Death's Shadow

by Jon Wells

  He also noted that the woman’s arms lay straight at her side. He knew that after a hanging the hands are often near the neck. It was as though her arms had been placed in position. Suicide? Don Crath’s gut said otherwise.

  Ray Roach was led down to the morgue in Hamilton General Hospital by Crath. In the future, Hamilton would have a renovated morgue that would offer family members a tiny window through which to view a body for identification. But that was not the case with the old morgue. Ray watched an attendant wheel a gurney out in front of him. A body lay on top, covered by a sheet from head to toe.

  Ray had been at home on the east Mountain with Floria when they got the call in the middle of the night that their daughter’s house was on fire. Floria had called Trisha at 9:30 p.m., but no one answered. She called again later, kept trying, but eventually the signal was just busy. After receiving the news, Ray and Floria drove down to Montclair. Cathy, Trisha’s sister, arrived as well. The scene was cluttered with fire and police vehicles; her sister’s car was in the driveway.

  Ray walked up to a uniformed police officer.

  “Was there anyone in the house?” Ray asked.

  “Yes. One person.”

  Cathy, a nurse, saw a car on the road that had a sign in the window. The coroner’s car. Her body shook. There was a pounding inside her head; she felt sick.

  An old family photo of Ray, Floria, and their daughters Trisha and Cathy at Christmastime.

  Hamilton Spectator.

  A neighbour of Trisha beckoned Cathy to come to his door. What did he want to tell her? She started to go, then her husband called for her. She joined her parents in a police cruiser. They answered questions, were taken to the police station. They entered a room and met Crath for the first time. He asked them about suicide. Absolutely not, they said. Trisha would never do it. Her life was turning around. Not a chance. He asked if there was anyone they believed would hurt Trisha. There was someone and they urged Crath to interview him.

  There was no mystery to the identity of the victim in the house on Montclair, but by protocol she had to be identified by family. In the morgue the attendant drew down the sheet from the head of the body on the gurney. The attendant was supposed to reveal enough for identification, just past the eyes, nose. Instead the sheet dropped lower. And now Ray Roach saw it: the mark on his daughter’s neck, a clean dark red welt. It was burned forever in his mind’s eye at that moment.

  “They must have strangled her,” Ray said quietly in the room. “Used a telephone cord.”

  “No,” Crath said softly in the deep voice. “That wasn’t it.”

  Before dawn Mauro Iacoboni heard a voice, awakening him from a deep sleep. It was his dad. Mauro had come home from work after midnight, watched TV, and gone to bed.

  His parents knew he was dating someone, but he had not told them a name or details. He knew that his dad, Azio, an old-school Italian and a Dofasco man, would not appreciate his son dating a recently separated woman.

  “Mauro, you need to come to the door,” his father said.

  Mauro padded out of his room and into the front hallway on the same floor of the bungalow. Two men in suits in the doorway.

  “Do you know Patricia Roach?” one of them asked.

  “Yes,” Mauro said.

  “She died tonight. Would you come with us to answer some questions?”

  He talked to the detectives in the unmarked cruiser and then down at the station.

  “Do you know what she was doing last night?”

  “Packing,” Mauro said. “She said she had moved boxes to the basement. Her house sold, she’s moving.”

  Mauro felt numb the entire time, and always would when recalling that night. Trisha was gone. He thought they were on the road to serious commitment, maybe even marriage. Now Trisha was dead, and he knew police were trying to determine if he had any role in her death.

  Don Crath worked against time, and the grain. His bosses were calling it suicide. Trisha’s family insisted it was murder. He believed the Roaches. Thursday morning, not pausing to sleep, he went after it by the book. Interview those closest to the victim. In homicides in a house, the victim knows the killer in 80 percent of cases. There had been no sign of forced entry. She must have known him. Trisha’s death, and the fire, had happened sometime after 9:00 p.m., when she had answered the phone, and 11:30 p.m., when neighbours saw the house ablaze. Nothing had been stolen.

