Note to readers: Post Mortem was a true crime series written by reporter Jon Wells that ran in The Hamilton Spectator in February and March 2006, detailing the investigation into the murder of a woman whose bludgeoned body was left in a field near African Lion Safari in Flamborough. The series won an Ontario Newspaper Award for feature writing, and was later reworked and published as “Post-Mortem: Justice At Last for Yvette Budram,” that was nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award for non-fiction mystery writing.
Did the blood red images and guttural sounds float in his memory, against his will, nicking his conscience like shards of broken glass?
Yvette. White satin. A sickening crack.
He loved her. That much, he was sure. A beautiful woman, he thought the first time they met. Olive skin, dark eyes. Would do anything for her. She did not always reciprocate, no, did not always speak to him in the most kindly manner. But that was just her way.
A horrible thing, what happened, he reflected. He liked to say karma would be the killer’s ultimate sentence, because you never escape it.
One thing was certain: the killer had shown calculation and composure in the house when it was over. Tried to erase it all, leave no trace at the scene in the bedroom, or, perhaps, on his soul. It was the kind of cold attention to detail that only someone with a moral hollowness could achieve.
Or perhaps someone who has murdered before.
On June 13, 2001 a man approached a travel agent behind the counter and spoke with urgency in his voice. He needed an international air ticket for departure out of Pearson Airport. Tonight. One-way.
The travel agent looked up at the clock on the wall: 1:30 p.m.
“There’s no flight tonight,” he said. “BWIA flies out at 2:45 p.m., you won’t be able to catch it.”
“What would be tomorrow’s flight?” the man asked.
“There’s no seat on the special fare, it will cost you more. The next flight on the special fare is in four days.”
“No. This is an emergency.”
The man pulled out his Canadian Tire MasterCard. On short notice, for tomorrow’s flight, one ticket cost $1,060. Departs at 11:40 p.m. A stop in Antigua en route.
He’ll take it.
“Have to be there immediately,” he said. “Death in the family.”
***
Oct. 4, 2000
6:20 a.m.
If the dark eyes could see, if the face could turn up to the sky, the view would offer a peek through tall grass, weeds, leaves of an old basswood tree, and the morning’s first light filtered through rain clouds.
It is quiet beside the rolling cornfield, the only sound that of wind brushing leaves, the buzz of insects.
Thunder rumbles; rain ticks the cornfield.
Perhaps raindrops find their way to that very spot, dotting cold skin of her neck where the iron crescent-moon pendant rests. It had been a bad astrological period. A Saturn phase. She wore the pendant to bring luck.
Summer had never really arrived that year. It was the kind of summer where the sky seems a perpetual dead grey, rain is never far away, the cool air always seems to betray an end rather than a beginning.
In the early evening, clouds break, the sun shoots rays of light between the tree branches.
It does not last. The clarity lasts just an hour. Then darkness bleeds into the blue sky.
***
8th Concession West, Flamborough
Fall 2000
Clop-clop/clop-clop/clop-clop
Luke shuffled along the country road on his daily walk. He was white with brown spots, a 10-year-old jack — a male donkey not gelded, and so constantly in search of a female. Catherine got him out as often as she could for walks that fall, so he could burn off energy. She smiled. Poor guy. Typical male.
She and her husband Adam had lived just three months in the house on Cooper Road, near the African Lion Safari, 20 minutes outside urban Hamilton off Highway 8.
Their home had already been broken into once. But they had always dreamt of living in the country, and loved it.
It was called the Town of Flamborough before amalgamation made it part of the city. Great wads of open space, hamlets, a mobile-home community called Beverly Hills. Some local rebels, unimpressed with the thought of joining Hamilton, put up a creaky display sign on the side of the highway: “Free Flamboro.”
On occasion, visitors passing through with something to hide treated it like one giant rural alleyway, a place to sweep things under the rug out of the public eye. Stolen purses and wallets littered ditches near where Catherine and Adam lived. That fireball they saw one night just down the street from their house was a stolen car somebody had dumped and lit up.
Clop-clop/clop-clop/clop-clop
Catherine and Luke turned left off Cooper Road and walked up 8th Concession. That’s when the smell hit. You live in the country, you get used to strong odours in summertime. But this was overpowering, rancid. Luke, he didn’t care, the jack’s mind was elsewhere.
It was coming from over there, the other side of the ditch, somewhere in the thick roadside brush at the end of a cornfield. Couldn’t see anything unusual though.
Had to be a dead animal somewhere. Maybe a deer.
Clop-clop/clop-clop/clop-clop
Most days that fall, Catherine walked Luke, couldn’t help but pass that same spot on the road.
The smell eventually faded. Nothing lasts. Days grew short, leaves drained of life turned and dropped in the fall winds, returning to the soil.
The rain fell cold and hard. Catherine and Adam’s house got burglarized a second time. Nobody was caught.
That winter, the winter of 2001, was a nasty one. Unrelenting bitter cold for weeks on end, allowing unusually heavy snow to build, blanketing the country fields, and the broken remains that had once lived and shone with colour.
***
The homicide detective stared pensively through the windshield at the nondescript building, as though a clue would miraculously show itself.
