A teen was raped and murdered in ’85 — now her killer is out
Killer banned from Lanark County, at the request of former girlfriend
Thirty-one years ago, teenager Heather Fraser was brutally raped and murdered in the sleepy town of Smiths Falls. The man responsible, James Harold Giff, served more than three decades behind bars for the crime. Now he’s out. Shockwaves still ripple from a murder that stunned the town back in 1985.
“Smiths Falls has had a few murders (before Heather’s), but none, I don’t think, as horrific as that one was,” said Linda Spencer this week, the Frasers’ neighbour, whose eldest son was in kindergarten at the time that Heather was killed. “People were pretty horrified.” Heather, then 16, was a popular Smiths Falls high school student. She was walking home alone from an after-school student council meeting on the snowy evening of Jan. 28 when she was attacked by then 17-year-old Giff in a park just a few hundred metres from her Abbott Street home.
Giff raped and stabbed Heather in the snow-covered railway embankment park and left her to die.
When Heather didn’t come home from school that day, her father, Ian Fraser, and her now late mother, Carolyn Fraser, went out to look for her. It was Ian who found his teenage daughter clinging to life near a bridge in the park.
“She was in bad shape,” said Ian, now 88. “That was the last time I saw her alive.”
Heather was rushed to the Ottawa Civic Hospital but died hours later.
Ian said he didn’t want to recall how he felt on that January day.
“I don’t want to remember,” he said.
Heather’s tragic murder shook nearly everyone in the town of fewer than 9,000 people, and it brings back some vivid memories for those who were there.
“I just remember feeling disbelief,” said Spencer. “It didn’t make sense. From everything we understood (about Giff ), he was kind of rough and (Heather) was not.
“It wasn’t like their paths would cross in a seemingly normal way.”
Heather was a smart, studious girl who excelled at anything she set her mind to, Ian said. She was a Sunday school teacher, a girl guide, a top athlete and had just started to learn the bagpipes.
“She could have done anything,” said Ian. “I think she might have ended up with a scholarship for basketball — but I guess we’ll never know.”
What happened to his daughter will never leave him.
“It’s really difficult to keep your faith (when something like this happens),” he said. “She had so much to offer.”
The scales of justice tipped for Heather with Giff ’s arrest in March 1985. Though 17 at the time of the crime, he was charged and tried for first-degree murder as an adult.
The courthouse was packed the following January to await the verdict. It took the jury just eight hours to find Giff guilty of first-degree murder — a charge that carried the sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years.
Ian said he found “no satisfaction with the verdict,” in an Ottawa Citizen article from January 1986. His wife Carolyn, in another Citizen article from the same time, expressed outrage that Giff would start a new life in his 40s — a chance their daughter would never get.
Giff, now 48, was released this month after serving more than 30 years in prison. On July 7, he was granted full parole — with conditions. He can’t use drugs or alcohol, must avoid bars and people involved in the “drug subculture,” seek or remain employed, have no contact with the victim’s family or other identified victims and abide by a curfew from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. He must also report all “intimate” female relationships or friendships, sexual or non-sexual, to his parole supervisor.
Giff is also banned from Lanark County unless authorized by his parole supervisor, at the request of his former girlfriend — something Fraser’s neighbour, Spencer, said is a “good thing” for Giff’s former girlfriend, and Heather’s friends and family who still live in the area.
“He doesn’t need to be here, and nobody needs to see him, really,” she said. “Could you imagine anything more horrible than coming across him at some point?”
One of Giff’s former girlfriends expressed to the parole board prior to his release that she “feared for her safety were (he) to be released” and objected to his parole being granted. And just last month, according to parole board documents, she told the board that Giff had tried to contact or locate her whereabouts through Facebook — which is why he has been banned from social media.
In previous psychological assessments, Giff was found to have anti-social personality disorder compounded by substance abuse and sexual sadism, but as of July 7, the parole board stated he “will not present an undue risk to society.”
Giff was last held at The Waseskun Healing Centre, a 34-bed correctional institution and healing lodge for minimum and medium security offenders in Saint-Alphonse-Rodriguez, Que.
Giff currently lives in Quebec.