CHAPTER
1
It was an odd request. The Calgary Police Service Crime Stoppers Unit needed an elderly actor who could convincingly play a dead body. The police couldn’t turn to modelling agencies because they always sent handsome young men. In the end, a cop offered the unit his dad, Howard Owen. Owen made an excellent corpse, though he later said it had turned his stomach to lie on the floor exactly where an elderly man had been murdered.
Six weeks earlier, on April 29, 1994, a killer had bludgeoned to death retired railwayman Ardie Turner, 77. The murderer had left the body lying on the kitchen floor of the old man’s rented tumbledown farmhouse on Highway 797 in the prairie village of Langdon, southeast of Calgary. With the murder still unsolved after six weeks, the Calgary RCMP had opted for a TV re-enactment in the hope that television coverage would spark new information from the public. The crime scene was now bustling with a fake corpse, a fake killer, a camera operator and a film director. It looked like robbery had been the motive, because Ardie’s meagre pension was missing along with his camera. And, most importantly, his beloved old truck had been driven away by his attacker.
Ardie had been a sociable bachelor who spent his days driving his 1977 GMC El Camino to visit numerous friends in the surrounding villages of Dalemead and Carseland to the south and Beiseker to the north, where he’d always be invited in for coffee and a chat. That old truck was the only promising lead police had found. Two days after the murder, it was discovered abandoned in the parking lot of one of Calgary’s busiest shopping malls—Chinook Centre—where it had been dumped by the killer. But days of intense forensic examination failed to yield a single clue, and the murder remained unsolved. Then another elderly man disappeared.
Robert William (Bill) Vomastic, 68, was living on his own in his southwest Calgary home. He had seemed perfectly fine when his son, James, visited him on the evening of Thursday, August 24, 1995. One of his dad’s friends, Ray Tudor, arrived while James was there, and the three of them talked while Ray helped himself to old Bill’s rye and cigarettes. After a while, James set off for home, leaving the two men still chatting.
The next day, Bill didn’t show up for an appointment with his son. On Saturday, James picked up his sister, Sharon, and they both went over to see why their dad hadn’t turned up. What they found in old Bill’s home had them so worried they immediately went to the District 2 police station to report their dad missing. They already feared the worst had happened.
Some of the furniture had been moved, obviously by someone trying to hide a large bloodstain on the floor. A few things were missing, including Bill’s car, and there was a ridiculous note that read, “Gone fishing in Montana. Dad.” This was something their dad would never have done, and the note wasn’t even in his handwriting. If it was supposed to allay their fears and explain where he was, it produced exactly the opposite reaction. It aroused their suspicions and sent them straight to the police. Officers didn’t like what they heard from the distraught brother and sister and soon homicide detectives were at the house. Now things began to happen fast.
No sooner had the description of old Bill’s white 1991 Ford Crown Victoria car, licence pzz 399, been circulated to every officer on duty throughout the city than police spotted it being driven in the southeast section of Calgary. When police stopped the car, three people leaped out and scattered in different directions. The pursuing officers managed to chase down and catch the driver. Well, if it wasn’t Ray Tudor! And here he was driving Bill’s car, wearing Bill’s watch and carrying Bill’s wallet, with Bill nowhere to be found.
Calgary’s forensic specialists found a lot of blood in Bill’s house, and they already knew that Tudor had been alone with the victim just before he disappeared. Even if he didn’t have Vomastic’s body, the head of the homicide unit, Staff Sergeant George Rocks, was sure that old Bill had been murdered and here was the killer. Raymond (Ray) John Tudor, born August 29, 1953, of no fixed address, was charged with the second-degree murder of Robert William Vomastic.
But the anguish for Vomastic’s son and daughter was in no way eased by knowing a suspect had been charged. They desperately needed their father’s body found if they were to have any chance of closure in their lives. Tudor was saying nothing and public appeals for Calgarians to look out for the body bore no results.
Homicide detectives appealed to the public to keep their eyes open for specific items missing from Bill’s home—a set of dark green cloth curtains and a white floral- pattern bedspread. Police were convinced these items had been wrapped round Bill’s body, which was then carried to his car and later dumped somewhere.
