‘SOMEBODY GOT AWAY WITH MURDER’
‘It’s really the unknown that’s the worst,’ says one of the victim’s two daughters. The silence of the police hurts. ‘No one cares anymore. But to me, it’s still my dad — I don’t want it forgotten.’ Jesse Feith reports.
Nathan Benditsky, 81, was killed in his bungalow in Côte-St-Luc on Sept. 2, 1999. Nearly 19 years later, his daughters are still haunted by questions — ‘Who did it, and mostly, why?’ And they fear the cold case has been forgotten by police. Jesse Feith reports in
At first, Naomi Mouadeb called often. After the initial blur of the first few days, every week or so she picked up the phone and dialed the same number. Then it became every couple of months. Then, gradually, two calls a year became one: every Sept. 2.
The last time she tried calling, in 2015, no one answered.
So Mouadeb, 63, drove across the island instead, from her home in Hampstead to Place Versailles, where she knew the Montreal police force housed its major crimes unit.
Desperate to speak with someone, she tried an officer as he made his way into the building. He wasn’t a detective, she realized, but maybe he could help.
“My name is Naomi Mouadeb. My father, Nathan Benditsky, was murdered in 1999 ... ” she started telling him.
The officer called a detective down to speak with her, the ensuing conversation as brief as it was each year. He penned his name and number on a piece of paper and handed it over.
Back at home, Mouadeb placed it in a blue folder she’s kept over the years, the newest addition to a bulging pile of police correspondence, newspaper articles, reward offers and photos of her father.
That conversation was the last time Mouadeb spoke with police about her father’s unsolved killing. Subsequent calls and messages have gone unreturned. Like many families afflicted by cold cases, she feels forgotten, still haunted by what happened, but unsure who to turn to or what more can be done.
She understands police are overburdened — the Montreal police force says there have been 427 unsolved homicides in the city since 1990 — but she wishes families would be acknowledged, not left to fend for themselves.
“You develop a close relationship with a detective and all of a sudden there’s nobody. No one cares anymore,” Mouadeb says. “But to me, it’s still my dad — I don’t want it forgotten.”
For Mouadeb, a mother of three, early September meant the beginning of a new school year, and she was having a busy day.
Her father lived less than 10 minutes away, in Côte-St-Luc, and they usually spoke each day. But on Sept. 2, 1999, life got in the way: one kid needed a new school uniform, another needed to pick up textbooks downtown. She left him a message: “I’m busy, but call me back when you can.”
A feeling started creeping over her that night while prepping hamburgers, an easy meal after a hectic day — she still hadn’t heard from her father. She called a family friend who lived nearby to ask if he had seen him around.
When he hadn’t, she put the minced meat back in the fridge and went over to see for herself. Nothing seemed amiss from outside his Regal Rd. bungalow. The doors were all closed and his car was in the driveway. But inside was different. Cupboards and drawers were left open; there were papers all over the floor.
Benditsky, at 81, was the kind of person who left his door unlocked half the time and trusted strangers. His wife died when she was only 52, and he grew into what his children call “an eccentric old soul.” He worked in his family’s textile trimmings business, but was always artistic and creative. He built furniture, sculpted, repaired violins and liked to tend to his garden. Coming from a family of six children, he loved his own, and later, his grandchildren.
Mouadeb has trouble talking about what came next. Sitting at her dining room table recently, she pauses, hesitant to continue. Her older sister, Sue Baron, is on speakerphone from her home in Philadelphia. Years later, Baron’s still protective of her younger sister.
“And then what happened happened,” she says, saving Mouadeb from reliving the memory again.
After looking throughout the house, Mouadeb found her father’s body in the basement. He had been stabbed in the chest. In the nearly 19 years since, no clear motive for the crime has ever been determined.
The police investigation revealed Benditsky was likely killed in his entranceway after a struggle, and his body was moved to the basement. The culprit, or culprits, tried to clean the house afterward. Towels used to wipe the floors and walls of blood were left in the bathroom.
The weapon was never found, but DNA evidence was recovered from the scene. Police believed the perpetrator cut himself during the stabbing, leaving traces of his own blood behind. The sample was later tested against family members’ DNA and anyone the family could think would have recently been in the house. No match was made.
