Mindy Tran 8 Yr Old. Murdered 1994 Kelowna, BC No One Convicted.

[Gregory Carr]

Canada
Murrin acquitted in Mindy Tran murder

CBC News · Posted: Jan 26, 2000 2:47 AM ET | Last Updated: November 10, 2000
Shannon Murrin jumped from his chair and clapped his hands when he heard the verdict in the murder trial of 8-year-old Mindy Tran. Not guilty. He was free to go.

"I knew today would come," he said outside the courthouse. "I can't believe it, well I can believe it, I've got two really good lawyers."

Justice Alexander Henderson of the British Columbia Supreme Court had explained to the jurors they had three options to choose from: not guilty, guilty of first-degree murder or guilty of second-degree murder.

After almost a week of deliberations, they decided Murrin wasn't guilty. He gave them a thumbs-up signal as they filed out of the courtroom.

The RCMP said they have no plans to reopen the investigation. Const. Garth Letcher said they believe "the appropriate person was charged".

Timeline
Aug. 17, 1994 -Tran disappears Aug. 22, 1994 - search called off Oct. 11, 1994 - body recovered in Kelowna park Jan. 14, 1997 - Murrin charged Aug. 4, 1999 - trial begins Jan. 17, 2000 - jury begins deliberation Jan. 25, 2000 - not guilty verdict
Mindy disappeared from her neighbourhood in August 1994, just after supper. She rode her bike down her quiet Kelowna street and vanished.
Hundreds of people searched for the girl but her body wasn't found until six weeks later when a man with a divining rod led police to a shallow grave near her parents' home. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

The RMCP suspected Murrin, who lived near the Trans, from the start but the evidence was largely circumstantial.

The trial was originally scheduled to begin in May 1998, but was postponed after a British lab completed DNA tests that linked Murrin to three hairs found in Mindy's underwear at the gravesite. Previous DNA tests on the hairs, done in Canada, had been inconclusive.

More than 80 witnesses testified at the trial that lasted nearly seven months.

The Crown suggested that Murrin had killed and sexually abused Mindy, stuffed her body into a suitcase and then taken it to a Kelowna park where he covered it with leaves and twigs.

The defence argued that Murrin was at a friend's house at the time Mindy disappeared and that police had convinced a defence witness, Murrin's main alibi, to change his story and say Murrin was there more than an hour later.

Murrin's lawyers accused the RCMP's lead investigator Sgt. Gary Tidsbury of trying to manufacture a case against their client, and of manipulating witnesses.

Murrin had been badly beaten by three men who said they were enlisted by the RCMP in a bid to get him to confess.

The Tran family was not in the courtroom when the verdict was announced. They released a statement which said they were unhappy and confused with the results of the trial.

Murrin says his next move is back home to Newfoundland. "I'm going home to be with my family. I had a girlfriend there five years ago. I don't know if she's still there. We'll soon find out.

As for the Trans he says "I just feel so very, very, sorry for the Tran family, but there's nothing I can do for that, right."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/murrin-acquitted-in-mindy-tran-murder-1.208935 I just saw on Channel 21 that the body was found 4 blocks from her parents case.

http://www.mindytran.com/ this website claims that the man acquitted was a police informant.

‘Every night they are still so angry’: Memorial held 25 years after Mindy Tran’s abduction

By Sydney Morton Global News
Posted November 16, 2019 3:07 pm
Updated November 18, 2019 9:10 pm
News: 25th anniversary of Mindy Tran's murder
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It's been 25 years since eight-year-old Mindy Tran was murdered in Kelowna. Her killer has never been brought to justice. Jules Knox takes a look back at the case full of twists and turns. – Nov 18, 2019
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It’s a story that rocked Kelowna 25 years ago.


In 1994, the body of eight-year-old Mindy Tran was found in Mission Creek Regional Park, Tran was abducted while riding her bike in a Rutland neighbourhood.

Her body was found six weeks later in a shallow grave after intensive searches across the city, which then was home to just over 76,000 people.

Shannon Murrin, a neighbour, was charged with her murder, but was acquitted and returned to Newfoundland, joined by one of his jurors, Kathy MacDonald, who later admitted they had fallen in love during the trial.

READ MORE: Kelowna residents band together to protect kids

Since Murrin’s acquittal, the murder remains unsolved.

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Today, 25 years later, a small group of mourners met at the Mindy Tran Memorial, a tree with a sign next to it featuring her school photo and a dedication to the memory of the little girl.

The dedication reads, “See this tree that will grow instead of Mindy.”

Roses were laid, kisses were blown and a prayer was said in Tran’s memory.

“I want to remember the little girl … I want her to rest in peace,” said Shui Lee, a friend of Tran family who helped search for Mindy.

Lee spoke on behalf of her parents who did not attend the ceremony because it was “too painful.” However, Lee said that the couple is still grateful for the support of the community in the search for their daughter.

“Every night they are still so angry,” said Lee.

READ MORE: Man accused in 1987 Toronto abduction gets prison time in U.S.

For Sandi Giddings, her son lost a best friend all those years ago.

“There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t think of her,” said Giddings, who also helped search for Tran.

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“She was a very lovely girl, a beautiful girl inside and out … Kelowna shouldn’t be forgetting this. This was a tragic thing … we need to remember this.”

A reporter at CHBC when Tran was abducted, Deputy Mayor Mohini Singh has never forgotten the effect of the little girls’ disappearance.

