Prairie Murders by Peter B. Smith

Author:Peter B. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-926936-26-0
Publisher: Heritage House
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

6

The Kleenex in the Courtroom

Everyone experiences that inevitable urge: your head is blocked, you feel a cold drip on the tip of your nostril, and you just have to blow your nose. You grab a Kleenex, use it and throw it in the garbage. It is the most trivial, unremarkable moment of your whole day. Ryan Jason Love did exactly that. It was the biggest mistake of his life. It cost him 20 years behind bars—and it played a role in changing criminal law across Canada.

Love’s dripping nose afflicted him in a motel room in Gibsons, on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, in the summer of 1992. What made it all so vital had begun on a dark and deserted street 1,400 kilometres away in Banff, Alberta, more than two years earlier.

In the early hours of May 17, 1990, Banff cabbie Lucie Turmel, 23, is parked on the street. Her fiancé, Jeff Hayes, is talking with her at her car window. At 1:30 a.m. she gets a call from the Taxi–Taxi & Tours dispatcher, Bruce Feriancek. She waves to Jeff as she drives off to The Works, a nightclub at the Banff Springs Hotel, where she picks up the three waiting fares—a man and two women.

Feriancek expects that he’ll hear from her on the radio after a while, but he doesn’t. The silence is unnerving. Feriancek feels uneasy. Meanwhile, not far away on Squirrel Street, security guard Cindy Smith makes a shocking discovery. It’s 1:45 a.m. and a woman’s body is lying on the street in a spreading pool of blood. Police soon cordon off the area. For Banff RCMP constable Nigel Paterson, the crime scene is a short walk, less than a block from his home. He’s there in seconds with the other officers. They immediately establish that the victim is dead. Cabbie Lucie Turmel’s life lasted only the shortest moment after her killer savagely stabbed her in the middle of the road and drove off in her cab.

Just a few moments later, fellow cabbie Larry Laundreau sees Turmel’s cab being driven through the darkened streets with a man behind the wheel. He swings his cab in behind the obviously stolen taxi, but the killer sees immediately he’s being tailed and hits the gas pedal. They touch speeds up to 100 kilometres per hour as the killer tries to give Laundreau the slip. When he reaches the section of Banff just south of the bridge over the river, he dumps the taxi and flees into thick bushes and trees. Laundreau gives chase but loses him. The killer obviously knows his way around Banff. He disappears into the night.

* * *

The townsfolk of Banff, the internationally known jewel of the Rocky Mountains, were stunned. The slaying of a vulnerable young woman late at night was the first murder in their midst that anyone could remember. The town’s population was already swollen by thousands of spring tourists, and the flood of visitors had just begun. Now there was a killer

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.