Mike on Crime

by Mike McIntyre

  “She asked if Fred could be cremated, and if we could send the remains to her. I asked about having a service, but she didn’t think anybody would come,” said Sweryd. He began asking some questions about Fred Linton’s life, and learned he’d spent several years working at a Winnipeg scrap metal business until he was let go in two months earlier.

  Sweryd called Orloff Scrap Metal, and was surprised by the reaction of the employees. They were stunned and saddened by news of Linton’s death. They wanted to know if there would be a service. They wanted to come. It seemed Linton, warts and all, had left quite an impression.

  “I was his boss, but I guess I was also one of his closest friends,” said owner Shelby Orloff. He gave a dishevelled-looking Linton a job six years earlier after he walked in off the street unannounced—then had the unenviable task of recently firing him when his battle with the bottle became too much. “His biggest demon was that he drank too much, and it became his relief from the world to get drunk,” said Orloff. “He started coming in, and it was obvious he’d been drinking all night. But he was in denial. I felt very sorry for him, and tried very hard to keep him going with his day-to-day fight with society. But we didn’t know what else to do.”

  Linton took great pride in his work—quickly progressing from a “lowly labourer” to a crane operator—but was drinking away all his earnings while living in a suite inside the Northern Hotel on Main Street, he said. “Even when he had a job, he didn’t live too much better than an animal. He never bought new clothes, and he’d eat raw wieners all the time. We saw the lifestyle he had, and it was very sad,” said Orloff.

  Linton’s life was on a downward spiral since the age of 13 when his mother was killed after his alcoholic father flipped his car in a drunken stupor near the family’s Ontario home, pinning the woman underneath, according to his aunt. Three years later, Linton’s father was found dead inside a car of suspected carbon monoxide poisoning. He was naked, along with a deceased young woman found beside him, said Doris Linton, 63. Linton and his younger brother, Kenneth briefly lived with Doris and her husband before hitting the streets to live on their own. Ken Linton had not been seen, or heard from, in many years, she said. Fred Linton moved to Winnipeg in his early twenties after suffering major head trauma in a car accident. “His head was split open, and he spent about six months in the hospital,” said Doris Linton.

  Fred never fully recovered, physically or mentally, and lived an isolated and clearly troubled life in Manitoba. His only connection to his family was with Doris, whom he would call nearly every weekend. “The calls stopped coming this year just after Easter. He never called me on Mother’s Day, which he always did. I was very worried. He would never give us a number to call him at,” she said.

  Even after losing his job, Linton continued to stop by his former employer at the corner of King Street and Sutherland Avenue on a regular basis. It was clear life had gone from bad to worse, as Linton had been evicted from the hotel for not paying rent and was out on the streets with his shopping cart. “He would come by, almost every day, and bring us scraps of metal he’d collected in his shopping cart. We’d give him a few bucks, but knew he was probably just using it to drink,” said Orloff. Just days before he died, a secretary at the company began trying to set Linton up with some social help. But they would never see him again.

  Doris Linton was now trying to get funds together to come to Winnipeg for her nephew’s service. For Linton, as for most Canadian farmers, times were tough and money was tight. A small private service would be held the following month in Rosenorth, Ontario, where Linton would be buried in a family plot.

  “One of the last conversations I’d had with him, he told me out of the blue that ‘I want to be buried with Mom and Dad.’ He broke down and cried,” said Doris Linton. “I told him, ‘Well, Fred. You better put my name in your wallet in case something happens.’ And I guess he did. I always worried about him. At least I now know where he is.”

  TUESDAY JULY 12, 2005

  At first he was a John Doe. Then some relatives were tracked down to give him an identity. And now the long-lost brother of Fred Linton had finally surfaced and reunited with his family after a Winnipeg Free Press subscriber recognized him as her newspaper carrier.

  Ken Linton was delivering copies of the previous Saturday’s edition in Fort Frances, Ontario, when one of his customers read him a story about the accidental strangling death of a man on a Winnipeg street. The subscriber said she recognized the name and immediately made the connection.

  Ken, who had battled through his own problems and was illiterate, was stunned to discover his brother had died. “I always wondered about him, and never knew where to find him. Fred was supposed to come to my wedding nine years ago. He never showed up,” said Ken. “I tried to call him at the hotel he was living at in Winnipeg, but he never called back. I don’t even know if he got the messages, and I never heard from him again.”

  Equally shocked by Fred Linton’s passing was his aunt. Until last week, Doris Linton had no idea what happened to the brothers, who were on their own in their teens. She had now gone from preparing for an August memorial service for Fred in their Ontario hometown, to planning to reunite with Ken for the first time in almost a decade. The pair had a tearful telephone conversation over the weekend.

  “He told me he always thought I knew where he was, but I never did. I always worried Ken would end up the way Fred had,” she said. Ken had turned his life around and was recently honoured for his volunteer work for speaking about fetal alcohol syndrome. He had also developed strong ties with a community church.

  “Fred was the most marvellous guy, and he was always a survivor. It’s so sad,” Ken said. He came to Winnipeg to attend the funeral service.

