Later in February, the three investigations—the one into Maria Breau Tanasichuk’s disappearance as well as the others into the brutal murder of Abby Brown and the sudden disappearance of Robert Breau—were all merged together. As the investigators realized the full extent of what they were dealing with, they became ever more determined to do whatever it took to find Maria and charge David with her murder. At the same time, this new information, coupled with their knowledge of his criminal history, made the detectives very much aware of how dangerous their suspect really was.
The importance of trying to get a suspected serial killer off the streets became their everyday—and every night—reality, because one of their principal concerns was that David would find a way to dispose of his wife’s body in some manner that would mean the police would never be able to find it and formally establish her death. And they were hopeful that if they could find Maria, it would not only confirm their certainty that she was a homicide victim, but her body would also give them more vital evidence which would help in prosecuting the case.
The task of watching David became critically important. The detectives wanted to know where he was as much as possible, so that if he entered the woods, someone would know it who might be able to intervene and prevent him from moving the body. This was a nearly impossible mission. Ask any investigator about surveillance, and you’ll get stories about techniques and tactics, the necessity for using a hopscotch weave of multiple officers. Then ask about the challenges of doing surveillance on foot, and it becomes more complicated. Then ask them to imagine doing surveillance in an empty town on an empty street in the middle of winter, on a suspect who traveled by three-wheeler or on foot and was as likely to disappear into the woods and travel on groomed woodland trails as to drive on paved roads. Then ask them to do it at night. That was the level of the challenge the Miramichi investigators faced.
David was an experienced woodsman who had spent thousands of hours of his life moving through the woods around the city, fishing, hunting with guns—whether he was allowed to have them or not—and hunting with a bow, both in and out of season. If he went with Maria, she carried the guns on her three-wheeler, wrapped in a tarp, until they were in the woods. If he hunted with friends, they carried the guns. It might not just be Maria’s guns, either. Investigators had learned from those who’d hunted with David that he was known to stash guns wrapped in plastic tarps in convenient spots in the woods, just as he’d done when he was plotting to kill the judge and prosecutor in an earlier case.
Even the toughest officer is only being reasonable to be concerned about a suspect who may have killed three people and especially someone whose past anger at being charged with a crime led him to plot the assassination of law enforcement officials. Tracking David into the woods at night, stopping by to speak with him or even getting a phone call from him could make the hair stand up on the investigators’ necks. He was volatile and dangerous, given to impulsive acts of terrible violence, yet also, as the assassination plot showed, calculating. There was always the possibility of a bullet from the darkness.
Sometimes, in police work, an officer will learn something that suddenly places a past experience in a startling new light. That was the case for Detective Cummings when he reflected on the information he’d gotten from Darlene Gertley. He remembered a time during the investigation into Abby Brown’s death when he had sat in the living room of the Tanasichuks’ apartment, talking with David as an information witness about a possible suspect in the case. Now, given David’s potential for violence, he reflected on what must have been going through David’s mind as Cummings queried him about a murder they now believed he had committed. Had David been complacent, content to have gotten away with the crime and enjoying the game of toying with the investigator? Had he contemplated taking steps to ensure that Cummings didn’t get suspicious and didn’t take things further? How truly dangerous, in retrospect, had that situation been?
The general public, in a case like this, will read in the newspaper that a woman has gone missing and that the police are looking into it. Rarely will they have much sense of what “looking into it” means. What are police looking into and how are they going about it? What is going through their minds when they wake in the morning and when they’re trying to get to sleep? What are their days and nights like—are they different from the way they were before this woman disappeared? Even those who are cooperating with the detectives or have a relationship with the victim will have little idea of what an investigation really entails.
Even before the public had read anything in the papers, the police had taken a missing person report, obtained material information and photographs of Maria and prepared news releases and announcements about her disappearance which had been sent to the local and regional news media, giving a description of the missing woman and some available details about her and when and where she was last seen. They had also distributed press releases about Maria at taxi stands and bus and train stations throughout the province, looking for anyone who might have seen her leave Miramichi or arrive in Saint John or elsewhere. They interviewed personnel at the bus stations in Miramichi and Saint John and spoke with local taxi drivers who might have picked Maria up.
They had been working with the news media to keep Maria’s disappearance constantly in the public’s mind. Ensuring continuing news coverage served many investigative purposes. It fostered public investment in the disappearance of a fellow citizen, it served to nudge witnesses who might know something to come forward with what they knew and it helped pressure reluctant witnesses to tell them the whole story. Those stories also helped to keep the pressure on the suspect.
Another effort that helped keep pressure on the suspect, which police frequently use, was simply their continual presence: The patrol car that slowed when it passed the suspect and the car parked at the curb near the suspect’s house were just a regular presence to remind the suspect that the police were keeping an eye on him.
