Arrests made in 2010 Cranbrook double murder

Two men have been arrested in the gruesome slaying of a couple in 2010 that police have said was a case of mistaken identity.

Leanne Laura MacFarlane, 43, and Jeffrey Todd Taylor, 42, died after being shot in a cabin they were renting on the outskirts of Cranbrook on May 29, 2010.

MacFarlane was found dead at the scene, while Taylor died on his way to hospital.

Colin Raymond Correia, 41, and another man, Sheldon Joseph Hunter, 30, have been charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths.

In the weeks after, police said it appeared the intended target of the shooting was a previous resident and appeared to be connected to another shooting outside a Cranbrook hotel in October 2009.

A suspect in the October shooting, Douglas Glenn Mahon, 38, was arrested months before at the home where MacFarland and Taylor died.

Mahon and two others were charged with attempted murder in the Oct. 29, 2009 shooting at the Sam Steele Hotel in Cranbrook. The victim of the October shooting, Chad Everett Munroe, was released from hospital after suffering gunshot wounds.

Police said the shooting involved members from rival gangs.

Weeks after the hotel shooting, investigators learned of a conspiracy to murder Mahon and intervened, recovering an AK-47 and two other firearms. Munroe and Correia along with Lonnie James Adams and Lorne William Murray Carry were charged in the case; Adams, Correia and Carry were convicted.

According to a story by the London Free Press in 2010, Taylor and MacFarlane had moved to B.C. in 2006. Taylor was from London, Ont., and had moved with MacFarlane, his girlfriend, to be closer to his parents, who retired and settled in Kelowna.

The couple, who had three children, started a cellphone shop in Salmon Arm called Shuswap Wireless Connection and were starting up a second in Cranbrook.

They had been living in Cranbrook for three months.

Investigations by the RCMP over the past eight years, dubbed Project E-Navaid, led to Correia and Hunter being charged and arrested in recent days with the couple’s murder.