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It had already been a deadly month.
Ottawa police had opened three separate homicide investigations in June 2007.
Then came another call. Three senior citizens had been found tied up, with plastic bags over their heads, in a Riverside Drive condo. Retired tax court judge Alban Garon, his wife, Raymonde Garon, and their neighbour, Marie-Claire Beniskos, were dead.
Last month, police finally closed their long-open investigation, and charges of first-degree murder were laid against Ian Bush.
The team investigation saw its share of key players. Among them:
A lead detective who made a promise in 2007 to three grieving families;
A cop-turned-academic who learned everything he could about the suspect before sitting down for an interrogation years in the making;
And a veteran investigator who probed leads for years, only to retire six months before a break would crack the case wide open.
These are their stories.
The Lead
Tim Hodgins
Staff Sgt. Tim Hodgins can see the Riviera II from the Queensway.
Whenever he drives by, he scans the horizon for the tower, then counts down from the top level until his eyes find unit 1002.
For a former homicide cop, the city takes on a different meaning. It becomes a living memory of your cases.
On a hot Saturday afternoon in June 2007, Hodgins went to that condominium at 1510 Riverside Dr. and began trying to piece together a puzzle to find a killer.
Hodgins was 22 when he joined the Ottawa police force in February 1987. He started the job on the road, working as a patrol officer before moving to a plainclothes role, which led to stints doing surveillance. He describes it as one of the best things he’s done as an officer. While often dismissed as tedious, Hodgins knows it’s technical work with infrequent but significant payoff.
“You have those little nuggets of success,” Hodgins, now 50, says from an empty boardroom inside Ottawa police headquarters. He’s in full uniform while on shift as a central division patrol staff sergeant overseeing D platoon.
Avoiding detection is itself a thrill, he says, but so is trying to keep eyes on your target. It’s hard to lose something once it’s in your sights. Few things you observe while conducting surveillance will lead to an arrest but, together with other evidence, what you see helps build a case.
The same could be said of working murders.
•
In 2005, Hodgins joined the force’s major crime unit and became a homicide detective.
“I thought I’d reached the summit,” he says.
The unit represents the highest end of the force’s investigative capacity and probes the most heinous of crimes. He misses detective work. “It’s kind of what pulses through my veins,” Hodgins says.
Together with veteran detectives, his team worked some of the biggest cases the city has known: Crimes that rattled the community were solved by investigators who had to be told to go home. The murder of Barrhaven teenager Jennifer Teague, which will mark its 10-year anniversary in September, still sticks with Hodgins. It was a “stranger homicide”, one of the most difficult to solve.
Police searched areas of Barrhaven, using air, water and ground searches of railway lines, rivers and deep brush areas while looking for Barrhaven teen Jennifer Teague in 2005.
“It was an interesting time because the Ardeth Wood investigation was going on at the same time,” Hodgins says. “We had two unsolved homicides, which were both stranger-on-stranger attacks — they kind of had the city at a bit of a standstill. There weren’t very many answers forthcoming at that time.”
Hodgins would investigate more of that rare breed of crime in his career — complete stranger Kevin Gregson would kill Const. Eric Czapnik in 2009 and police would later allege that a complete stranger killed the Garons and Beniskos all those years ago.
Few details were available when Hodgins got the phone call asking if he could come into work on June 30, 2007, from then acting Staff Sgt. Julie Vaillant. She had decided, though, that he’d be leading the investigation.
Hodgins won’t speak to what he saw when he entered Unit 1002.
“I try to divest emotionally from scenes, because it provides you with the best opportunity to collect and gather information,” he says. “There’s lots of time for emotion down the road, the time is not when you’re in the throes of battle or the throes of trying to put the puzzle together or figure out what’s going on.”
But that initial separation doesn’t mean there’s distance.
“I live and breathe them all,” he says about his cases. “I do.”
•
Those early weeks on the Riverside killings saw officers logging 20-hour days. There were three victims and three devastated families, three high-rises of potential suspects and witnesses, a concerned public, clamouring reporters trying to make sense of a shocking crime, and police brass looking for immediate answers to quell the mounting pressure from all sides.
