CHAPTER
1
A neat round hole in the skull, too large for any bullet, turned the case from a mystery to a murder. The crime came to light in one of the most spectacular surroundings imaginable, with the snow-capped Rocky Mountains towering in the background. From a high rocky precipice, a scree slope plunged at a dizzying angle down to the mirror-calm waters of Spray Lakes. And there, at the foot of the slope, lay a skull.
RCMP officers had feared human remains might be somewhere in the vicinity, hence the search, but never for a moment did they expect to find a skull with a neat hole in it. It was time for the forensic pathologists at the medical examiner’s office to extract every possible secret from the skull. Whatever they found, it was clear this breathtaking stretch of Rocky Mountain scenery had just become the heart of a puzzling crime scene.
This scenic valley in Kananaskis Country, located beside one of its most picturesque lakes, had been a much happier place four years earlier. In July 1986, a special group of kids were taken there for a summer camp. These kids didn’t often have such excitement. They were dubbed problem kids. Some were known runaways, and all of them were in the care of Alberta Social Services. The department had entrusted them to Ad Infinitum Treatment Services, an organization for troubled teens that was running the summer camp.
The remote forestry camp was accessible only by one rough gravel road and was isolated from the outside world with no telephones or radiotelephones. Towards the end of July, four staff members organized a wilderness camping trip, taking some of the kids into an even more remote section of the forest to set up a small campsite close to the lake.
During the first few days after arriving in the main camp, 13-year-old Billy Stuppard and 17-year-old Joey Platner struck up a close friendship and were among the group taken on the wilderness camping trip. They’d only been in this isolated spot for two days when on July 30, 1986, Billy, Joey and a third boy all decided to run away. Before nightfall, the third boy returned to the main camp, leaving Billy and Joey alone in the forest.
The group’s small wilderness campsite had been set up not far from a lone camper called Richard Richards, who’d already been camping near the lake for some time, but was in no way connected to them. He was away exploring in the forest the night Billy and Joey ran away, and the two boys soon came across his empty tent and campsite.
None of the staff searched for the two missing boys, but the next day one of the childcare workers saw the two runaways in the group’s canoe on the lake. One of the boys held aloft a crossbow and shouted obscenities before paddling off across the lake. At this point, the staff acted. They sent a message to the RCMP saying a canoe had capsized in the lake and two boys were missing.
Kananaskis RCMP constable Jim Kruk quickly contacted the nearest park ranger and ordered him to get a boat search under way. Kruk then raced to the lake and went out himself in a second boat. The two officers found nothing, so Constable Kruk called in a helicopter. Within 15 minutes of arriving on the scene, the helicopter crew spotted the canoe. It had apparently landed safely on the shore of the lake two kilometres away from the group’s main camp. Once again, Kruk crossed the lake in his boat, and this time he found the canoe, which had been hidden in high weeds. It was upright and dry inside, with its paddles lying in the bottom. It was clear to Kruk that the two boys hadn’t come to grief in the lake, but had landed and probably run away. Now the constable called in a dog handler and his sniffer dog from Banff National Park. They mounted a ground search north and south of the canoe, but despite working into the evening they found nothing.
While Kruk was scouring the area, Richards, the man in the nearby tent, stopped him to report that his crossbow had been stolen from the campsite while he was away. The next day Richards travelled into Calgary and went to the office of Ad Infinitum Treatment Services to complain about his crossbow being stolen.
Meanwhile, the RCMP began a separate investigation into the theft. Numerous RCMP officers and park rangers resumed the search through the forest, assisted by the helicopter, but still found no trace of the two boys. Inquiries among the staff and kids at the group camp revealed that Billy and Joey had talked about running away to Vancouver, where they wanted to visit Expo ’86. Police recalled that when they found the canoe they saw tracks leading off towards a gravel path, one that could have given access to roads leading to Vancouver. Believing the boys had hitchhiked out of Kananaskis Country and were on their way to Expo ’86, the RCMP called off the search. For the first time, the boys’ parents were notified that their sons were missing, but the strange disappearances were never made public.
Joey’s parents, Virginia and Harris Platner, were angry that the search had been called off so soon simply because searchers thought the boys had run off to Vancouver. The RCMP argued that nothing more could be accomplished by continuing to search. After all, their helicopter and ground-search teams had scoured the area thoroughly.
Billy’s dad, Brian Stuppard, was angry that he hadn’t been told immediately that his son was missing. Brian decided to search for his son in Vancouver. He thought Billy might try to contact his grandfather, who lived there, and immediately warned Grandpa to keep a watchful eye open for the boy. Meanwhile, Brian kept on searching for Billy, not only in Vancouver, but also in other major cities. After all, it wasn’t implausible that Billy had run away. He had become difficult to handle and was a regular runaway after the death of his mother in 1982, when he was nine years old. Further, Billy lost his grandmother and grandfather in quick succession soon afterwards. “His way of dealing with problems was just to run away,” said Brian.