“It was a time [when] Kelowna lost its innocence,” Singh said. “Mindy’s story sent shockwaves through this community.”
“I never forgot Mindy and I remember [when] I was single and I worked for the TV station, my colleagues and I on the weekend went out with the search teams to look for any evidence that would tell us what happened to Mindy.”
Tran’s memorial and her tree sits at the Springfield/ Ziprick Road parking lot, close to where she was found.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6178566/memorial-mindy-tran-abduction-25-years/

https://www.kelownacapnews.com/news/twenty-years-since-disappearance-still-no-justice-for-mindy-tran/ a man with a diving rod found the body, the man acquitted filed a lawsuit against the RCMP and settled out of court. In 2009, Murrin settled out of court a lawsuit where he alleged Sgt. Tidsbury manufactured the case against him, and that the three men were enlisted to beat a confession out of him.

He spent 11 days in hospital as a result of his injuries at that time.

The details of that settlement haven’t been released.

https://www.kelownacapnews.com/news/twenty-years-since-disappearance-still-no-justice-for-mindy-tran/

Case #1: RCMP Sgt. Gary Tidsbury involvement in attack on suspect in Mindy Tran’s murder
2 Votes

IMBALANCE IN THE COURT ROOM (PART 3)

The following is the first case in a series where we examine several of Richard Peck’s cases where he acted on behalf of the government as a special prosecutor. The analysis will demonstrate at the very least a perception that Peck may have a pro-accused viewpoint that may lead to a propensity to withdraw charges in cases involving police or government officials. Peck’s pro-accused bias created a perception that he was not independent when he acted as special prosecutor in case against former Ontario Attorney General, Michael Bryant.

(R. v. Murrin, 1999 CanLII 6025 (BC SC)



On August 17, 1994 eight year old Mindy Tran disappeared near her home in Rutland, BC. Her body was discovered on October 11, 1994. The prime suspect in her murder was a neighbour, Shannon Murrin. He would be arrested, tried and acquitted of her murder.





An RCMP review of the police investigation found that it “was plagued from its first day by police mistakes and personnel problems that ultimately doomed their case against Shannon Murrin” (“Tran murder case doomed from first day, review says”, Globe and Mail, July 18, 2001)





The report noted that the lead investigator, RCMP Sergeant Gary Tidsbury, should have been replaced. “The downfall of this case was the integrity of the investigation.” “There were a few whose bad judgment, loss of objectivity and a failure to live up to one’s duty as a member of the RCMP contributed to the downfall of this file.”





Murrin’s defence attorney’s argued that Tidsbury investigated with tunnel vision and decided very early that Murrin was guilty.





The review team said that the integrity of the investigation came in to question as a result of a beating of Murrin by three men, “described by RCMP spokesman Cpl. Grant Learned as controlled by the police.” (“Review critical of RCMP”, Kelowna Capital News, July 18th, 2001). The men claimed they were put up to the beating by investigators, including Gary Tidsbury.


Two of the men involved in the beating of Murrin filed a complaint with the RCMP which led to a criminal investigation into allegations that Tisdbury encouraged and arranged for the men to beat a confession out of Murrin. This was a serious allegation that could embarrass the RCMP and the government so Richard Peck was brought in as a special prosecutor to review the possibility of charges.



Special prosecutor Richard Peck said his investigation focused solely on Tidsbury’s role in the beating of Murrin, not the entire criminal investigation.



“We were looking primarily at whether the evidence would substantiate a charge in terms of an assault or criminal negligence or bodily harm sort of charge,” said Peck. (“Shannon Murrin claps hands, gives jury thumbs up as it finds him not guilty in death of Mindy Tran”, Vancouver Sun, January 26, 2000)



During the trial (R. v. Murrin, 1999 CanLII 6025 (BC SC) Murrin’s defence attorney’s presented evidence that Tidsbury knew of the impending beating and did nothing to stop it.

A Saturday Night feature article by Shawn Blore explained the evidence against Tidsbury (“Love on the Run”, Saturday Night July 29, 2000):



On December 29, 1994, with an undercover operation that had gone nowhere, Tidsbury visited Murrin’s buddy Bob Holmes and convinced him that Murrin was the killer. Holmes, an ex-con, was infuriated. “I would just as soon kill the bastard who did it myself,” Holmes told Tidsbury in a taped conversation. “Couldn’t agree with you more,” Tidsbury replied.



With Tidsbury’s encouragement, Holmes decided to ask Murrin some questions. On January 5, he and a pair of hefty friends showed up at Murrin’s place with a tire iron. Murrin tried to scare them off with a .22-calibre rifle, but Holmes, who had been negotiating to buy the gun from Murrin, knew it wasn’t loaded. Murrin was knocked on the back of the head, thrown down his stairs, tossed in the back of a waiting pickup and driven to Mission Creek Park. The bridge over the creek was gated and locked, so they hoisted Murrin over the fence and let him drop six feet onto the concrete on the far side.



Screaming prompted someone to call the police. A pair of uniformed officers arrived at the scene, but according to radio logs, Tidsbury’s deputy, Constable Gerry Webb, sent them away. “You weren’t here,” one cop testified Webb instructed him. “Don’t take any notes.” (In court Webb denied this.) The logs then indicate Tidsbury himself called the dispatcher and had all the uniformed patrolmen removed from the scene. Tidsbury’s detectives drove to a near-by mall, parked, and waited. Forty-five minutes later, Tidsbury finally moved in to find Murrin, bleeding, half-buried in the snow, cranial fluid leaking from his ears. Police told the ambulance it was a routine call and not to bother with the lights and siren.