Hodgins fits the image of the detective who sits at home, poring over crime scene photos. But “that’s TV stuff,” he says. “I don’t have to splay evidence out,” he explains. “It’s all in my head.”
As the weeks turned to months, then years, Hodgins says he never truly moved on from the Garon case, though he left the homicide squad in 2010.
He would routinely call the clerks overseeing the files asking them to look up details.
“I always thought of who and why,” Hodgins says. “I always wondered if I had missed something. You question yourself and your own ability.”
The 2007 triple killing was his only unsolved homicide case.
Then, in December 2014, when highly publicized details of the home invasion attack against Ernest Côté made national headlines — including that a bag had been placed over the 101-year-old war veteran’s head by his attacker — Hodgins’ interest was immediately piqued.
“I was just hopeful that good people would take notice or at least have a look at it,” he says.
They did. By January, police moved to arrest Bush but decided to wait until a court-ordered psychiatric assessment for the home invasion charges was complete before laying murder charges against him.
Hodgins ditched the uniform to don a familiar suit and head to court on Feb. 20 to finally lay eyes on a suspect he’d chased for years, who now stands accused of the triple murder.
While it’s satisfying to close cases, Hodgins is adamant there is no such thing as true closure for the families of someone who’s been killed. What the police force and its detectives do is attempt to give people some answers.
“Closure is a bit of a myth, I think,” Hodgins says. “Regardless of the answers that we provide them, it doesn’t ever put those people back in their lives so that they can enjoy weddings, graduations, first baptisms, grandchildren. That doesn’t happen. Nothing that happens in this building or down the street at 161 Elgin Street will ever satisfy that.”
Once the arrest was made, the families of the three victims were notified. Hodgins spoke with them later in the day. He’s on a first-name basis with every one of them.
“I promised them seven-and-a-half years ago that I’d figure this out,” he says. “Foolishly.”
The ‘file’?
Hodgins and Sgt. Greg Brown were scheduled to work on Canada Day 2007 in the ByWard Market, directing crowds and calming drunks.
Instead, they began working the month’s fourth, fifth and sixth homicides.
Brown was the file co-ordinator to Hodgins’ lead. A file co-ordinator, or “file,” is responsible for ensuring the proper processing of all of the materials coming into the investigation — officers’ reports and notes, video, audio, interviews and transcripts. They make sure that everything is accounted for and that important tasks get done.
As file, Brown knew every piece of evidence that was catalogued in the Garons and Beniskos case.
Brown can retire any day now. He’s completed 30 years on the job, but his phone still rings at all hours of the night.
“It’s a lot less than it used to be with informants or those types of issues,” he says, sitting in a Hintonburg coffee shop.
The former drug officer spent eight years as a homicide investigator, working alongside Hodgins on cases that gripped the city.
His very first homicide investigation was that of Oladapo Agoro.
“He was a wonderful kid,” Brown says — a good student and soccer player.
“He was at a dance club,” he said. “See, it’s funny, ’cause you can remember these details like it was yesterday, and I would know every one of my cases like an encyclopedia.”
The club was called Sub Zero at 172 Rideau St. It was an upstairs-level club where two men got into what Brown calls a “jostling match”. They were antagonizing each other and one wouldn’t take an apology at face value. So young Dapo, as he was called, put himself in the middle hoping to break up the argument.
“Michel Belance came in from the back with a knife and stabbed him to death,” Brown says. The surprise attack left Agoro stabbed in the chest and stomach.
“Dapo died on the dance floor.”
The case came in when Brown had been in the homicide squad for just a couple of months. A staff sergeant asked if he thought he could handle the case.
“I was petrified,” he says.
Veteran detective Dennis Smith took him by the hand and walked him through it.
“That’s kind of how you learned.”
These days, Brown is seconded to the Criminal Intelligence Service Ontario, a co-ordinating body for intelligence sharing in the province. When he’s not pulling duty as a police officer, he’s teaching, researching and working toward his PhD in sociology.
It’s a busy life, full of kids and class and work, but when the suspect in a case he hadn’t forgotten about finally had a name, Brown spent all the time and energy he could to learn about Ian Bush and what makes him tick to interrogate him for the Ottawa Police Service.