Twenty-six-year-old male beaten to a pulp, left to bleed to death right there, in Unit 6, back in the spring of 2000. Grow operation inside.
Paul Lahaie thought about the Damian cold case at least once a day, would often pull off Rymal Road into the industrial park on Lancing Drive for a look.
Lahaie referred to it by the first name of the victim, rather than wrestle with pronouncing the last name: Damian Dymitraszczuk.
Lahaie did not follow the axiom that you should never look back. On the job, at least, as a detective with Hamilton’s Major Crime Unit, he lived in the past most every day.
There had been leads in that case, but mostly dead ends. Some in the grow subculture who knew Damian had been hesitant to talk: “The guy lived by the sword, died by the sword.” And those were his friends saying that, Lahaie reflected. That kind of sentiment offended him. Every victim deserves justice, no matter what.
Later that day, downtown at Central Station on King William, Lahaie strode into the Major Crime Unit on the second floor, past the sign on the door that read: No Witnesses, Lawyers, Media.
“Pauly,” one of the detectives greeted him. Few of the Major Crime guys knew him from his days on the tactical team, when his nickname had been Ninja.
Lahaie went 6-1, 190, had short dark hair and his skin bore a faint tanned cast. Surname was French and he looked Italian, he joked.
One old-school senior officer seemed to delight in barking out his name as Lay-hee rather than the proper La-hay. Maybe an anti-French thing. Lahaie grinned.
He was known for his intensity and enthusiasm for the job. But Lahaie liked to think of the detectives as thoroughbreds, chasing every case full bore. Some police services went after some cases harder than others, he felt, influenced by the status of the victim, public interest in the crime, political optics.
Lahaie’s first case with Major Crime was in 1997 when he got seconded from the child abuse branch in the middle of what had been a fruitless hunt for the Stoney Creek Rapist.
“So Lay-hee, you arrest my serial rapist yet?” growled a senior officer back then.
“Sir,” Lahaie replied, “I promise you he will be arrested in 21 days.”
Why 21? Lahaie wasn’t sure, the bold prediction just popped out. As it happened, James (Ted) Wren was arrested in 19 days, and Lahaie found an important piece of evidence, a collage of photos of the victims hidden behind a ceiling panel.
Wren was a big-time sexual deviant, and no one in his neighbourhood knew it. Lahaie thought he had the look of a predator, a cold, bloodless focus to the eyes resembling that of a shark. Felt great to get him off the street.
Losses and unsolved cases stick with detectives more than successes, though. Lahaie often thought of a line from a book called “A Terrible Love of War.” It said that it’s harder to kill the dead than the living, because memories live forever.
He thought it applied to the job: I am the keeper of the memories. They don’t go away, not until the case is closed.
At his desk in Central Station, Lahaie cracked a can of soda water, opened a black binder and walked the corridors of murders past. Every once in a while when he had spare time, he would look through the department’s historical homicide index, listing every case over the years, who investigated, the outcome.
He flipped the pages. One of the cold case entries always caught his eye.
It read:
Cindy Williams/unsolved/
murder-abduction?
26 July 74
He turned to the corresponding case file folder. Page 1 was a photo of a little blond girl staring back at him. Four years old. The victim. The case had been long before his time, but Lahaie felt his throat tighten. That kind of stuff got to him.
The last notes on the case were from 1996. Not much had been done on it since. “So who speaks for Cindy Williams?” he said.
Back then, the 1970s, police had fewer forensic investigative tools. Most notably, didn’t have DNA to work with. But they were resourceful in the old days, too.
Today? Better technology, but the cases got complicated. Killers covered their tracks better. They watched the Crime Scene Investigation shows on TV, too.
Cold cases like Damian, Cindy Williams, they’re tough nuts to crack. And yet, as difficult as those unsolved cases are, at least police had a basic outline of what happened, and to whom.There are occasions, though, when the mystery is not just finding the killer. It is finding the victim.
***
8th Concession West, Flamborough
Tuesday, April 17, 2001 3:40 p.m.
A jogger’s shoes rhythmically pound along the country road, less than a kilometre from African Lion Safari.
The jogger’s wife was a high school science teacher. Out on his runs he kept his eyes open for anything interesting for her to use for show-and-tell in class.
It was a grey day: the sky, the lifeless brush and trees.
There: a spot of colour, flesh-toned, to his left, a few metres away in a field.
The jogger’s name was Steve Dmytrus and he worked as a firefighter. He was a few minutes on the road from his home. He was passing the spot where Catherine and her donkey had smelled something seven months earlier, and also where a family doctor had passed while out for a walk in the spring, and noticed something that he thought was a dead deer in the brush.
Dmytrus stopped and walked to the edge of the road for a closer look.
He knew anatomy. He could see bones. Human bones.
He headed for home.
At 5:05 p.m. the phone rang in the Major Crime Unit.
Detective Sgt. Mike Thomas, the senior man on duty, answered.
It was a superintendent on the line. Not a good sign.
Thomas turned to Paul Lahaie. A body has been found out in Flamborough.
The homicide detectives headed downstairs to the carpool garage.
It was just about quitting time. And no one was going home.
