The unsolved murder of a Toronto teen
One Saturday morning, 15-year-old Sharmini Anandavel disappeared from her Don Mills home. Her neighbour Stanley Tippett was the prime suspect, but police lacked enough evidence to charge him. Over the next decade, Tippett embarked on a terrifying crime spree
The summer of 1999 would go on record as one of the hottest in decades. On the morning of Saturday, June 12, Toronto was already enveloped in a heavy blanket of humidity, and the Anandavel family didn’t have air-conditioning in their Don Mills apartment. Fifteen-year-old Sharmini was scheduled to begin a new job that morning; her parents wanted to drive her to work, but they were called away unexpectedly to help a sick relative. They asked her to leave the number and address of her employer. She had told them it was a position answering phones just a few blocks away. But Sharmini had told her close friends another story: that a police officer had offered her a $12-an-hour job as an undercover drug operative.
Like many families who had found refuge in Canada, the Anandavels struggled to make ends meet. Sharmini’s father, Eloornayagam, had moved from Sri Lanka to Toronto in 1994 to set up a new life for his family. He was soon able to sponsor his wife, Vasanthamalar, and their three children: Kathees was eight, Sharmini was 10 and the eldest, Dinesh, was 12. The whole family worked hard to build a new life in Toronto. One of the kids’ jobs was helping their father deliver the Toronto Sun and Toronto Star. On Friday nights, the family would pick up the flyer inserts for the Saturday newspapers. They’d assemble them together, sometimes ordering pizza, then they’d all get up early the next morning, the kids running around dropping off the papers in the pre-dawn hours. “That was like the worst job ever,” Kathees recalls.
The Anandavels managed, and the kids excelled in school. Sharmini was especially bright, both in intellect and spirit. She attended Woodbine Junior High for grades 7 through 9, and her smile beams from the pages of the yearbook. Girls often find their tribe in those early teenage years, sometimes oscillating between the mean-girl posse and the empathetic group. By all accounts, Sharmini belonged to the latter. Her Grade 9 homeroom teacher, Jody White, remembers her as a peacemaker, the one who would always notice if another student was lonely or in trouble. “She was such a vivacious, intelligent, loving person,” White told me. “But she wasn’t a pushover. She had opinions, and she wanted to be heard.” Sharmini sat next to Colin Braddock, a tall, athletic teenager. “She was so kind,” says Braddock, who’s now 35. “She was my first crush.”
At around 9 a.m. on that June morning, Sharmini left the apartment, but neglected to leave a contact number as she’d promised. Kathees walked his sister to the elevator. She pressed the button. The elevators opened. She stepped inside and the doors closed. Then she disappeared.
Around the same time, Stanley Tippett was driving by the building on his way to a job cutting grass. Tippett, who was 23 at the time, had lived with his wife and their infant son one floor below the Anandavels. Just a couple of weeks earlier, he and his family had packed up and moved to Oshawa, but he still had work in the area, so he was back that Saturday.
Sharmini’s family believed she’d gotten her job through Tippett, who was well-known in the building, especially among the children. He only worked odd jobs, so he was often hanging around. He’d take the kids in the building swimming at a North York pool and teach them judo. His appearance was also distinctive. He has Treacher Collins syndrome, a genetic condition that affects the bone development of his face: his eyes slant down away from his nose, he has a receding chin and notably small ears. From a young age, he wore hearing aids. “When he was little he was bullied a lot,” says Tippett’s mother, Susan Anderson. “People would make fun of the way he looked, beat him up.”
He also had a reputation for making up stories. He once told a group of boys in the building that he was a police officer and needed one of their bikes for an investigation. Tippett was not an officer, nor had he ever worked with police, but some of the children, including Kathees, believed he was a former cop. He would often patrol the building, and he wore a police jacket. He later told me he’d bought it at a flea market.
When Sharmini didn’t arrive home that evening from her new job, her parents were frantic. It wasn’t like her to be late. They didn’t know Tippett had moved, so they ran down to his unit, banging on his door. When there was no answer, the Anandavels called the police.
At the time of Sharmini’s disappearance, I was working as the Toronto Star’s crime reporter. I first met the Anandavels on June 16, after Sharmini had been missing for four days. The family was still hopeful Sharmini would come home. She didn’t fit the profile of a runaway, but maybe she had a secret life? Maybe there was a boy? Maybe she’d been kidnapped and was being held for ransom? Her parents even consulted psychics, who told them she was still alive.
They desperately wanted her story to be told, but racist rumours swirled in the press. Some reports suggested her disappearance had to do with an arranged marriage or Tamil gangs, which were waging public street battles in the late ’90s. I was pretty green as a journalist, but I knew these stories were false. Everything about Sharmini’s case pointed to an abduction. I didn’t think she was going to be found alive.
Tippett quickly became the prime suspect, and police were closely tracking his movements. They discovered he’d sold his car to a junkyard, and seized it before it could be destroyed. But the vehicle didn’t yield any clues. The only suspicious detail was that the trunk liner had been removed. Police never found it.
I joined forces with Dale Brazao, a veteran investigative journalist at the Star, to track Tippett down. He wasn’t hard to find— people tended to remember him. One day, we followed him from his apartment into a Canadian Tire in Oshawa. In the parking lot, Tippett marched right up to us, demanding to know why we were following him. He figured we were cops. When we explained we were journalists, he relaxed and casually sat on the trunk of a car. Then he talked—and talked. He seemed to relish the attention. He was well-spoken and polite, meticulously describing what happened after Sharmini disappeared.
He said the last time he’d seen Sharmini was a week before he’d moved out of his Don Mills apartment. Less than 24 hours after she was reported missing, he said, a dozen police cruisers converged on his Oshawa home. He was driven to 33 Division in the back of a cruiser. He didn’t have a lawyer during his interrogation. “I have nothing to hide,” he told us. “Why do I need my lawyer?” He vehemently denied he had offered Sharmini any kind of job, but admitted he had given her an application for a position at the local pool, and suggested that was likely why Sharmini’s parents were confused. “The cops were following me all over the place,” Tippett said. “I just figured I’ll let them do their job. They’re just wasting their time and wasting taxpayers’ money.” On July 1, we ran his story under the headline “Man’s Life ‘Hell’ Since Teen Vanished.”
In the weeks that followed, I couldn’t stop thinking about Tippett and Sharmini’s case. I kept hoping she’d suddenly walk back into her apartment. But four months after she disappeared, in October 1999, a father and son hiking the East Don Parkland Trail discovered human remains beside the river. There wasn’t much to find. The hot summer had caused rapid decomposition, and coyotes had ravaged whatever was left. All that was found were a skull and some bone fragments— no useful DNA or forensic evidence. Dental records confirmed Sharmini’s identity.
Toronto homicide detectives Matt Crone and Greg McLane were assigned to the file. They were veteran investigators, big in both stature and reputation. The most crucial clue they uncovered wasn’t at Sharmini’s burial site, but in her bedroom. It was a fake application for something called the Metro Search Unit. Police believe this may have been the bogus job offer—the ruse her killer
hikers found sharmini’s remains in october 1999. the hot summer had caused rapid decomposition, and coyotes had ravaged whatever was left