  Sweryd said his business received many calls from people with no connection to Fred Linton, inquiring about the service and even offering to make donations in his memory. “The [newspaper] article has done a world of good. It’s helped reunite a nephew with the aunt who raised him and made it possible for a man to come and say goodbye to his brother.”

  SATURDAY APRIL 13, 2013

  Somewhere under a pile of soon-to-be-melted snow at Brookside Cemetery was the unmarked grave of a mystery woman. Very little was known about her demise, which came to light the previous summer when a badly decomposed body was fished out of the Red River in Winnipeg. Even less was known about her life—not her name, not her age, not her place of birth or whether she had any living relatives or friends. It is the rarest of cases, an unidentified Jane Doe who had somehow lost her life without a single person coming forward to claim the body or offer information.

  And the many lingering questions had Winnipeg police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner desperate for answers but open to the possibility she could forever remain buried in anonymity. “This person has lived on this Earth, they have made a contribution to society,” said Gordon Holens, a sub-inspector and statistician with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. He had spent the past 10 months trying to find anything he could about the woman he had dubbed “Miss X.” “You just don’t see this very often,” he said.

  Information had been difficult to obtain since a resident who lives just south of the north Perimeter Highway bridge made the grisly discovery on June 15, 2012. The case was initially treated as suspicious because there was plastic wrapped around the remains. Police later determined it was likely debris that had become entangled and ruled out foul play. But other factors—such as when she died and how and why she died remained a mystery, as did anything pertaining to her identity.

  Police took the unusual step last September of issuing a forensic sketch of the woman, along with photos of jewellery she was wearing when pulled from the water. The drawing of the woman was a facial reconstruction, not an exact likeness. She was believed to have been between 35 and 50 years old and about 5'5" with a slim build. She may have worn dentures. It was h
oped the public plea for assistance would lead to a break in the case. But investigators were met with frustrating silence.

  “We have to sometimes think outside the box. We were very hopeful and optimistic at the time it might generate some discussion and get someone to come forward. Unfortunately that hasn’t happened,” said police Const. Jason Michalyshen. “The investigators really take these matters very personally. They really want to bring some closure out of respect for the individual.”

  Holens said his office held the woman’s remains until last October, then finally arranged for a brief funeral service and burial at Brookside. Predictably, nobody showed up. “We view it as a community service to try and make at least some reasonable effort to locate family,” said Holens.

  Holens had held his job for 13 years and said this was only the second case he could remember in which a person remained anonymous long past burial. He said there were typically about 70 cases a year in Manitoba in which a person whose identity was known died in relative obscurity and nobody would come forward immediately to claim the body. Usually about half are resolved quickly when a family member or friend is tracked down. The other half are given a service and burial similar to the one Miss X received last fall under the Manitoba Anatomy Act.

  “Usually there is nobody going, or you can count the attendance in terms of one or two,” said Holens, who does as much research as he can on the unclaimed person to plan a funeral that suits their religious background or even have them buried in the same cemetery as other deceased relatives. “But a lot of these unclaimed bodies, they chose to live that lifestyle, they like being on their own. And in some cases we’ll find family and they just refuse to claim because of family dynamics that go on,” he said.

  Of course, there’s no way of knowing what the family dynamics are in the case of Miss X. Winnipeg police had reached out to other jurisdictions, asking law enforcement to check their missing-persons’ databases to see if there could be a match. Forensic sciences hadn’t been able to offer much help so far.

  “This case is not closed in our eyes by any stretch of the imagination,” said Michalyshen. “Learning a bit about the history of this individual would certainly help us paint a better picture of what happened. We’d be taking quite a leap right now to try and say.”

  It is the type of case that can keep a police officer or medical examiner tossing and turning at night. Gordon Holens still can’t shake lingering thoughts of the very first “John Doe” buried under his watch as he now tried to find answers in a similar case involving the unidentified woman he dubbed “Miss X.” Holens said he often thinks about the anonymous man who was laid to rest about a decade ago in complete obscurity. He spent months trying to track down clues in the case only to be repeatedly met with frustration. Holens was only able to learn the following:

  The man appeared to be Korean, in his mid-30s and may have been financially well-off given the clothing and jewelry he was wearing. He came to Winnipeg and bought a one-way bus ticket at the downtown terminal. His final stop was Grand Rapids, about 400 kilometres north of Winnipeg.

  The man checked into a motel under a bogus name and paid cash. When he didn’t check out the following morning, staff entered his room and found him hanging. He had committed suicide.

  “As it so happened, the Korean ambassador was in town at the time and we had him look at the body,” Holens said. But they were never able to learn who the man was, where he came from or who he may have left behind. “He was probably running from something. I thought he may have been from the US,” said Holens.

  As of the deadline for this book, the identity of Miss X remains unknown. Her story is one that sticks with me far beyond the daily tales of despair coming from the court docket and police blotter. Winnipeg police and medical officials have continued searching for clues without any success. And so she continues to be a nameless victim of an unknown demise.

  Hopefully, in the months ahead, the mystery of Miss X can finally be solved. Anyone with information is asked to call the police missing persons unit at 204-986-6250 or Crime Stoppers at 204-786-TIPS (8477).

  Holens is also still searching for answers in his John Doe case.