•
In the summer of 2007, investigators began working the Riverside killings but the leads were few and far between — it was frustrating on many levels.
“I think we pride ourselves on being pretty good at the job we do,” Brown says.
When that job becomes difficult, investigators question themselves. Sometimes, there are breakthroughs, the kind that come from a “guardian angel looking over you,” Brown says. But those breaks just weren’t coming.
Brown doesn’t buy that some cases just can’t be solved.
“I don’t think that’s true,” he says. “I don’t think there’s such a thing as a perfect murder. I don’t think anybody can commit a murder where the right investigation done the right way couldn’t figure out that you did it and get evidence. As a homicide investigator, it’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to catch the person.”
As the years went on, there were other cases and other commitments. But Brown didn’t resign himself to the idea the case would remain unsolved.
“I give all the credit to Tim, because Tim never gave up. Tim is like a pitbull with 2,000 pounds per inch of jaw power.”
Then in December, a fresh lead.
“I think the first time I heard through the news about the Côté case – things twigged for me there,” Brown said. “I know Tim felt the same way.”
In the background, current homicide detectives began working double-shifts, dotting all their i’s and crossing all their t’s, executing warrants and interviewing people who now could tell them more about their suspect than the anonymous evidence could for all these years.
In January, it was decided that Brown would interview Ian Bush upon his arrest.
Brown spent weeks learning every conceivable thing he could about Bush to prepare himself for an interrogation that would last hours.
He first saw Bush at his Feb. 20 court appearance when the man knew he would be arrested for the triple homicide. Brown focused on him inside the prisoner’s box. “I was trying to assess his demeanor,” he says.
Brown says he hasn’t even tried to figure out his feelings after a whirlwind few weeks.
“I don’t think I’ve processed that yet. It’s so new.”
Officers don’t have a legal or even a professional obligation to solve cases, Brown says, but how can they let them go knowing full well what hangs in the balance – holding someone to account and grieving families desperate for answers. Morally, he says, they had to keep going, even nearly eight years later.
“I don’t think you lose your skills or that passion for that kind of work.”
But, it’s the kind of consuming work that you have to make the top priority in your life.
“It’s all or nothing.”
The dogged investigator
Sgt. Gerry Kinnear spent his last days as a police officer doing what he loved. He retired in June 2014 as a homicide detective.
For Hodgins and Brown, the arrest and subsequent charges came at the tail-end of their careers. They will retire knowing the process is now out of their hands. Both said that had they ended their time as officers without closing the case, they’d have been disappointed.
In the last years of his career, Kinnear probed all leads in the Garons and Beniskos case, including revisiting any possible connections to biker gangs.
Police investigate outside the condo building at 1510 Riverside Dr. where Alban and Raymonde Garon and Marie-Claire Beniskos were murdered in 2007.
He had worked his share of long, trying cases. When police knew they would be charging Chris Myers with the murder of Ardeth Wood, Kinnear and Det. Jenny Edge scoured the city to find yellow roses before notifying Wood’s family. Then-chief Vince Bevan had given Wood’s mother a single yellow rose and promised the case would never go cold. Twenty-six months later, Kinnear and Edge bought the flower pot at an all-night grocery store before delivering the news.
The Citizen requested a retirement interview with Kinnear in the spring of 2014, pitching the story as one that could bring public attention to the Riverside killings once more. He politely declined the request, shying away from the spotlight, saying he still had hope, even after several years, that the case would be solved. He couldn’t have known that, six months later, the break he and the team had waited for would come. The veteran cop also declined a request for comment once Bush had been formally charged in the killings.
Brown believes Kinnear had made peace with his decision to retire, leaving the case open and unsolved as he left Elgin Street headquarters one last time.
“I think he probably wrapped his brain around it,” he says.
Hodgins says that being part of an investigative team can be like being a family. Each member had intimate knowledge of the case but a resolution won’t have the same affect on everyone.
“It means different things to different people,” Hodgins says, knowing how complicated his own feelings on the matter are. “I wouldn’t for a second try to guess how he was feeling,” he says.
Ian Bush is next scheduled to appear in court on April 7.
None of the allegations against him has been tested in court.
syogaretnam@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/shaaminiwhy
查看原文...
