Even as plans got underway to work with the local search and rescue group to do a massive, organized search for Maria, the detectives got some news that ramped up the tension of the investigation significantly. The pressure of constant surveillance, police interference with his drug supply and the disapproval of people all up and down the river, resulting from publicity about Maria’s disappearance and gossip that he was a suspect, was getting to David in a big way and making him extremely angry. Word got back to the investigators that David had stated that if the police didn’t back off and leave him alone, he would make them back off by retaliating against them and their families.
Knowing David’s reputation for violence and his lengthy criminal record, they did not consider this an idle threat. David seemed primarily fixated on Brian Cummings, that “bald-headed son of a bitch,” because of their prior relationship and David’s inability to convincingly lie to Cummings and manipulate the detective into believing his story about Maria’s departure to Saint John. The threat was particularly disturbing, because Cummings’s family lived quite near to Donnie Trevors’s house, where David spent a lot of time. But the threat was perceived as being against all of the detectives most visibly involved with the case—Paul Fiander, Dewey Gillespie and Cummings. Each man had children at home and Cummings’s boys were very young.
David’s ultimatum brought into play the downside of the detectives’ abilities to imagine. Just as they were constantly imagining scenarios of the night Maria disappeared, based on the facts that they’d developed to help them locate her body, now they found themselves imagining scenarios involving their own families. Cops may be expert at putting the emotions of the job in lockboxes to avoid bringing them home, but this was something they couldn’t lock out. It just wasn’t possible to suppress the stories they’d heard over the years about David’s propensity for violence.
They had seen firsthand the violence that was done to Abby Brown. As they conducted their interviews, the detectives kept hearing new stories involving David and violent acts. There was John Paquet’s story of Tanasichuk beating his brother-in-law, Robert Breau. Darlene Gertley related a story she’d heard from Maria, about a time when David was hunting and had shot a deer but not killed it. Instead of firing a second shot and ending the animal’s suffering, he had drawn his hunting knife and thrown himself on the injured animal, stabbing it repeatedly until it finally died.
Nor could they overlook Darlene’s husband’s story. David had always been obsessed with hunting. In the fall of 2002, he’d become particularly fascinated with bear hunting, buying and watching many bear hunting videos as well as putting out bait and spending time in his bear blinds, contemplating which animals he would ultimately kill. One day, he’d remarked to Darlene’s husband that a skinned bear and a skinned human looked remarkably alike, except that the bear was heavier through the haunches.
And while it was entirely circumstantial, there was the information David was broadcasting through the art and words inked on his body. In addition to having guns tattooed all over his torso, he had four black teardrops tattooed beneath his right eye. Dewey had done research on those teardrops and learned that a teardrop tattoo is a permanent mark for each murder the wearer has committed. Canadian courts have allowed recognition of the significance of such tattoos in murder investigations. David also had another tattoo at the base of his throat, “
,” which he challenged Cummings to decipher. With the help of Dr. Allen P. Reid at the University of New Brunswick, the words were translated from Russian and Ukrainian as Death Dealer.
Prompted by the seriousness of the threat and by their deep concern for their families, the Miramichi police went to the RCMP and asked for help improving security at their homes. The RCMP installed security systems in each of the detectives’ homes and provided their wives with security alarms to wear around their necks any time they left the house. From that point in the investigation, the tension levels rose sky-high for everyone concerned. The investigators’ phones already rang constantly, with the Tanasichuk case and all their others. Now, each time the phone rang, they had a moment’s pause as they wondered: was it a frantic call from home?
Suddenly, part of each day’s to-do list included periodic calls to their wives to be sure that everything was okay, and if Cummings or Gillespie was out in the car, he might swing by his house just to check things out. In some ways, the threat was hardest on Paul Fiander, because his family lived twenty-five minutes outside the city, in an area patrolled by the RCMP. While the Mounties might be quick to respond, especially to a fellow public safety officer, they were thin on the ground. He took some comfort in the fact that he had a brother-in-law only a minute or two away, who could be there with a loaded gun if needed.
