Was it murder? Grieving father won’t let go of the mystery surrounding his son’s hit and run death in Hamilton

The man in black kneels unsteadily before the wooden cross marking his son's grave.

Don Armstrong made the cross in his shop, carving letters that spell out Troy Armstrong."

The son's name has faded over the past 22 years in the sun, wind and rain, in the cemetery south of Hamilton in Dunnville, on the banks of the Grand River.

The father is fading a bit, too.

Not his sense of mission, though, for better or worse.

He has carried the loss like an open wound, since Father's Day weekend in 1998, when Troy was crushed under the wheels of a truck.

Don's mourning seems infinite, and so is the fire inside to find what he calls truth and justice for Troy.

No one was charged in the hit-and-run and the investigation remains open to this day. Mystery lingers around what happened.

A coroner's report initially categorized the manner of death as accidental, but it was later changed to undetermined.

Don Armstrong has another word for it: murder.

He has pushed the envelope in his quest, spent thousands of dollars on private investigators and psychics, even courted danger.

He says a police officer once suggested he was obsessed with the case, and a doctor warned him of risks to his health from the stress.

What is it that pushes a parent to venture beyond the horizon of grief, and motor down that road for two decades?

It's true, I might be obsessed," says the father who keeps a picture of Troy on the dash of his pickup.

But he was my only son, goddamnit, and I deserve answers. If it kills me, it kills me."

On June 20, 1998, Troy Armstrong, 23, was heading out of Hamilton after a late Friday night in the city.

He was returning home to Dunnville, 45 minutes to the southeast, near Lake Erie.

When Don and Mary Armstrong's first child was born, Mary suggested naming the blue-eyed baby after 1960s movie star Troy Donahue.

Don had never heard of the guy, but went along with it, and suggested Mark, after his grandfather, for the middle name.

In his 20s Troy had an easy smile, lots of friends, and looked like the frontman of a rock band, with long dirty blond hair past his shoulders.

He worked construction, but loved to hike and dream big and race dirt bikes; he performed stunts on a BMX bicycle at the Dunnville Mudcat Festival.

His favourite piece of clothing was a leather jacket adorned with an X" for U.S. civil rights firebrand Malcolm X, and world peace maker."

He planned to restore a van and drive it solo to the west coast to see the mountains.

Leaving Hamilton, just after 2:30 a.m., Troy rode in the passenger seat of a Dodge Colt driven by his brother-in-law, Dale Sammon, 21.

They stopped at a 7-Eleven for food.

A few minutes later, they approached the intersection of Highways 20 and 53 - Upper Centennial Parkway and Rymal Road - in the darkness on the edge of the city, at what was known as the hamlet of Elfrida.

It was hot and fog had settled in.

Sammon entered the left-hand turn lane, to head east on Hwy. 20 and stopped.

Putting the pieces together of what happened next has dominated Troy's father's life ever since.

But first came the knock on Don Armstrong's door in Dunnville.

It woke him up at about 7 a.m. Saturday.

It was Sammon. Don, who was 44, came outside and saw family members on his lawn.

Don heard: Troy's dead."

Sammon said a pickup truck ran over Troy when he got out of the car.

Don was beside himself. It didn't make sense.

He phoned Hamilton Police. He drove to the city, and met two homicide detectives from the major crime unit. They took him to the morgue in Hamilton General Hospital.

Troy's body was under a sheet, but the face was exposed, not a mark on it.

Don said: Who killed my son?"

The detectives said they didn't know.

Well this is one case that will not go unsolved," he told them. You find the man who killed my son."

It was stifling hot at the funeral. Don broke down and could barely function in the days that followed.

But when he learned that the driver who killed Troy, and the pickup truck, were still missing, he couldn't stand it.

The anger inside me, it somehow kept me alive," he says.

The case was investigated by the traffic division of Hamilton Police.

Witnesses had reported an old white pickup truck with rattling blue wooden sideboards racing from the scene where Troy lay dead.

At the time, a police officer told the Spectator the incident had likely been unintentional.

Don felt otherwise, and that police weren't moving fast enough.