  CHAPTER 14

  HORROR ON THE GREYHOUND

  WEDNESDAY JULY 30, 2008

  The mass email arrived at 9:21 p.m. from one of my editors at the Free Press, Helen Fallding. The subject line read “Homicide Volunteer.”

  “Someone decapitated on a Greyhound on highway past Portage la Prairie. Suspect barricaded inside the bus,” it began. Helen explained that a reporter and photographer were on their way out to the scene from Winnipeg. But that this was clearly an all-hands-on-deck type of situation. “Anyone willing to head out there and help out?” she concluded.

  My immediate reaction was that this must be some kind of a mistake. There was no possible way this could be true. Perhaps it was the result of some prankster phoning the newsroom, or some bizarre news tip. But a quick phone call to the news desk revealed it was deadly serious. The police scanner was buzzing with news of an incredible crime unfolding in the middle of the Prairies.

  Naturally, the initial instinct as a justice reporter was to rush out there to cover it. But there was just one little problem: I was more than 700 kilometres away, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on vacation with my family. It would be a couple days before I returned home and found myself immersed in the case that quickly made international headlines.

  Years later, it remains the story I am asked to talk about most often. But words are often difficult to come by. It was an unspeakable tragedy on many, many levels.

  TUESDAY AUGUST 5, 2008

  He swayed back and forth, staring blankly at the floor and responding to a series of questions with audible grunts and sudden jerks of his head—up and down in the affirmative, side to side in the negative. The heavily shackled man showed no visible reaction as the Crown attorney read aloud some of the facts of his alleged crimes, even while some courtroom spectators gasped.

  And then, quickly and quietly, he spoke for the first time. “Please kill me,” Vince Li, 40, said inside the packed courtroom in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba.

  Provincial court Judge Michel Chartier had heard and seen enough. Chartier agreed with the Crown’s request to order a forensic psychological assessment for Li, saying there appeared to be serious mental health issues that could affect whether the Chinese immigrant was fit to stand trial. Li was facing a second-degree murder charge for what seemed impossible to comprehend: The decapitation killing and cannibalization of a complete stranger, 22-year-old Tim McLean, on board a Greyhound bus. The unprovoked slaying of the Winnipeg carnival worker just days earlier had prompted an outpouring of grief and outrage.

  Dr. Frank Vattheur was set to meet with Li to try to get information to form an expert opinion that would determine if, or how, the case would proceed. If Vattheur ruled Li wasn’t fit to stand trial, that would effectively end the matter. Li would be sent indefinitely to a mental-health facility and held until, or unless, he was ever deemed ready to appreciate the legal process. The court case would resume at that point. If found fit to stand trial, the next issue would be whether Li was criminally responsible for his actions. Vattheur planned to submit an opinion on that issue as well. A finding of “not criminally responsible” would result in Li going to a hospital instead of prison. His release would be in the hands of medical professionals who would have the option of keeping him locked up and in treatment as long as they deemed necessary.

  Crown attorney Joyce Dalmyn revealed full details about the circumstances surrounding McLean’s killing. She did so at the invitation of Chartier, who wanted to know what her grounds were for seeking a forensic assessment. They weren’t for the faint of heart.

  Li had been exhibiting “bizarre and unusual behaviour” in recent weeks and months, including taking sudden bus trips to various cities in Canada for no apparent rea
son, Dalmyn said. Li had worked in the automotive department at an Edmonton Wal-Mart and delivered newspapers and flyers. The last day he was seen at work was Monday, July 28, two days before the deadly assault. His wife told an employer he had an “emergency” in Winnipeg and was coming for a job interview.

  Dalmyn told court Li attacked a sleeping McLean for absolutely no reason as the Greyhound bus travelled down the Trans-Canada Highway near Portage la Prairie, stabbing him as many as 40 times while 36 horrified passengers looked on. He got McLean on the floor and then sat on top of him in the aisle of the bus, stabbing away with a large hunting knife, court was told. A passenger called 911 while the Greyhound driver pulled over at the side of the highway, allowing all the passengers to flee. The driver then locked the bus with just Li and a mortally wounded McLean inside.

  Police rushed to the scene and surrounded the bus. Officers watched in horror as Li began carrying around McLean’s severed head and appeared to be taunting them with it, court was told. Li said nothing to police, except to tell them at one point, “I have to stay on this bus forever,” Dalmyn said. At one point, Li began cutting other body parts off McLean and was seen to consume some of them, she said. There were audible gasps in the packed courtroom at this revelation, including from several members of McLean’s family.

  “He appeared to be focused on his victim. He did not appear to be drunk or high,” Dalmyn said. “This was a completely random attack. There’s been no link established [between Li and McLean].”

  Police elected not to storm the bus, waiting until Li smashed out a window and tossed a bloody knife and scissors towards them. He then jumped from the broken window, cutting his hand on the shards of glass, and was arrested, Dalmyn said. Police searched him and found several severed body parts, including an ear, nose and partial mouth, inside a plastic bag in his pocket. Police tried to interview Li but he refused to make verbal responses. However, he did softly mutter that he was “guilty” at least four times, Dalmyn said.