Crime Seen (15 page)

David Snow remains a person of interest in several southern Ontario cold-case homicides that occurred during the same time frame as Ian and Nancy Blackburn were murdered and with many similar circumstances.

EVERYONE’S DAUGHTER

“Just a child

A victim of society gone wild

In God’s grace

Please let me take her place …”

—From the song “Angel’s Smile” by Brad French, “for my little sister Kristen”

DURING THE TIME THAT I WAS WORKING
on the Blackburn case, I was also squeezing in any spare moments that I had to get ready for my wedding. I was pleased that Bob’s then twenty-year-old daughter also wanted to be a part of our ceremony. Cheryl was a beautiful young woman who credited me with healing the rift between her and her father after a period of tumultuous years following her parents’ breakup. Not the usual role for the new woman in a divorced father’s life, but I was glad to have played a part in bringing them back together.

Several weeks before the wedding, I got a call from Inspector Vince Bevan of the Niagara Regional Police. When he introduced himself on the phone I knew immediately who he was and hoped that he was looking for my help. I’d seen him in numerous media interviews over the last several months as he led a large multi-agency investigation in southern Ontario known as the Green Ribbon Task Force. Vince and I arranged to meet the next day so I could get a full briefing.

On Thursday, April 16, 1992, just before the Easter holiday long weekend, Kristen French left Holy Cross Catholic Secondary School in St. Catharines, Ontario, at about 2:45 p.m. in the drizzling rain. Normally she would have participated in after-school athletic activities such as precision skating or rowing, but the fifteen-year-old had been sidelined with a back injury. Kristen liked to get home as soon as she could after school to let out her dog.

When Kristen’s mother, Donna, arrived home from work, Kristen wasn’t there. This was out of character and her mother was immediately concerned. Donna called the school and spoke to the principal who then contacted some of Kristen’s teachers and friends. No one had seen her since the end of school. The principal called Donna back and told her to call the police. As the evening went on, Donna and Kristen’s father, Doug, knew something was terribly wrong.

Over the Easter weekend, four to five hundred police, teachers, students and members of the public gathered at Holy Cross school where a police command post had been set up to coordinate searches. Searchers found one shoe and a lock of hair—possibly cut with a knife during a struggle—believed to be Kristen’s in a church parking lot along her route home. Anyone who was in the vicinity of Kristen’s route home at the time she went missing was asked to call police. Several witnesses came forward with information and the police pieced together the likelihood that Kristen was abducted. A young girl matching Kristen’s description was seen walking along her route. A short time later, someone who knew Kristen reported having seen her talking to two men in a car that was pulled over on the side of the road. A few minutes later, another witness saw a man struggling with something in the back seat of a similarly described car, and others saw a similar car racing away from the area.

Holy Cross students gathered in large groups almost every day after Kristen went missing. The school was the site where the media congregated, so the students were coached on how to deal with reporters when bombarded with questions each day. As a coping mechanism, teachers organized activities such as composing prayers and poems. A Grade 9 student, Stephanie, wrote a prayer entitled “Colour Me Green.”
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The prayer identified green as the colour of hope that Kristen was safe. It was also the colour of the school’s Cape Breton tartan for the girls’ uniform skirts, which Kristen had been wearing at the time she went missing. The students decided to make up green ribbons to wear, symbolizing the hope that Kristen would return unharmed. The ribbons were enclosed in small packets along with a copy of the “Colour Me Green” prayer and distributed across the region.
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Vince’s task force was also named in honour of the students’ campaign of hope.

On April 30, the hope of the French family and their community changed to anguish and despair when Kristen’s body was discovered in a rural area along a roadside north of Burlington, Ontario. She had been sexually assaulted and died of asphyxia. Vince said, “All of the investigators worked so hard those first two weeks to find Kristen and we weren’t successful. I was really worried about guys on the team, both men and women. They really thought we had a shot at bringing her home. They worked twenty-four hours a day to try and do that. And then when we found Kristen’s body, they were devastated.”

Less than a year earlier, in nearby Burlington, Leslie Mahaffy, fourteen, had attended an evening funeral home visitation for a friend who had died in a car accident and after the service she began walking toward home. Two weeks later her dismembered body was found in a lake near St. Catharines. Vince had been leading the Niagara piece of the investigation of Leslie’s case and he recognized the similarities in the two cases.

Over the next several months the Green Ribbon Task Force combed through all of the leads from the public, probation and parole offices and other police agencies. But there was nothing of substance to give focus to possible suspects or information gleaned that forensically connected the two cases. When Vince and I met and he presented all of the information on both investigations, I agreed with his opinion that the two cases were likely connected. Forensic science was not linking them but the likenesses in criminal behaviour, including victim selection, crime motivation and execution, and basic geography were striking. Vince was getting ready to go to the public to solicit information, primarily regarding Kristen’s murder, since there was significantly more information available in her case than Leslie’s. He was developing a television show with a local independent television station, CHCH-TV, and asked for my help.

I was assigned a contact in the Green Ribbon Task Force: my old pal from our OPP recruit class, Sue Lloyd. We would be working with the show’s producer, Rose Stricker. With a timeline of only several weeks to prepare, Rose, Sue and I, along with others, strategized to produce a show that would be persuasive for viewers to call in with tips. Our audience would be given factual information about what was and wasn’t known about the case and dispel some widespread rumours. There would also be mention of a $100,000 reward for information. Our strategy was to evoke an emotional response in the viewers through re-enactments, poignant interviews of friends and family reliving memories of Kristen, as well as scripted voiceovers to go along with the case-file video footage. We wanted to be factual, but nonsensational. Dan McLean, a trusted local news anchor, was selected as the show’s host.