Ottawa police had opened three separate homicide investigations in June 2007.
Then came another call. Three senior citizens had been found tied up, with plastic bags over their heads, in a Riverside Drive condo. Retired tax court judge Alban Garon, his wife, Raymonde Garon, and their neighbour, Marie-Claire Beniskos, were dead.
Last month, police finally closed their long-open investigation, and charges of first-degree murder were laid against Ian Bush.
The team investigation saw its share of key players. Among them:
A lead detective who made a promise in 2007 to three grieving families;
A cop-turned-academic who learned everything he could about the suspect before sitting down for an interrogation years in the making;
And a veteran investigator who probed leads for years, only to retire six months before a break would crack the case wide open.
These are their stories.
The Lead
Tim Hodgins
Staff Sgt. Tim Hodgins can see the Riviera II from the Queensway.
Whenever he drives by, he scans the horizon for the tower, then counts down from the top level until his eyes find unit 1002.
For a former homicide cop, the city takes on a different meaning. It becomes a living memory of your cases.
On a hot Saturday afternoon in June 2007, Hodgins went to that condominium at 1510 Riverside Dr. and began trying to piece together a puzzle to find a killer.
Hodgins was 22 when he joined the Ottawa police force in February 1987. He started the job on the road, working as a patrol officer before moving to a plainclothes role, which led to stints doing surveillance. He describes it as one of the best things he’s done as an officer. While often dismissed as tedious, Hodgins knows it’s technical work with infrequent but significant payoff.
“You have those little nuggets of success,” Hodgins, now 50, says from an empty boardroom inside Ottawa police headquarters. He’s in full uniform while on shift as a central division patrol staff sergeant overseeing D platoon.
Avoiding detection is itself a thrill, he says, but so is trying to keep eyes on your target. It’s hard to lose something once it’s in your sights. Few things you observe while conducting surveillance will lead to an arrest but, together with other evidence, what you see helps build a case.
The same could be said of working murders.
•
In 2005, Hodgins joined the force’s major crime unit and became a homicide detective.
“I thought I’d reached the summit,” he says.
The unit represents the highest end of the force’s investigative capacity and probes the most heinous of crimes. He misses detective work. “It’s kind of what pulses through my veins,” Hodgins says.
Together with veteran detectives, his team worked some of the biggest cases the city has known: Crimes that rattled the community were solved by investigators who had to be told to go home. The murder of Barrhaven teenager Jennifer Teague, which will mark its 10-year anniversary in September, still sticks with Hodgins. It was a “stranger homicide”, one of the most difficult to solve.
Police searched areas of Barrhaven, using air, water and ground searches of railway lines, rivers and deep brush areas while looking for Barrhaven teen Jennifer Teague in 2005.
“It was an interesting time because the Ardeth Wood investigation was going on at the same time,” Hodgins says. “We had two unsolved homicides, which were both stranger-on-stranger attacks — they kind of had the city at a bit of a standstill. There weren’t very many answers forthcoming at that time.”
Hodgins would investigate more of that rare breed of crime in his career — complete stranger Kevin Gregson would kill Const. Eric Czapnik in 2009 and police would later allege that a complete stranger killed the Garons and Beniskos all those years ago.
Few details were available when Hodgins got the phone call asking if he could come into work on June 30, 2007, from then acting Staff Sgt. Julie Vaillant. She had decided, though, that he’d be leading the investigation.
Hodgins won’t speak to what he saw when he entered Unit 1002.
“I try to divest emotionally from scenes, because it provides you with the best opportunity to collect and gather information,” he says. “There’s lots of time for emotion down the road, the time is not when you’re in the throes of battle or the throes of trying to put the puzzle together or figure out what’s going on.”
But that initial separation doesn’t mean there’s distance.
“I live and breathe them all,” he says about his cases. “I do.”
•
Those early weeks on the Riverside killings saw officers logging 20-hour days. There were three victims and three devastated families, three high-rises of potential suspects and witnesses, a concerned public, clamouring reporters trying to make sense of a shocking crime, and police brass looking for immediate answers to quell the mounting pressure from all sides.
