Memories of murder in Fort Erie
Sometimes the most innocent things can bring back memories — both good and bad.
Catching a whiff of a certain perfume may trigger happy memories of a grandmother who has passed away, or hearing an old song reminds you of your first love. On the darker side, a car backfiring may be enough to send someone who has experienced gun violence to suffer an episode of anxiety and fear brought on by post-traumatic stress disorder.
But for former Fort Erie resident Karen Lowden, it all started with a conversation with friends, followed by reading news about a former restaurant in town scheduled to be demolished to make way for a condo project. That story led Lowden to contact the Fort Erie Post.
Her thoughts had gone back to a murder that happened nearly 30 years ago at a Fort Erie hotel.
It was the case involving the death of Monika Mayer at the hands of two men in a room at the Quality Inn Hotel — once known as the Garrison Inn — on Central Avenue, where Lowden once worked.
“I was talking with friends,” Lowden, now 64, said, via telephone from her home in B.C. “We were talking about bad things that had happened in our lives. I told them about the murder. There were a lot of tears.”
Lowden, who was known as Karen Violino back then, was working the overnight shift at the hotel.
“I was the last person to see her alive, except for the people who killed her,” she said.
That hotel is long gone now, but the memories of that time and what happened on a July night in Room 222 at the hotel have in large part stuck with her. When she reached out to the Post, she was looking for any scraps that could help fill in the gaps. The Post contacted the Niagara Falls Public Library and the Fort Erie Historical Museum to see if they could help. The library managed to locate some newspaper clippings about the murder and the subsequent trial.
The museum managed to find an old black and white image of the hotel.
Lowden, who was 37 at the time, recalled Mayer came in long after the two men who were charged with second-degree murder in her beating death — Michael Brooks and James Standring, who was once a jockey at Fort Erie Race Track — had registered. She and the victim spoke for almost a half-hour.
“She seemed nervous,” Lowden said. “She was very nervous about coming up (from Toronto). She didn’t elaborate.”
Then she saw the murder scene the next day, she was horrified.
“The bathroom was a disaster,” Lowden said. “They had even tried to get rid of the body themselves but there were people in the hallway.”
In an account of evidence presented at the February 1993 trial, Niagara Falls Review reporter Tony Ricciuto wrote that Mayer was beaten over the span of hours, had liquor bottles smashed over her head and shards of glass from the broken bottles were used to cut her face, the reporter wrote in his trial coverage. A large shard of glass had also been embedded in Mayer’s forehead. Both men had been using cocaine and alcohol over the course of two or three days and had gone without sleep.
An autopsy performed on Mayer showed she had suffered four deep cuts to her head, a six-centimetre wound on her forehead, cuts on her face and nose, a torn left ear, a fractured rib and cuts and bruises on her chest and back.
Lowden said there were complaints about noise coming from the room and that one hotel guest asked to be moved. “He was a Miami cop,” she said. The pair were arrested by York Regional Police after returning to the Toronto area.
Ricciuto, who has since retired, minced no words when describing the incident.
“This was a brutal, senseless and vicious murder, and it goes to show what can happen when drugs are involved and a situation gets completely out of control,” Ricciuto said. “No one should have to die like this at the hands of two people she once knew. This was not a case of just killing someone, this victim suffered and was tortured.”
The two men responsible initially had been charged with, and pleaded not guilty to, second degree murder. While the subsequent trial in 1993 was expected to last weeks, the men changed their plea, and pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter. Brooks was sentenced to eight years in prison while Standring received a sentence of 30 months.