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| quote: | 8 bodies found in cars
Rumours run rampant, but police investigators are revealing few details about four abandoned vehicles and one resident's grisly discovery on his farm near Shedden
Apr. 9, 2006. 08:50 AM
NICOLAAS VAN RIJN
STAFF REPORTER
Forensic investigators in the tiny London-area hamlet of Shedden today are continuing to piece together clues in the worst mass murder in Ontario history, discovered when a local resident went to investigate strange cars parked on his farm overnight.
Police say the man, who lives in a wooded rural area, looked out his window at about 8:30 yesterday morning and saw three cars and a tow truck parked on and near his property.
On investigating, the resident came across the bodies of eight adult white males, police said.
"This type of grisly find is very surprising to a lot of people, ourselves included," said Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. David Rektor.
"It's quite shocking."
Many locals were quick to connect the deaths to the Hells Angels and Bandidos biker gangs that have long been active in this area, and police specialists said a biker connection could not be ruled out.
One police source talked of a motorcycle gang "turf war" that's been going on in the London area for some time.
"That's the first thing that comes to mind," said the source, noting there's a farm in nearby Dutton where members of the motorcycle gang the Bandidos, rivals to the Hells Angels, hang out.
According to a neighbour, local landowner Russ Steele found the bodies on his property, which he bought about a year ago.
Brent Potter, who lives less than a kilometre from the scene, said Steele dropped by yesterday to say he'd be leaving for a few days. Potter said Steele told him he'd found the bodies, which left him badly shaken.
"It's never good to find someone that has been killed in your neighbourhood," Potter said.
Rektor would not say how the men died or where the bodies were located in the crime scene, on Stafford Line near Mill Rd. southwest of St. Thomas and just a short distance from Highway 401. Three cars and a tow truck are involved.
News photographers who flew over the scene, a barren stubble field bordered by trees and shrubbery about 200 kilometres southwest of Toronto, returned with images of a small silver-blue compact hatchback driven into a farmer's field, nosed into a fence a few metres from one of the lonely gravel roads that bisect the area.
The rear hatch was open, showing the body of a man sprawled in the rear.
Parked not far away on the adjacent road was a dark blue tow truck hauling another small blue compact car. A third car was nearby. Police would not say if bodies were found in or near the truck, operated by an Etobicoke company, Superior Towing, or in the other cars. Superior officials would not discuss how one of their trucks came to be involved in the crime scene.
"It's all males that are involved in this incident," the OPP's Rektor said. "I can't speculate on the ages, other than to say they are adult males, Caucasian."
Yesterday's grim discovery, in the pastoral farmlands of southwestern Ontario, came as farmers were preparing the soil for spring seeding, and as local residents were getting ready to celebrate the rituals of Easter week.
"In rural Ontario — especially in Elgin County, which is very much a farming community, a very peaceful area of the province — this type of grisly finding is very surprising," the OPP's Rektor noted.
The discovery left area residents reeling, and trying to make connections as they cast about for answers. Some questioned whether bikers were somehow connected, or drugs, especially after bodies were found dumped here in 1994 and 1998 in murders that remain unsolved today.
Rektor wouldn't comment on a possible biker connection.
"At this stage of the investigation we can't speculate on motives," he said. "And it's something we'll have to find out down the road as the investigation ensues, in terms of what happened."
But he was quick to reassure local residents.
"At this point there is no further information to reveal that there's a threat at this point to people in this area," Rektor said. "The area has been looked at extensively earlier this morning, so at this point we're satisfied that this incident is contained to this area specifically."
Police scoured the area on foot, by helicopter and with tracking dogs, but remained tight-lipped about what they found.
"At this point, there's a lot of information coming in very rapidly, and we're assessing that information," Rektor said, refusing to elaborate. "We've got our criminal investigation branch here, an assortment of experts within the OPP, to do the investigation. We're going to move forward and try to piece it back together."
Local residents, stunned by the violence visited on their tiny community, say that can't happen quickly enough.
Stan Lidster, the deputy mayor of the township of Southwold, which covers the area, said he was shocked by the grim morning discovery.
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"I don't know what to think of it, it's terrible," said Lidster. "This is a pretty quiet area."
One woman, who has lived in the 400-resident hamlet of Sheddon for the past 20 years, said local residents had a grim foreboding when firefighters called to the scene returned to the hall in record time.
"I just had a terrible feeling when the firemen came back," she said. "We were having a church bazaar and we said, `You've been called out,' and they said, `Oh no, it was something bad,' because they weren't even allowed near the crime scene."
The lonely road, some 25 kilometres southwest of London, "is not very well travelled," said Murray Silcox, who runs the general store in Shedden, the closest community of any size. "It's a gravel road."
Still, he wasn't totally surprised to find police investigators at work nearby.
"This stuff happens all the time," he said. "Midnight justice, or whatever you want to call it."
But the scale of the find is unprecedented in modern Ontario history.
Most Ontario mass murders, single incidents involving more than two or three victims, are domestic incidents.
The worst previous mass murder in Ontario occurred July 6, 2000, when 42-year-old Bill Luft of Kitchener stabbed his wife Bohumila and shot dead their four children — Daniel, 7, Nicole, 5, Peter, 2, and three-month-old David — before turning the gun on himself.
One of the worst previous mass murders involving non-related victims came in Ottawa on April 6, 1999, when a disgruntled former transit employee, Pierre Lebrun, shot four transit workers dead in a bus garage before killing himself.
Farmer Rob Monteith, a municipal councillor for the area who lives several kilometres away from where the eight bodies were discovered, expressed the shock and surprise of local residents.
"Oh, I think everybody around here is surprised," he said. "It's a rural road, but it's a pretty well-travelled area."
The road, which is not lit at night, is used by local residents as a shortcut to the Ford plant, Monteith said.
Josie Morton, who lives about six minutes away from where the cars were found, said the find, while shocking, wasn't completely a surprise.
"I've lived in the area my whole life and I've noticed a lot more violent crime reported in London, in nice neighbourhoods," she said. "A lot of it seems to be drug-related. It is shocking, but it's a very isolated area."
Local farms, she said, "are kind of spread out," and it's easy to go unseen in the area, which she described as "secluded."
It's so quiet, in fact, that the sight of a police cruiser with its flashers going is itself an unusual sight.
Charlene Armstrong had just finished an early Easter dinner with her husband, Gary, when she saw an OPP cruiser, flashers alight, speed by.
"It happens so rarely, we knew there was something going on," Armstrong said, adding she even called her mother Monica Oates to tell her about it.
The Armstrongs, who have lived just off Stafford Line for nine years, said they were "shocked" when an OPP officer came to the door with news of the awful discovery, and wondering whether they'd seen anything out of the ordinary.
"We didn't hear anything. The dog didn't bark. Nothing," Armstrong said.
Her husband agreed. "It's a quiet rural community where all the neighbours watch out for each other," he said.
"It's nothing that I'm involved with, or that the community is involved with," he added. "Until we get more information it's all speculation.
"I'm not overly surprised," the man added. "This kind of stuff is creeping more and more into the rural area."
Many residents got the news from reporters.
" I never heard of that. Oh, my God! You're kidding," said Holly Lunn on hearing the news. "That's craziness. I thought there was an accident on the 401," said the woman, who has lived in Shedden all her life.
Carol O'Connor, 50, who spent the day working the check-out line in Shedden's only store, had little information. "I just heard that there was a crime scene back there," she said. |
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