Tidsbury, in many long appearances on the stand, unequivocally denied all allegations of impropriety. (Now living in Calgary and retired from the RCMP, he was invited directly, and through RCMP channels, to comment on his role in the investigation, but he never returned calls.)



Beth Killaly, another detective on the Tran case, testified that the afternoon before the beating Tidsbury himself told her about the plan for Holmes to extract a confession from Murrin. She testified that Tidsbury told her, “We might find Murrin tied to a tree at [Tran’s] gravesite.” So stark was Killaly’s contradiction of Tidsbury’s testimony that defence counsel Peter Wilson said that one of them had to be lying. Killaly, he added, had no reason to lie.



Peck completed his investigation in February 1999, almost a year before the trial was over but his decision was not released until the day Murrin was acquitted on January 26, 2000. Peck decided not to bring charges against Tidsbury. He said there was “insufficient evidence to charge Tidsbury” and “no likelihood of a conviction if a charge was laid”.



Shannon Murrin filed a lawsuit in B.C. court against Gary Tidsbury, the federal government and the three men who beat him, Patrick Dunn, Robert Holmes and Ken Macdonald. The federal government and the RCMP settled the suit one week before it went to trial, with Murrin receiving an undisclosed substantial sum of money.



Murrin, in an interview at his home near St. John’s on Thursday, confirmed that a settlement was reached and that he was satisfied with it.

“They paid the money because they done wrong,” he said. “They committed criminal acts.”

Murrin also believes the Mounties didn’t want the case to go to trial.

“If it had’ve gone to court, everything would’ve come out,” he said. “And the way the RCMP is looking right now across Canada, it’s not too good. They didn’t want that.” (“Shannon Murrin settles civil suit with RCMP”, December 31, 2009)

In this case RCMP officers’ testimony corroborated the testimony of the men who admitted to beating a suspect. They corroborated testimony that these men were encouraged by an RCMP police sergeant. The RCMP had so little confidence in its ability to win a civil case surrounding the accusations that they settled to avoid a trial and paid a large sum of money to a man they still believe to be a child murderer. The RCMP sergeant facing the serious accusations retired shortly after the accusations surfaced. He retired even before the trial of the murder suspect was complete.

Yet the Special Prosecutor, Richard Peck decided there was insufficient evidence to even lay a charge against the RCMP sergeant. The special prosecutor is supposed to be the buffer between government and any appearance of conflict of interest. He is supposed to instill confidence in the public that no special treatment is given to those in power. He is supposed to instill confidence in the public that there is not even any appearance of special treatment to those in power.

https://bryantwatch.wordpress.com/2016/12/05/case-1-rcmp-sgt-gary-tidsbury-involvement-in-attack-on-suspect-in-mindy-trans-murder/

https://ucfiles.com/Files/1994/tran.php


LOVE ON THE RUN
By Shawn Blore

Shannon Murrin


Soon after juror Kathy Macdonald helped acquit Shannon Murrin of a sensational child murder, she followed him to Newfoundland. Now she's cashed in her Kitsilano condo for a trailer in St. John's. They say it's love, but that's not all they want

By Shawn Blore

In St. John's, a road-salt town of twisting, narrow streets, a mint-condition 1970 Monte Carlo is an unusual sight. Add to that a front novelty licence plate reading "Evil, Wicked, Mean & Nasty" and a driver who has shaved his head bald in celebration of his return to Newfoundland, and the result is a stare at every corner.

Not that Shannon Murrin cares. This is his hometown. He's free. So he takes it slow with the window down, pointing out the sights and giving a narrated tour of the city's landmarks. "There's Signal Hill," he says. "That's Quidi Vidi Lake there, where they hold the fireworks."

We come to a tall blue wall topped by a guard tower. "There's Her Majesty's. I spent a few years in there off and on."

Just outside the old downtown we pull into a gas station. Murrin opts for full service, tells the attendant to fill 'er up, then turns to Kathy Macdonald. "Get out the credit card, woman," he says, adding to me, as she digs into her purse, "Soon as the credit card's full, soon as her Visa's expired, that's it. Out she goes." Macdonald gives him a good-natured laugh.

They're a curious couple: a man who's just been through a six-month trial for the sex slaying of eight-year-old Mindy Tran, and a woman who served on the jury that set him free. Even they thought their relationship was odd at first. "When we started going out and that," Murrin recalls, "I says, 'This feels. . . . How does it make you feel?' And she says, 'A bit strange.' And I said, 'Yeah, me too.' So we dealt with that for a while until we realized that what we were doing was really normal."

That's not what a lot of other people thought. When Murrin was found not guilty, his own cries of justice gone wrong - of being the fourth "M" in a series that runs Morin, Marshall, and Milgaard - received little attention. He'd been let off, but a strong whiff of suspicion still hung over him. When it came out that one of the jurors had followed him home to Newfoundland and was now living with him, that got people talking again.

At first, Macdonald protested that her relationship with Murrin was strictly business; the two of them were writing a book together. Sure she was staying with him at his mother's house in St. John's, but that was just down-East hospitality. It was weeks before Macdonald and Murrin admitted what everyone else had already assumed. They were a couple.

