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Nearly 30 years after a 10-year-old girl went missing, a Quebec inmate is charged with her murder. A daughter faces her mother’s alleged killer in court — her father. Two DNA tests, conducted four decades following a seamstress’s brutal death, result in an arrest and conviction.
These are some of the cold cases in Canada that saw breakthroughs in 2023.
But many crimes and disappearances remain unsolved. More than 2,500 adults and children in Canada are missing, based on the Canadian national RCMP database, said Jan Guppy, who created the Facebook group Unidentified Human Remains Canada.
Guppy, from the Montreal area, said 378 people who are missing are unidentified. Guppy said the figures are “way too low and completely inaccurate” because provinces are not required to provide numbers.
Here are some of the Canadian cold cases that saw breakthroughs in 2023 as well as some of those that remain unsolved in 2024:
BREAKTHROUGH IN KILLING OF QUEBEC GIRL
“Innovative methods” in forensic biology are being credited with helping investigators arrest a suspect in the killing of a 10-year-old Quebec girl nearly 30 years ago.
The suspect was identified and arrested following “the meticulous, long-term work” of investigators and forensic staff, according to the Quebec police force’s press release.
Marie-Chantale Desjardins, 10, was last seen on her bike leaving her friend’s home at about 9:30 p.m. in Sainte-Thérèse, Que., on July 16, 1994. Witnesses reported spotting her that day at a local billiard bar that police said she had frequented.
Days later, her body was found in a wooded area behind a shopping centre in the nearby municipality of Rosemère. Pathologists suspect she was strangled.
Twenty-nine years after she disappeared, there was a breakthrough in the cold case on Dec. 12, 2023. Réal Courtemanche, 61, was arrested at a medium-security prison about 190 kilometres northwest of Montreal, and charged with first-degree murder, according to police.
N.L. HUSBAND CHARGED WITH WIFE’S MURDER
Jennifer Hillier-Penney was separating from her husband when she disappeared in 2016 — a case that shocked the small town of St. Anthony, N.L.
The last time Hillier-Penney was seen was Nov. 30, 2016, when her sister dropped her off at her estranged husband Dean Penney’s house so she could spend time with their daughter.
Seven years later on Dec. 15, 2023, RCMP charged her estranged husband, Penney, with first-degree murder in connection with her disappearance. Police called the high-profile case one of the longest and most complex investigations. Police are still searching for Hillier-Penney’s remains.
DNA SAMPLES LEAD TO CONVICTION
Soon after Montreal native Sonia Herok-Stone moved to the tiny California town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, she was found partially naked, bloodied and strangled to death with her pantyhose in 1981, according to Det. Lins Dorman.
Police questioned Michael Glazebrook, a 25-year-old married tradesman who lived across the street. He denied killing the 30-year-old seamstress, but said he was having an affair with her and was at her house the day of the murder.
In 1982, he was charged with first-degree murder in her death. However, a judge ruled Glazebrook’s statement was inadmissible because police violated his rights by picking him up on traffic warrants.
Although Glazebrook’s trial ended in a hung jury in 1983, the Monterey County District Attorney’s office re-opened the case in 2020. A search warrant allowed police to get a sample of his DNA in 2021. The blood under the victim’s fingernail was a match and Glazebrook was charged with first-degree murder for the second time. Months later, police also collected a DNA sample from Herok-Stone’s breast swabs that matched with Glazebrook’s DNA.
More than 40 years on, the two DNA samples led to his conviction in February 2023. Glazebrook was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole in June. The school bus driver, 67, has never confessed.
‘NATION RIVER LADY’ IDENTIFIED
For nearly 50 years, the identity of the “Nation River Lady” remained a mystery. A farmer discovered the woman’s remains floating in the Nation River in eastern Ontario on May 3, 1975.
Green cloth covered her body. Her hands and feet were bound with neckties.
