The Bulldog and the Helix Read online

  Ship Creek Road had been built only recently, at MacMillan Bloedel’s expense, to provide a truck route from the mill to the chip dump off Sezai Road. Ship Creek crosses the city limits at Anderson Avenue and becomes Franklin River Road, which, in 1977, was still unpaved. Today, the entire stretch is seamlessly paved past Cox Lake, all the way to a junction at the City of Port Alberni chlorination station, which was installed in the 1960s. At the junction, a driver might swing left up the Cameron Main logging road toward Mount Arrowsmith or turn right and continue along Franklin River Road.

  From 1912 through 1957, the Alberni Valley was criss-crossed with rail lines, operated by a variety of companies, for extracting and hauling logs to the hodgepodge of mills that sprang up and disappeared over that period. By 1977, forest companies had converted entirely to truck logging; the railway tracks had been pulled and the steam locomotives hauled away to be resurrected decades later as tourist attractions. Some of the old railbeds and spur lines had been repurposed as roads, but in many instances, their remnants remained visible.

  One such old railbed ran by Lyle Price’s potato fields. That Friday morning, the fields were covered with a thin wet blanket of snow. Twenty-nine-year-old Price co-owned and operated Port Potato, a farm located at 725 Franklin River Road, past Cox Lake and just short of the junction at the chlorination station. It would be weeks before he could put in his seed potatoes. Price had to run into town that morning with a truckload of potatoes from last year’s crop.

  “It had been a miserable night, and my oldest kid was sick with the flu. We were up most of the night with him,” Price recalled, thirty-seven years later. “We had just gotten to bed with him, and we hadn’t gotten much sleep. Then, about one o’clock in the morning, my Labrador, Jake, started to growl, and he kept it up till about four. That was completely out of character for him.”

  Had it been a deer or a bear, Price says, Jake would have simply chased it out of the yard. Despite the official timeline, which put the suspects at Cox Lake just minutes after Carolyn’s abduction, Price still has his doubts about the prosecution’s version of events, based on Jake’s behaviour during the night of the killing. “My dog said they drove in there at one in the morning,” he said. “He had never in his whole life growled like that, and never did afterward.”

  Price got up at about 7:30 that morning and made his delivery run into Port Alberni. He returned later in the morning and did some chores in the potato warehouse before his wife Jackie called him to lunch. It was the first he had heard about the search for Carolyn.

  “My wife said, ‘I was just listening to the radio, and there’s a girl missing in town. They’re asking people to check their rural properties.’” That stirred a growing realization. Price had seen members of the Alberni Valley Rescue Squad at the edge of Franklin River Road, but they hadn’t come onto his property. He was still processing it when Jackie set the hook. “She said, ‘Remember how Jake was last night? Why don’t you get your bike out and have a look around.’”

  For years, Price said, he remembered taking Jackie’s suggestion and immediately launching a search of the farm on his dirt bike. But he concedes now that there must have been a gap of a few hours from lunchtime to when he started his actual search. Most likely, he believes, he completed a few more routine tasks before firing up the motorcycle. After making a few sweeps in different directions across the property, Price then sped down a short section of the old Weist Logging/Alberni Pacific Lumber Company railbed that ran past his house toward Cox Lake, a distance of about seven hundred metres. Close to the lake, a railway spur line cut into the main line at an angle of approximately 130 degrees, requiring any vehicle to make an extremely tight (and blind) right-hand turn. The spur line ran about 120 metres back to an abandoned landing that lay parallel to Franklin River Road, just below the roadway. At the junction, Price hit the brakes and came to a sudden stop.

  “There was a fresh set of tire tracks there. And I got a very bad feeling at that point,” he said. It was obvious to Price that the vehicle had been a four-wheel drive with heavy-duty traction tires because of the tread patterns and the fact that it hadn’t slipped in the muddy roadway. “The tire tracks came down it and made that turn without backing up or anything. Whoever went in there knew that road was there and had been there before.”

  With a sinking feeling, Price shut the bike down and began to walk up the spur, carefully staying between the tire tracks in the mud. After following the path for a hundred metres, he stopped. About twenty metres ahead, lying in front of the old landing, was the half-naked body of a young girl. “I got close enough to realize that she was deceased,” he said.

