FORSAKEN The crime is the coverup
The devastating hit-and-run that killed beloved teenager Lucas Shortreed north of Guelph was a cold case for 14 years. An investigation involving 142 police officers came to a shocking conclusion when the car was found
A tall, broad silhouette on a county road, under the stars, the autumn air thick and warm on the edge of midnight.
The friendly bear of a teenager had always walked. Always followed his own path.
On that Friday night, he walked along Wellington Road 17, the lights in the village of Alma shrinking behind him, northwest of Elora and his hometown of Fergus.
He walked past cornfields, up a long rise in the road, and over the crest.
A light breeze.
And it was over.
Crushed steel. Shattered glass. A victim of fate, and a man.
All the light and laughter, imagination and the possible, gone.
Gone and forsaken, there on the county road where blood pooled.
The question had lingered in her mind, on the seemingly endless, hour-long drive south to the hospital in Hamilton: what if it is someone else’s son? And at the same time, she thought, she could never wish this on another.
In the morgue, she stood outside a door and peered through a small window.
A sheet was drawn to reveal his face.
Her kid.
She cried.
The police came knocking, as he knew they would.
When they search for a damaged white Dodge Neon, they won’t find his.
How often did he think about that night?
Did it haunt him, or could he tuck away the images and sounds in a corner of his mind?
That night: had a few beers. Headed for home around midnight, his young son in the back seat. Drove up the rise in the road. Nearly home.
A terrible collision.
“What happened?” the boy asked. The lie came quick. A plausible one, out there on the dark county road.
“We hit a deer.”
He took steps to hide the truth. He was not an educated man, but knew things.
Perhaps he did not consider the big picture.
Could never imagine that what he had done would bring not just a couple of cops to his home, but ultimately involve more than 140 police officers, and trigger a 100-kilometre-wide hunt for his battered car.
Did he realize how beloved the victim was, and that a brazen coverup was not a private act, but sticking a knife in the heart of the family, and an entire small-town community?
That wound would not scar over, but fester with sorrow, anger and recrimination.
Keeping his secret was not an end, just the beginning.
Earlier that same fall, in 2008, 18year-old Lucas Shortreed walked late down a darkened street.
This was in Fergus, a town of fewer than 20,000 in Wellington County, about 20 kilometres northwest of Guelph, on the Grand River.
He walked with a girl named Nora Crete.
When she left a party, he offered to walk her home.
Said he was going home too, so no problem.
They walked a half-hour to her house, and then the six-foot-three, 230-pound teen said goodbye, and walked back to the party.
“He just wanted to make sure I got home safe,” she says.
He was born in January 1990 to Judie Moore and Pat Shortreed.
When Lucas was a toddler, his parents divorced. He lived with his mother, and older brothers, Christopher and Marcus, and older sister, Jenneen.
Shortreed is a name with Scottish roots and a long history in town. He grew up on McTavish Street, at Highland Road, near Shortreed Avenue.
Their little bungalow sat on the edge of a downslope that led through woods to a grassy hill, and a cemetery at the bottom.
Lucas tended to wander. At three and a half years old, he headed out to the yard to play. His mother panicked when she went looking for him and he was gone.
Later, she saw him dawdling back up their street.
At four, he took off again, following his brother to kindergarten. His mother retrieved him, and reminded her boy that he was too young to go to school.
The Shortreed name never fit
because Lucas was always the biggest kid in his class.
Genial and gentle, he would inadvertently knock down friends playing soccer and basketball. Someone nicknamed him “Piglet,” and it stuck.
In Grade 7, he met Tarique Todd, who became a close friend.
“He was really loud, you could hear him across the hallway in a different classroom,” says Todd. “I wouldn’t call him a class clown exactly, but there was a lot of energy … A big funny dude.”
And yet Lucas spent many hours on his own, walking, feeling a bond with nature.
Through his teens he spent quiet afternoons with his grandmother, Ilene Moore, who had helped raise him when Judie went back to school. He loved helping her bake muffins and cookies and making jars of peach preserves.
He worked as a cook at Dairy Queen, along with friend Ashley Mackenzie.
“He was just a big, genuine, comfortable guy,” says Mackenzie.