The threat had a significant impact on their families as well. In a community where popping in and out of each other’s houses for a coffee or a chat was commonplace and where children ran freely in and out of neighborhood homes, the detectives’ families suddenly found their lives drastically changed and constricted. No one visited for coffee. It wasn’t safe. Neighborhood children couldn’t play. It wasn’t safe. Wives didn’t leave the house without checking the yard. They never got in the car or loaded their children without first checking inside and under the car. Even a trip to the grocery store, school or work required remembering to wear the alarm and checking around before leaving the house or entering the car. Those aptly-named panic buttons weighed heavily on the hearts of the detectives and their wives.
While their wives and children were dealing with these newly changed circumstances, the detectives bore an added burden. Now they jumped each time the phone rang, never knowing when it might be a chilling message in a panicked voice saying, “Come at once. He’s here.”
As one of the investigators put it, he could live with the threat of danger to himself—he’d taken on that risk when he took the oath. But a threat to his family was a whole other thing. It really crossed the line. Cummings recalled that, for much of that February and March, even when he could get home he wasn’t sleeping. When he was in bed, his loaded gun stayed at the head of the bed, an absolute no-no for anyone with small children in the house and especially for a cop. But it seemed like the only reasonable course of action. He wasn’t taking chances with his family. “Every bump or thump, every time the motion-activated light comes on, I’m out there in the yard in my underwear and boots with my gun out.”
In late February, Paul Fiander, aware that locating Maria’s body was critical to their pursuit of the case and that none of the search strategies they’d come up with were working, began exploring the idea of using cadaver dogs. A lot of phone calls and online research later, he’d learned that trained cadaver dogs were a scarce resource in Canada. He’d located dogs that the RCMP had in Ontario and he was told that he could get a single dog to come to Miramichi if they were willing to provide first-class tickets for the dog and its handler.
Recognizing that a single dog was unlikely to be able to handle the task and that the expense was prohibitive for a small police agency, he began looking across the border in the United States. An internet search took him first to Andy Rebmann in Connecticut, a retired state trooper who had played a significant role in promoting interest in, and the training of, cadaver dogs in the region. Rebmann referred Fiander to the state of Maine and to a volunteer organization called MESARD (Maine Search and Rescue Dogs). Phone calls to MESARD’s president, Keith Heavrin, elicited a positive response. The MESARD handlers wanted to help, but since they were a group of dedicated volunteers and a search of the scope Fiander was describing would need serious mapping and organization, MESARD then referred him to the Maine Warden Service and Sergeant Roger Guay.
Eventually, the back and forths between Fiander and Guay led Fiander to Lieutenant Pat Dorian, the Search and Rescue coordinator for the Maine Warden Service. Dorian, Fiander was told, would have the ability to assemble and coordinate a large-scale operation through his association with the Maine Warden Service’s Incident Command Team, with their sophisticated mapping and GPS programs and substantial search experience.
The Miramichi detectives could not have found a better resource. Lieutenant Dorian told Fiander that he had been an incident commander for almost a decade, in charge of search and rescue for the state of Maine since 1995 and had extensive expertise in organizing and coordinating large-scale outdoor searches. Pat Dorian enjoyed the challenge of outdoor searches for homicide victims and understood the value of combining outdoor search and rescue expertise, including trained cadaver dogs and their handlers, with good detective work.
Two years earlier, Dorian had put the Maine Warden Service’s search and rescue prowess on the map in a major way by initiating a search effort that found the buried body of a young Maine woman who had been missing for seven weeks. Lovely twenty-five-year-old Amy St. Laurent’s disappearance had riveted the entire state. Because her body was recovered (buried bodies are extremely difficult to locate and are often never found), St. Laurent’s killer was subsequently convicted and sentenced to sixty years in prison.