  Right off the bat, Crath and Dave Matteson visited Trisha’s estranged husband. Terry Paraszczuk, who was still working as a customs officer, lived with his girlfriend in a two-storey apartment above a store on Queenston Road in Stoney Creek. The detectives knocked on the door. No answer. They knocked louder. Terry finally answered. It was very early in the morning; he had been asleep. There had been a fire at the house, the detectives told him. Trisha was dead. Terry looked surprised. The detectives took him to the station, continued to question him, and the girlfriend. He said he had been with his girlfriend all night; she said the same thing.

  Word spread that morning among friends of Trisha and Terry. A close friend of Terry, a man named John Pajek, who had been best man at the wedding, was awakened by the phone ringing at about 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. It was Michael Paraszczuk, Terry’s father. Half asleep, John heard Terry’s father’s voice on the other end. The words did not make any sense to him.

  “Tragedy,” Michael Paraszczuk said. “Trisha’s dead.”

  It was sometime after 7:00 a.m. when Trisha’s friend Sandra received a call from Terry. She hadn’t seen or talked to Terry in years; she had been in touch with Trisha only. Now Terry told Sandra that Trisha was dead. In disbelief, she hung up and dialed Trisha’s number. The line was busy. She turned on the radio and heard about the fire on Montclair. My God, she thought, it’s really happening.

  The Hamilton Spectator reported that morning that police were investigating the sudden death of 26-year-old Patricia Paraszczuk. The story quoted Terry: “It came as much of a shock to me as everyone else,” he said. “She was a beautiful person and she didn’t deserve to die that way.”

  The post-mortem concluded the next day, Friday. The cause of death: strangulation by ligature hanging. The level of carbon monoxide in her body was 14 percent, consistent with that of a smoker; the ligature killed her, not smoke from the fire. There were no signs of sexual assault.

  The body was delivered to Friscolanti Funeral Home on Barton Street. The Spectator reported a police official saying that Trisha had “been experiencing personal and family problems prior to her death.”

  That day Crath met with Ray, Floria, and Cathy. He told them her death was still being ruled a suicide. They were angry.

  “It was not a suicide!” Floria said, nearly shouting. “You have to look harder.”

  At home that night, Crath continued brooding over the case, seeing the body in the basement. Nothing added up. He went to his workshop, hammered a few pieces of wood together to mirror the firestop joist construction where the torn ligature had been found. He knelt on the floor, trying to imagine how she could have strangled herself just three feet off the ground. It made no sense.

  The next day he took his homemade re-enactment to Hamilton General Hospital and spoke to veteran forensic pathologist Rex Ferris. Ferris, who had a lofty reputation in the field, had had doubts about the suicide theory as well. He said they could learn more from further examination of the body.

  With plans already set for the funeral visitation, police officers entered Friscolanti to take the body back, much to the horror of the funeral director, who had never seen such a thing. He refused, before permission to re-examine the body was granted by the coroner.

  Crath had attended the first post-mortem, and on Sunday, March 7, four days after Trisha had died, he attended a second. Rex Ferris examined tissue behind the skin on her face. He detected bruising that could not be seen in the original autopsy. She had been struck prior to her death. It was not tramline bruising, which is caused by a cylindrical object, b
ut it clearly had been an assault.

  Crath could all but see it now. Trisha, just 98 pounds, punched in the face by her attacker, someone she knew, knocked unconscious or unable to defend herself; dragged to the basement, strangled, the scene made to look like a suicide. Killer sets house on fire to cover his tracks. Crath had seen it all, but this killer had been especially ruthless.

  He had wondered if it was a spontaneous crime, an assault sparked by an argument. But the strangulation and arson concealment looked planned. The killer knew he could be connected to the crime by his association to the victim, or the location. So he had burned it up.