This was hardly a reprise of the Gillian Guess saga, however. True, both Guess and Macdonald are from Vancouver. And both are women of a certain age who elected to start relationships with men accused of murder on whose juries they served. But there are important differences. Guess started sleeping with Peter Gill during the trial. Macdonald's relationship with Murrin began only after he'd been acquitted. Guess ran around bragging about her accomplishment and seemed to regard her obstruction-of-justice trial as a springboard to kitschy celebrity. Macdonald has been cautiously circumspect.

Yet to some extent, the question remains the same. Given sanity, intelligence, and free will, why would any woman choose to associate herself with a man police would like to see put away in a small concrete cell?

Even if, in her flakier moments, Macdonald will say she and Murrin were linked from the start - born as they were within three weeks of each other in 1950 - their backgrounds could hardly have been more different.

Murrin was a hellraiser from the get-go, starting his criminal career with small burglaries of summer cottages, always carrying a fishing pole along so he wouldn't look suspicious. But he quickly graduated to bigger things. He's proudest of his bank jobs, including, as he often mentions, "the biggest bank job in the history of Newfoundland." That heist, in 1972, netted Murrin about $70,000, plus some serious time in a federal penitentiary after a former friend ratted him out. Less readily mentioned are his many convictions for fights in bars and gas-station lots. (Absent from his record is any conviction for a crime of a sexual nature.) Murrin also had a respectable trade as an auto-body man, and, plying one skill set or the other, he made his way over the years in and out of a marriage, several prisons, and across the country. It was a spontaneous, unattached existence, but one Murrin says he was happy with. "I wouldn't change one thing I ever done. Not one."

Where Murrin was content to drift, Macdonald took the opposite tack. "I've spent my life trying to fit in," she says, "usually feeling like an oddball." It was true in her family; it was true in the working world. After high school, Macdonald got a job with the Toronto-Dominion Bank in Vancouver, fully expecting within a year or so to be home raising children. A marriage duly followed at the age of twenty-one, but then a divorce ensued two years later.

Eschewing the traditional tel-ler's wicket, Macdonald asked to be placed on the bond desk. Over the course of several years, she became a certified general accountant and picked up a broker's licence, becoming the first female trader hired by Peter Brown, the dean of Vancouver's stock-market scene. She made some money. The high point of her brokerage career occurred when she took a company through a public offering and saw the stock take off. She netted around $250,000. Then the oddball side of her character kicked in once again. Most brokers, after making a pile of money, set out to make more. Macdonald set out to find some meaning in her life.

She travelled to Europe, a thirty-six-year-old woman schlepping around a backpack. She went to Toronto, hung out, and tended bar for a time. She was back out west in Calgary working for the Alberta Stock Exchange when the biological imperative hit with a whump. She latched on to the first likely mate and spent the next two years frantically trying for children.

But 1992 found Macdonald still childless and again single, now persuing a general arts b.a. at the University of British Columbia. As if being a forty-two-year-old undergrad weren't enough, Macdonald liked to reaffirm her outsider status by taking the right-wing Fraser Institute's line during discussions with her classmates in women's-studies courses.

Hellraising, perhaps - though of a safe, academic sort. Nothing that Murrin would have been interested in. What eventually brought the two together was the disappearance, on August 17, 1994, of eight-year-old Mindy Tran.

Murrin's wanderings had by then brought him to Kelowna, B.C., where, having recently been laid off from his auto-body job, he spent that day getting drunk. Sometime before 6 p.m., he wandered back to the duplex on Taylor Road where he was boarding, flopped onto his cot in the living room, and passed out.

By 8:30 that evening he'd come to and was sitting in the carport of a friend's place - a burly ex-Newfoundlander named Bob Holmes - having yet another beer. A police cruiser pulled up to the curb and asked if they'd seen a missing girl named Mindy Tran.

Murrin knew Mindy. She lived just a few doors down. She sometimes came over to the duplex to play with the daughter of his landlord. Murrin said he hadn't seen her, then set out to help search.

Over the next several days, more than 500 volunteers came out to poke into dumpsters and comb through backyards and the nearby Mission Creek Park. It was the largest search operation ever conducted in Canada, and it turned up absolutely nothing.

The police investigation was on a similar scale. Twenty-one officers were first assigned, then thirty a week later. By September 14 there were forty-four detectives working the Tran file. Heading the investigation was Sergeant Gary Tidsbury, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the rcmp, and head of the Kelowna detachment of plainclothes detectives.

On October 10, they finally found Mindy's body, buried in a shallow grave in Mission Creek Park, about two kilometres from where she was last seen.

Within days, police had a scenario. Mindy had last been seen in the vicinity of Murrin's duplex. Her bicycle had been found on its lawn. At some point, she was seen going up his steps. Behind the door was a man with a long criminal record. By late October, Tidsbury had come to the firm conclusion that Murrin was guilty. Now it was just a question of proving it. Murrin wouldn't be charged in the murder for more than two years, and he wouldn't come to trial until 1999, but because of Tidsbury's suspicions he would spend the next five years behind bars.

The call for jury duty in the summer of 1999 caught Kathy Macdonald at a conveniently loose end. Her fling with academia was over, culminating in a degree in classical studies. She'd been wondering what to do next, so when the call came, she thought, "Why not?"

She liked the idea of public service. There were family expectations, too. Her sister, a prison guard, made it clear what she expected of Kathy. "Your job is to give the Tran family closure," she said. And then there was Kathy's unadulterated curiosity.

