Possible Suspects on the Highway of Tears

WhyaDuck?

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Please discuss possible suspects and official POIs here.

However, PLEASE NOTE, do not accuse anyone of things without proof or reason. You may bring up possible suspects based on convictions and official suspect/POI status, but you must back this up with links to MSM or LE documents.

We do not sleuth non-suspects, victims or their families here at WS. We do not attack, call people names, or seek to ruin anyone's lives.

This thread is to be a calm, non-abusive place to discuss theories. It is not a witch hunt.

Please remember that an accusation of crimes like these can last forever in the public mind and memory.


~*~

Convicted Murderer Jerry Baker, 100 Mile House, BC

Leibel said he got excited again when he began investigating another likely suspect, who lived outside of 100 Mile House in the 1970s.

“Somebody came to the detachment and said a man had tried to abduct them and they took down the licence plate,” Leibel recalls today.

Police ran the plate and saw that the man, Jerry Baker, had a history of sex offences, had done time in prison and had returned to the Williams Lake area around the time MacMillen was killed — the teenager was last seen hitchhiking to a girlfriend’s house about six kilometres away in Lac la Hache.

At the time, Leibel felt the man could have been responsible for other murders as well. His name had surfaced in several other investigations, including the murders of Pamela Darlington in Kamloops in 1973 and Gail Ann Weys in Clearwater in 1974.

He tried questioning Baker about MacMillen’s murder, “but he was extremely nervous and denied it.”

Fifteen years later, Baker became the prime suspect for the murder of a young girl named Norma Tashoots, 17, whose body was found on July 10, 1989 in a wooded area near 100 Mile House. She had been shot.

She was last seen about a month earlier being dropped off near 100 Mile House while hitchhiking to Vancouver.

A local resident suggested Baker was responsible for the Tashoots murder.

Baker, who had reported his Ruger handgun stolen to police the day after Tashoots was last seen, was interviewed and denied being involved. The investigation eventually dead-ended.

But it was re-opened in 2001 after a complete file review and a decision to try an undercover operation.

Baker eventually confessed to murdering Tashoots to an undercover officer and confided where he had disposed of the murder weapon — the gun he had reported missing — which was recovered. He was convicted in 2003 of the murder.

“Is he responsible for four or five [murders] or one? I don’t know,” Leibel said of Baker.

http://www.globaltvbc.com/world/Possible+Highway+Tears+suspects+haunt+detectives/2336915/story.html

http://www.canlii.org/en/bc/bcsc/doc/2003/2003bcsc400/2003bcsc400.html
 
Felker sentenced to life in prison
Thursday, April 2, 2009

Paul Russell Felker of Fort St. John has been sentenced to life in prison.

Felker was sentenced in a Prince George court this week after a jury found him guilty of second-degree murder in the death of Cindy Burk.

http://www.energeticcity.ca/fortstjohn/news/04/02/09/felker-sentenced-life-prison

Cindy Burk, an Aboriginal woman, went missing on the Highway in 1990 while hitch hiking. She was found beaten and nude, with her throat slit.

IMO, this is a convicted killer worth looking at twice.
 
August 29, 2009

Police confirmed that the former owner of the site being searched Friday was a "person of interest" in the Hoar case. The site was once owned by Leland V. Switzer, convicted of murdering his brother in 2002 at his parents' nearby farm two nights before Hoar went missing.

Michalko finds it incredible that Switzer, now serving a life sentence, would have the audacity to kill or dispose of Hoar on his own site.

"You'd have to be pretty stupid to murder somebody, bury them on your own five-acre property and then sell it. But I guess anything is possible," Michalko said.

http://www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=b487ac7b-a3ea-4f18-821f-eca71caf497e

Investigators descended last August on a piece of property in the Isle Pierre district west of Prince George looking for evidence related to the 2002 disappearance of Nicole Hoar, 25, who was from Red Deer and working as a tree planter when she was last seen hitchhiking near a gas station west of Prince George.

At the time of Hoar’s disappearance on June 21, 2002, the property searched by police was owned by Leland Switzer, a welder who told police in 2004 that the night Hoar disappeared he and a friend stopped and urinated near the Mohawk gas station — Hoar’s vanishing point.

