Trisha was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery on Tuesday, March 9, a bitter day with biting wind, blowing snow. Father Ron Cote presided over the funeral at St. John the Baptist, at Edgemont and King Street, a few blocks from the house on Montclair. Don Crath and Dave Matteson stood at the back of the church, watching who attended. Mauro Iacoboni was there; the family had asked him to attend.
The detectives took aside one of Mauro’s friends after the funeral. The guy had showed up with a cup of coffee from Tim Hortons. Mauro figured his friend had looked a little too detached, nonchalant, so they questioned why he was there. Terry did not show at the visitation or funeral, nor did anyone from his family, or his friends. Crath was not surprised. He knew relations between Terry and the Roaches had been sour for a long time, and they were especially so now.
On March 16 police announced that Trisha’s death had been a homicide. The next day Terry was quoted in the Spectator: “I knew right off the bat that it must have been a murder,” he said. “There’s no way in the world that she would do it herself.... She had absolutely no reason to kill herself. All she wanted to do was help people. For someone to cause so much harm to her is just amazing.... Yes I’m upset. I’m obviously very upset.” He said that they had signed papers a week before her death in order to sell the house, and that it “was a very amicable” agreement.
A senior police officer was quoted saying “we have our ideas” about what might have happened. “But we’re not saying anything, for obvious reasons.”
Crath continued to meet and question Terry. With no one else jumping out on his radar, an ex-husband had to remain a person of interest, even though Terry continued to maintain that he had been with his girlfriend at the time Trisha was killed. He appeared to lack a strong motive as well. He had not benefited in a substantial financial way from her death. Trisha had moved her life insurance benefit to her mother after their separation.
Had he been angry about Trisha dating again? When she was killed he had been living with his girlfriend, a woman who also worked with Canada Customs. The detectives questioned friends of Terry, including John Pajek, asked him about Terry’s character. John felt police were barking up the wrong tree.
They interviewed Terry’s father, Michael Paraszczuk, who lived on Balmoral Avenue South, 200 metres from Trisha’s house. Ray Roach said Michael had his own key to Trisha’s place. Crath was told Michael had hard feelings toward Trisha as a result of her separation from his son. She had been killed before the lawsuit had been settled over his handyman expenses for doing work in the basement. (Michael and his wife eventually moved from the neighbourhood and could not be located to comment for this story. He later died, on February 18, 2012.)
The detectives revisited Mauro Iacoboni. Mauro took three weeks off work after Trisha died. He could not sleep at night; instead, he lay awake, agonizing over what had happened to Trisha, wondering what might have been. Crath returned to Mauro’s workplace at American Can, questioned his supervisors. Was there any way Mauro could have left the factory for a while and come back on shift before punching out? Next to impossible. Everyone had seen him there, and he had been on the phone during his break. He could not have left until midnight, and by then Trisha was dead.
Crath and Dave Matteson met with friends of Trisha’s at Mellows, a restaurant and bar at Highway 20 and Queenston Road, where she had gone on occasion. The detectives interviewed another man she had dated. It had been nothing serious, went nowhere.
Terry had suggested a theory: perhaps the killer had a connection to someone Trisha knew at the hospital where she worked? Crath looked into the hospital angle; there was nothing, and, in any case, she had been highly respected at work.
They had already canvassed the neighbourhood around Montclair Avenue. Trisha’s sister, Cathy, continued to replay that night in her mind, especially the incident with the neighbour of Trisha who had asked her to come and talk. She should have gone. Maybe he had seen something: a car, someone approaching the house. If anyone had seen anything, they hadn’t told the police. But then, it had been bitterly cold, and no one had been walking around. And the fire-damaged house had yielded no physical evidence.
Crath had come up empty. He interviewed everyone remotely connected to Trisha, and had given people of most interest a rough ride, leaning on them, old school, questioning them repeatedly. Everyone had an alibi. Not all were air-tight, but none could be disproved. He was not about to lay a charge on speculation. You only had one crack at a conviction.
On April 27 Hamilton Police offered a $10,000 reward for information that would solve the case. Soon after the Roaches added $15,000 to the reward. “We’ d pay anything to put the person behind bars,” Ray said in the Spectator. “It’s all the savings we have, but it’s not much when your daughter’s life is involved.”
Matteson moved on to other assignments. Crath stayed with it, putting more work into the homicide than any case in his career. Each day he took a phone call from Floria, who asked him for the latest news. She could not sleep; she would burst into tears in public on occasion. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe, waiting for a break in the case. She prayed every night that someone would come forward in the neighbourhood — someone who saw something, or someone who knew the killer.
As spring weather began to set in, she could think only that the killer was walking around enjoying the warmth, while her daughter was under the ground. One day Ray visited the stone in Holy Sepulchre and saw flowers had been left with no name attached. Why? He went home and called the police. Crath, hungry for something, anything, showed up at his door, picked Ray up and bombed down the Sherman Cut en route to the cemetery, Ray white-knuckling all the way. Crath traced where the flowers had been purchased. He found the buyer. Turned out to be nothing, just a couple of Trisha’s old friends.
Ultimately Crath’s supervisor asked if he was not just treading water on the case. He was taken off it, and he locked the case file away in his desk. Floria continued calling. Don’t forget about Trisha, she told him.
A cold case never closes. But no one was actively looking for Trisha’s killer.
Crath continued working in CID, homicide, and drugs. During the last few years of his career, he closed out his old homicide cases in court while working out of the coroner’s office, regularly attending autopsies as part of the job. He grew hardened to them. But when Don Crath came home from work after attending one, he would always undress in the garage and stuff a laundry bag with the clothes that smelled of formaldehyde and death.