Josiah Wood, the Crown attorney, was a legal heavyweight, a former appeals-court judge who'd been brought in especially to prosecute the Tran case. The Crown's theory, as outlined during Wood's opening address, was this: Murrin had awoken about the time Mindy came looking for her friend. Murrin let Mindy in, then tried to rape her, in the process strangling the girl. He then stuffed her corpse in a suitcase, ducked out the back door, jumped a few fences, and walked to Mission Creek, which he hopped across on the exposed rocks before burying Mindy in a heavily wooded patch. Then he ran back to his buddy's place in time to be there when the police stopped by.

The problem was the timing. Mindy had been seen alive as late as 6:45 p.m. At least one witness insisted repeatedly that he saw Murrin at Holmes's house at 7 p.m., making it impossible for him to have committed the murder. Later, however, that witness changed his mind about the time. In fact, many of the witnesses at the trial seemed to reconsider testimony they'd initially given police. In every case, the change in testimony favoured the police case against Murrin. Often witnesses' memories seemed to improve after a police officer had paid a visit. Often, that police officer was Gary Tidsbury.

For Macdonald, the most notable thing about the timing testimony was the confusion. "They had him everywhere, all at the same time. He was dragging suitcases along the street, he was dancing across the creek. I'm calling that chapter of my book 'The Ubiquitous Shannon Murrin.' "

There was also a problem with the so-called "suitcase witnesses." Ten people testified that on the night of the disappearance they had seen a man with a suitcase walking on the streets around Taylor Road. Some testified that the suitcase seemed to be very heavy. Others said it was light. Unfortunately for the Crown, weight was hardly the only difference between suitcases. Witnesses recalled seeing soft-cover suitcases, hard-shell suitcases, beige suitcases, navy suitcases, suitcases made of leather, cardboard, and vinyl. So many types and sizes, in fact, that the suitcase witnesses degenerated into a bit of a joke with the jury. When they assembled their own luggage for transportation to the hotel, someone looked at the wide variety of piled-up luggage and joked, "Ah, so there's the suitcase."

The only other bit of humour was provided by the testimony of an informant by the name of Doug Martin. Just forty-three years old in 1995, Martin had in his thirty-year criminal career amassed over 105 convictions, most of them for fraud or deceit; one was for perjury.

Then in prison, Martin had contacted police to offer his services as an informant. After talking with Tidsbury twice, he was placed in a cell with Murrin, and within ninety minutes, Murrin was giving Martin highly incriminating evidence about the very things Tidsbury was most interested in. Or so Martin claimed.

Martin had a remarkable track record, including having been present for the confessions of eight other accused killers. One of those was Thomas Sophonow. In June, 2000, after the Murrin trial was over, Winnipeg police apologized to Soph-onow after dna evidence conclusively proved he had had nothing to do with a killing Martin maintained he'd confessed to.

Even without that information defence counsel Peter Wilson still managed, over the course of a brutal three-day cross-examination, to thoroughly destroy Martin's credibility. At times, Martin got so wrapped up in his own lies that members of the jury seemed to be struggling to hold back laughter. By the end, Macdonald explains, "I wanted to get up and cheer."



Kathy Macdonald





She felt differently at the end of the testimony about Murrin's beating. On December 29, 1994, with an undercover operation that had gone nowhere, Tidsbury visited Murrin's buddy Bob Holmes and convinced him that Murrin was the killer. Holmes, an ex-con, was infuriated. "I would just as soon kill the bastard who did it myself," Holmes told Tidsbury in a taped conversation. "Couldn't agree with you more," Tidsbury replied.

With Tidsbury's encouragement, Holmes decided to ask Murrin some questions. On January 5, he and a pair of hefty friends showed up at Murrin's place with a tire iron. Murrin tried to scare them off with a .22-calibre rifle, but Holmes, who had been negotiating to buy the gun from Murrin, knew it wasn't loaded. Murrin was knocked on the back of the head, thrown down his stairs, tossed in the back of a waiting pickup and driven to Mission Creek Park. The bridge over the creek was gated and locked, so they hoisted Murrin over the fence and let him drop six feet onto the concrete on the far side.

Screaming prompted someone to call the police. A pair of uniformed officers arrived at the scene, but according to radio logs, Tidsbury's deputy, Constable Gerry Webb, sent them away. "You weren't here," one cop testified Webb instructed him. "Don't take any notes." (In court Webb denied this.) The logs then indicate Tidsbury himself called the dispatcher and had all the uniformed patrolmen removed from the scene. Tidsbury's detectives drove to a near-by mall, parked, and waited. Forty-five minutes later, Tidsbury finally moved in to find Murrin, bleeding, half-buried in the snow, cranial fluid leaking from his ears. Police told the ambulance it was a routine call and not to bother with the lights and siren.

Tidsbury, in many long appearances on the stand, unequivocally denied all allegations of impropriety. (Now living in Calgary and retired from the rcmp, he was invited directly, and through rcmp channels, to comment on his role in the investigation, but he never returned calls.)

Beth Killaly, another detective on the Tran case, testified that the afternoon before the beating Tidsbury himself told her about the plan for Holmes to extract a confession from Murrin. She testified that Tidsbury told her, "We might find Murrin tied to a tree at [Tran's] gravesite." So stark was Killaly's contradiction of Tidsbury's testimony that defence counsel Peter Wilson said that one of them had to be lying. Killaly, he added, had no reason to lie.

(The day Murrin was released from hospital after the beating, Tidsbury arrested him for pointing the unloaded .22 at Holmes. He served two years plus a day. He was charged with the Tran murder shortly after he got out.)