  Years later, Price recalls that he had the presence of mind to avoid contaminating the crime scene by rushing and in touching the body or leaving footprints all over the place. Now mindful that the entire area was an active crime scene, Price carefully backtracked to the junction and retrieved his motorcycle. Realizing that he was closer to his neighbour’s home than his own, he drove straight to the Murray farm to contact police. Price told Mrs. Murray that he had found the missing girl. He called the RCMP and told them he would show them where the body was located.

  In a show of force, detachment commander, Inspector Bob Stitt, joined Sergeant Blair and his team at the crime scene. “We parked at Franklin River Road and the junction into Cox Lake,” Blair said. “We left our vehicles there and walked in, just so we could preserve anything that was there.”

  Blair and his team found Carolyn lying on her left side, wearing only her ski jacket and her sneakers. A quick examination led them to believe she had died of head injuries. Investigators found the rest of her clothes scattered along a nearby path.

  The question of where the assault took place and whether the Cox Lake site was merely where her body was dumped has never been fully settled. Investigators found no obvious signs of struggle at the scene, and had Price not specifically conducted a search of the property, Carolyn’s body may not have been found for weeks or months. Blair believed that for a murderer with a body to dispose of, it might have looked like a quick and easy solution—but he had to know the area.

  “We worked into the night,” recalled Blair, “and left a member at the crime scene overnight. The Ident guys came in first thing the next morning and made casts of the [tire] tracks. I don’t remember any snow on the ground when we got to the crime scene, but it was muddy, and that was fortunate, because it made for clear impressions.”

  Over the next several days, police performed an extensive search of the entire area. “We got all our auxiliaries out and walked the Cox Lake bush from between where the body was found and Franklin River Road and right down to the lake. We basically joined hands and covered that whole property because we were looking for some sort of a weapon that he had used to hit her on the head with,” Blair said. They also collected and preserved a great deal of evidence, including a set of five vaginal swabs from Carolyn’s body and various soil samples from the crime scene. A sample of grit taken from a footprint on the back of Carolyn’s jacket would later prove critical in reopening the investigation.

  Dog teams tracked down scents, and a dive team waded the muddy shoreline of Cox Lake looking for a weapon or anything of interest. But on that first day, after telling his wife and fending off the initial waves of horror and dread, Price discovered one of the hard truths of police work: if you discover the body of a murder victim, you are automatically the first suspect—until someone better comes along.

  The RCMP called him at home that night, telling him he was required to come to the Sixth Avenue detachment “to answer some questions.” When Price arrived, he was escorted to a small room. It didn’t feel right. “I realized this was the interrogation room. They started to ask questions, and I gave them the details as I knew them. And they started grilling me pretty good.”

  After pushing the interrogation for a few more minutes, the officer in charge then demanded that Price undergo a lie detector test. Price re
alized the interrogators were swerving outside the lines of strict police procedure on the off chance he might reveal something voluntarily. And he wasn’t having any part of it. “I said, ‘Look—I’ve just been through something pretty traumatic. You can take your test and shove it.’ I said, ‘You want to know where I was last night, phone my wife.’”

  The next day, Saturday, April 16, the RCMP called him back in for another interview. The approach was softer, but still didn’t ring true. “This time, they said, ‘Don’t say anything to anybody.’” Price angrily assured police he wasn’t going to speak about his discovery of a murder scene. He had not spoken to reporters, and the RCMP assured him they had not released his name.

  The Alberni Valley Times would not publish their story, which referred to Price only as “a local resident,” until Monday, June 18. But that night, his phone started to ring. First it was the CBC, looking for comment, then the newspapers. Thirty-seven years later, his resentment was still palpable. “I was really pissed that they had released my name. I know the only place they could have got it from was the RCMP.”

  The investigators lost interest in Price as a suspect soon enough, but they did contact him occasionally during the ongoing investigation, usually for information about the physical layout of the farm or for local information. Sergeant Blair didn’t take part in the questioning, nor did he meet Price at the time of the investigation. “We didn’t really consider him any kind of a suspect,” Blair said. “But that request [to interview him] came from upstairs. That’s why we had to put the pressure on, to go through the process to satisfy the powers that be. I remember he was quite offended.”