When investigators began to strongly believe that the story David Tanasichuk was telling them was largely a bunch of lies and that the behavior he was attributing to his missing wife was a significant and implausible departure from her usual ways, the investigators then focused on constructing a different narrative—one that involved domestic violence, David’s slide into deepening drug use, David’s personal history of angry outbursts, including his statements to his drug counselor that sometimes he got so mad he wanted to kill someone and the fact that his wife, Maria, knew his secrets.
As the investigation went on, it truly did become a 24/7 thing, a complex investigation that proceeded on two fronts—on the one hand, trying to find helpful witnesses and usable evidence against their suspect and on the other, searching for Maria’s body and watching David to see if he would lead them to it—an investigation made especially difficult as their suspect turned out to be nocturnal.
Maria was reported missing on January 26, and, as Paul Fiander put it, “Up until March 22, there weren’t a whole lot of nights when any of us had a whole lot of sleep.”
Surprisingly, in a discipline viewed from the outside as a “just the facts, ma’am” kind of occupation, the ability to imagine has critical significance in police work. Investigators, working with a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of facts, would merge those facts with their training and experience, their victimology—that deep understanding of the missing woman that they had developed from those who knew Maria—and their suspect analysis, to imagine scenarios which would help them solve the crime.
In the case of Maria’s disappearance, two narratives from witnesses became very significant in getting the investigative team to imagine what had happened between David and Maria. They knew, from witnesses familiar with the couple, that one of the greatest pleasures the Tanasichuks shared was hunting together; another was riding together on their three-wheelers, or going riding in the woods together on David’s three-wheeler, Maria behind him with her arms wrapped around his waist. It was an image witnesses constantly repeated—seeing the happy couple go by on their three-wheelers or together on one three-wheeler, heading out into the woods. David and Maria’s love of hunting was an activity that bonded them.
Sometimes, they’d been told, when David hunted by himself he would kill an animal deep in the woods and then need Maria’s help bringing it home. Maria had special clothes she wore for hunting and for three-wheeling. Even in her house-bound and depressed state, especially with the increasing tension between them about David’s disturbing absences and inattention to their marriage, there was little that would have roused Maria to leave the apartment like an invitation from David to go out riding with him or a request from him for her help.
The second narrative involved witness reports of David’s strange nocturnal trips into the woods around the time Maria disappeared, and his peculiar behavior the following day when he encountered Donald Malley as he was coming out of the woods. Now that they had established that her body was not somewhere in or around the apartment, they took the neighbor’s story of David’s three mysterious round trips into the woods on the night of January 15 and began to imagine what the rest of that tale might be.
Their knowledge and experience led them to surmise that late on the night of the 15th, David had convinced Maria to go for a midnight ride somewhere out in the woods surrounding the city. Once they were out there, he had lured her away from the vehicle and off the trail, killed her and then hidden her body. The neighbor’s story not only gave them a likely date for Maria’s murder, but the duration of those trips also gave them a timeline that would help them to narrow the search area. Assuming that David was passing the neighbor’s house in one direction and then returning at fifteen to twenty minute intervals, Maria’s body must be somewhere within a seven-to-ten-minute travel distance on a three-wheeler from the neighbor’s house.
The weather that night had been clear, with the temperature rising as the evening grew later. There was a little snow on the ground and it was a bright night, just a couple days shy of a full moon, so there was good light for traveling in the woods. The night of the 15th, or early on the 16th, was also a date that made the greatest sense as the murder date, because the 16th was when David began openly pawning and selling Maria’s possessions.
Initially, the investigators had wondered whether David’s sale of Maria’s jewelry was evidence of a temporary slide into drug use that was impairing his judgment. As they learned more they realized that his own behavior contradicted that assumption. There is a saying that investigators use to test the veracity of information given to them in an interview: liars lie with specificity. Liars tend to have a single story and stick to that story verbatim or close to verbatim—like, for example, David’s oft-repeated story of the addiction counselor saying that he and Maria needed to spend some time apart. There was a shred of truth in it—she had told them to give each other an hour or so a week to allow each other space—but she hadn’t given the advice David reported.
Because it has actually been lived, the truth is easy to remember, though remembered stories often change and become clearer as details of the event are recalled. Lies are hard to remember over time, so liars tend to ground them in something that did happen. Or, because their version of the events is not real and they didn’t live through the experience, they tend to embellish their stories, filling them with authentic-sounding details so they will sound like something that really happened. Thus David had told an elaborately detailed story about the events leading up to Maria’s departure—his call from the grocery store on the 11th, asking Maria if they needed dog food, the point at which she had announced her intention to leave the following day for Saint John and the color of the suitcase she’d packed and of the jacket she’d worn. He’d listed what was in the small pile of clothes that she had laid out to pack. He included the tender moments they had spent on the morning of her departure when he brought her coffee and their promises to be good to each other.