This time their appeals were successful. A local resident who was walking near the village of Dalemead, 20 kilometres southeast of Calgary, found the bloodstained curtains. The discovery served to concentrate the search for the body in that area. On the evening of September 22, almost a month after the murder, a pheasant hunter’s dog found a shallow grave containing Bill Vomastic’s decomposed remains in a patch of heavy brush about 30 kilometres southeast of Calgary, near Carseland, Alberta.
This was especially interesting news to the RCMP investigators who still had Ardie Turner’s unsolved murder on their files. Here were two murders of old men. Both had apparently been killed in their own homes, and in each case the killer had stolen valuables from inside the house, then driven off in the victim’s vehicle. Ardie Turner’s home was on the prairies southeast of Calgary, and now Vomastic’s body had been found dumped in the same area. What’s more, Bill Vomastic had known Ray Tudor, his suspected killer, for years. RCMP inquiries soon revealed that Tudor was also an acquaintance of Ardie Turner. Ardie had used him as a mechanic for work on his truck.
A bombshell breakthrough in the spring of 1996, two years after Turner’s murder, made the difference. An eyewitness came forward to say he’d dropped a man off on the night of the killing right near the victim’s house. The man he dropped off was Ray Tudor. On May 31, 1996, Tudor was charged with the first-degree murder of Ardie Turner, and a year later the Turner slaying was the first of the two trials to begin at the Calgary Court of Queen’s Bench.
The first shock of the trial came when the accused killer’s own brother, Roger Tudor, appeared for the prosecution. He told the jury that old Ardie Turner was like a father to him, and that he had arranged the old man’s funeral and was pleased to have done so. He claimed to have no clue that his drunkard brother had anything to do with the murder.
Alberta’s deputy chief medical examiner, Dr. Lloyd Denmark, said Turner had been smashed over the head 14 times with something like a tire iron. The sheer brutality of the murder made a significant impact on the jury. The jury also heard of a weird episode with a man who first contacted police under the alias of Zorro 23, better known to his friends as Nollind Dodd. Zorro demanded $50,000 to tell what he knew, ostensibly to help hide him in a witness protection program. He eventually became the Crown’s star witness, giving evidence that nailed down the case against Raymond John Tudor.
Dodd claimed that Ray had called him on the night of the murder and had asked Dodd to drive him out to Langdon, near Turner’s home. After they arrived, they sat around in the car, sinking a six-pack of beer and throwing the cans out of the windows. Then Ray, who was dressed in heavy, dark clothing “just like a burglar,” got out of the car and ordered Dodd to drive away.
The jury immediately saw the significance of the testimony. Ray obviously wouldn’t need Dodd to hang around and drive him home later, because he knew that if his murderous plan worked out he’d have a vehicle—Turner’s beloved old truck. Dodd also told the jury that early the next day Ray had them race back out near Turner’s home to pick up all the beer cans, so police wouldn’t find their fingerprints on them. The jury saw this as damning testimony. Tudor was retrieving the incriminating evidence of his crime before Turner’s body had even been found.
Chief Crown Prosecutor Bruce Fraser outlined a simple scenario. Tudor, knowing old Ardie Turner was alone and vulnerable, went there to rob and kill him. Tudor beat him to death, robbed him of his paltry pension money, took the keys to his truck and simply drove away. Defence lawyers Sandy Park and Jim Lutz applied to the judge, Justice David Wilkins, to have the charges thrown out because, they submitted, there wasn’t a “scintilla of evidence” that Tudor had planned the murder. Nor was there any direct evidence that he was ever inside Turner’s house.
The judge dismissed their application and put the case in the hands of the jury, who saw it as clearly as Fraser had portrayed it. On June 27, 1997, after deliberating for 14 hours, the jury found Raymond John Tudor guilty of first-degree murder, leaving Justice Wilkins with no alternative but to impose the mandatory life sentence with no parole for 25 years. Tudor, whose last act before leaving the courtroom was to sneer at the jury and shake his head, was only in prison a few months before he was back in the Court of Queen’s Bench to face the second murder rap.
This time it was before a judge alone—a different judge—but the facts outlined by the new Crown prosecutor, Jerry Selinger, were déjà vu to anyone who knew the case. Selinger pointed out that Ray Tudor knew old Bill Vomastic and that while visiting Vomastic’s home he murdered him. He then robbed him of his cash, his wallet, his booze, his cigarettes, his gold watch and his gun collection, and then drove off in his car.