***
Tuesday, April 17, 2001, 6 p.m.
The video camera lens zoomed in on the body, lying among short brush, about four metres from the edge of the 8th Concession.
It was partly buried, not apparently from any attempt to dig a grave, but from sinking into the soil over time. And in fact, this was not the place to try burying anything. The entire area was bedrock. Call someone to come and dig a hole to install a post in that part of Flamborough, and he won’t do it.
Pan out. Ditch. Brush. Cornfield. Trees. Road. Yellow tape surrounding the scene.
After the uniforms, Ident was on the scene first. The eye looking through the lens belonged to Gary Zwicker, forensic investigator.
First rule, always record the scene as you find it. Don’t walk in and start handling potential evidence, not until after you photograph and videotape everything. Walk over a crime scene and, one day — if you’re fortunate enough to get the case through the system to court — a defence lawyer will expose you on the stand.
Zwicker knew that’s the way the system goes. Police work is put on trial, not just the accused, the O.J. Simpson case being the highest-profile example.
One of the senior Ident guys, Al Yates, had seen it all and loved his work — except when it came to testifying in court. You take such pride in work that requires minute attention to detail, so you find it disconcerting to be cross-examined with an eye toward discrediting the job you felt was done thoroughly.
As Zwicker continued filming on 8th Concession, the question hung out there. Was he even documenting a crime scene? That much wasn’t certain. Body has obviously been here a long time. Someone who simply collapsed one day long ago? Old hit-and-run accident?
Homicide. You’re in forensics long enough, you feel when something isn’t right. Zwicker’s instinct off the top was to think foul play.
As usual, Zwicker, who had a lean, compact frame, was armed at the scene with both a camera and a Glock. Combination of scientist and cop.
They are known by different names. In the United States they are crime scene investigators. In Hamilton, the old title was identification officer (“Ident officer”), and it stuck, even though the modern title is forensic detective, or forensic investigator.
Zwicker had been a uniformed cop first, got into forensics later. Some of the forensics types were cut from different cloth than typical cops.
There were times Zwicker, who was an easygoing guy with a dry sense of humour, showed his regular uniformed roots.
Ontario Police College in Aylmer, years back, in a classroom.
“Hey, you gotta come over here!”
Zwicker looked across the room toward the sound of the excited voice, and a group of forensic investigators huddled together.
What, he thought playfully, is there golf involved?
Zwicker was attending an investigation course on forensic entomology — the study of insects and their behaviour to help crack crimes.
An interesting field. Sometimes, bugs are the first ones on the scene of a homicide. Know the bugs, and they might provide a lead.
Anyway, somebody in the class was pretty excited about something. Zwick walked over to the table. Maggots. In the course they had learned that blowflies will lay their eggs on a corpse in any available moist, warm opening — the mouth, a wound.
Over time, maggots hatching from the eggs will migrate across the dead body, searching for another warm orifice. They leave a trail as they move. You can determine when the maggots started the migration, which can pinpoint the time of death and other timeline details about the wounds, and therefore the crime — even the type of location where the murder took place.
One of the guys in class was observing a maggot trail on a pig carcass.
“There it is, there’s the trail!” one officer said.
Zwicker’s eyes expanded in mock excitement. O-kay. This was interesting stuff, very useful to know, but there were a few things in life that elicited unrestrained excitement from him. His baby daughter. Golf. Maggots weren’t high up on the list.
Zwicker had never thought he would gravitate to forensics. Took first-year biology at university, but that didn’t spark anything.
In his previous life as a uniformed cop, Zwicker made the pages of The Hamilton Spectator for his bravery, received two citations at fire scene rescues, once put his foot through a door trying to save a child inside a burning house, another time carried a man down a fire escape to safety.
But when he attended a crime scene investigation course in 1995, he was hooked. That was what he wanted to do.
Detectives say the first couple of hours after a possible homicide are the most crucial in an investigation.
That’s when traces of human evidence are freshest, memories are sharpest among witnesses, and the perp might still be in the area.
But if the corpse near the 8th Concession had a story to tell Gary Zwicker, it was perhaps many months old.
Forensic cops are internally wired to be optimistic. Their mindset is one that combines scientific probabilities and on-the-job experience. The laws of physical evidence suggest that something is there. A fibre. Blood. An impression.
There is faith in their training, the science, but also, perhaps, faith in the perp — faith that a criminal, no matter how devious or careful, will slip up, somehow.
He has broken the social contract, perhaps violently, brutally. Somehow, some way, he will show weakness, he will leave something, he will be caught.
Zwicker believed that there is always something left behind at a scene. Always. Maybe, he thought, it’s one needle in a whole bunch of haystacks. But it’s there, somewhere. The question is can you find it?
About this series: Jon Wells spent eight months researching and writing Post Mortem. His research included extensive interviews with forensic investigators, homicide detectives, as well as a one-on-one interview with the prime suspect. He reviewed forensic reports and hundreds of pages of court transcripts and investigators’ notes from police files. The story is written in a novelistic style, but every piece of detail and dialogue, and any reflection of the characters, is based either on interviews, reports and transcripts, or on first-hand observation.