The weather was warm as Thanksgiving 2008 approached.
Students who had gone away to university returned home for the weekend.
Shortreed had been volunteering at a long-term-care home, where he started a gardening club for residents.
His future was in a holding pattern, but there was plenty of time for that.
On Friday night, Oct. 10, he headed out with friends to a house party in nearby Alma.
Shortreed was drinking at the party, playing beer pong.
It was nearly 11:30 p.m. Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown” played.
“You guys don’t know Kanye,” Shortreed said, starting one of the playful rants about rap music for which he was known.
He showed signs of being drunk, but was talking and walking with no problem.
He seemed his usual jovial self. He started wrestling with one of his friends. Shortly after that, one of the parents who was home that night asked him to leave.
Shortreed had a girlfriend, but she was not at the party. He spoke to her on his cellphone, and said he would see her the next day.
He told Todd he was going home. “Goodnight, man, see you tomorrow,” Todd said. He figured Lucas had called a taxi.
Other friends had full cars. Shortreed set out walking along a home-lined residential street, and came to a T-intersection at Wellington County Road 17, next to Alma Bible Church.
Home was 14 kilometres to the southeast.
If you were driving to Fergus, you would turn right, head east along 17 to Highway 6, and then south.
If you turned left, to the west, you would come to the crossroads in Alma, marked by a convenience store, antiques shop and restaurant.
Did he plan to hitch a ride? Call someone on his phone? Or just walk, and walk, and figure it out later?
He turned right.
He walked east, into darkness.
No one would ever forget where they had been when they heard the news.
On Saturday afternoon, Oct. 11, Ashley Mackenzie was working at Dairy Queen.
“My boyfriend called,” she says. “I can still hear his voice. He said: ‘Lucas has been in an accident … Actually he is dead.’ We all started bawling. The boss said to keep working. My mom came in, trying to be supportive to broken-hearted teenagers.”
He had been killed by a hit-andrun driver east of Alma on Road 17.
Friends drove to the crash site that day. They saw blood on the road.
“Huge puddles of blood,” says Todd. “It was imprinted in my mind.”
Judie had a sense something was wrong in the early morning hours, when she saw $20 for cab fare she had left for Lucas on the kitchen counter.
They had done this routine before: upon arrival in a taxi, he would enter the house, grab the money and take it out to pay the cabbie.
But she had noticed the money still on the counter. It was her first clue he had not come home.
Shortreed’s friends gathered at Todd’s house and cried. Police cruisers pulled up. Officers said they had to come to the police station.
The friends were questioned in separate rooms. It made some of them angry, feeling like they were being treated as suspects.
Police said it was standard procedure. Anyone who is a potential witness is interviewed.
“We were young and (police) were saying crazy things trying to make you say you did it,” says Todd. “No one knew what was going on. My mom came down and told (police) to get lost, that we just lost our best friend.”
Rumours spread.
Who had done this to Lucas? Did someone kill him on purpose? Where was the driver?
The forensic scientist trained her eye through a microscope at a minuscule fragment of white paint that she had dissected from a larger sample using a scalpel.
It was Oct. 22, 2008, 11 days after Shortreed’s death.
The paint sample had come from the car involved in the hit-and-run.
The car was missing. The task for the scientist, Gerri Lynn Vardy, was determining the make, model and year of the vehicle.
The first paint sample police had sent her was taken from the autopsy on the victim.
That sample was less than one millimetre thick. It was from a laceration on Lucas Shortreed’s left hand.
A second, larger sample, measuring 2.5 centimetres, was from the crash scene.
Working at the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto (CFS), she deduced that the samples matched.
Vardy had worked many “paint” cases: studying samples of paint found at the scenes of break and enters, car accidents and hit-andruns.
CFS scientists can work with paint samples as small as a period on the printed page.
For this new case, she sliced a layer from the larger sample.
She determined it was OEM: Original equipment manufacturer vehicle paint.
To find a match for her white paint sample, she tapped into an RCMP database that stored more than 15,000 paint samples.
She determined the paint had come from the frame of the hitand-run car, near where the windshield meets the front door, and found 578 samples in the database that matched.
