CHAPTER
6
Alone and lonely, the homeless man crawled into his desolate shelter in a deserted ravine not far from Calgary’s sewage plant, away from the thousands of citizens in their snug, warm homes. What happened to him that night no one knows, but by morning he was dead. No one missed him. No one found his body.
Nothing much happened to that isolated stretch of land for nearly 20 years, until new work was started on the sewage plant in the 1980s. A team of men with bulldozers was ordered to fill in the ravine as part of the landscaping connected to its expansion. By this time, Calgary was burgeoning, and the Bonnybrook Sewage Treatment Plant needed upgrading.
By the 1990s, the city was really booming and the sewage plant needed a second major expansion. Once again, backhoes were sent in to excavate new foundations for the bigger and better plant. But this time the work had barely begun when it came to a complete halt. One of the workmen saw a shoe deep down in the earth, and he thought he could see human bones inside it. It was November 2, 1992. Uniformed police officers were called, and they brought in the homicide detectives.
Workmen had already excavated a pit at least five metres deep in preparation for installing an electrical manhole when they made their grisly discovery. It brought a sudden stop to the $140 million operation, and from that minute on, the sewage plant construction site was transformed into a full-scale crime scene.
Initially, workers had taken no notice of the shoe deep down in the excavation. Their work had produced two large mounds of earth below ground level, and the shoe was only partially exposed. Supervisor John Vogel said boots, shoes and other items were often found, which explained why the shoe was ignored at first, probably for a couple of days. “Today, one of the men checked the shoe, found bones inside it, so we called the police,” said Vogel.
Forensic specialists from the medical examiner’s office and homicide unit detectives climbed down ladders into the excavation site to carefully sift through the remainder of the mound of earth. After two days of digging they had located almost enough bones to complete an entire human skeleton. They photographed every stage of their work and took measurements of the ground around it. Once the bones had been removed, detectives scoured the base of the excavation pit with metal detectors, seeking any clue that might be linked to the mystery body.
In the next few days, Dr. Anne Katzenberg, an anthropologist from the University of Calgary, and a radiologist joined forensic experts at the medical examiner’s office to examine the bones. Homicide unit detectives were also at their side, as no one knew at this stage whether or not this was a murder victim.
After three weeks, the forensic scientists under Alberta’s chief medical examiner, Dr. John Butt, announced their findings. These amounted to a few sparse personal clues and a huge gap in information about who the man was. In fact, one of the few things they knew was that the remains were that of a man. They didn’t know if he was Caucasian, Asiatic or Native, but they knew he wasn’t black. He was probably tall, between 5 feet 9 inches and 6 feet 1 inch, and probably had black hair and a beard. They could certainly tell he’d had a rough life, as several of his bones had been broken long before he died. He’d had a broken jaw surgically repaired and suffered broken ribs, a broken finger and broken bones in his right foot. They thought he probably wore dentures, as his lower jaw had no teeth.
Everything else about him was a blank. The two biggest mysteries were how and when he died. His skeleton yielded no clues as to whether or not he’d met a violent death. Inspector Ray McBrien, in charge of Calgary’s major crimes unit, explained the timing of the man’s death with the vague phrase “modern day, but not recent.” The forensic scientists had studied the surgical treatment carried out on the jaw, trying to assess in which decade such dental work was typically performed. They tried to determine the decade from the style of his shoes. Of course, not knowing when he died, even to within 10 years either way, made any search of missing persons files very difficult. The files they did consult all came up negative.
The crime scene investigators first had to find out what had been on the site in the previous two decades, as their body was “not recent” and hadn’t been placed there in the past few weeks. They turned to the City of Calgary Survey Division, whose files in city hall contained aerial photographs going back decades. Photographs showed that in the years prior to the 1980s, the place where the body was found had been a heavily overgrown ravine. It was well documented in the city records that the ravine had been filled in as part of the sewage plant expansion in 1982.
From these clues, investigators formulated a theory. Perhaps this man had been living rough in the ravine, certainly before 1982 and perhaps in the 1970s or even the 1960s. He may have been a vagrant, and he had probably led a violent life. It was all so vague, not much more than an intelligent guess. Their only real hope was to appeal to the public for any information that might help them. It was probably the most optimistic appeal for help McBrien had ever put out. His team was looking for details on a man they couldn’t describe, who may have been living in a ravine 10 or 20 years earlier as a homeless vagabond, and who therefore had no close family. Not surprisingly, by the end of 1992 the appeal had produced no results. But unknown to the crime scene investigators, the appeal had sparked a chain of events that was to bring a remarkable breakthrough, thanks to the undying love of a daughter.
For 24 years, Calgarian Corinne Boudreau had wondered what had happened to her father. It was a difficult situation for Corinne and her six siblings, who had all grown up and gone their separate ways. Their dad, an old soldier who’d served his country in the Second World War, had adopted a transient lifestyle, often disappearing for many months on end. Sometimes he’d be in Calgary, sometimes in Edmonton, often travelling between the two cities and seldom keeping in contact. They knew he was a tough, hard-drinking man who could look after himself. It would take someone special to beat him in a fight. They also knew some of his rougher scraps had left him with a few broken bones.