Those lovely, touching details made the story sound authentic, but Maria had been seen by friends and her neighbor at the apartment for three days after the date of this supposedly tender separation, and she had spoken with others on the phone when they called the residence, something David had never tried to explain, other than his comment that Darlene must have taken too many prescription pills if she imagined she’d seen Maria on the 15th.
And then Maria was never seen again, although over the next two weeks, David told her friends many different stories about her absence. He told Darlene on the 16th that she had gone to a baby shower, an event he later changed to a christening. He told others that she had left on the 19th or the 20th. He told Sharon Carroll that she was returning on the 25th and he would have Maria call when she got in. He even attempted to convince Darlene that she was mistaken in her statement that she had had coffee with Maria on the 15th, trying to get her to agree to a date when she was actually away on Prince Edward Island.
Records secured by a search warrant showed no calls to the Tanasichuk apartment from the phone in the lobby of the grocery store. No taxi driver had driven her to the bus station. No one had seen her at the terminal or on the bus. No friends in Saint John had seen or heard from her. There were no calls from the Tanasichuk residence to make arrangements to visit with anyone in Saint John.
The investigators turned their attention to strategies for locating a body somewhere in the woods. The area was vast and there were many possibilities—Maria might be tucked up in one of David’s bear stands, hidden in some other shelter or buried under what was now almost two feet of snow. Detectives fanned out, some searching for hunting companions who might know the locations of David’s bear stands or the areas in which David usually hunted. Some got in touch with search and rescue groups in the region, both to learn about winter search techniques and to begin the process of organizing some searches once the most likely areas were identified.
As part of setting their search parameters, they drove ATVs out on the major trails on timed journeys of between seven and ten minutes, taking note of how far these timed journeys took them. It gave them a search area that was still huge, but at least it had a focus. The most likely place to search, given their knowledge of the area, information from the places Tanasichuk had gone during his nocturnal wanderings and the timeline, was an area known as the “industrial park” that contained businesses, open areas, an old dump and the sewage treatment plant.
While the investigation focusing on David Tanasichuk was still in its early days, things began to happen which would dramatically change the character of the investigation for those detectives most intimately involved. The first events occurred late at night on February 4, following the search of the Tanasichuk apartment. Detective Cummings was sound asleep in bed, grateful to be getting some rest after the long days spent preparing the warrant, searching the apartment and conducting interviews, when his phone rang at around 12:40 A.M. As a detective, Cummings was used to calls at all hours. But this call was not from dispatch or another officer. The caller was David Tanasichuk, violating Cummings’s boundaries and the unspoken rules of police/civilian interactions by calling him at home.
During that phone call, David was rude and insolent. He angrily demanded that the investigator make the Miramichi police department return the eight hundred dollars they had taken from his wallet, which had been left in the house during the search. Tanasichuk said that he needed the money to pay his bills. He then complained that when the police left, they had left his heat on too high, causing him expense and discomfort, and that as a result of the mess the searchers had left, he’d had to go to a motel.
Cummings told him that he had personally had little to do with the actual search, and that if David had a complaint, he should contact Detective Sergeant Fiander the next morning after eight. The following morning, Fiander called Cummings at home at 7:30 A.M. and said that David had also called his house during the night, around 1:00 A.M. Fiander had told David that police business was conducted during business hours and made clear, in no uncertain terms, that David was never to call Fiander’s house again. Fiander also told Cummings that his wife had been very concerned by the call, because in all of Fiander’s years in police work, nothing like that—a suspect being so intrusive, personal and provocative—had ever happened.
It was clear to Cummings, from both the tone and the timing of David’s phone calls, that they were about more than an aggrieved citizen’s complaints. Underlying what David had done was a message and a threat: I’ve got your number, Mister Policeman, and I know where you live. If you insist on making me your suspect in this case, I am going to haunt your dreams. I am going to disturb your sleep. I am going to be a force to be reckoned with.
By making the phone calls to the detectives’ personal numbers at a time of night when it is never appropriate to make non-emergency phone calls to a residence, David Tanasichuk had made the investigation personal—a conflict between himself and the police—in a way that it had not been previously.
Friendship and familiarity—and the cops’ perennial hope for reform—might have gotten David the benefit of the doubt early on in the investigation. Now, that familiarity became a reminder of the many ways in which the man couldn’t be trusted and how important it was never to lose sight of how dangerous he was. Cummings considered the call to his home threatening enough to his family’s safety that he immediately added a “call waiting” feature to his home phone, so that he would still be able to reach his wife, who enjoyed lengthy conversations, if she was on the phone.