Dorian understood the dilemma the Miramichi detectives found themselves in—both the investigative urgency they felt and the frustrating complexity of conducting a large-scale outdoor search—and he sympathized. He wanted to give them the assistance they needed. Before Dorian could agree to help, however, he had to convince his superiors in the Warden Service to let him, his mapping expert and some of his experienced K-9 handlers and their dogs use work days to cross into a foreign country and travel many hours and hundreds of miles north to assist a small city police department, at a time when the Warden Service was facing budget difficulties.
Dorian told Fiander that New Brunswick and Maine had a mutual aid pact, which had been put into play in the past to allow Canadian and Maine agencies to assist each other in searches. He felt there was a good chance he would be able to persuade his agency to use that pact and consideration of prior aid that New Brunswick had provided on searches in Maine, to enable them to come to Miramichi and conduct a search for Maria Tanasichuk.
There was another, unexpected reason why he was eager to help. Pat Dorian was deeply familiar with the Miramichi region and it was a very special place for him. An avid salmon fisherman, Dorian had been coming to New Brunswick to fish the river for twenty-five years. He knew the area well and understood the challenges the terrain would present to the dogs and their handlers.
Before he set about getting permission for the search, Dorian spent some time on the phone interviewing Fiander about the case. Based on what he learned about the date of Maria’s disappearance and the subsequent weather that winter, including the depth of the snowfall, Dorian knew that the body was almost certainly frozen and buried under snow, and therefore it would not be giving off scent. For a search effort using trained cadaver dogs to have any probability of success, it would need to be postponed until the snow melted and the body was thawed sufficiently to give off a scent which the dogs could pick up.
He also advised Fiander that with Maria’s body frozen and buried under several feet of snow, it was unlikely that David would be able to move her. As Cummings put it, “They were very definitive about that. They didn’t say ‘well, he might do this, he might do that.’ It was, he won’t go near her until the snow’s gone and she’s not frozen. So that was a little bit of a comfort.”
Dorian’s assessment brought a huge sense of relief to the detectives. It meant that for the next month or two, they could put their constant fear that David would move the body, or that predators who worked on scent would find it and destroy it, to rest and focus their efforts on finding some way to get David off the streets and behind bars.
They didn’t abandon their own efforts to find Maria and continued to plan for another search and rescue effort in a different part of the woods off the snowmobile trails, farther away from the Tanasichuks’ apartment. As rumors of another search effort, and its location, swept the community, a very frightened witness came forward. She didn’t want to give a formal statement. However, she had some information she believed they needed to know.
Lesley Allen was a tiny wisp of a woman who was the girlfriend of David’s buddy, Donnie Trevors. In an interview with Cummings, she told the detective that she knew both David and Maria, and said that Maria used to visit her and Trevors at Trevors’s house quite frequently. More recently, in the period just prior to Maria’s disappearance, David had been coming by himself. When Maria called the house trying to locate him, Allen had been told to lie and say that he wasn’t there.
She told Cummings about a conversation with David that she’d had the night before in Trevors’s kitchen. She had been smoking marijuana, she said, and had gone into the kitchen where David was. He was blissed out on prescription pills, which tended to make him talkative. He was sitting down on the kitchen floor, and suddenly, referring to the rumors of another major search being planned south of the area previously searched, he said, “They’re getting close. We have to go move the body or they’re gonna find her.”
Allen told Cummings that she had contacted the police because of the extreme seriousness of the statement, but insisted, because of her great fear of David—especially since he had confirmed for her that he was a murderer—as well as her relationship with his best friend, that she was unwilling to give a formal statement or to go on record as a witness.
During that interview, she also told the detective that David had given her a gold “90% Devil” pendant which she knew to be a piece of Maria’s jewelry and she was quite certain that this gift had been made prior to the date that David had reported Maria missing. This was very significant to Cummings, because in his interview with David on January 29, he had specifically said that Maria was wearing the pendant when she left for Saint John. Cummings appreciated Lesley Allen’s courage in coming forward with such important information and hoped that eventually they would be able to persuade her to go on the record as a witness.