  Price said he had the impression that the murder weapon was a wooden object, because RCMP divers spent several days combing Cox Lake, looking for something that may have been thrown into the lake and later washed ashore. Price told the divers that they were looking at the wrong end of the lake, based on his observation of the flooding that took place each winter. Rather than floating to the outfall at the lower end of the lake, he advised them, any floating debris would, due to the prevailing winds, accumulate at the higher end.

  “Nobody ever told me what killed her, but they did ask me where something wooden would end up,” he said. Sergeant Blair, however, said he didn’t recall anything specifically that indicated the murder weapon was wooden. “We were just looking for anything that could have been used.”

  Price subsequently reported one very strange and disturbing incident that took place a year later, almost on the anniversary of the crime. “It was about two o’clock in the morning. A vehicle came down our driveway and did a circle in the bottom of the driveway and drove out again. It was in the middle of the night. I got up. It woke me up because the dog barked. I looked out, and it was a frickin’ blue Blazer, and I’m sure it was an East Indian driving it.” At the time, however, Price had no idea that the RCMP had long established a suspect of Indo-Canadian descent who owned a blue Blazer.

  IT WAS THE tire tracks that led investigators to Gurmit Singh Dhillon, who at that time lived at 2595 Second Avenue with his common-law wife, Sharon McLeod, and her children. Investigators consulted local tire dealers to determine the type of tires involved. Pearson Tire was located kitty-corner to the foundry across Third Avenue, while Jack’s Tires was barely a block away on Kingsway. Owners Earl Pearson and Jack Mackenzie both concluded that the suspect’s vehicle was mounted with four 700 x 15 Seiberling commuter lug tires, typically used on four-wheel-drive trucks.

  From there it was a matter of getting enough investigators out on the street. The city was divided up into four zones, with a corporal in charge of each zone, and three or four patrol officers in each squad. The first target was parking lots. With so many men employed in shifts at the big MacMillan Bloedel operations, this tactic was expected to locate the suspect’s vehicle relatively quickly—provided he was a forest industry worker. Each officer carried a photograph of the tire tracks and knew to look for a four-wheel drive.

  Blair said one factor working in their favour was that investigators were sure the suspect was a local person. When Carolyn Lee’s body was first discovered, he explained, everybody was a suspect. Then, once it could be proved that a specific vehicle was involved, that narrowed down the focus. “But we knew it must be a local person, because, if you’re not a local person, you wouldn’t know that road into Cox Lake was there.”

  When parking lots failed to yield a matching truck, the search shifted to residences in the same zones. It was a combination of leads that led investigators to Dhillon’s driveway at the corner of Second Avenue and Bruce. On April 25, ten days after the body was discovered, Constable Ian MacDonald was assigned to investigate a claim by an Indigenous woman named Mildred Rose Mickey that, some time prior to the murder, she had been driven to the same wooded area near Cox Lake and indecently assaulted.

  With investigators already searching residential areas as part of the Lee investigation, MacDonald decided to drive Mickey through some of the neighbourhoods in town. When she spotted a blue 1977 Blazer in Dhillon’s driveway, she recognized it right away. Mickey told MacDonald it looked exactly like the truck driven by her assailant.

  Looking back, Blair said Mickey’s identification of the suspect’s vehicle was a real break. “There was nothing whatsoever pointing us towards Dhillon. We were just checking for tires, and he [MacDonald] was fortunate enough to drive her down that street.”

  Without probable cause to question the owner, MacDonald had to settle for a discreet inspection of the tires on the Blazer. All four tires were of the same heavy-duty traction tread, made by Seiberling. The size, 700 x 15, matched the specifications provided by Earl Pearson and Jack Mackenzie. For the past week, every patrol officer in Port Alberni had been carrying photographs of the tire impressions taken at the crime scene by the Ident unit. When MacDonald held up the photograph to the tires on the Blazer, it was a perfect match. After running the plates, MacDonald took Mickey back to the detachment to see if she could identify the suspect. Because Dhillon already had a police record, his picture was on file.

