Mysterious envelope meant to send a message to suspect
A mysterious envelope arrives three decades after the deadly Rosedale Manor fire — and the key suspect knows someone is sending him a message. Turns out it was Regina police. Check out Part 3 of the four-part series Suspicion.
The envelope had no return address. As Michael Morrison tore it open, the past spilled into the present.
The brown envelope with a Regina postmark held a single LeaderPost clipping.
Morrison’s eyes fell on the headline: “Rosemont hit by arson fires.”
Published in April 2005, the article was one in a series, profiling cases getting a second look by the then newly created cold case unit at the Regina Police Service.
The story recalled the devastating Feb. 10, 1974, fire at Rosedale Manor that claimed the lives of Rose Woznesensky, a 51-year-old widow and grandmother, Second World War veteran Alexander Kostichuk, 54, and teacher Gladys Christie, 60.
It also told of survivor Melinda Woznesensky, Rose’s seven-yearold granddaughter whose sleepover was harshly broken by screams of “fire!” in the night and a desperate run in darkness, smoke and searing heat. Firefighters found her collapsed in the hallway by Rose.
Despite third-degree burns to 80 per cent of her body, Melinda remarkably survived the fire but suffered severe scarring.
Police had a suspect in 1974, notes the article, but insufficient evidence. “Part of me would love to know who he was, just to have him know … what it did to our lives,” Woznesensky, who endured years of painful skin grafts and treatments, told the Leader-Post back in 2005. “Does he even know? Did he care?” Morrison was that suspect. A decade later, when his siblings talk about the deadly fire, they speak first of its victims.
“What a tragedy,” says Randall, Morrison’s older brother. “That tragedy — we don’t contest anything that happened with that.”
What they take issue with is casting their brother as the culprit.
The Regina Police Service has declined requests this year to discuss anything about the investigation.
After a year of living under police scrutiny, Morrison left Regina for Calgary in 1975. As before, he worked providing care to seniors.
In the years that followed, their brother, who never seemed to “fit in” as a kid, who’d struggled with depression and anxiety into young adulthood seemed for the first time in his life to settle and grow content, say his siblings.
They attribute much of the change to him finding his longtime partner Don Silver. “Mike said when he met Don, and they clicked, he knew he’d spend the rest of their lives together,” says Morrison’s sister, Margaret Scrivens.
The couple had 16 years together. Morrison nursed his partner through HIV and AIDS and was at his bedside when he died in 1994.
Silver’s loss, followed soon after by the death of Morrison’s mother took a toll, but he carried on at his job, sold the couple’s house, bought a condo and travelled, in particular taking his father, a war veteran, to Europe.
Through the decades, the Rosedale fire and the investigation dropped from family conversations. “It was just like a dark chapter,” says Scrivens.
Everyone had moved on — until 2005 when the letter arrived. Morrison subsequently learned it had come from Regina police — a notso-subtle reminder that Rosedale Manor wasn’t forgotten.
With the creation of a cold case unit in Regina in 2004, the deadly fire was one of the cases to catch the attention of its inaugural officer, Det.-Sgt. Rod Buckingham. By February 2005, Buckingham was in touch with Calgary police, and Morrison was under “observation status,” according to information Morrison received from his lawyer, Jeff Deagle.
When Regina officers showed up unexpectedly on his doorstep one day and asked about Rosedale, Morrison reportedly replied: “I thought that was all forgotten.”
In 1974, a senior prosecutor had advised against laying charges, concluding police could neither prove the fire was caused by arson nor that Morrison had a hand in it.
Buckingham re-interviewed people who had been involved in the case in 1974. A nurse, who worked at the Grey Nuns Hospital (now Pasqua) when the fire victims arrived three decades earlier remembered helping Morrison remove his shirt. She recalled his hands and face were soot-covered, but not his clothing. He was “flapping” his hands about and wanting something for the pain. She told Buckingham his burns were “different.” There’s no further explanation in the available written material that Deagle gave Morrison.
Investigators had a theory Morrison had burned his hands while starting the fire, although an RCMP crime lab in 1974 found no trace of an accelerant.
Police interviewed Morrison in Calgary in June 2006. He “made no incriminating statements,” says a summary, “however, the investigators simply indicated that not once during the interview did he deny the accusations, and an investigator convinced them Morrison exhibited responses (indicative) of guilt.”
In October 2007, a new cold case officer, Det.-Sgt. Brent Shannon, took over the Rosedale file, and again turned up the heat. The officer called and dropped in on Morrison, as well as his siblings, friends, and co-workers.