Switzer told police about this because he said he didn’t know if police used a “fine tooth comb” to search the scene.

During his police statement, which was obtained by Global TV and provided to The Sun, Switzer provided the name of a friend and neighbour whom Switzer claimed had broken down crying when Switzer asked if he was responsible for all the “girls” going missing along Highway 16.

“My daughter heard a gun shot that night,” Switzer added. “When Nicole Hoar went missing, right?”

He said his wife and daughter were home that night but Switzer said he was at a dance and maintained 33 people saw him there.

Two days after Hoar’s disappearance, Switzer fatally shot and killed his older brother, Irvin Switzer, at his parents' property, near his own home. He now is serving life for that murder.

http://www.globaltvbc.com/world/Possible+Highway+Tears+suspects+haunt+detectives/2336915/story.html

"Secrets run deep and thicker but, uh, bottom line is like it's hard for me to even say I'm gonna like confess, but I will for Nicole Hoar, okay? And if you guys don't believe me here, whatever," Switzer said during his 2004 police statement, which was obtained by Global TV and provided to The Sun.

http://www2.canada.com/nanaimodailynews/news/story.html?id=2334742
 

FTA

"Leibel says he still has his notebooks from those days, which he keeps in his basement, hoping one day to get a phone call, asking him to to testify about the cold case if it gets solved and goes to trial.

“One day, you hope for the call,” he said."

Please don't ever let his basement flood. He could have all kinds of information that would be "AHA! Moments" later on.

"Michalko, 62, a former North Vancouver Mountie, said there is no shortage of theories and rumours about who is behind the murders and disappearances.

Some say it’s a cop or a long-haul trucker preying on young girls walking along the highway alone, he said.

“I have seen no evidence of that,” Michalko said of the rumours. “There’s a million places to pull off and go undetected, but not in a tractor-trailer.”


Yeah, but if it so remote and lightly traveled, this could still be a theory?
 
I thought this might help for us 'Mericuns who are unfamiliar with the area. I kept thinking this could be an actual building. Obviously from references in the article, it is not, but I still wanted to know about the area. But then I live in a place with a town called *Ninety six* and a Road 13....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Mile_House,_British_Columbia

Ty. 100 mile house, or as we would say it hundred mile house, is just a town. Strange name but I'v seen stranger, Spallumcheen, Yak.... Lol



Baker, who had reported his Ruger handgun stolen to police the day after Tashoots was last seen, was interviewed and denied being involved. The investigation eventually dead-ended.

Would some one please ask the police how an investigation into a murdered girl "dead-ends"?
 
Serial killer Clifford Olson at one time claimed to have “personal knowledge and information” about the unsolved murders of Ha, Pamela Darlington of Kamloops and others, but police dismissed the claims as bogus.

“At one time, he [Olson] was confessing to everything,” recalled retired senior Mountie Fred Bodnaruk, who initially headed the Darlington investigation. “He was playing games.”

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/va...meeting+drew+investigators/2336912/story.html
 
At one time, Bodnaruk suspected U.S. serial killer Ted Bundy was responsible for Darlington’s murder.

The nude body of the 19-year-old was found at the edge of the Thompson River in 1973 with bite marks on her body — a Bundy trademark in some U.S. killings. But investigators concluded that although Bundy had been known to visit Canada, there was no evidence he was in the area at the time.

Bundy, a former Seattle resident, was caught and sentenced to death in Florida for three murders. Just before Bundy was executed in 1989, he confessed to committing more than 20 murders but investigators felt he was responsible for many more.

“Bundy didn’t confess anything until the end,” Bodnaruk said. “I felt police here should have gone down to talk to Bundy.”

http://www.globaltvbc.com/world/Possible+Highway+Tears+suspects+haunt+detectives/2336915/story.html
 
Bodnaruk recently watched a TV documentary about a man named Wayne Clifford Boden and felt he might be a suspect. Boden was a travelling salesman who killed three women in Montreal before moving to Calgary, where he killed again and got caught in 1972.

He was known as the Vampire Killer because he left bite marks on all his victims, similar to Darlington.

The TV documentary detailed how Boden travelled through Kamloops to Vancouver.