The last significant piece of Crown evidence was a fragment of mitochondrial dna (mtdna), drawn from some pubic hairs found on Tran's clothes. According to the Crown's experts, this mtdna match- ed Murrin's. But there were problems there too. The experts admitted that although it is more re-silient, mtdna is not as definitive as the more established nuclear dna. All individuals along a maternal line share the same mtdna, and it's also possible for totally unrelated people to have identical mtdna strands. The likelihood of this occurring was given at one in 128, or 781 people in a city of 100,000.

When it came time to consider their verdict, the six men and six women deliberated for a full seven days. On January 25, 2000, the jury came back into the room and a number of them, Kathy Macdonald included, were smiling at Murrin. The verdict was not guilty.

The evening he was freed from jail, Shannon Murrin had a bit of a celebration at an airport hotel. Kathy Macdonald wanted to go. She let on her desire to her fellow juror Chantal Laverdure. "'I don't want you involved with that man,'" Laverdure says she told Macdonald. " 'Promise me you won't get involved.' " Macdonald didn't make the promise, but neither did she make it to the party. Murrin and she had, to that point, exchanged not even a word. So she watched the footage on the late news that night of Murrin catching a fiight back to Newfoundland.

Still, she couldn't stop thinking about the trial. Ten days after it ended, she got Murrin's number from directory assistance and gave him a call. She wasn't the only one. Two other jurors, according to Murrin, also called him in the aftermath of the not-guilty verdict. Macdonald asked him what he was up to. Not much, he said, thinking of writing a book. Those were exactly the sort of words to pique Macdonald's interest. She had once tried her hand at mystery writing, creating a plot for an elaborate stock-market thriller. Somehow it never got done. This material was even better.

"I wouldn't mind writing the story," Murrin recalls her saying. "And I said, 'Well, if you're really interested, come down and talk to me about it.' " Macdonald flew out a few days later.

When the relationship became public, and Macdonald returned home to prepare for her move east, the Vancouver Police Department announced that she was being placed under investigation for possible obstruction of justice.

Being under investigation, says Macdonald, "really freaked me out." She contacted Murrin's lawyer, Peter Wilson, for advice. She also called up Gillian Guess, who suggested the two meet to talk. In Guess's experience, phones and bedrooms and other private places were liable to harbour microphones, so the two eventually met in a park and walked their dogs together. The next day, to Macdonald's surprise, shots of the two with their respective pooches were splashed across the front pages. Very quickly, however, Macdonald got used to the media attention. She went on a radio phone-in show with Guess. By the time Canada am had them set up for an early-morning interview, Macdonald and Murrin, back in Vancouver for a visit, were comfortable enough to share a joint beforehand.

They stuck to beer - a Kokanee for Murrin, a Corona for Macdonald - at our first meeting in a Vancouver restaurant. In short order, Macdonald began discussing mtdna and how certain populations that are genetically similar - like Newfoundlanders - could have a greater than usual percentage of people with identical mtdna sequences. Murrin, listening in, got increasingly agitated by all this technical talk.

"It was all shit. Ah, now I'm pissed off." With that he stood up, slammed his Kokanee on the table, and stalked off. Macdonald stared at his retreating back, then shrugged. "I think the beating has given him a really short fuse." I took the opportunity to question Macdonald more closely on her personal life, wondering aloud if the relationship is largely about sex. For the first time since I'd met her, she laughed. "After menopause it's just not quite the same," she said. "My girlfriends and I keep waiting for when we'll want to have sex again."

Murrin, it seems, appeals to a different set of desires. Part of it is literary. Murrin and Macdonald are indeed trying to write a book. Part of it is adventure. "I'm fifty years old," she said, draining her Corona. "If there was ever a time to do what I want in life it's now. Going to Newfoundland is a big adventure."

A few evenings later I headed over to Macdonald's west-side condo for a farewell party. Murrin was there, along with three or four of Macdonald's friends, having a beer, and, in Murrin's case, another joint. Macdonald's girlfriends had mostly been accepting of Murrin. Mostly. A neighbour with whom Macdonald shared condo keys turned white when Macdonald told her she was going to Newfoundland. Then she had her locks changed. She hasn't spoken to Macdonald since.

Macdonald's family was equally leery of Murrin. Her father refused to meet him. So did her sister. "That's their problem," said Macdonald. "They know where to find me if they want me. It's their turn to make an effort."

Before Macdonald finally packed up and left Vancouver, however, something happened to change her family's minds. A television reporter turned up two startling bits of evidence that the defence had never received. Way back in August, 1994, a woman, a neighbour of the Trans', had told an ex-rcmp officer and a Missing Children investigator that on August 17 she twice drove past a little pink bicycle left in the street in front of Murrin's house, not on the lawn. The ex-cop and the investigator made a point of getting this information to Kelowna rcmp. Whether deliberately or not, the rcmp did not pass this information on to the defence.

The second revelation was that during the trial, a man in jail for a sexual offence had confessed to the killing. According to the report, the man told a fellow inmate that he had killed Mindy in an abandoned house on nearby Gaggin Road. Police had never searched the house, and it was later demolished.

For Murrin's lawyer, Peter Wilson, it was the last straw. He wrote out a twenty-three-page letter outlining all the things wrong with the investigation and prosecution of Shannon Murrin, demanding a public inquiry.

The news report left Kelowna rcmp in a bit of a bind. The investigation was formally closed, but an alleged confession could hardly be ignored. So they developed a facility for semantics. "Reopening the investigation would imply everything we've done to date, all the thousands of hours of work that's been put into this case, was wrong-headed," said rcmp constable Garth Letcher. "That is not the position of the force. However, we continue to investigate this tip and all tips as they come in. But the investigation itself is closed."