Over the next two years, Brian contacted police departments in several provinces. Finally, he turned to missing children’s organizations and called on the Salvation Army. “I made it my business to search for him everywhere. I hunted all over western Canada,” said Brian. Ever hopeful, he sought his son all through 1987 and 1988.
Sadly, on May 16, 1989, nearly three years after the boys disappeared, hikers found a skull only a couple of kilometres from where the group campsite had been set up. It was sent to the medical examiner’s office in Calgary, where a forensic pathologist determined it was Joey Platner.
RCMP officers went back to the site and discovered a few more human bones and some items of clothing before a heavy snowfall forced them to abandon their search. Though they’d found Joey’s remains, police had no definite evidence to say what had happened to Billy. Kananaskis RCMP staff sergeant Keith MacMillan told the media he wasn’t very optimistic that the second boy would be found alive.
Brian received the news stoically. “I’m keeping my chin up,” he said, “One has to be optimistic, but logic tells me there’s not much hope.”
Joey’s parents planned a quiet funeral service for their son, who’d been a student at Shaughnessy Secondary School in Calgary. Police told his parents it simply looked like the boys had got lost. “There is no way of determining the cause of death at this point,” said RCMP sergeant John Metcalfe. “At the time they went missing there was nothing to suggest foul play.” Joey’s mother, Virginia, said that from the bones the hikers had found it was evident that Joey had suffered a broken leg. The family had feared the worst during the three years Joey was missing, as they were certain he wouldn’t go that long without contacting them.
From the little information Brian Stuppard had been given, he formed his own theory of what had happened. He knew the boys likely had a crossbow. Perhaps they had gone hunting in the woods, and there had been a fall or a rockslide that Joey hadn’t survived. Maybe Billy hadn’t survived either. It fit the known facts.
Two weeks after the discovery of the skull, on June 1, Brian’s theory seemed to be proved right. As soon as the weather improved, the RCMP resumed their search of the area, and Brian was on the slopes with them when they discovered more clothing. The bloodstained jeans and other items of clothing finally destroyed Brian’s hope that Billy was still alive. Located at the bottom of a slope, the clothing confirmed the speculation that they had fallen. “This kind of brings things pretty close to an end,” said Brian. “It certainly appears as if they fell.” As Joey had been confirmed dead and was in the care of Alberta Social Services at the time he died, the provincial attorney general’s department ordered a routine fatality inquiry for October 1989 into his apparent accidental death.
Suddenly, a sensational twist changed everything. Mysteriously, the RCMP postponed the inquiry. All they would say was that they were investigating some startling new development. Inspector Bob Tramley now said foul play wasn’t being ruled out. That meant Joey’s death might be murder. For three months, the RCMP probed their new lead without revealing what it all meant. It seemed to revolve around some man who had since committed suicide, but by December the lead petered out. Tramley now said the investigators were no further ahead than they had been before, and a complete report on what they had discovered was passed on to the chief medical examiner’s office.
All through the winter, deep snow and freezing temperatures prevented any more searches being carried out in Kananaskis Country, but once the snow had melted in early June 1990, RCMP and park rangers were back out on the scree slopes near the lake. On June 11, the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place. At the bottom of the scree slope they found the second skull, and to their amazement, it had a neat round hole in it. It was sent to the chief medical examiner’s office in Calgary. Forensic pathologists confirmed that it was Billy Stuppard, and it no longer looked like he had died by accident. It looked like he’d been murdered and that this area was the crime scene.
This time there was no postponing the fatality inquiry. When it opened before Judge A.W. Aunger in Canmore in August 1990, it delivered one shock after another. First, the RCMP revealed all the latest information they had learned. They felt sure a man suffering from schizophrenia had murdered the two boys by shooting them with his crossbow or pushing them off the top of the scree slope. Later, he’d killed himself. It was Richard Richards.
Canmore RCMP corporal Al MacIntyre told the inquiry that police knew that Richards, a 27-year-old confirmed schizophrenic from Stony Plain, near Edmonton, was the man in the campsite next to the group camp where Billy and Joey were staying. He’d twice been treated for schizophrenia in the Misericordia Hospital in Edmonton, in 1984 and in early 1986. He’d reported that his tent had been broken into and his crossbow stolen. But police had no reason to believe he was connected with the disappearance of the two boys until after he committed suicide on March 13, 1987. Everything changed when police talked to one of Richards’ associates.
Bernie Lehman said he’d been with Richards shortly before he took his own life, and that Richards had acted in a bizarre manner. Lehman, put under hypnosis by investigators, revealed that Richards had showed him crude satanic drawings on the wall of an abandoned shed. They depicted a stick figure with a crossbow and the word “murder” written both forwards and backwards. Richards said there had been two guys who were evil, but that they would never do it again. He told Lehman he would burn in hell for what he had done to them. There would be no forgiveness. He had clearly been harbouring guilt for some time, as he had unsuccessfully tried to kill himself a few months earlier.