Then, as the department maintained surveillance on David, hoping that he might lead them to Maria’s body, he began to play cat-and-mouse games with the detectives. His primary source of transportation, when he wasn’t traveling on his three-wheeler, was getting rides from his friend Donnie Trevors in Trevors’s car. Knowing that he was being watched, David had Trevors drop him places, such as around the industrial park area not far from his house, where he would disappear into the woods and wait to see if the police followed him. He did this night and day, sometimes walking for hours, sometimes on groomed trails and sometimes not. Then he used his cell phone to call Trevors to come pick him up. Sometimes, Trevors drove down an accessible trail and emerged at the other end without David in the car.
The Miramichi detectives were outdoorsmen. But David took “outdoorsy” to a whole new level.
Around the time that Cummings installed call waiting, David called him in the afternoon at the office and left a voicemail saying he was going out skiing with some of his buddies; he was just calling to let the detective know. Of course, because they had him under surveillance, the police knew that David never left his residence and when Cummings returned the call and asked where the ski trip was, David said he was going out skiing behind the Portage Restaurant, which was out at the limits of the industrial park in the area where all the local gossip said that he had dumped his wife’s body. The investigators understood that the call was their suspect’s way of playing with them and of asserting that he knew he was smarter than the cops. David had always been very cocky and arrogant, certain that he was more intelligent than his adversaries. And he already thought that he’d gotten away with murder.
Another part of David’s cat-and-mouse strategy, as a way of testing who was talking to the police, was to drop in and visit with people he suspected were giving the police information. He told them something—like the day he told Maria’s friend Betty that he was going to go skiing behind the Portage—and then waited to see how the police would respond. Then, because they had to take it seriously, the police had to sit down and analyze the information and decide how they ought to proceed.
While they were hoping that their surveillance of David might lead them to the body, they also pursued every other avenue they could find. They were using every resource they could think of to locate Maria. They called colleges and universities throughout Canada, asking about new methods which might be employed to find a body under the snow. They tried people in British Columbia, who had experience with avalanches, to see if they knew of some useful technology to locate buried bodies. They contacted the science department at the University of New Brunswick. And time after time, they came up with nothing.
Constable Jody Whyte had been calling search agencies and military installations throughout the provinces, trying to find some sonar or other military device that might help them locate a body hidden in the snow. They borrowed a bunch of metal detectors to help with the search, thinking they might pick up zippers on her jacket or metal on her boots, but everything worked against them. The area they were searching was an old dump, and it was full of discarded bits of metal. The machines ran on batteries, which functioned poorly in the cold, forcing them to spend a fortune on batteries. After exorbitant expense and many frustrating hours in the cold, they had uncovered a lot of trash and were no closer to finding Maria.
It was discouraging, but cops are a determined lot. During another search, they were probing into the snow with long poles, looking for spots which might show a different depth. Day after day, they walked or rode along the trails, stopping and walking the edges of the trails or going out into the woods, looking for differences in the ground or the faint traces of old tracks. Everyone was constantly searching. The language they used, to themselves and to others, was that they were haunted by Maria’s absence and the unanswered questions it created and driven by a sense of urgency—to get to her and the secrets her body could reveal—before David or wild animals found her and destroyed her.
Animals were a very real concern. There was a vast wilderness surrounding the city and all the investigators had had direct experience with hunters lost in the woods, suicides or people out walking who’d had heart attacks and their bodies hadn’t been found until months or a year later. If predators had gotten at the body—which was common—they might get back only a small percentage of the remains. And in this case, that might mean that they would never know the cause of death.
There are many pieces of important evidence a body can provide. This begins with confirmation of death and expands to include clues about how the person was killed. Hair and fiber evidence might identify the killer. If tape is involved or the body is fresh, there is the possibility of fingerprints. Often, police will be looking for toxicology—evidence that the person was intoxicated or drugged prior to death, evidence which may be lost as the products of decomposition begin to mimic or mask drugs or intoxication.
They will be looking for gunshot residue, tissue damage, bullets, bullet trajectories, shoe prints or other tracks that might help identify the killer and ante- and post-mortem injuries which may tell them whether they are looking at the site where the person was killed or whether she was killed elsewhere. And every day that passes, decomposition advances and animal interference or weather events destroy the body, they may be losing critical evidence.
And too often, without a body, the pressure on the investigators is heightened because the suspect continues to walk the streets.
In order to spark the public’s conscience and to keep the pressure on David, the investigators were very public about their searches. Their actions were constantly in the news and people in the community could see them out searching.
They chartered a small plane to do fly-overs of the area, looking for signs of a body, an artificial pile of branches that could mask a body or for clusters of crows or ravens that might signal the location. They looked for shelters, bear stands and anything out of the ordinary that suggested the need for on-the-ground follow-up.