The information may have done little for the investigation, but it did open up a link to Macdonald's family. Kathy's father, Gary, agreed to meet Murrin. According to Murrin, they talked cars. Macdonald, Sr., gave Murrin a roof rack for Kathy's Monte Carlo. And then the next morning, after packing up, in Murrin's words, "seventeen bags' worth of shoes and makeup," the two set off on their cross-country road trip to Newfoundland.

A couple of weeks later, i follow. Macdonald meets me at the St. John's airport. The next day, I'm driven out to the Murrin family home, a trim little bungalow on a treeless acre on the far rural edge of the city.

When the story about her son and Kathy broke, Murrin's mother invited the reporters who besieged the house in and fed them while they waited for her Shan to come back. She welcomes me similarly, taking a plastic bag of fresh cod tongues that Murrin has bought up the road and dipping them in flour before throwing them into a lightly oiled pan. "I loves 'em, cod tongues," she says. As she cooks and chats, part of Macdonald's attraction to the place becomes clear. Her own mother has been sick with Alz-heimer's for many years. Even as a child she felt somewhat estranged. Mrs. Murrin, by contrast, is warmth personified. "I just feel really at home here," says Macdonald. And Mrs. Murrin, used to having a house full of people, clearly likes having Macdonald around. "Ay, Kathy," she says, as she tells a story about how she came to St. John's from a far-off outport in the forties, "I had to come to St. John's to find a man. You had to come all the way to Newfoundland." Then she goes off on a small cackling fit.

Macdonald doesn't seem to mind the ribbing. Indeed, she runs off to find her clipping file in a bedroom and returns with a Province cartoon in a laminated cover. "How to meet chicks," says the caption. Below in separate panels are four options: go to the gym; go to the bar; go to the beach; get charged with murder.

"Yeah, Kathy," chips in Shannon, who is standing by the sink, "weren't there no criminals in B.C. for ya?"

I meet Mr. Murrin in the same kitchen a few days later. He's just come from a veterans' function, so he's wearing the medals from his Korea campaign. A small, stocky man with wiry black hair, Shannon, Sr., bears little resemblance to his son, nor do they seem to share much in the way of temperament. I show him some photos I've taken the day before of Shannon and Kathy on the dock at Portugal Cove.

"Ah, there's Shan smoking a joint as usual," he says with a bafflement that must be decades old. Murrin, Sr., is a teetotaller, and the steadiest of citizens. He worked as a truck driver for nearly three decades. He built the house we sit in himself and put food on the table for his three kids. Shannon, his middle child and elder boy, clearly remains a mystery. "He had a girl for a while. Nice girl she was, too," he says, referring to Shannon's first wife. "Gave him two nice boys. But she took off, sick of waitin' on him, and I don't blame her."




LOVE ON THE RUN
By Shawn Blore

I ask him if he ever tried to discipline Shannon. "No," he says. "What can you do? I never did lam into him or anything like that. Or maybe once when he was fifteen, but when he's eighteen or twenty what are ya gonna do?"

Did the trouble not start earlier? "No," he says. "The cops never showed up here but once or twice. 'Course he fought just about every kid on Thorburn Road at one time or another."

Mrs. Murrin interjects to speak up for her boy. "There were fights," she says, "but you know afterwards they'd be friends. Shan was never one for holding a grudge."

I gather there's no point asking what Mrs. Murrin thought of the murder charge against her favourite son, but I'm curious to hear Mr. Murrin's less-varnished appraisal. "If you told me he done just about anything, I could believe it," he says. "But not that. I never believed that."

The conversation is interrupted by a phone call. Shannon comes back excited. "Get your money, woman!" he calls out to Macdonald. "Tom's giving us the trailer."

Since arriving in st. john's the two have been searching for a place to live. One of Murrin's Thorburn Road buddies has finally come up with an option that's affordable, a sixty-foot mobile home set on a bushy piece of land out past the city limits. The rent is $300 a month and Macdonald is paying it.

They have a written agreement, Macdonald tells me on the way to the bank machine, in which Murrin formally acknowledges his debts to Macdonald and agrees to repay her if and when he wins a settlement to compensate him for the five years he spent in jail. But for the moment he's not working, except for occasional cash jobs fixing cars, and until the welfare cheque comes in, he's flat broke. Macdonald is supporting them both on a line of credit backed by her condo in Kitsilano.

From the outside, Tom's trailer turns out to be a wreck, with weeds growing everywhere and the rusted hulk of a truck parked on the lawn. The sight of it will make Murrin's niece observe that "we now official-ly have trailer trash in the family." Inside, however, it's not bad, despite the dirty shag carpet and the rips in the wallpaper left by a previous tenant.

Murrin, Macdonald, and I crack open beers and toast their new home. Then Murrin gets out the Smartie tube full of weed and rolls a celebratory joint. Talk, as it often does with Murrin, turns to the glory days of his life of crime. Getting a free hooker from the undercover guys in the early days of the Tran case. Fencing stolen silverware for a pellet gun as a young mug. The biggest bank job in the history of Newfoundland.

At times Murrin can have a great deal of charm. He's the lovable rogue who robs banks but is happy to pay the price. But as the shadows lengthen, and another joint gets rolled and smoked, Murrin's speech begins to slur, his eyes dull, and the talk turns to revenge.