Hodgins fits the image of the detective who sits at home, poring over crime scene photos. But “that’s TV stuff,” he says. “I don’t have to splay evidence out,” he explains. “It’s all in my head.”
As the weeks turned to months, then years, Hodgins says he never truly moved on from the Garon case, though he left the homicide squad in 2010.
He would routinely call the clerks overseeing the files asking them to look up details.
“I always thought of who and why,” Hodgins says. “I always wondered if I had missed something. You question yourself and your own ability.”
The 2007 triple killing was his only unsolved homicide case.
Then, in December 2014, when highly publicized details of the home invasion attack against Ernest Côté made national headlines — including that a bag had been placed over the 101-year-old war veteran’s head by his attacker — Hodgins’ interest was immediately piqued.
“I was just hopeful that good people would take notice or at least have a look at it,” he says.
They did. By January, police moved to arrest Bush but decided to wait until a court-ordered psychiatric assessment for the home invasion charges was complete before laying murder charges against him.
Hodgins ditched the uniform to don a familiar suit and head to court on Feb. 20 to finally lay eyes on a suspect he’d chased for years, who now stands accused of the triple murder.
While it’s satisfying to close cases, Hodgins is adamant there is no such thing as true closure for the families of someone who’s been killed. What the police force and its detectives do is attempt to give people some answers.
“Closure is a bit of a myth, I think,” Hodgins says. “Regardless of the answers that we provide them, it doesn’t ever put those people back in their lives so that they can enjoy weddings, graduations, first baptisms, grandchildren. That doesn’t happen. Nothing that happens in this building or down the street at 161 Elgin Street will ever satisfy that.”
Once the arrest was made, the families of the three victims were notified. Hodgins spoke with them later in the day. He’s on a first-name basis with every one of them.
“I promised them seven-and-a-half years ago that I’d figure this out,” he says. “Foolishly.”
The ‘file’?
Hodgins and Sgt. Greg Brown were scheduled to work on Canada Day 2007 in the ByWard Market, directing crowds and calming drunks.
Instead, they began working the month’s fourth, fifth and sixth homicides.
Brown was the file co-ordinator to Hodgins’ lead. A file co-ordinator, or “file,” is responsible for ensuring the proper processing of all of the materials coming into the investigation — officers’ reports and notes, video, audio, interviews and transcripts. They make sure that everything is accounted for and that important tasks get done.
As file, Brown knew every piece of evidence that was catalogued in the Garons and Beniskos case.
Brown can retire any day now. He’s completed 30 years on the job, but his phone still rings at all hours of the night.
“It’s a lot less than it used to be with informants or those types of issues,” he says, sitting in a Hintonburg coffee shop.
The former drug officer spent eight years as a homicide investigator, working alongside Hodgins on cases that gripped the city.
His very first homicide investigation was that of Oladapo Agoro.
“He was a wonderful kid,” Brown says — a good student and soccer player.
“He was at a dance club,” he said. “See, it’s funny, ’cause you can remember these details like it was yesterday, and I would know every one of my cases like an encyclopedia.”
The club was called Sub Zero at 172 Rideau St. It was an upstairs-level club where two men got into what Brown calls a “jostling match”. They were antagonizing each other and one wouldn’t take an apology at face value. So young Dapo, as he was called, put himself in the middle hoping to break up the argument.
“Michel Belance came in from the back with a knife and stabbed him to death,” Brown says. The surprise attack left Agoro stabbed in the chest and stomach.
“Dapo died on the dance floor.”
The case came in when Brown had been in the homicide squad for just a couple of months. A staff sergeant asked if he thought he could handle the case.
“I was petrified,” he says.
Veteran detective Dennis Smith took him by the hand and walked him through it.
“That’s kind of how you learned.”
These days, Brown is seconded to the Criminal Intelligence Service Ontario, a co-ordinating body for intelligence sharing in the province. When he’s not pulling duty as a police officer, he’s teaching, researching and working toward his PhD in sociology.
It’s a busy life, full of kids and class and work, but when the suspect in a case he hadn’t forgotten about finally had a name, Brown spent all the time and energy he could to learn about Ian Bush and what makes him tick to interrogate him for the Ottawa Police Service.