But Tudor had added a few refinements to his second killing. This time he hid the body, hoping it would never be found, and left a “Gone fishing in Montana” note. He assumed everyone would think old Bill was away fishing and wouldn’t even realize a crime had been committed.
The two days after the murder had been party time for Tudor. First, with amazing bravado, he drove his victim’s car to Calgary’s courthouse, parked and went in to face a completely unrelated charge. Later, he uncharacteristically took his friends on a drinking spree at various bars, liberally splashing out his new-found cash, getting ever more drunk. Only three days earlier, he’d been picking up cans because he didn’t have two coins to rub together. He even paid the bar tabs of his friends using the dead man’s credit card and identity. The drinking binge didn’t stop until cops cut it short by nabbing Tudor.
The judge heard evidence of the brutality inflicted by Tudor. Dr. Denmark, the same medical examiner who’d seen Tudor’s handiwork on the skull of Ardie Turner, testified to what he found on Bill Vomastic’s decomposed body. Seven lunging stab wounds in the back had killed him, some so powerful they had severed his ribs. They were almost certainly inflicted by Vomastic’s own First World War bayonet, which had been part of his weapons collection. Denmark proved the murderous attack by matching the seven holes in the shirt Vomastic was wearing with the seven holes in his body.
One of Tudor’s friends testified that Ray had turned up at his home in the early hours soon after Vomastic was slain, heavily blood-splattered and very drunk, in what turned out to be old Bill’s car. Tudor’s story was that he had been beaten up and bloodied in a bar brawl in Montana. The friend didn’t believe it, and neither did the judge.
On December 3, 1997, Justice Robert Cairns found Raymond John Tudor guilty of the second-degree murder of Robert William Vomastic and gave him a second life sentence, with no parole for 20 years. Outside the courthouse, Vomastic’s daughter, Sharon, who’d endured the anguish of her father’s murder and the prolonged agony of not knowing where his body had been dumped, remarked on the verdict. “I think justice has been served . . . I think the only way that Tudor is going to come out of jail is in a pine box . . . and I hope that’s the case.”
That may have been the intention of the law and it was certainly Sharon’s fervent hope. But that wasn’t how Ray Tudor saw it. He had escaping on his mind even before the trials had started. The judge heard during the Vomastic trial that back in 1995 Tudor had been held in a Calgary forensic unit on psychiatric remand while charged with Vomastic’s murder. He was sporting an arsenal of escape tools: two hacksaw blades, two flat-ended screwdrivers and a fantastic homemade handcuff key fashioned from the plastic insides of a pen. A guard tried it on a pair of handcuffs and was shocked to find it worked. In a later search of Tudor’s cell, authorities found a 34-metre-long string of bedsheets knotted together and noticed that the caulking around his window frame had been dug out. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why he had those tools,” said Justice Cairns. He ruled that they were proof of a planned breakout, thwarted by alert staff and a tip from a fellow inmate at the unit.
Tudor began his two life sentences in the maximum-security Edmonton Institution prison, but in 2000 two notable events took place. On the appeal of the Ardie Turner trial, Tudor’s first-degree murder conviction was reduced to second-degree murder, and his sentence of life with no parole for 25 years was reduced to life with no parole for 20 years. Then he was transferred to the medium-security Drumheller Institution northeast of Calgary, where guards saw his health deteriorating badly and where he was clearly aging fast.
Although he was only 47 years old, his beard grew long and grey, aging his haggard face. He developed increasingly bad shaking and trembling symptoms and appeared to be suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease. His condition worsened almost daily. By 2002, he was a trembling old man, a doddery senior with a debilitating and uncontrollable stutter. Tudor was no longer considered an escape threat. Except that on March 26, 2002, he escaped—clean as a whistle!
In previous breakouts, prison guards had established exactly how the escapees had wriggled out. There was one notable breakout where the escapee was boxed into a crate by fellow prisoners and shipped out by truck to a downtown Drumheller store. But Tudor’s Houdini-like escape left no clues. The Drumheller prison fence is topped by flesh- shredding razor wire, so he obviously didn’t go that way. And none of the easily triggered ground or fence sensors were breached either.