The rumor mill soon generated another piece of news: even as he was tearfully reporting her missing, Maria’s loving and worried husband, who had told Cummings in an interview that “there wasn’t anyone on the river who doubted the love he and Maria had for one another,” had gotten himself a new girlfriend, one he might already be sleeping with. The young woman was a friend of his deceased stepson, B.J., as well as a friend of Allen’s.
On the same day that Cummings was speaking with Lesley Allen about what she had heard from David in the kitchen, Dewey Gillespie sat down to talk with the young woman rumored to be David’s new girlfriend. Possibly because she was embarrassed about the relationship, she was not entirely forthcoming in her interview. That was a familiar situation—the challenges of getting information from a witness who is not candid because of shame about his or her behavior and is reluctant to be viewed in a bad light or who is uneasy about revealing too much about a person for whom he or she has, or had, serious feelings, despite his or her own suspicions about that person.
Witnesses like these put investigators in a difficult situation. They know it may take time and repeated interviews to build trust and elicit the full story. They also know that doing repeated interviews with a witness may backfire and result in charges at trial that they have harassed or coerced the witness. It would take a number of interviews with this particular witness and the passage of several years before the full story would be revealed. What they did learn at that initial interview in March was that David had tattooed the witness’s name onto the webbing of his hands not long after he’d reported Maria missing and then, when she protested that it was inappropriate, he had literally chewed it off. David had told her that he was falling in love with her and that she was a very special girl.
The investigators, still running on little sleep and the debilitating effects of constant worry about their families, were desperate to get David off the street, especially when they received information that David was looking to acquire a gun. Then, in an interview with the Tanasichuks’ neighbor, John Paquet, Dewey Gillespie learned that David was in possession of a shotgun that he was trying to sell. Getting his hands on a gun had been just too easy for David. It increased the urgency investigators felt about getting him off the street so that they could investigate the case without the constant worry that he would be coming after them or members of their families.
On March 14, as a result of the paperwork and warrants being completed regarding the illegal sale of Maria’s three-wheeler and the forging of the sale documents, David was arrested. He spent the night of March 14 in jail. However, it was only a momentary relief.
They hoped that if David was behind bars, witnesses who were reluctant to talk to them because they were afraid of him—witnesses they knew were out there—might come forward. They anticipated the challenge of talking those witnesses past the risk that he might go to trial and get off, or, far worse in the imaginations of those living in Miramichi, that even if arrested, he might escape and, like serial killer Allan Legere, commit more brutal murders.
By mid-March, David had sold almost everything of value in the apartment to support his drug habit and was throwing items such as B.J.’s memorial Bible and family pictures into trash barrels on the curb. Neighbors who understood the sentimental value of these items were rescuing them from the trash and saving them for Maria, if she ever returned, and if not, for Maria and B.J.’s relatives.
Surveillance indicated that his rising drug use was rendering David erratic, unstable and, consequently, increasingly dangerous.
Tempers were fraying as the detectives sat down to discuss what other avenues they might pursue to uncover some offense that would enable them to put David behind bars for more than a night. That strategy session generated one important idea that would allow them to keep closer track of his movements. After applying for a search warrant to give them permission, the Miramichi police “stole” Donnie Trevors’s car, which was known to be the primary source of transportation for David other than his three-wheeler, and installed both a tracking device to monitor the movements of the vehicle and a wire so that they could listen in on conversations.
Around the same time, they heard that David had sold the shotgun to a drug dealer on the river who, like David, was prohibited from possessing a firearm. As a result, a search warrant was written, the gun was seized and David was charged with illegally transferring a firearm. Now they just needed to find and arrest him.
For a few days they monitored the wire closely, hoping for a breakthrough and the chance to arrest David on the new charge. But just as they had their best-ever technology in place for keeping track of their suspect, David became more elusive and they lost all track of him.