More cold cases can be resolved with teamwork

Last week the Lethbridge Police Service made international headlines when Staff Sgt. Scott Woods of our Criminal Investigation Section publicly announced that two sisters, who had been missing for more than 30 years, had finally been located alive and well in the U.S.

It was a very positive ending to an investigation that involved numerous officers over the years who worked tirelessly to piece together what happened. Over decades, the file changed hands many times and in January landed with Cst. Saska Vanhala whose review and follow-up ultimately resulted in our ability to finally provide the women’s family with an answer. Cst. Vanhala did an outstanding job and while he credits the conclusion of the case with a little luck and good timing, I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge his efforts and all the solid police work by everyone over the years that helped solve this cold case.

Anna and Kym Hakze were last seen by family members in Edmonton in the mid-1980s and reported missing to LPS in 2003 by their mother. The investigation, spanning nearly two decades, involved the pursuit of a number of tips and leads and many dead ends. But police never give up. The long awaited break finally came during the annual file review in January after police contacted a woman with the same name as an alias Anna was known to use, in regards to a theft report she had filed years earlier with Vancouver Police. It wasn’t Anna, but the woman told police she had saved a newspaper clipping from 1984 advertising a book written by a woman with the same name.

That information corroborated a Crime Stoppers tip from 2012 that identified two women — one being the author of several books — and the other with an alias known to have been used by Kym Hakze. Attempts to contact them in 2012 were fruitless, but a new online search of the author’s name led police to her current whereabouts including documentation that listed a sister as her next of kin. From there the pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place and fingerprint comparison subsequently confirmed the two women are in fact, Kym and Anna Hakze.

For the record, most missing person cold cases do not end this way. More often than not police find themselves tasked with telling a family their loved one has met with foul play or never being able to provide any answers. These investigations are complex, and as demonstrated by Anna and Kym, people do not stay in one place. They cross jurisdictional boundaries and the ability for law enforcement to better connect with one another when they do, is absolutely critical to police being able to solve more of these kinds of cases.

Police in Canada (except in Ontario and the Vancouver Police) are still generally working in isolation on major cases, and clues will continue to go undetected until we are connected and work together — regardless of jurisdictional lines.

We have had two major inquiries in Canada, Campbell in 1996 and Oppal in 2012, that made it very clear all police agencies need to work together using interoperable major-case management software. It became reality across Ontario after the election of a majority provincial government that understood the need and had the courage to make participation mandatory by all police services. In Alberta, anything short of that will be another 20 years of debate, bureaucracy and isolation — all while murders, missing persons and other major cases go unsolved.

We are now in the early stages of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Inquiry. There is already a call for cold cases to be reopened if there was an egregious failure to properly investigate or if there was police misconduct.

Irrespective of what the catalyst is to have these cold cases reviewed, law enforcement agencies operating in isolation is a systemic issue that must be addressed. Our current provincial government is very aware of the concerns about investigations that are emerging from families who are speaking about the MMIW inquiry. Last April, I presented a motion to the Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police that was passed calling for police services to adopt a proven and tested major-case management software system.

Our government is positioned to be a leader in addressing how police in Alberta investigate all major cases including murders and missing persons by mandating the use of interoperable software. It is the only way we will be able to make connections between jurisdictions, detect similarities in MO, evidence and other clues that could help us bring closure to families who are waiting and deserve answers.