,” his grandmother Diane Veilleux told the Citizen. “The important thing is that the police find him and that he gets the help he needs.”
With such compelling evidence to suggest Justin had fled home and was somewhere on the streets of Ottawa, it was baffling that police and family weren't able to pin the 14-year-old down.
It wasn't until much later that the picture changed.
Those sightings shared with the public were never confirmed by police through a second witness, or were determined to be false.
Even the last time Justin was “seen” — his conversation with the friend in which he said he might stay out all night — was later revealed to have never been verified.
In 2014, the Ottawa Police Service said Justin was last seen by his family that day: Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009.
Justin had asked Jaye if he could go to the park, Jaye recalled. He said he wouldn't be back late.
“If he was going to run away, why would he ask me?” she questioned. “I never said, `I love you mom, I'll see you later,' when I was running away from home. I went out my window, (my mom) didn't even know I was gone.”
He was a very active child. He was not a gamer, he was ... a nature kid: outdoors, climbing, getting into mischief with his siblings.
It's one item on the list of arguments against the runaway theory. There's also the fact that Justin didn't have a habit of doing so, was close with all of his family members, and had the option of staying elsewhere if he needed a break from home.
“Children that run away from home … It's a drip at first, and then it becomes a trickle, and then a stream (and) just — gone. It's something that happens with time,” Jaye said. “You don't for the first time in your life take a stab at running away from home and disappear off the face of the earth.”
Looking back, she resents the police decision to speak openly about her son being a runaway without knowing for sure what was going on, feeling that it diminished the public's interest in the case.
“'He ran away ... he doesn't want to be at home,' and then people speculate. That, I don't really care about. But they just don't care as much, they're not interested anymore, because he's put this on himself.”
“Even if it is a runaway, it's still a f-----g serious thing, he's 14. But it still takes away from the fact that this child is missing.”
More than a decade after his disappearance, Bonin confirmed that he doesn't believe the “runaway” label describes Justin's fate.
“I think, in my experience, anyhow, any runaway would have come back, one way or another, or we would have had another police contact. We would have had something leading down a different path.”
He also acknowledged that you shouldn't be so focused on one
investigative theory that you discount other possibilities along the way. And hypothetically, had he been on the case at the time, Bonin said he would have approached it thinking “dirtier” in his detective work, a mindset that can help ensure all bases are covered in case the worst-case scenario becomes the leading theory.
But at the same time, Bonin recognized that he has the benefit of hindsight, and was reluctant to critique the work of his predecessors, whom, he believes, were really looking for what they thought was a runaway, and were hoping to find him alive and well.
“It's not easy for the officers there, I know they worked really hard, they had long hours, and they did the very best that they could to the best of their ability,” Bonin said.
He also doesn't think resources were lacking, and pointed out that hundreds of people have been spoken to over the course of the investigation.
“It's not a lack of effort … it's not a lack of resources, the resources were there. Is it possible that a different investigator would have had a different outcome? Who knows, I don't think so.”
By the five-year anniversary of Justin's last day at home, Ottawa police had received almost 50 tips relating to the boy's whereabouts, but hadn't been able to confirm a single one. It was then that they released an artist's sketch of what Justin might look like at age 19, and offered $5,000 for information that could pin down his current location or lead to the prosecution of anyone responsible for his disappearance. It was the first time a reward was put on the table for a missing persons case in the history of the police service.
“After five years, it's very concerning to us that we have not located him,” Supt. Don Sweet said at the time. “If he was alive and well right now, I think somebody would be giving us that.”
That suggestion gives rise to its own set of questions. If Justin died, where, how and why did it happen?