By the time I’d been brought in on the investigation, an FBI unknown-offender profile had already been prepared by Gregg McCrary of the BSU in Quantico, and he agreed to be part of the television program.
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In consultation with the FBI, it was decided to release previously confidential information contained in their profile. We decided to release only the details that we were confident had the highest change of being accurate.

Details of Kristen’s life were shared with the audience in emotional interviews. Donna was interviewed at home in Kristen’s bedroom with it looking just the way that she had last left it. Her bed was perfectly made with teddy bears sitting on top. Donna said, “I just don’t have the heart to put anything away yet. Right now, it would be like packing away my memories and I just can’t do that. I like her room just as it is now. I often come in and I’ll sit and talk to her or just think about her. What really gets tough is when you think of the things that will never come. The fact that she will never marry and won’t be able to plan a wedding. She was in a wedding a couple of years ago and when they went trying on bridesmaids’ dresses, she found a wedding dress that she just loved and I said, ‘Try it on Kristen.’ She tried it on and she looked so beautiful. In October Kristen was to be a bridesmaid again and they went and chose their dresses and ordered them. They were green. That’s the hardest part—just thinking ahead. Things that you won’t be able to do. Had she been older, and [had] she had a child, at least I’d [have] had a granddaughter by her.”

I was videotaped at the sites of Kristen’s abduction and the place where her body was found. I made several pleas for an elderly couple to come forward with their information, as several other witnesses had seen them close to the abduction scene. Gregg McCrary was brought into the show from a Washington, DC, studio via live video feed, with a photograph of the United States Capitol building in the background. I knew Gregg from my time at the FBI and we shared the strong belief that the offenders responsible for these deaths would watch the show. It was an opportunity for us to drive a wedge between the two of them. Gregg was focused on messaging to the public and to the offenders that we knew their profiles, were confident that the case would be solved and the offenders caught.

Gregg advised viewers that this was a high-risk, sexually motivated homicide. The offenders stalked Kristen in advance and would have done the same with other young girls in the past. It appeared that Kristen may have been conned toward the car perhaps by one of them asking for directions. Other young women may have experienced similar interactions and he encouraged them to call police if they had.

Gregg reiterated that eyewitnesses had seen two males inside the abduction vehicle. As I had cautioned investigators in the Blackburn case, Gregg told viewers that an opinion in relation to age was difficult and determined more behaviourally than chronologically. They would likely be in their late twenties or early thirties.

One of the offenders would be the leader and the other more of a follower. The dominant offender was a human predator and would be a psychopath. He would be the one behind the crime and the “cold-blooded killer.” He would feel no guilt or remorse for the suffering of the victims or their families.

If this dominant offender had a wife or girlfriend, he would be the dominant one in the relationship. It would be an abusive relationship as he demonstrated he had a hatred for women. He would have a history of criminal sexual deviancy, including sexual assaults, and would likely have spent time in prison for sex-related crimes.

Given the evidence, this dominant offender would likely be employed in a semi-skilled industrial setting, working with power tools, and probably with a workshop at home.

Gregg provided the opinion that the secondary offender would have a very close but subservient relationship with the main offender. That person’s crime motivation may have been more the thrill of committing the crimes. He was more likely to feel emotional over the killings, fear, apprehension and have a problem coping with the aftermath of the crimes. Gregg warned that the secondary person should be fearful for his own safety from the dominant offender.

Near the end of the segment, Dan asked Gregg about the dominant offender. “If he is watching tonight, what do you think he might be experiencing?” Gregg replied, “The only thing the dominant offender cares about is apprehension. If he is watching, I want to tell him that you are going to be apprehended. It’s just a question of when.”

Filming of the ninety-minute show wrapped up the day before my wedding and I hurried home in time to get to the rehearsal dinner. Thankfully Bob and our families and friends had pitched in to look after most of the last-minute details. The next day as my mother helped me get dressed in my wedding gown, I remembered what Donna had said about Kristen trying on the wedding dress. I was experiencing one of the happiest days of my life, a day with my mother that Donna would never experience with Kristen.

The Abduction of Kristen French
aired on July 21, 1992, a little more than three months after Kristen disappeared. The satellite company broadcast the program unscrambled across North America. Bob and I were away on our honeymoon, but I called back to the task force office the next morning to see if the elderly couple who had witnessed Kristen’s abduction, and that I had made the appeal to, had called in. They hadn’t, but thirty thousand others had.

Not having anticipated such a response, there was no planned capacity to deal with that number of tips and the task force was swamped. Receiving so many tips was a double-edged sword. The more tips received, the better the chance that one or more would advance the investigation—but there were so many it was hard to know where to start. RCMP officer and intelligence analyst Larry Wilson was one of the forty-one call takers the night of the show and later daily assigned leads to dozens of investigators to follow up on. The thirty thousand tips grew to over forty-one thousand in the weeks and months that followed and three thousand persons of interest were identified. Out of necessity, Larry developed a suspect management system to prioritize the persons of interest. He later developed the Persons of Interest Priority Assessment Tool (POIPAT)
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—a manual that assists police to create their own objective and consistent priority ranking of suspects according to the unique nature of their particular investigation.