Putting all the evidence together, investigators knew for certain that Billy and Joey had broken into Richards’ tent, stolen his crossbow and other valuables, and taken the canoe from the group camp. The two boys had spent some time in the nearby countryside shooting target practice with the crossbow. Investigators believed that some time later Richards, with his history of mental problems, became enraged at the thefts and had caught the two boys, marched them to the top of the perilous scree slope and then killed them.
Billy’s father, who listened to all the evidence, knew exactly what it meant in his son’s case. “There was a round hole in Billy’s skull, too large for any bullet, which they [the police] believe was made by a crossbow bolt,” he said. “That means, one way or another, that guy found the boys, disarmed them of the crossbow they’d stolen, and shot Billy through the head.”
Police believe that having killed the boys, Richards probably pushed both bodies down the scree slope. It was likely this all happened soon after the search had been called off. The boys’ bodies certainly weren’t on the scree slope on the last day of the search, as the helicopter flew low over it several times and the crew saw nothing.
Shocking new facts emerged at the inquiry when the childcare workers from the group campsite testified. They now reluctantly revealed what they had known but kept secret at the time the boys disappeared. They suspected Richards had been a disruptive influence on the troubled kids at the camp, supplying them with liquor and maybe even drugs, and that he had even had sex with one of the girls. At one stage the staff went to the Spray Lakes park ranger and asked him to remove Richards because he was a pest. But they didn’t tell the ranger what they believed had been going on regarding the booze, drugs and sex. Not knowing the serious nature of what he was dealing with, the ranger was powerless to remove the man.
One camp counsellor told the judge that after the two boys ran away he’d heard them rummaging through Richards’ tent and campsite, but did nothing to stop them. What was worse, he didn’t report to his superiors that he knew the boys were breaking the law by stealing from someone’s campsite. Nor did the staff tell their superiors they knew some of the kids had committed other crimes during the camp.
By the time the fatality inquiry ended, everyone had a pretty clear picture of what had happened, but Judge Aunger officially listed the medical cause of death for each boy as “unascertainable.” He listed the manner of death, which could include the possibilities of “natural, homicidal, suicidal, or accidental,” as “undeterminable.” He agreed that the RCMP’s theory that Richards killed the two boys fit the established facts, but added that there was “nothing conclusive” upon which he could find a cause of death.
However, the judge had a lot to say about how badly this camp had been run. He stated that Alberta Social Services must ensure that future camps run by organizations on their behalf would be run in a way that prevented such a tragedy from being repeated. The judge came up with three recommendations: first, in future all childcare workers employed in group homes should get instruction in how to apply government regulations regarding childcare; second, all means of conveyance (which in this case had been a canoe) should be secured out of the reach of the kids; and third, any suspected crime should be immediately reported to the RCMP.
Judge Aunger blasted the camp staff for not telling anyone when they saw kids from their camp committing crimes, and for not passing on vital information about the two missing boys and Richards. He also commented, “The tenor of the childcare workers collectively was an attempt to blame the RCMP and park rangers. If those childcare workers had conveyed their knowledge and suspicions of crimes being committed to the proper authorities, those authorities would have had grounds upon which to act and check out any suspicious character.”
The representative of the group running the camp defended her staff. Director Carol Freeman told the inquiry they could only “guarantee to do as much as is humanly possible” to control the children in their care.
Four years after the fatality inquiry, Billy’s dad, Brian, made a major effort to use his son’s death as a warning to other parents of kids in care to monitor closely the people looking after their children. Brian, who’d been a childcare worker years earlier, was angry and upset by the knowledge that his son’s death could have been prevented. He believed that the staff at the camp had left his son out in the wild knowing he was in potential danger from a deranged man. “What bothers me most is that it should never have happened. People who knew enough to possibly prevent the tragedy, didn’t tell,” he said. “Instead of telling anyone, these people kept silent and the boys were left out there alone.”
Ultimately, the deaths of Billy and Joey did bring some improvement to how troubled kids in care are looked after. Alberta Social Services say the deaths may have already indirectly saved other children’s lives. The stinging rebuke from the judge at the fatality inquiry brought immediate action from Alberta Social Services in 1990. “We changed the regulations and toughened them up right away,” said Bob Scott, the spokesman at the time. The new rules dictate a much closer look at which kids should be taken on such camping trips in the first place. As well, new regulations ensure that kids at camps are much more closely supervised.
Perhaps the last word should rest with Brian Stuppard. He tells parents that they shouldn’t take it for granted that their kids are in good hands; they should check and satisfy themselves that they are. As Brian put it, “Remember Billy.”