Credit police for arrests in an inexplicable case

I stand in awe of city police for the arrests this week in the death of Lorry Anne Santos.

This was a case with the deck stacked against investigators. Of connections between the victim and the alleged culprits, there were none. No motive was apparent. The three accused are from Alberta and apparently did not even know the victim. Police have said the gunmen allegedly came to town to kill a rival drug dealer, but, almost unbelievably, got lost and went to the wrong house in the wrong neighbourhood where they killed the wrong person. The horror of it is that the victim could have been anyone, you, me, your loved one or mine, Lorry Anne Santos … anyone.

Forensic evidence was minimal in what was almost a drive-by shooting. Police had nothing to go on but a partial description of what might have been the getaway car, a grey or silver Acura with tinted windows. They still were without a suspect or even a useful lead 48 hours later, when, as police procedurals have made common knowledge, the prospects of solving the case drop off precipitously. With no apparent reason for anyone to target in a suburban neighbourhood a devoted wife and mother of exemplary character, police could only speculate that the per- petrators might have gone to the wrong address. Now they were looking for unknown suspects who were gunning for an unidentified victim.

It didn’t help that the accused were from out of province, unfamiliar to Saskatoon police and probably to their informants. The Edmonton-based gang to which the accused allegedly belong, the White Boy Posse, had not previously been active in the city. In reports on gang activity here, the name had never come up.

Another complication was the involvement of at least three police forces: RCMP in Alberta and city police here and in Edmonton, where the White Boy Posse is all too well-known. Major police investigations in that city in recent years have led to at least 30 arrests on drug, weapons and other charges of people connected to the gang. One of the accused charged with first-degree murder in this case, Joshua Petrin, 29, was stopped by Edmonton police in 2007 for careless driving. In his car they found a secret compartment containing crack cocaine and a 9-mm Beretta pistol, loaded, with a round chambered. The car also was armoured with bulletproof vests under the door panels. In Saskatoon, however, no one in authority ever had heard of him.

The other two accused in Santos’s death also have been charged in a homicide in Alberta. The problem would have been connecting alleged Alberta gangsters to the isolated killing in Saskatoon of someone who had nothing to do with gangs.

The co-operation among police departments that this must have required is not necessarily automatic. Robert Pickton, for instance, got away with multiple murders for as long as he did in part because he picked up his victims in one police jurisdiction and killed them in another. RCMP at Port Coquitlam, where his home was the scene of his monstrous crimes, did not follow up for years after Vancouver police identified him as a possible suspect.

Lack of police co-operation infamously contributed to the belated apprehension of another Canadian serial killer, Paul Bernardo. He might have been apprehended earlier, but evidence of his crimes left in different police jurisdictions was not shared. A judicial review of the investigation found that Bernardo “fell through the cracks” because law enforcement agencies failed to co-operate.

Investigation of the notorious Manson murders likewise involved several police departments. One of them was searching for the revolver used as a murder weapon while for weeks it gathered dust in the evidence locker of a neighbouring department. Turned in by a boy who found it not far from the murder scene, the gun was only connected with the murders after the boy’s father called repeatedly to raise the possibility. But for him, the vital evidence might have been lost in the system.

In the case at hand, cooperation among police here and in Alberta was rather more effective. Starting with almost nothing, they have apprehended suspects in a case that presented as inexplicable, and was all the more alarming because of it.