Morrison’s brother Don recalls one such visit. “He was hoping for me to tell him that Michael did it, that Michael had told me he did it.”
But Don says he didn’t, because his brother hadn’t.
Police also wanted to hear what Morrison might be saying, so sought a warrant in February 2008 to tap his phone.
By July that year, he was again under surveillance, much like 30 years earlier. Police watched the “target address” — his Calgary condo — and followed him when he left.
Shannon also tracked down Bob Fairbairn, who had been friends with Morrison since the 1970s. He urged Fairbairn to do right by the Rosedale Manor victims and reveal what Morrison had told him.
“I kept telling him that Mike had always told me the truth,” says Fairbairn. “And he said he didn’t do it. That’s basically where I was at with it.”
Scrivens recalls a phone call from Shannon in the fall of 2008, contending Morrison must have confessed. But she too denies her brother ever said any such thing.
The pressure of the renewed investigation coincided with a downward slide in Morrison’s life through 2008 and 2009. Having first discovered as an awkward teen that alcohol made him stutter less and relax more, he developed a lifelong battle with booze — sometimes under control; more often not. Then he added cocaine.
“Michael’s condo turns into the place people go to smoke crack and do drugs, sort of the party place,” says Deagle.
Morrison, who’d quit working in the fall of 2007, saw his bank accounts and investments dwindling. He began to ask friends and family for money. His siblings got odd phone calls, sometimes in the middle of the night.
Scrivens had developed a close friendship with her brother since they both resided in Calgary, but even she found herself being pushed away.
She recalls a dinner meeting in July 2008 with her brother and one of his former co-workers. Unexpectedly, Morrison showed up with a new friend, a man Scrivens had first met about six months earlier. She remembers her brother as “deathly thin” and the conversation stilted.
Although Scrivens didn’t know it then, police were watching.
She says an officer later accused them of laughing about the Rosedale fire during that dinner — an allegation she calls outrageous.
Two weeks later, Scrivens got a call from her brother, wishing her a happy birthday. It was August — and she was a New Year’s baby.
As she pressed him for an explanation, Scrivens began to wonder if the call was not actually about her birthday because of his odd, clipped responses — but rather a call for help. She asked if he was “in trouble.” The reply was “yes,” she says.
When she arrived at the condo after calling police, it was “one hell of a mess” and whoever had been with her brother was gone. She tried to urge him to come with her — without success.
Neighbours at the Calgary condo complex had witnessed Morrison’s increasingly erratic behaviour. And they didn’t care for some of the characters that had started to frequent the suite.
In December 2008, a small fire broke out inside his condo. According to the Calgary Fire Department the cause was “improper disposal of smoking materials,” which had in turn ignited some clothes on a chair. The fire itself resulted in no charge, but Morrison was charged with mischief for kicking out the window in a police cruiser.
The slide continued in 2009, with Morrison hooked on crack and forced to sell his condo. By spring, home was a budget motel.
That’s where police arrested him on May 27 that year.
He was confronted with five charges: three counts of manslaughter for each of the Rosedale deaths, one count of assault causing bodily harm for the injuries suffered by Melinda, and one of wilfully setting a fire at the Regina nursing home where he’d worked in 1974.
Police had interviewed their primary suspect numerous times — in the 1970s, in 2006 and in 2007.
With his arrest, Morrison again squared off with investigators.
In his first interview on May 29, 2009, Morrison spoke mostly about his life, what it meant to be gay, and of his suicidal thoughts.
When talk turned to Rosedale, he stuck to what he’d always said — about going into the hallway, realizing there was a fire, returning to his suite, and being rescued by firefighters. The officers tried again the next day for a confession. Again, “there are no major admissions of any kind,” reads a summary of the interview.
Undeterred, police planted an undercover officer with Morrison in his cell. Dubbed Project F-Voken, it too resulted in no admissions.
When the investigation died in 1974, the prosecutor who reviewed the file made it clear to the police that without a confession or evidence proving Morrison set the Rosedale blaze, he couldn’t be charged. What changed three decades later?
The Regina Police Service has refused to say what prompted charges.
After Morrison’s arrest, Shannon, the cold case investigator, told the Globe and Mail: “Think of all the technology that has changed since 1974,” adding “relationships break down and people all of a sudden become motivated or less fearful.” But it wasn’t new technology at play; police had an old-fashioned snitch.
SUSPICION CONTINUES SATURDAY WITH PART 4
Part of me would love to know who he was, just to have him know … what it did to our lives. Michael’s condo turns into the place people go to smoke crack and do drugs, sort of the party place.