For Corinne, it was almost impossible to know at any given time whether her father was away for a few months in Edmonton, just wandering, or had disappeared altogether. But in February 1969, officials at the Colonel Belcher Hospital in Calgary contacted the family. They told Corinne that her dad, who was then 57 years old, hadn’t picked up his armed forces pension cheque. Corinne knew the pension was her father’s only income. No matter where his wanderings took him, he never missed his pension cheque. But from February onwards he never turned up at the hospital, and he never picked up another cheque.
Corinne, the eldest daughter, was worried. Her older brother, Dennis, shared her concerns as the months turned into years without any word from their father. Between them, the two siblings chased down any lead that might have given them a clue to his whereabouts. Throughout the 1970s, they kept their father in their thoughts, hoping he might still be alive. During the 1980s, they still kept him in mind, but knew that with the passing of 20 years any chance of discovering what had happened to him was long gone. Obviously, he was dead and whatever had befallen him could have happened almost anywhere in Alberta. They were resigned never to know the answer.
So when Corinne and Dennis read in the local newspaper on November 3, 1991, that human remains had been found near a sewage plant, they wondered if this might be their father. They decided to watch the papers in the next few days to see if more details might be released. By the end of November, what they read in the paper gave them much more hope. “When we heard the body may have been there for 20 years and had suffered various broken bones, we felt straight away it was probably Dad,” said Dennis.
“I had a fear and a hope it was him,” said Corinne, who started making her own inquiries without at first going to the police or the medical examiner’s office. She began with the Department of National Defence, asking staff at the archives department if they had any medical records relating to her father. The archivists said they did have records, but they couldn’t release them without a death certificate. Corrine was in a classic “catch 22” situation. She couldn’t get a death certificate unless the records were able to prove her father was dead. And she couldn’t get the records until she produced a death certificate.
She turned to Calgary MP Harvie Andre and explained her dilemma to him. Under pressure from the MP, the military authorities relented and agreed that the medical records of Corinne’s father could be sent to the Calgary medical examiner’s office for examination. Amazingly, dental X-rays meticulously kept by Veterans Affairs Canada showed that Corinne’s father had had his jawbone wired together in a certain way when he was a young man. Forensic pathologists compared the X-rays to the jawbone from the sewage plant and found they were a perfect match. The remains were those of Corinne’s father, Albert James Boudreau.
Two days after the match was made, on Friday, February 5, 1993, Corinne was at work in an office supporting the homeless when an RCMP officer and an investigator from the medical examiner’s office walked in and broke the news she had waited 24 years to hear. “I lost my breath, then relief came over me and all I could say was, ‘Thank you, Thank you, Thank you,’” Corinne recounted.
Corinne knew all about her dad’s broken jaw. That had happened when he was a coal miner after the war. Someone busted his jaw during a union battle, and it had to be wired up. She thought it a remarkable twist of fate that if he hadn’t got into that fight, his remains may still not have been identified.
Dr. Butt was full of praise for the meticulous care taken by the Veterans Affairs Canada office to preserve the medical records of war veterans. Their records showed Albert Boudreau, born in northern Alberta in 1911, enlisted in the army in Calgary at the outbreak of war in 1939 and was discharged when he was wounded in 1944. He had served in an artillery unit protecting Prince Rupert, British Columbia. This was at a period of the war when the port was a crucial north Pacific supply, storage and distribution centre for American and Canadian military forces. The vital dental X-ray was taken when his jaw was wired up in 1958, and their last record of him being alive was in 1968. Shortly after that he stopped picking up his army pension.
“This whole matter was only concluded by the remarkable availability of long-standing X-rays,” said Dr. Butt. He pointed out that most X-rays are destroyed after a number of years, with the exception of those held by the Veterans Affairs Canada office.
Corinne and Dennis were relieved to have closure, knowing at last what had happened to their father. Their family members would now have a gravestone to visit and a place to meditate, said Corinne. “It is a relief to know his spirit is with the Great Spirit,” said Dennis.
But the story wasn’t complete for the crime scene investigators, who still didn’t know how Albert Boudreau had died. Detective Cal Johnston of the homicide unit said his death would probably always remain a mystery. Someone may have murdered him. He may have got drunk, fallen and injured himself and died. He may have passed out and died of exposure. However he died, the evidence showed the most likely chain of events was that he probably met his end in his makeshift transient’s home in the grassy ravine near the sewage plant in the winter of 1968. His remains would have decomposed into the ground unseen. For 14 years nothing disturbed that ravine. Then in 1982, bulldozers filled it in during landscaping work. Still unseen, his remains lay buried under the ground for another 10 years, until the new excavation work revealed them.
Corinne had the last, sad word. “That’s a horrible way for someone to die,” she said, “alone, homeless and forgotten.”