The next day, Oct. 23, she received a call from OPP Sgt. Mike Ashley, who was heading the Shortreed investigation for the traffic department.
In the early moments after the hit-and-run, Ashley had been called at home near Fergus. He had called in his serious traffic collision team to the scene.
He had investigated many hitand-runs, but they hardly ever involved a pedestrian fatality.
His team collected samples of car debris that littered the scene.
One of the officers had bagged a shard that had broken off a signal light housing on the car. The officer conducted research. He determined it had come from a Dodge Neon, mid-1990s.
Vardy was pleased.
“That took my 578 hits down to 59,” she says.
She narrowed it down further to 40 in the database.
And then 12.
“That gave me the year range.” The scientist reported back to police: the car from the hit-and-run was a white Dodge Neon, made between 1995 and 1997.
She even pinpointed where it had been manufactured: an automotive plant in Belvedere, Ill.
Shortly after the collision, a motorist passing by had called 911.
An OPP officer arrived first, and then two paramedics, who wrapped Shortreed’s body in a blanket.
He had died instantly.
It was not clear how fast the car had been going on the dry, two-lane paved county road. The speed limit was 80 km/h. His body had been thrown approximately nine metres.
His spinal cord had been torn. He had multiple rib fractures, broken leg bones and lacerations to his lung and liver.
He had been walking on the downside of a rise, two kilometres from Alma, in the eastbound, righthand side lane.
No one knew what he had been doing out on that stretch of road.
When a police officer first contacted Judie that morning, he said they were investigating a hit-andrun, but said the identification found on the victim belonged to Lucas’s older brother, Christopher.
She knew it could not be Christopher. He attended university in northern Ontario and had not come home for Thanksgiving.
She had a feeling it was Lucas, but wondered if he had shared the I.D. with a friend.
Police drove Judie to Hamilton General Hospital, where she learned the truth in the morgue. Her youngest son’s face looked unharmed, but for a small scrape on his forehead.
A police officer told Judie: “We will find the guy who did this.” “I don’t care if you do,” she replied. “You will need closure.”
“My son has died.”
She selected a closed casket for the funeral later that week. She wanted people to remember how he had been and figured he would want that.
A baseball hat was placed on his head with the logo of the band Lost Boyz.
Elora Community Centre hosted the memorial to allow for more people. Had to be at least 800, many of them young, tearful faces. Lucas’s favourite music played. Judie read from a poem she wrote, that invoked her son’s love of nature, loud music and “surrounding yourself with good friends.”
Meanwhile, police searched the area for owners of 1995-97 white Dodge Neons.
One such owner lived five kilometres northwest of the crash site, on Sideroad 21, near Highway 6.
It was the country home of Dave and Anastasia Halliburton.
They had a young son and daughter. Dave drove a truck and Anastasia ran a cleaning service.
When police came calling, they saw that the couple’s 1995 white Neon was in good condition.
Police asked Dave if they could use the car for a Crime Stoppers reenactment video, to help encourage public tips on the hit-and-run.
Dave said he would be glad to assist.
Just make sure you return the car when you’re done with it to the same spot next to the house, he said.
Police ultimately widened their vehicle search to a 100-kilometre radius.
On Nov. 4, 2008, three weeks after the crash, an OPP officer returned to the Halliburtons and checked their car a second time.
No damage.
He noted that the car was registered to Anastasia Halliburton, and the Vehicle Information Number
(VIN) stamped on the inside of a door, and on the dashboard, matched with Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation records for the vehicle’s plate.
The officer spoke with Anastasia. He asked if this was the car she had been driving at the time of the crash down the road in October. She said that it was.
The car was cleared.
Police followed up on tips.
One name that appeared on their radar about two months after Shortreed’s death was that of Carl Leblanc.
The 20-year-old from Fergus had counted Shortreed a friend, as well as Lucas’s older brother, Marcus.
Leblanc’s mother had died two years earlier in a small craft plane crash in Brantford. He lived with his sister, Sharelle, and their stepfather.
Leblanc served time in youth jails. Had anger issues. Eventually was selling drugs.
About one week prior to the hitand-run, Leblanc had fought one of Shortreed’s friends at a party near Elora.