  Leafing through a series of police photographs, Mickey breezed right past Dhillon. When MacDonald risked pointing out Dhillon’s image, she was quick to dismiss it. “That’s not him,” she said. “He [the man she saw] isn’t a Hindu [Indo-Canadian].”

  Twenty-one years later, Dhillon’s defence counsel grilled MacDonald at trial, contending that the investigator had violated his integrity as a police officer by pointing out Dhillon’s image. But whether his actions constituted a breach of police policy in those pre-Charter of Rights and Freedoms times or not, they had categorically eliminated half the case against Gurmit Singh Dhillon. On the other hand, investigators still had the tire tracks, and they led straight to the foundry owner’s son.

  On the Monday that MacDonald and Mickey identified Dhillon’s Blazer as the suspect vehicle, the Alberni Valley Times published an update on the story under the headline “Investigation Help Sought.” With Sergeant Blair as the source, it announced that no new leads had been reported although “questioning of people in town and a ground search of the area” continued. At this point, Blair wanted to find out just how many people knew about the Cox Lake spur road and how travelled it was. “Police say no weapon was found by divers searching muddy Cox Lake,” the report continued. Blair told the Times that he particularly wanted “to hear from youths who frequently visited the area for drinking parties, girls who were driven there by their boyfriends, or fishermen who visited the spots.”

  Blair also reported that, in the course of the ongoing investigation, the RCMP had learned of “several sex-related offences that occurred up to two years ago,” likely referring to the Mickey assault. “[The] RCMP have no plans to lay charges in connection with old sexual offences that surface during the course of their investigation,” Blair concluded.

  Having staked out the ground rules in the Times concerning unconnected sexual offences, Blair went to the Alberni Foundr
y the following day to take a statement from Dhillon. Blair had been careful not to reveal that police had a suspect in their sights—what he had was a guy whose tire tracks matched impressions taken at the crime scene, and that was it. “That’s why we didn’t advertise that we were looking for someone with Seiberling tires, because they wouldn’t last too long. Anyone with any sense would either get rid of them or call us up and say, ‘I’ve got those tires. I wasn’t there.’” Blair knew he needed more than a plaster cast to make an arrest. “What we needed was that one piece of evidence that would put Carolyn in that truck.”

  Mickey had positively identified the blue Blazer, but emphatically excluded the owner as her assailant. Blair and MacDonald subsequently drove Mickey out to the Cox Lake area to see if she could identify the site where her assault had taken place. Blair said she did not react when they drove past the spur line where Carolyn’s body was found. Mickey only expressed a vague familiarity with a couple of derelict vehicles in the general area. That didn’t give Blair a lot of leverage with which to confront a murder suspect.

  “When I interviewed Dhillon, I knew he would have an alibi, which is fine. All I wanted to do was get the alibi down, and then what you do is try to disprove it. I wanted to get out of him that nobody borrowed his truck that evening; that was the big thing.”

  Faced with direct questions from the lead RCMP investigator, Dhillon made no attempt to implicate any associate. On the evening of April 14, he told Blair, he had stayed at the foundry until sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 PM, drinking with his father, two brothers, and a couple of customers. This was fairly normal activity at the foundry, he maintained.

  After locking up, Dhillon, as was his practice, drove straight out of the foundry parking lot to the Somass Division car wash and had the Blazer hosed down. After that, he told Blair, he drove straight to the Beaufort Hotel, located at Third Avenue and Mar, just two blocks south of Argyle. According to his statement, Dhillon went into the beer parlour and ordered two beers. He saw one acquaintance, Don McMurtry, and spoke to the bartender, Ken Sherman. He called McLeod at home, was unable to reach her, and then ordered two more beer. Later, while he drank, McLeod called the hotel, looking for him. Dhillon said he left the bar at 8:30 and that McLeod was angrily waiting for him outside. She then followed him home, a drive of just seven blocks, in her car. Perhaps significantly, however, they did confirm that he was familiar with the road into Cox Lake. “We used to drink there as kids,” he told Blair.