  Many more questions than answers remained. Why would the killer tie the ligature to that joist? Why had the ligature torn and broke? Was it heat from the fire? The extra dead weight of her body when her clothes became soaking wet from the fire hoses? Why had the ligature been tight enough to kill, but still managed to slip up over her chin onto her face? Who had motive and opportunity to do it?

  Trisha Roach on her wedding day.

  Hamilton Spectator.

  The family was at least pleased that the notion that Trisha had taken her own life had been put to rest. That was justice of a sort. But confirmation that it was a homicide also meant that there would be miles to go before Crath or the family could rest.

  Back at the station, a senior colleague chided Crath. “You just had to turn it into a goddamn murder, didn’t you.”

  — III —

  Trisha was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery on Tuesday, March 9, a bitter day with biting wind, blowing snow. Father Ron Cote presided over the funeral at St. John the Baptist, at Edgemont and King Street, a few blocks from the house on Montclair. Don Crath and Dave Matteson stood at the back of the church, watching who attended. Mauro Iacoboni was there; the family had asked him to attend.

  The detectives took aside one of Mauro’s friends after the funeral. The guy had showed up with a cup of coffee from Tim Hortons. Mauro figured his friend had looked a little too detached, nonchalant, so they questioned why he was there. Terry did not show at the visitation or funeral, nor did anyone from his family, or his friends. Crath was not surprised. He knew relations between Terry and the Roaches had been sour for a long time, and they were especially so now.

  On March 16 police announced that Trisha’s death had been a homicide. The next day Terry was quoted in the Spectator: “I knew right off the bat that it must have been a murder,” he said. “There’s no way in the world that she would do it herself.... She had absolutely no reason to kill herself. All she wanted to do was help people. For someone to cause so much harm to her is just amazing.... Yes I’m upset. I’m obviously very upset.” He said that they had signed papers a week before her death in order to sell the house, and that it “was a very amicable” agreement.

  A senior police officer was quoted saying “we have our ideas” about what might have happened. “But we’re not saying anything, for obvious reasons.”

  Crath continued to meet and question Terry. With no one else jumping out on his radar, an ex-husband had to remain a person of interest, even though Terry continued to maintain that he had been with his girlfriend at the time Trisha was killed. He appeared to lack a strong motive as well. He had not benefited in a substantial financial way from her death. Trisha had moved her life insurance benefit to her mother after their separation.

  Had he been angry about Trisha dating again? When she was killed he had been living with his girlfriend, a woman who also worked with Canada Customs. The detectives questioned friends of Terry, including John Pajek, asked him about Terry’s character. John felt police were barking up the wrong tree.

  They interviewed Terry’s father, Michael Paraszczuk, who lived on Balmoral Avenue South, 200 metres from Trisha’s house. Ray Roach said Michael had his own key to Trisha’s place. Crath was told Michael had hard feelings toward Trisha as a result of her separation from his son. She had been killed before the lawsuit had been settled over his handyman expenses for doing work in the basement. (Michael and his wife eventually moved from the neighbourhood and could not be located to comment for this story. He later died, on February 18, 2012.)

  The detectives revisited Mauro Iacoboni. Mauro took three weeks off work after Trisha died. He could not sleep at night; instead, he lay awake, agonizing over what had happened to Trisha, wondering what might have been. Crath returned to Mauro’s workplace at American Can, questioned his supervisors. Was there any way Mauro could have left the factory for a while and come back on shift before punching out? Next to impossible. Everyone had seen him there, and he had been on the phone during his break. He could not have left until midnight, and by then Trisha was dead.

  Crath and Dave Matteson met with friends of Trisha’s at Mellows, a restaurant and bar at Highway 20 and Queenston Road, where she had gone on occasion. The detectives interviewed another man she had dated. It had been nothing serious, went nowhere.

  Terry had suggested a theory: perhaps the killer had a connection to someone Trisha knew at the hospital where she worked? Crath looked into the hospital angle; there was nothing, and, in any case, she had been highly respected at work.

