RENE LYNN GUNNING
Jo Gunning, 56, held his daughter, Rene Lynn, on the hospital bed as she mourned the loss of her prematurely born son and promised to turn her life around.
“We had a real, close emotional bonding time then,” Gunning said of the conversation that followed a tense period in their relationship, when she had left home, pregnant for the second time, to be with a boyfriend that he did not like.
“She turned to me and said, ‘I know I’ve done a lot of bad things. . . I want to come home. I want to get my act together. I want to be a mother to (my son). I want to go back to school and get my education,’ ” Gunning recalled.
He told her she was welcome home any time and things were good for a while, until one day, following a heated argument between her father and her boyfriend, she ran out the back door and started sleeping on couches again.
Sometime later, the 19-year-old hitchhiked to the West Edmonton Mall, where she spent the day of Feb. 18, 2005, before leaving to hitchhike back home to Fort St. John, B.C., again with 16-year-old Krystle Knott, who was from Dawson Creek, B.C.
Over the next five years, Gunning says he travelled to Edmonton at least four times, desperately hoping to find her somewhere on the streets, perhaps having gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd, or the sex trade, searching for her in the mall where she was last seen.
“Every time I would see somebody with long, black hair like hers, from behind, my heart would stop and I would pick up my pace and walk up, walk in front of this person to have a look. And it wasn’t her and my heart would drop to the bottom of my stomach again. I always kept my hopes up that I would find her,” Gunning said.
On May 21, 2011, campers found the skulls of both girls near Grande Prairie, Alta.
“It was the worst day of my life. I’d been dreading that day a long time. I was hoping it had never come, but it did. How I never went back to booze and drugs, I don’t know,” said Gunning.
The investigation is in the hands of the RCMP Project KARE task force, and while Gunning thinks they are doing the best they can, he believes they need more resources.
“They can only do so much with what they’ve got,” he said.