Thanks to genealogical DNA testing meant to find genetic matches, the U.S. non-profit DNA Doe Project (DDP) announced in July 5, 2023 that it had identified the woman as Jewell “Lalla” Parchman Langford, 48, a businesswoman from Jackson, Tenn. That same day, the Ontario Provincial Police revealed that they had charged Rodney Nichols, 81, of Hollywood, Fla., with murder in September 2022. They said they delayed the public announcement to avoid jeopardizing the investigation and court process. Police said the victim and accused knew each other.
The OPP worked with experts to exhume the body and create a new DNA profile in late 2019 that eventually led to confirmation in 2020 that Langford was the “Nation River Lady.” Her remains were finally buried after they were repatriated to the U.S. in March 2022.
The defence is seeking a fitness assessment order so that experts can assess whether Nichols is fit to stand trial since he has dementia, his Toronto-based lawyer Laura Metcalfe told CTVNews.ca in an email.
ARREST IN 50-YEAR-OLD CASE
New DNA technology helped OPP lay charges against a 78-year-old man in the 1973 death of a woman from the northern First Nation of Attawapiskat. Helen Carpenter, 21, was found dead on Oct. 23, 1973.
An investigation turned up no charges at that time, police said.
Fifty years after her death, Remi Gregory Iahtail of Attawapiskat, who was 28 when Carpenter disappeared, was charged with manslaughter and rape in October.
The case will be heard at Attawapiskat Ontario Court of Justice on Jan. 17,, 2024.
CREE WOMAN’S DEATH RAISES SUSPICIONS
More than three years after Chelsea Poorman went missing from downtown Vancouver in 2020, her family and Indigenous advocates are still searching for answers.
Poorman, 24, was last seen near Granville and Drake streets around midnight on Sept. 7, 2020.
A member of the Kawacatoose First Nation in Saskatchewan, she had just moved to Vancouver at that time.
Nearly two years after she disappeared, Poorman’s remains were discovered in an abandoned mansion in the upscale Shaughnessy neighbourhood on April 22, 2022.
Her mother Sheila said her daughter’s remains were found in a blanket on the balcony, missing some fingers and her cranium.
Vancouver officials have not revealed how she died and police said there isn’t enough evidence to call her death suspicious.
Sonya Cywink of London, Ont., was 24 weeks pregnant when her body was discovered in 1994. Police said she was last seen alive at about 2 a.m. on Aug. 26, 1994. Four days later, her body was found at the Southwold Earthworks National Historic Site of Canada, southwest of London.
She was originally from the Whitefish River First Nation territory on Manitoulin Island.
“We’re still out there looking for leads, looking for people to come forward,” the victim’s sister Meggie Cywink told CTV News in October 2023.
LETTER WRITER ADMITS TO KILLING
In an anonymous letter to Vancouver police, a writer admitted to killing an Indigenous sex trade worker, whom the person didn’t name, who had disappeared on Nov. 30, 2002 and apologized to her family.
Police received it on Dec. 31, 2002, a month after Danielle Marissa Lynn Larue went missing. Though the body of Larue was never found and she wasn’t explicitly named, police believe she was murdered.
Police believe the letter writer knows where her body is buried and hope the person will contact them again.
Larue was in foster care, ran away when she was just 13 in Prince George, B.C., and turned to drugs to cope with her trauma of being abused as a child, they added. Larue, who was 24 when she disappeared, became a sex trade worker in Vancouver to support her drug addiction, police said.
With files from CTVNews.ca, CTV National News, W5, CTV News Regina, CTVNewsLondon.ca, CTV News London, CTVNorthernOntario.ca, CTVNewsVancouver.ca, CTVNewsMontreal.ca and The Canadian Press
TORONTO – An Ontario judge says any outstanding issues regarding a proposed $32.5 billion settlement between three major tobacco companies and their creditors should be solvable in the coming months.
Ontario Superior Court Chief Justice Geoffrey Morawetz has released his reasons for approving a motion last week to have representatives for creditors review and vote on the proposal in December.
One of the companies, JTI-Macdonald Corp., said last week it objects to the plan in its current form and asked the court to postpone scheduling the vote until several issues were resolved.