  They had already canvassed the neighbourhood around Montclair Avenue. Trisha’s sister, Cathy, continued to replay that night in her mind, especially the incident with the neighbour of Trisha who had asked her to come and talk. She should have gone. Maybe he had seen something: a car, someone approaching the house. If anyone had seen anything, they hadn’t told the police. But then, it had been bitterly cold, and no one had been walking around. And the fire-damaged house had yielded no physical evidence.

  Crath had come up empty. He interviewed everyone remotely connected to Trisha, and had given people of most interest a rough ride, leaning on them, old school, questioning them repeatedly. Everyone had an alibi. Not all were air-tight, but none could be disproved. He was not about to lay a charge on speculation. You only had one crack at a conviction.

  On April 27 Hamilton Police offered a $10,000 reward for information that would solve the case. Soon after the Roaches added $15,000 to the reward. “We’ d pay anything to put the person behind bars,” Ray said in the Spectator. “It’s all the savings we have, but it’s not much when your daughter’s life is involved.”

  Matteson moved on to other assignments. Crath stayed with it, putting more work into the homicide than any case in his career. Each day he took a phone call from Floria, who asked him for the latest news. She could not sleep; she would burst into tears in public on occasion. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe, waiting for a break in the case. She prayed every night that someone would come forward in the neighbourhood — someone who saw something, or someone who knew the killer.

  As spring weather began to set in, she could think only that the killer was walking around enjoying the warmth, while her daughter was under the ground. One day Ray visited the stone in Holy Sepulchre and saw flowers had been left with no name attached. Why? He went home and called the police. Crath, hungry for something, anything, showed up at his door, picked Ray up and bombed down the Sherman Cut en route to the cemetery, Ray white-knuckling all the way. Crath traced where the flowers had been purchased. He found the buyer. Turned out to be nothing, just a couple of Trisha’s old friends.

  Ultimately Crath’s supervisor asked if he was not just treading water on the case. He was taken off it, and he locked the case file away in his desk. Floria continued calling. Don’t forget about Trisha, she told him.

  A cold case never closes. But no one was actively looking for Trisha’s killer.

  Crath continued working in CID, homicide, and drugs. During the last few years of his career, he closed out his old homicide cases in court while working out of the coroner’s office, regularly attending autopsies as part of the job. He grew hardened to them. But when Don Crath came home from work after attending one, he would always undress in the garage and stuff a laundry bag with the clothes that smelled of formaldehyde and death.

&nb
sp; — IV —

  On Christmas Day for five years, 10 years, 20 years after Trisha was killed, Floria set the table for a family dinner in their little house on the east Mountain. Each time, when everyone had eaten, the plate and cutlery at one of the settings went untouched, remained sparkling clean. That was Trisha’s place, still set every Christmas.

  Pictures of her decorated the living-room walls: Trisha as a little girl; Trisha as a teenager; and, most prominently, a large one of her in the iconic nurse uniform, hair up under the hat. In that photo she looked so young and so mature at the same time. She had a look that said the future had no bounds. It was the photo that, every year, the Roaches put in the Spectator obituaries on the anniversary of her death with a write-up: “Why was she taken so young and so fair when earth held so many it better could spare. Hard was the blow that compelled us to part with our loving daughter so dear to our heart. She was taken without any warning, her going left hearts filled with pain, but although she’s gone from amongst us in our hearts she will always remain.”

  Ray and Floria continued to visit her grave regularly. For a couple of years after she died, they would go three times a day: visit, linger, go for coffee, and return. Ray kept a shovel in the trunk of his car in winter. Each morning he shoveled a narrow pathway from the cemetery driveway up several metres to the stone.

  Floria was never the same. She was a gregarious woman, more talkative than Ray, and put on a good face for others, but she was damaged inside. She and Ray lived in fear, for one thing, increasing the security in the house, making it impossible for anyone to break in. But mostly it was just missing Trisha and living in a dark hole with no answers or justice.