Boden, however, was arrested in Calgary in 1972, convicted of four murders and died in prison in 2006.

http://www.globaltvbc.com/world/Possible+Highway+Tears+suspects+haunt+detectives/2336915/story.html
 
2010.11.29: Man charged in death of B.C. girl, 15

A 20-year-old man has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of a teenaged girl whose body was found along a snowy forest road in northern B.C.

<CAL> of Prince George was charged Monday in the death of Loren Donn Leslie, 15, of Fraser Lake after a Mountie pulled over a truck after it turned onto a highway from an unused logging road.

<L> was arrested after the RCMP officer stopped the pickup, which turned onto Highway 27 north of Vanderhoof on Saturday night.

More at:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/11/29/bc-northern-homicide-highway.html

See also:
http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/...ered_teen_tues_101130?hub=BritishColumbiaHome
 
(If this is in wrong spot, or previously posted, sorry and please delete,thanks.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...p-sex-assault-suspect-in-jail/article1904735/

Vancouver Police have issued an &#8220;extraordinary&#8221; appeal for witnesses in an effort to keep a man suspected in multiple sexual assaults behind bars.

Martin Daniel Tremblay, 45, was arrested recently on drug charges along with 11 other men in a police operation targeting violent drug gangs in and around the Downtown Eastside.

Inspector Dean Robinson said that the RCMP also suspects Mr. Tremblay in connection with an investigation of sexual assaults involving teenage Aboriginal girls, including the deaths of Kayla LaLonde, 16, and Martha Jackson Hernandez, 17, in March, 2010. Mr. Tremblay spent 14 months in jail after he pleaded guilty in 2003 to sexual assault cases.


&#8220;We don&#8217;t usually tell you about a person&#8217;s extensive criminal record or that we suspect their involvement in many unsolved crimes, but this time is different,&#8221; said Inspector Robinson. &#8220;The only way we can guarantee that he won&#8217;t harm more women is if he stays in jail.&#8221;

At least 14 Aboriginal girls have come forward as witnesses, but some are still waiting to speak to investigators, said Mona Woodward, executive director of Aboriginal Front Door Society, a resource centre for aboriginal people downtown. Women&#8217;s groups unsuccessfully tried to persuade the courts to classify Mr. Tremblay as a dangerous offender in 2003. Ms. Woodward criticized the police and justice system for releasing Mr. Tremblay without conditions eight years ago.

Mr. Tremblay was charged with drugging girls, ages 13 to 15, and shooting videos of himself assaulting them while they were unconscious. Some of the girls learned of the assaults during the trial when they were shown still photos from the videos.
 
I put Gary Ridgeway on the wrong thread...WhyA was kind enough to comment that LE in Canada have been or are in touch with LE where Ridgeway is being held. I think.
 
i'm very happy that michalko is interested and working on the case, he seems to be making more progress than the rcmp.

rcmp are so uninterested in this case, it makes me wonder if it's that they are racist against first nation (native) women, or are they covering for someone?

from the above link whyaduck gave, michalko says:

“One year later, I still hear stories from people about how they tried to talk to police but ended up being told to call elsewhere or were passed off to answering machines, their messages never returned,” he says."

people are actually trying to call in tips to police who don't care! it makes me so upset =(

Hi Just
Googling the Hwy of Tears I read of a Mountie who was accused of killing several girls of this age. Could it be that is why there has been no resolution, that a member of LE killed these people?

I'll go find a link.

I had never heard of this Hwy. But I have a fav TV show from BC, Da Vinci's Inquest which shows the crime world there in a real down to earth way.

Be back with link after dinner. xox
 
scandi, i think what you suggest could be a huge issue in the lack of interest by the rcmp.
they could be "protecting" one of their own, or even someone with a high profile political background and money (or relative)
 
http://highwayoftears.blogspot.com/2008/12/quesnel-rcmp-officer-accused-of.html

here is a link i found, scandi; not sure if its the one you were thinking of. here is an exert from it:

"Mr. Landrud states that he witnessed an RCMP officer murder a 16 year old girl in Quesnel B.C., in 1999. He claims the same officer is responsible for 8 other murders. All of these murders remain unsolved. Mr. Landrud additionally states that the RCMP have attempted to murder him. Mr. Landrud continues his quest to have his information investigated by agencies other than the RCMP......"
 

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