Leblanc says that after the fight, the guy had left and returned with others for revenge, and one of them had a crossbow. Leblanc ran from the party through cornfields. Later, he went into hiding when he heard he had been charged with assault.
He believes that at least one of Shortreed’s friends interviewed by police after the hit-and-run pointed the finger at him, saying that he had been at the Alma party, even though he had not.
Sharelle says that when police were looking for her brother, they questioned her, leaning on her to give him up in the Shortreed investigation.
Sharelle had owned a Dodge Neon. She says police suggested it was the car that hit Shortreed, and that her brother had been driving.
She told them their Neon had been black, not white, and that she had taken it to a wrecking yard in August, prior to the hit-and-run, after the transmission had blown for the second time.
“They didn’t believe me,” she says. “It didn’t make any sense; my brother didn’t even have a driver’s licence, much less a car.”
Leblanc had left town, hiding from police on the assault charge. He stayed with a friend in Delhi, 40 km southwest of Brantford, and worked at a tulip nursery.
One day, he thought he spotted a trespasser behind the house where he was staying.
He went out for a look. He says police officers emerged from a ravine, dressed in camouflage gear, and pointing weapons at him. He says they arrested him and interrogated him about the hit-and-run.
“They were like, ‘You killed him … We know you did it.’ I was bawling my eyes out. I was like, ‘Man, I did not do that.’ ”
Leblanc says he signed a form allowing police to check his cellphone records. He says they determined that his cell had “pinged” off towers in Guelph at the time of the crash in Alma.
He thought that would clear his name. Police had no evidence he had anything to do with Shortreed’s death.
But rumours that he was a suspect in the crash continued to plague him, as well as his sister, and police were not done with them yet.
Police would not comment about Leblanc, other than to say they are familiar with him.
Police continued searching for 1995-97 Dodge Neons.
Ultimately, they checked up on hundreds of them.
On March 9, 2009, five months after Shortreed’s death, a police officer returned to the Halliburtons’ home on Sideroad 21.
In criminal investigations, police officers often take actions intended to rattle the cage of a suspect: for example, tell them they are a “person of interest,” or ask if they will take a polygraph (lie detector) test.
It’s an investigative tool. Apply gentle pressure and note how the suspect reacts.
But police say this was not the case with an additional visit to the Halliburtons. It was a routine doublecheck of vehicles located near the crash site.
The couple’s Neon was cleared yet again.
Around town, at the grocery store, Judie could not escape the talk, and stigma.
Some people would point as if to say: that’s her, the woman who lost her son. Still haven’t caught the killer.
Some would greet her with a mix of condolences and theories about the mystery of what had happened.
“Someone would say, ‘I think (the driver) buried the car,’ ” she says. “Or: ‘I think it was somebody’s kid who did it.’ ”
She created her own narrative: it was probably a drunk driver, an alcoholic who didn’t even have a driver’s licence. The guy probably drank himself to death, unable to live with what he had done.
“That was a story I told myself to get me through the day. But when we found out what actually happened, nobody’s story had been as bad as the real one.”
In August 2009, 10 months into the investigation, a billboard went up on well-travelled Highway 6, about six kilometres from the crash site.
The giant poster featured a photo of Shortreed, and a white Dodge Neon, and read: “Do you know who hit and killed Lucas Shortreed?”
It also announced a $50,000 reward in the case.
The billboard remained there for several years.
Smaller versions of the poster were hung everywhere, including the foyer of Shortreed’s former high school, as well as university campuses from Waterloo to St. Catharines.
A mural that featured the poster was hung on a long-haul truck trailer; Lucas’s grandfather paid for the space.
When the reward was announced, Judie was encouraged by police to speak to the media to generate tips.
She was not anxious to assume the role of family spokesperson but agreed.
“I just wish this person would come forward,” she told reporters. “They are a danger to others on the road and our family just needs to put this to rest … He was a good kid.”
The following year, on Thanksgiving weekend 2010, police handed out information flyers about the case during RIDE checks in Wellington County.
In October 2011, Crime Stoppers announced the unsolved case was its “crime of the week.”
In 2012, the investigation was taken over by Wellington OPP detachment Det.-Const. Dave Telfer, who worked in the major crime unit. His supervisor had moved the case over to him from the traffic unit.