•
In the summer of 2007, investigators began working the Riverside killings but the leads were few and far between — it was frustrating on many levels.
“I think we pride ourselves on being pretty good at the job we do,” Brown says.
When that job becomes difficult, investigators question themselves. Sometimes, there are breakthroughs, the kind that come from a “guardian angel looking over you,” Brown says. But those breaks just weren’t coming.
Brown doesn’t buy that some cases just can’t be solved.
“I don’t think that’s true,” he says. “I don’t think there’s such a thing as a perfect murder. I don’t think anybody can commit a murder where the right investigation done the right way couldn’t figure out that you did it and get evidence. As a homicide investigator, it’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to catch the person.”
As the years went on, there were other cases and other commitments. But Brown didn’t resign himself to the idea the case would remain unsolved.
“I give all the credit to Tim, because Tim never gave up. Tim is like a pitbull with 2,000 pounds per inch of jaw power.”
Then in December, a fresh lead.
“I think the first time I heard through the news about the Côté case – things twigged for me there,” Brown said. “I know Tim felt the same way.”
In the background, current homicide detectives began working double-shifts, dotting all their i’s and crossing all their t’s, executing warrants and interviewing people who now could tell them more about their suspect than the anonymous evidence could for all these years.
In January, it was decided that Brown would interview Ian Bush upon his arrest.
Brown spent weeks learning every conceivable thing he could about Bush to prepare himself for an interrogation that would last hours.
He first saw Bush at his Feb. 20 court appearance when the man knew he would be arrested for the triple homicide. Brown focused on him inside the prisoner’s box. “I was trying to assess his demeanor,” he says.
Brown says he hasn’t even tried to figure out his feelings after a whirlwind few weeks.
“I don’t think I’ve processed that yet. It’s so new.”
Officers don’t have a legal or even a professional obligation to solve cases, Brown says, but how can they let them go knowing full well what hangs in the balance – holding someone to account and grieving families desperate for answers. Morally, he says, they had to keep going, even nearly eight years later.
“I don’t think you lose your skills or that passion for that kind of work.”
But, it’s the kind of consuming work that you have to make the top priority in your life.
“It’s all or nothing.”
The dogged investigator
Sgt. Gerry Kinnear spent his last days as a police officer doing what he loved. He retired in June 2014 as a homicide detective.
For Hodgins and Brown, the arrest and subsequent charges came at the tail-end of their careers. They will retire knowing the process is now out of their hands. Both said that had they ended their time as officers without closing the case, they’d have been disappointed.
In the last years of his career, Kinnear probed all leads in the Garons and Beniskos case, including revisiting any possible connections to biker gangs.
Police investigate outside the condo building at 1510 Riverside Dr. where Alban and Raymonde Garon and Marie-Claire Beniskos were murdered in 2007.
He had worked his share of long, trying cases. When police knew they would be charging Chris Myers with the murder of Ardeth Wood, Kinnear and Det. Jenny Edge scoured the city to find yellow roses before notifying Wood’s family. Then-chief Vince Bevan had given Wood’s mother a single yellow rose and promised the case would never go cold. Twenty-six months later, Kinnear and Edge bought the flower pot at an all-night grocery store before delivering the news.
The Citizen requested a retirement interview with Kinnear in the spring of 2014, pitching the story as one that could bring public attention to the Riverside killings once more. He politely declined the request, shying away from the spotlight, saying he still had hope, even after several years, that the case would be solved. He couldn’t have known that, six months later, the break he and the team had waited for would come. The veteran cop also declined a request for comment once Bush had been formally charged in the killings.
Brown believes Kinnear had made peace with his decision to retire, leaving the case open and unsolved as he left Elgin Street headquarters one last time.
“I think he probably wrapped his brain around it,” he says.
Hodgins says that being part of an investigative team can be like being a family. Each member had intimate knowledge of the case but a resolution won’t have the same affect on everyone.
“It means different things to different people,” Hodgins says, knowing how complicated his own feelings on the matter are. “I wouldn’t for a second try to guess how he was feeling,” he says.
Ian Bush is next scheduled to appear in court on April 7.
None of the allegations against him has been tested in court.
syogaretnam@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/shaaminiwhy
查看原文...
