Victim’s family still feeling pain
Man convicted in 25-year-old murder of young mother continues to claim innocence
In Fairy Marshall’s experience, time doesn’t heal the kind of wound a parent suffers when their child is murdered. In her words: “You only learn to live with it.”
Marshall’s daughter Carrie was killed at age 21, her body found off a logging road outside Creston, B.C., in December 1992.
“She was a warm, loving person with a four-and-a-halfyear-old son ... (she) was stalked, abducted, brutally murdered and dumped on a mountain top,” Marshall recalled in a recent interview.
Duray Bentley Richards has served 25 years in prison for the murder. He has exhausted all avenues of appeal, but is asking the federal justice minister to take one more look at his case. Richards has admitted to a history of violence against women, but he has steadfastly proclaimed his innocence in Carrie’s murder.
For Marshall, every step in Richards’ long and ongoing legal fight has brought back a deep feeling of loss.
“It just never ends. Submissions of appeals and intent to appeal, and on, and on, and on,” she said.
“Every time something happens in the news, it tears off the scar tissue and you suffer all over again.”
The last time Marshall saw her daughter alive was Dec. 3, 1992, when she dropped her off at the mall in Cranbrook in time for a bus to Creston.
Carrie had been in the midst of a planned move from Creston to Ta Ta Creek with her son and her partner Stan Polak when she had returned to town to pack up belongings, according to court documents.
She was well-liked in Creston and had many friends there, but their move was intended to help Polak work on his sobriety, according to Richards’ submission.
Polak was involved in the drug trade and he had been physically abusive, according to court documents.
But police determined he was not involved in Carrie’s murder, RCMP Cpl. Stuart Deeks testified during a preliminary inquiry.
Polak himself was killed and left in the bush by members of the Greeks gang in 2005, an RCMP inspector told jurors during an unrelated 2012 murder trial.
The last known account of Carrie alive came from her friend Roselle Huscroft. Huscroft had driven Carrie to a shack that she was temporarily staying at outside Creston in the afternoon of Dec. 3. She left around 5 p.m. Marshall’s son was not with her at the time.
Huscroft later told police she had noticed “two sets of tire tracks going in and out of fresh snow,” according to the notepad of RCMP Const. Kim Bloy. The next lines in that notepad read: “Carrie stated ‘someone’s been up here.’ ”
The next morning, around 9 a.m., Carrie’s stepfather Mark Magotiaux drove to the shack, expecting to pick her up. When he arrived he saw that the door was ajar. Carrie’s purse, house keys and cigarettes were still inside, but the young woman was missing.
It was three days later that Carrie was found dead about a 10-minute drive from the shack.
When police seized Richards’ 1976 Ford Elite Torino, they found two drops of blood. A DNA expert determined the blood came from the same genotype as Carrie’s, “and matched the deceased’s blood on a population analysis of 1 in 12,” as Crown counsel put it in court documents.
Fairy Marshall attended every day of Richards’ 74-day trial at the Supreme Court of B.C. in Cranbrook. She said Richards was seated facing the judge and he never looked at her during the trial.
Among the many people Carrie left behind were her son Brandon, a younger sister with whom she had been very close, and a grandmother who is in her 90s and still needs to face what happened every time it comes up again, Marshall said.
It made no sense for Richards to submit a final appeal to the justice minister, given that courts have already turned down every legal appeal he has filed, Marshall said.
Asked whether she remained of the opinion that Richards killed her daughter, Marshall said: “Of course he did.”