Telfer continued to be optimistic the car would be found.
True, the hit-and-run driver could have taken the Neon to a junkyard and had it chopped up.
“But there was so much scrutiny on that vehicle, getting rid of it would have been tough,” he says.
Telfer’s investigative approach was to gather pieces of the puzzle and see where they fit in the big picture. While he projected evenkeeled calm, the case continued to fuel speculation, and emotion, in the community.
Police had no inkling who killed Shortreed — or why. It could well be a homicide.
In October 2013, on the fifth anniversary of the crime, police held a news conference to spark new tips.
Judie was again called upon to speak to media. An article in the Guelph Mercury urged the driver, or a tipster, to come clean: “You know who you are … There is your conscience … that part of you that knows turning yourself in or sharing what you know is the right thing to do. Because if you don’t, that feeling in the pit of your stomach won’t go away. Ever.”
One year later, in October 2014, Vardy, the forensic scientist, received a new sample to test in the case.
“The paint was totally different,” she says.
Another dead end.
Police said that over time, they received more than 100 tips from the public.
Telfer says one tip came from someone who said they overheard a family member confess to the crime.
The tip did not pan out. Another called Telfer and confessed, but their information did not match evidence police were holding back.
The false confession may have been related to a mental-health issue, and perhaps a symptom of the emotional ripple effect in the community: the desperation to provide closure for the family and find justice.
“Someone wrote a (social media) post saying that Lucas had become everyone’s child,” says Judie. “And it was true, people had internalized it.”
As the years went by, friends wrote messages on a Facebook page called “R.I.P. Lucas Shortreed!”
“Feelin’ you today brother,” wrote Ryan Sage in 2014.
“We think about you every day,” wrote Tina Gadoury.
“Miss you dude.”
“Happy New Year, Luc.” “They will find out who did this to you Lucas.”
Tarique Todd, who had helped lower the casket at the burial, says their friend’s violent and unsolved death “messed up a lot of people for a long time.”
Shortreed’s closest male friends each got a tattoo in tribute to him.
At weddings, toasts were made to his memory. Some named their kids after him.
Todd moved to Calgary to try to start fresh. Each time he returned to Fergus, at Christmas or Thanksgiving, it would all come back.
He would be out for drinks at “The Goofy Newfy” downtown along the river, and people would get talking about the case.
“They would say, ‘I know who did it.’ It was like people wanted credit, everyone wanted to be part of it; it was weird. It pissed you off more than anything … Some people thought a police officer hit Luc. That was one rumour that went on forever. A lot of it was malarkey but it just evolves, like the telephone game.”
‘‘ We never sat around at Christmas time pounding the table and saying we have to get (the one) who did it.
JIM MOORE LUCAS SHORTREED’S UNCLE
Carl Leblanc, investigated by police in the early months of the case, says he could never shake the rap others put on him as a suspect.
He received messages from people in Fergus urging him to confess.
“I heard it all the time, not to my face, but friends would tell me that someone is saying, ‘You did it’ … People thought I killed him. It made me cry. It emotionally damaged me.”
In 2021, Leblanc was living out West, when a police officer phoned him and said he should return to Ontario to talk about the case.
“I told him I’m not coming back and I’ve got nothing to say to you guys.”
His sister, Sharelle, says she received a call about once a year from police who suggested she was withholding information about the hitand-run.
As for Shortreed’s family, while they never stopped feeling pain from his loss, they did not fixate on the unsolved case.
“We never sat around at Christmas pounding the table and saying we have to get (the one) who did it,” says Judie’s brother, Jim Moore.
There was a part of Judie that never wanted police to catch the driver.
She did not want a name attached to her son’s death. Did not want to feel the anger that might flow from knowing who had forsaken Lucas like that.
And she didn’t want to experience a trial. She wondered if she could survive it.
Better to leave it that faceless drunk driver in her mind’s eye who did it, who has since gone off to die.
In 2022, as the 14-year anniversary of his death neared, Judie heard a knock at her door.
She saw that it was two police officers dressed in suits.
Why were they here?
It had been a stressful time at the law office where she worked and