Why an unsolved mystery will never die

I don't know the exact address where Michael Leo Resk, as the recent Halifax Regional Police Department news release identified him, once lived. I do know that his home was on Poplar Street, then viewed as part of the city's west end, where the houses to this day are neat and tidy.

And since that was the last place the victim of the oldest unsolved murder in Halifax history was seen by a human being, that is where my drive began, on a Thursday night, as his last journey, 65-years ago last Wednesday.

I also don't know a thing about Resk's personal habits. So, I'm unsure if it was normal for him to watch Halifax's only television station with his wife and six children, as the wire stories said he did that night. I just know that, according to a sister, he was in his “usual good mood”, when he left Poplar Street at 11:45 p.m. as he did every night, bound for the Resk Fruit Market at 379 Gottingen St., to help his brother Pete close up.

The store was on the harbour side of Gottingen, in about the spot where the Halifax North Memorial Library now stands. The only picture I've seen of it can be found in the Halifax archives, one of thousands taken by the city's works department in the run-up to the massive urban renewal projects of the 1960s.

That I have that picture — so redolent of what author Steven Laffoley calls the “mean streets” of Halifax during the 1950s and 1960s — as a screen-saver on my laptop, shows how I've been captivated by the story, since the first time I heard it.

In it is a rickety looking three-story brick building, where, if you look closely, you will swear that a human shape is visible in one of the upper windows. In the storefront are signs for Sussex Beverages, Coca-cola, and Sportsman Cigarette's. To the right is a vacant lot, to the left can be glimpsed part of Crowell's Drug Store, one of the many businesses operating on Gottingen Street in the 1950s, when it was “the” street where Haligonians went to shop.

“Mr. Resk's store outside and inside was dark,” recalled Ken Foran, The Chronicle Herald's former editor-inchief. He grew up in the city's north end and visited the store in those days, even though he seldom had the money or urge to actually buy fruit.

Foran remembers Resk, but after all these years, can't picture him. “He must have been easy on kids,” he added, “because we had no hesitation in dropping by on the relatively few occasions we did.”

There is snow in the photo, which meant that it could have been taken in December, the very month when Resk got into his panelled delivery truck and started driving. Last Thursday my GPS said that the most efficient way to get from his street to where his store once stood was by heading west on Oak Street, and then turning right on Connaught Avenue before veering off onto Chebucto Road.

Resk may have taken some other route on the evening of Dec. 9, 1955. But Christmas then was surely the same as Christmas now, so, the lights would have been ablaze, the streets possibly slick from a light snow, as they were when I navigated through his old neighbourhood the other night.

Resk was 36, a man with lively eyes, a dimpled chin and receding hair-line, whom a sister told police, “had no enemies to our knowledge.” So, I choose to picture a hardworking man, who provided for his wife and family, a man who had perhaps put in a long day at the store and then, when most of Halifax was asleep, dutifully headed down to give his brother a hand.

The drive from Poplar to Gottingen now takes about five minutes. By my calculation it would take five to get from Resk's home to the corner of Acadia and Roome Streets, in Halifax's north end.

That intersection was quiet when I drove through it the other night, as, I guess, it would have been at 2:30 a.m. on that long-ago Dec. 10, when a taxi driver named Lloyd Lavers came home and found a van blocking his driveway.

Police said that Mike Resk, whose wife had reported him missing at 12:40 that morning, had been shot twice in the head and once in the body. The weapon was thought to be a .32 automatic, which was not found near the van.

The freezing temperatures made it difficult to determine how long he had been dead before his body was found. Lavers' mother, who had been asleep in a nearby house since 10:30, said that she heard nothing the night before.

“The crime was well investigated at the time,” said Don Thomander, a decade from joining the force in 1955, but who later became the Halifax force's staff sergeant in charge of major crime, which handled cold cases like Resk's.

“We spent a lot of time looking at the different angles. But there was nothing definite. It was kind of left out in the shadows.”

The force's current spokesman John Macleod said that new information in the case has come to light over the years, and when it does “they look into it like it was just yesterday” but nothing has surfaced that has been conclusive enough to lead to a conviction or an arrest.

The mystery, though, won't die.

Earlier this week, on the 65th anniversary of Resk's death, the Halifax police department's special investigations unit asked anyone with information on the case who has not spoken with police to come forward with what they know. As incentive, there's a reward of up to $150,000 under the provincial government's unsolved crimes program.

In the meantime, the sum total of all the leads they have run down and people interviewed over the past 65 years is stored in big cardboard banker's boxes, with the force's criminal intelligence division in Burnside.

I suppose this would be some comfort to any family members who this week may have visited the Gates of Heaven Cemetery in Lower Sackville where Resk's gravestone, engraved with “ever loved.” stands.

I imagine they ask themselves the same questions I did the other night trying to retrace Resk's steps.

Was it a robbery, or a carjacking? Was someone else — perhaps someone he knew — inside the van when he climbed in that night?

Was there some reason why Mike Resk diverged from his usual route and instead drove down to the corner of Acadia and Roome, where I stopped with the engine running, as if to pay my respects?