The other two companies, Rothmans, Benson & Hedges and Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd., didn’t oppose the motion but said they retained the right to contest the proposed plan down the line.
The proposal announced last month includes $24 billion for provinces and territories seeking to recover smoking-related health-care costs and about $6 billion for smokers across Canada and their loved ones.
If the proposed deal is accepted by a majority of creditors, it will then move on to the next step: a hearing to obtain the approval of the court, tentatively scheduled for early next year.
In a written decision released Monday, Morawetz said it was clear that not all issues had been resolved at this stage of the proceedings.
He pointed to “outstanding issues” between the companies regarding their respective shares of the total payout, as well as debate over the creditor status of one of JTI-Macdonald’s affiliate companies.
In order to have creditors vote on a proposal, the court must be satisfied the plan isn’t “doomed to fail” either at the creditors or court approval stages, court heard last week.
Lawyers representing plaintiffs in two Quebec class actions, those representing smokers in the rest of Canada, and 10 out of 13 provinces and territories have expressed their support for the proposal, the judge wrote in his ruling.
While JTI-Macdonald said its concerns have not been addressed, the company’s lawyer “acknowledged that the issues were solvable,” Morawetz wrote.
“At this stage, I am unable to conclude that the plans are doomed to fail,” he said.
“There are a number of outstanding issues as between the parties, but there are no issues that, in my view, cannot be solved,” he said.
The proposed settlement is the culmination of more than five years of negotiations in what Morawetz has called one of “the most complex insolvency proceedings in Canadian history.”
The companies sought creditor protection in Ontario in 2019 after Quebec’s top court upheld a landmark ruling ordering them to pay about $15 billion to plaintiffs in two class-action lawsuits.
All legal proceedings against the companies, including lawsuits filed by provincial governments, have been paused during the negotiations. That order has now been extended until the end of January 2025.
In total, the companies faced claims of more than $1 trillion, court documents show.
In October of last year, the court instructed the mediator in the case, former Chief Justice of Ontario Warren Winkler, and the monitors appointed to each company to develop a proposed plan for a global settlement, with input from the companies and creditors.
A year later, they proposed a plan that would involve upfront payments as well as annual ones based on the companies’ net after-tax income and any tax refunds, court documents show.
The monitors estimate it would take the companies about 20 years to pay the entire amount, the documents show.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
OTTAWA – The Federal Court of Appeal has dismissed a bid by the Prince Edward Island Potato Board to overturn a 2021 decision by the federal agriculture minister to declare the entire province as “a place infested with potato wart.”
That order prohibited the export of seed potatoes from the Island to prevent the spread of the soil-borne fungus, which deforms potatoes and makes them impossible to sell.
The board had argued in Federal Court that the decision was unreasonable because there was insufficient evidence to establish that P.E.I. was infested with the fungus.
In April 2023, the Federal Court dismissed the board’s application for a judicial review, saying the order was reasonable because the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said regulatory measures had failed to prevent the transmission of potato wart to unregulated fields.
On Tuesday, the Appeal Court dismissed the board’s appeal, saying the lower court had selected the correct reasonableness standard to review the minister’s order.
As well, it found the lower court was correct in accepting the minister’s view that the province was “infested” because the department had detected potato wart on 35 occasions in P.E.I.’s three counties since 2000.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
FREDERICTON – New Brunswick health officials are urging parents to get their children vaccinated against measles after the number of cases of the disease in a recent outbreak has more than doubled since Friday.
Sean Hatchard, spokesman for the Health Department, says measles cases in the Fredericton and the upper Saint John River Valley area have risen from five on Friday to 12 as of Tuesday morning.
Hatchard says other suspected cases are under investigation, but he did not say how and where the outbreak of the disease began.
He says data from the 2023-24 school year show that about 10 per cent of students were not completely immunized against the disease.
In response to the outbreak, Horizon Health Network is hosting measles vaccine clinics on Wednesday and Friday.
The measles virus is transmitted through the air or by direct contact with nasal or throat secretions of an infected person, and can be more severe in adults and infants.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