But he was out, even if he was an almost helpless old man crippled with Parkinson’s disease. People across Alberta were very uneasy—and none more so than the witnesses who had testified against him. He’d killed twice and had nothing to lose. They feared he’d come for them next. Case-hardened detectives also acknowledged the frightening prospect of his being unleashed into the community. Staff Sergeant Rocks of the Calgary homicide unit, who’d helped put Tudor behind bars, voiced this fear, “This guy is a cold-blooded killer. You have a very serious problem here.”
Days passed. A few sightings of Tudor came in and were checked. Nothing. Then, after three weeks, prison authorities and police released a bombshell. Tudor was no doddery, helpless old man after all. It was a performance, all part of an elaborate hoax he’d spent months perfecting. He was as fit as the day he went inside. Tudor had cleverly transformed himself into this apparent human wreck as part of a brilliant escape plan—a plan that had an added advantage. “Immediately after he was out, he would have shaved off the long flowing beard and long greying hair . . . and lost the shakes,” said Calgary detective Ryan Dobson.
Just as the prison description of the escapee hit the streets, telling people to watch out for a frail old man, he would have been looking decades younger with hands as steady as a rock.
The manhunt for Tudor went international. He was featured on the television series America’s Most Wanted, after it was feared he could be on the lam south of the border. But not one worthwhile tip came in. It was seven weeks since he’d disappeared into thin air, leaving many frightened people looking over their shoulders for fear that he might be stalking them.
The stage was set for Tudor to make the biggest headlines of his life, this time right across Canada. He was finally captured where no one had thought to look for him. Not in the United States. Not stalking anxious witnesses in Calgary. Not threatening local residents in downtown Drumheller. Tudor was found in the ventilation duct above the workshop of the prison itself.
The story became more and more fantastic as increasingly incredible details poured out. Tudor had built himself trap doors, false walls and access holes throughout the ducting system over the prison’s 7,616-square-metre industrial workshop. He’d been dropping down at night, stealing scraps from the kitchen to keep himself alive and then climbing back up into the pipework. In his hideaway in the ceiling they found a bottle of antacid tablets, some vitamin supplement pills, a homemade grappling hook, one can of coffee and some paint-thinner tins, which he’d used as his toilet. In his seven-week-long cat and mouse game, he had eluded infrared detectors and even sniffer dogs.
But two days before Tudor’s capture, a prison guard reckoned he’d seen somebody moving under some machinery in the workshop. He thought it was Tudor, but knew he must be mistaken. Drumheller warden Floyd Wilson was taking no chances. Two days later, he called in a Calgary RCMP K-9 dog-handling team, as well as the Calgary Fire Department’s Heavy Rescue Unit. Once the dogs had pinpointed where the fugitive was hiding in the pipes, the rescue co-ordinator, Mark Turik, put his men to work. They inserted a snake-eye camera into the pipe, and after some manipulating they saw their man. The firefighters, who were used to ripping roofs off cars to reach trapped accident victims, used their heavy tearing machinery to peel back the duct’s metal skin until Tudor was visible through the hole. Calgary RCMP corporal Bill Hamilton grabbed the sawdust-covered and dishevelled Tudor. The seven-week hunt had ended.
So what possessed Tudor to hide there? George Rocks reckoned Tudor probably planned to stay up in the ceiling for several months until everyone forgot about him. Then he could drop down and slip out of the prison. “After all,” said Rocks, “who would be looking inside a prison for a guy who’d escaped months before?”
Whatever the reason, Tudor sparked a furor in prisons across Canada. Duct openings and pipework access points were sealed up with locks and grates in jails across the nation. Inquiries were launched into why a double-murderer was in a medium-security prison in the first place and how any prisoner could live undetected in a jail for weeks.
Tudor, who was dubbed the Ductman of Drumheller and assured of a permanent place in prison folklore, was charged with being unlawfully at large. He was sent back to the maximum-security prison in Edmonton, where authorities vowed that he would never embarrass them with an escape.
The final word was left to warden Floyd Wilson at Drumheller Institution, who never did admit to being red-faced about having a prisoner loose in his prison pipes for seven weeks. After Tudor was dragged out of the ceiling, Wilson told the media, “I’m stimulated and excessively proud we have this individual in custody . . . proud he never exited the institution.”