Five months before the killing, burglars had broken into Benditsky’s home. The family wondered if there was a connection, but that crime, too, was never solved. The day he was killed, his car keys were stolen but not his car.
What followed in the immediate aftermath never sat well with the siblings (Mouadeb and Baron have an older brother, Howard).
Within 24 hours, they say, the police cordon was removed and they were allowed back into the house. Left behind, on a newspaper opened on the kitchen table, were Benditsky’s toupée, watch and glasses, all stained with blood. When a specialized cleaning crew came soon after, they called the family: in a small closet upstairs was a blood-soaked golf umbrella hidden behind a vacuum cleaner.
If the police hadn’t found that, they wondered, what else had they missed?
“When the rawness and the pain and all that go away, and you start facing the facts,” Baron says, it becomes impossible to not question if everything was done properly.
“Somebody got away with murder,” she says. “That sounds like a TV script, but that’s really what it’s like for us.”
Talking to each other over the phone, Mouadeb and Baron mention detectives by name and try to place them in chronological order. After a few minutes, they give up.
Mouadeb figures their father’s case was handed down to a different detective on four or five occasions. In 2005, six years after the killing, she received a letter from the SPVM’s major crimes unit. Though the case would technically remain open, the letter explained, an investigator would no longer be assigned to it.
“There is no new information that would justify us to continue the investigation,” the half-page letter said.
Feeling the interest in their father’s case waning, they tried to do as much as they could on their own.
They contacted the Vidocq Society, a crime-solving hub of former detectives and forensic experts based in Philadelphia. It agreed to take a second look at the case and a member of the Montreal police force was flown down for a meeting.
Later, they convinced the SPVM to send the gathered DNA to a lab in Sarasota, Fla., which, they say, allowed the lab to register it with Interpol and also recreate the perpetrator’s ancestry in an attempt to cross-reference it.
But the family found out nothing more.
Though never closed, the case stood still and life went on.
The sisters, who remain close, grieved in their own way.
Baron tried grief counselling twice early on, but couldn’t see it through. She sat with others who lost loved ones — women whose husbands were killed, mothers who lost young children — and felt out of place, almost guilty. Her father had lived to 81, had a good life. Was she allowed to grieve the same? She left the group.
Mouadeb, Baron acknowledges, took it even harder.
After the killing, she fell ill and was hospitalized. She was uncomfortable alone at home, couldn’t shower without someone else in the house. She cried often. Two weeks after the crime, her security alarm went off and she felt paralyzed. Crouching down in her upstairs hallway, petrified and clutching the phone, she called the alarm company and police, pleading with whoever answered not to hang up.
Only in the last two years, Mouadeb says, has she grown able to put what happened “in a place” and not think about it. But the pain and questions still linger. She wishes the police would make someone more available to victims’ families, even if only once a year, to update them on where cold cases stand. “Some sort of acknowledgment,” she says, that cases haven’t been forgotten and families should keep their hope alive.
Baron agrees, but above all else, she just wants answers.
“It’s really the unknown that’s the worst,” she says. “Who did it, and mostly, why? At least then everything would be black and white. It wouldn’t be grey anymore.”
“I know I have it somewhere,” Mouadeb says as she heads down into her basement. She checks one room, then another. Nothing. Finally, she finds it tucked away in storage. Unfolded, it’s almost as tall as her: a nearly five-foot photo of Benditsky, erected in front of the Côte- St-Luc fire station two years after his killing, when the sisters started sensing the need to ramp up their efforts to keep the case from going cold.
In the photo, Benditsky shares a warm smile, his eyebrows slightly raised above wide glasses, as though he’s on the verge of saying hello. Next to his portrait: “Please, help the police solve this murder.”
Mouadeb only has half of the billboard today. When it came time to take it down, it didn’t fit into one car. So they broke it into two pieces — Mouadeb took one side, her sister the other.
Baron brought her half back to Philadelphia, storing it away in her own basement. She couldn’t bring herself to throw it away back then, she says, and still can’t today.
“How could I?”