ART OF THE COLD CASE
Sometimes time is on the side of police.
‘ The passage of time can really assist us with witnesses.’
CHRIS DROTAR,
RCMP SERGEANT
Late one Sunday night in the fall of 1989, an intruder knocked on the sliding glass door of Diane Corkum’s Shaughnessy basement suite and killed the 35- year- old Vancouver mother with a gunshot to the chest.
Investigators suspected Corkum’s custody battle with her estranged partner, and father of one of her three children, may have led to her death. But very little evidence was left at the scene and the trail ran cold after police were stonewalled by the partner’s family and friends.
Some nine years after the murder, Corkum’s former partner had had a falling out with his older brother over a property dispute and now wanted to talk. He reached out to a newly formed provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit and told investigators that his brother Allan Arthur Dunbar had confessed to the crime a couple years after Corkum’s murder.
Dunbar told his brother that he had done him a favour by eliminating his estranged wife, whom Dunbar had hated for trying to take his nephew away from the family, according to court documents .
The new evidence helped the Crown get a first- degree murder conviction and a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.
When police have pursued all investigative avenues and there is not enough evidence for a charge, the case inevitably gets shuffled to the side as fresh murder cases arise.
Still, an unsolved case is “never ever over,” according to Staff Sgt. John Cater, the man now in charge of the cold case provincial unit that solved Corkum’s murder.
“There’s this cold case term, but I don’t think we’d call them cold,” says Cater, sitting in a boardroom at the Surrey RCMP headquarters where his unit is based. “We’d just say the case is unresolved, for any particular number of reasons, but at any given time they can — boom — be sparked.”
B. C.’ s “dormant” cases, as Cater prefers to call them, are handled in several ways.
Cater’s unit was formed in 1996 after a public outcry over more than 400 unsolved B. C. murders dating back decades. Its 21 members help RCMP and municipal police from around the province with unsolved homicides and missing persons cases where foul play is suspected.
The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team has a small cold case team, formed in March 2012, to review some of its older unsolved files dating back more than a decade to IHIT’s founding.
Earlier this month, Vancouver police launched an online cold case database profiling an initial eight of the 313 unsolved murders in VPD’s history. The department doesn’t have a dedicated cold case unit, but its three teams of homicide investigators will run down any of the tips they get from the site.
Some RCMP detachments, like Surrey, also have their own cold case squad to look at murders from before IHIT was founded in 2003 to investigate most Lower Mainland homicides.
There are also instances where a task force will be struck to look at a specific cold case, like the random and horrific beating death of westside Vancouver mom Wendy Ladner-Beaudry , or a possible serial killer.
At one point, Cater’s unit had dedicated more than half its officers to the Highway of Tears investigation, dubbed Project E- Pana, to look at the files of 18 women murdered or missing along three northern B. C. highways.
Cater said in the past several years, investigators have started to return to his unit from E- Pana — which at its peak had as many as 75 people investigating cases from 1969 and 2006.
“That’s a very important file — they’re still unsolved,” Cater said of the Highway of Tears investigation. “Some of them have been working on that for years and you simply can’t replace the file knowledge.”
Time can be both friend and foe to a cold case investigator: suspects might die off, but in other cases witnesses might come forward after years of regret finally boil over or their allegiances change, as in Corkum’s case.
Murderers hardly ever come to police and deliver a Hollywoodstyle confession, but sometimes a suspect whose actions made him look anything but innocent at the time of the crime starts co- operating years later, according to Sgt. Chris Drotar — who leads one of the teams in Cater’s unit .
Drotar won’t discuss open files or ones before the courts, but recounts a case involving a particularly obstinate man who was the last person seen with a girl before she left a party and was murdered.
“He was unco- operative with the original investigation for at least 10 years,” recalls Drotar . “Through work and persistence of the unsolved homicide investigators, he finally provided a polygraph test and eliminated himself, which was great for us because now we can also stop putting resources toward that avenue and focus them somewhere else.”
“The passage of time can really assist us with witnesses,” Drotar says. “As the years go by, they have a new group of friends, they realize what they were doing back in the day was inappropriate. … Now they got a job or a family and they’re willing to come forward.”
The provincial unsolved unit had great success in the late ’ 90s cracking old cases using new forensic techniques and harnessing advances in DNA technology.
One of the high profile cold cases they solved with new DNA methods was the 1977 rape and murder of 12- yearold Port Alberni girl Carolyn Lee. Port Alberni Mounties, and others in the town, long suspected that resident Gurmit Dhillon was Lee’s killer.
A 1995 federal law allowing DNA evidence to be used in Canadian courts meant that police could get a warrant for a sample of Dhillon’s blood that ultimately led to his conviction 20 years after the murder.
Retired inspector Wade Blizard says that after investigating the deaths of dozens of people their names sadly “ran into another one after a while,” but Lee and the names of several other murdered children will always haunt him.
“They were the ones that shocked the community the most,” Blizard says. “You get the gangland ones and I think maybe the community has a different outlook on those.
“It’s almost like it’s collateral to a lifestyle that these guys want to lead, but when you get these young children? There’s nothing ( that’s) collateral. That’s straight tragedy.”
Nowadays, “there’s no fairy dust” that a cold case team can “sprinkle” over a murder to solve it, says Blizard, who now advises IHIT’s cold case squad.
Apart from an IHIT analyst that scours social media and the online world for new evidence, Blizard says investigative techniques haven’t changed much since DNA testing became possible.
“It’s all extremely, extremely time consuming to get in there many years later, find people and satisfy what you need to satisfy ( in terms of evidence),” he says.
When investigating murders of people involved in criminal activity, IHIT can offer limited-immunity deals to unsavoury characters if it, and Crown prosecutors, deem their evidence or testimony in the public interest and capable of bringing the killer to court.
“Sometimes some of these guys, they get jammed up on other things and they’re like everybody else, they’re looking for the deal,” Blizard says.
The provincial unit’s Drotar says that cold case investigators, like their counterparts chasing recent murders, will use every “investigative technique that the police have access to, as long as it’s moral and ethical.”
Drotar says that includes employing the controversial Mr. Big method as a “last ditch effort” to get a suspect to confess to an officer acting as a fake crime boss, as Jean James did in the shocking murder of her husband’s mistress Gladys Wakabayashi .
Sometimes evidence that cracks a case comes from a member of another unit who sees the murder with “fresh eyes” during a “war room” consultation, Cater says.
Regardless of the techniques used, an investigator’s happiest moment is telling the long- suffering family of a murder victim that the killer is being brought to justice, Cater says.
“That is what drives the members to be on unsolved homicides,” Cater says. “Every member believes and knows it’s a privilege to be on this team.
“They live it and breathe it and reflect on ‘ what if this was one of our loved ones?’ ”