"Tidsbury. The dumb fuck. Like to get him in a cage match, just the two of us. See who's left standing," he says. Then he launches into a tale of meeting Tidsbury at the trial. "I said, 'Good morning, shithead.' " Tidsbury, in his view, took away five years of his life and sent three thugs after him.

Another day, Murrin takes me for a drive to show me what he'd do with the money, should the government ever come through with a settlement. What he shows me is an old hay meadow fallen to ruin on a spot of land with a stunning view of Portugal Cove. Murrin wants to buy it. Then he wants to buy the land across from it. Then he wants to plant lots and lots of trees, and put up a fence. "I've had enough of people peering in on me. In the pen we used to get checked eight, ten times a day. He looks around at the view, looks back at me. "I ain't never going back, b'y, I'll tell you that. They'll have to kill me first."

This, for Murrin, is quite a change. Much of his life has been spent in prison. Never before has it offered the slightest deterrent to crime. Were this a novel the change might be attributed to Macdonald's influence - the love of a good woman and all that - but I suspect it's simply age. Murrin's a few months shy of fifty. Time has become a little more precious. Jail doesn't seem like so much fun anymore. The prospect of working for a living doesn't seem so absurd.

Not that Murrin's thinking of work. He's got his eye on a settlement. "I never done nothing," he says, making his point in short staccato sentences. "Spent five years in jail. Nearly got killed. And the cops are involved. That's gotta be worth something." Certainly his case is good enough for his lawyer to be working on a lawsuit, should the government not voluntarily come to the table. Once he gets a settlement, Murrin has plans for a dream home. "I'm gonna build a house, with a big den and a big-screen tv. I'll have lotsa booze and lotsa pot and a sign saying 'No women.' "

What role then for Macdonald? None, if you take Murrin's words at face value. But there's a teasing schoolboy tone to his voice that lets her know he's just asking for attention. Underneath his prison-yard manners, Murrin seems to have a real affection for Macdonald. And no wonder. She pays for his booze, and his pot, and his house. She laughs at his stories of hookers and brawls and burglaries. She sleeps with him. Most of all she offers him encouragement.

Kathy Macdonald is the first person outside his immediate family who, in more than five years, has actually believed in him. Photographs of Murrin just before his arrest show a chubby, smiling guy with curly hair - a bit like Sonny Bono. Murrin today is gaunt, hollow-cheeked where an iron bar smashed in his face, haunted-looking. Five years of being reviled as a child sex killer have left their mark. It's no wonder he'd reach for Macdonald. The question remains: What does she see in all this?

It's a question that comes to the fore as we drive home and Murrin starts talking sleeping arrangements for the trailer. "We'll get a queen," he says.

"A queen won't fit in there."

"Okay, we'll buy a double. Get it at Value Village. Or I know, we can buy one used in the paper." A bed from Value Village. For a woman approaching fifty. Clearly, adventure doesn't come without discomfort.

Two days later when we're in the dollar store shopping for a dustpan, I ask Macdonald how the adventure is going. "With everything that's happened I'm surprised I'm not a basket case," she laughs. And the Value Village bed? "At one point in my life I got to be very rich. I discovered it didn't mean much to me. My first garage sale I made $1,800 selling off all my silk blouses and stuff." She's clearly looking for something else.

So is that Murrin? "People underestimate Shannon," she says. "He's got a high i.q. He's self-educated, but he's very intelligent. He's an excellent writer." I've heard this before from Macdonald. I had never seen his writing, but it was hard to believe a great intellect would choose to hang out with the thugs and ex-cons who until recently formed Murrin's circle of friends.

But at his mother's place just before I depart, Murrin digs out an old pile of junk he's stashed away. Among the many papers there's a grade-seven report card, and a short story written in jail. The report card merely confirms my first impression. "Shannon is inattentive and unmotivated," it reads, giving him failing grades in nearly everything.

But the short story is something different. Written many years ago, "The Death of a King," as it's called, is about a wolf-pack leader driven from power, left with nothing but the love of his faithful mate Pa-tua. The spelling's a little off, but clean it up and strip away a few adjectives and it could pass for early Rudyard Kipling or Jack London. Maybe there are hidden depths to Murrin after all.

But is it enough? I suggest to Macdonald that their dreams may not be compatible. Murrin has had enough. He wants to retire, live away from the world. It's an old man's dream. What does she want?

Macdonald pauses. She's told me of her book plans. Of going on Oprah. I'm prepared for ambition. But what she comes out with truly floors me. "I'm curious by nature," she says. "I think I'd make a great talk-show host. Ideally, I'd like to host a show with Gillian [Guess] on the Canadian justice system. Call it 'Canadian Justice.' "

At last it's clear. What drives Macdonald is not love, or a crusade for justice, but fame. Another adventure. And one that almost certainly won't end with Macdonald and Murrin on the Rock, living happily ever after.

http://www.shawnblore.com/Pieces/SaturdayNight/LoveOnTheRun/LoveOnTheRun3.htm

https://www.saltwire.com/atlantic-canada/federal-election/nl-man-guilty-in-double-slaying-but-alleges-shannon-murrin-was-the-shooter-83259/ In 2009 a friend since childhood of Mr.Murrin while pleading guilty to two counts of manslaughter said Mr. Murrin was the killer but he was never charged in the case.

Mr. Murrin should find better friends or become a loner one video of him I saw on Channel 21 today showed him decades ago looking like Charles Manson he long ago changed his look to being short haired.