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Cold cases leave unhealed wounds |
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Written by Lethbridge Herald
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Monday, December 15 2008, 10:33 PM |
Last Friday, The Herald took a look back at the still-unsolved double murder of Peter Sopow and Lorraine McNab which rocked the Pincher Creek community 11 years ago.
But the killing of the RCMP officer and the kindergarten teacher isn’t the only southern Alberta murder case whose trail has gone cold. Several other deaths in recent years remain a mystery, leaving family members with unanswered questions and without a sense of closure.
Some of these unsolved deaths are listed on the RCMP’s cold case list (www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cold_case/index_e.htm). One that isn’t there is that of Melinda White, a 31-year-old single mother who disappeared Jan. 22, 1999 after leaving Leo’s Pub in Pincher Creek’s King Edward Hotel. Her body was found April 18 that year in the Castle River, 14 kilometres west of town. While police considered her death suspicious, no one was ever charged in connection with the death.
One of the older crimes on the RCMP’s cold case file is that of Kelly Cook, a 15-year-old girl from the village of Standard, about 70 kilometres northeast of Calgary, whose body was found June 28, 1981 in the Chin Lake Reservoir east of Lethbridge. Kelly was last seen the evening of April 22 when a man picked her up at her family’s home for a babysitting job.
Farther east, on Dec. 30, 1990, 71-year-old Alfred Palmer and his 35-year-old daughter-in-law Dolores Palmer were found shot at the rear entrance to a farmhouse on a dairy farm west of Medicine Hat. Dolores was dead at the scene and Alfred, a former councillor with the Municipal District of Cypress, died in hospital the next day.
About a year earlier, on July 31, 1989, the body of 27-year-old Michael Masson was found in a shallow grave south of Medicine Hat. He had not been seen since June 5 and his killer has not been found.
Earlier this fall, some 300 people took part in the second annual Sisters in Spirit Vigil, one of close to 40 held across the country to remember the hundreds of aboriginal women who have gone missing or been murdered. Only one other province has a higher number of missing or murdered aboriginal women than Alberta.
While these deaths may be forgotten by the public and media, they certainly aren’t forgotten by family and friends of the victims. For those loved ones, the pain of their loss continues and likely becomes more prominent this time of year as families make plans to celebrate Christmas.
Family members and friends of Peter Sopow and Lorraine McNab are caught in the hellish limbo of a murder case that may never be solved. And, sadly, they’re not alone.
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