He was an autobody man and mechanic. He was about straight lines: an engine falters, you get inside it, identify the problem, fix it.

It's not like the police were looking for a gun; the weapon was a truck. How hard is it to find a truck?"

He embarked on an odyssey that cost him dearly.

I wanted names of witnesses, I wanted everything," he says.

He hired a private investigator at $50/hour plus expenses, draining his savings.

He taped phone calls at home and carried a recorder in his jacket.

Sleeping four hours a night, his body was breaking down, and at one point he had to quit his factory job.

Don got a new position in the cooler unit of a poultry plant, just to get close to a maintenance guy who had seen the white pickup that night.

He was a good witness," he says. And I gave everything I gathered, all the statements and physical evidence, to the police."

He admits he went too far at times.

When his suspicions grew that Troy's killer was in a biker gang, he started following bikers in town, and confronted one in a Tim Hortons parking lot.

He even grew a beard to look shaggy enough to blend-in at a bar frequented by bikers.

Sometimes you have to pretend to be a tough guy. You can't show fear."

Don phoned police nearly every day for updates, visited the Hamilton Mountain police station two, three times a week.

He worked to reconstruct Troy's final night alive. He acquired a copy of a 7-Eleven security tape, that he says shows Troy and Sammon at the counter, Sammon springing for nachos and cheese, both of them laughing, less than 10 minutes before Troy died.

They had been drinking in Hamilton, hitting Hess Village for live jazz, and wrapping up at the Piccadilly strip club on Barton Street. Don interviewed a dancer who had been with them.

She said Troy wouldn't spend any money that night, wouldn't buy shots. She said Troy told her he was saving money to buy his dad his first ride in an airplane. To take me up on Sunday, on Father's Day."

A Crime Stoppers video re-enactment of Troy's death was released to encourage public tips.

The video depicts the white pickup truck bumping into the rear of Sammon's Dodge Colt at the intersection.

An actor portraying Troy gets out of the car, approaches the passenger side of the truck, and executes a karate kick at one of the truck's mirrors. He falls to the pavement, and the truck's rear tires roll over him.

There were conflicting accounts of what happened.

Don is convinced Troy did not kick the mirror; he was wearing sandals, and holding a platter of nachos, hardly ready to fight.

Boyhood friend Terry Reid says Troy's instinct when trouble brewed was to defend himself, but always try to make peace.

Troy was not a stupid guy; he would not have tried to kick a moving car," he says.

Don tracked down the Dodge Colt in a scrap yard. His private investigator bagged a piece just above the bumper, where the truck would have hit it.

Don says there was a small dent, that did not suggest impact from a truck.

So what had happened, and why?

Don dropped flyers in mailboxes, and stapled 1,000 posters to poles across the county and in Hamilton, offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the person responsible for Troy's death.

I would have offered a lot more but there was no way I could cover it."

Soon he began working with a new private investigator: Michael King.

King, a native of the U.K. who worked as a police officer in London and Toronto before becoming a P.I., had worked cases pro bono, felt for Don, and never charged him a fee.

(Don figures he has spent about $50,000 over the years on his investigation.)

Mike has a heart of gold, I could never repay what he has done for me."

King recorded a statement from a tractor trailer driver who had stopped to help Troy that night in 1998.

The man said that when he approached the scene, he noticed a white truck racing past him the other way on Hwy. 20. He got out of his rig and knelt to the pavement to help the victim, who was not breathing. He felt a pulse and administered CPR to Troy. The man asked Sammon what happened; Sammon described the bumping of his car, but then said the truck had sped up beside him, forcing him to stop. He also said someone in the truck threw a beer bottle at the car.

The Spectator viewed a transcript of the man's statement, but was unable to locate him, which is why his name is not published.

Don was frustrated with Sammon's varying accounts of what happened, and angry police waited more than two months to interview their best witness.

Police told the Spectator in 1999 that Sammon had cooperated with investigators, and that they planned to interview him under hypnosis to jar his memory.

(The Spectator spoke on the phone with Sammon's mother, who said she would relay an interview request to her son for this story. Sammon did not respond.)

Don started hearing from people around town that Troy had been a target.

A psychic told him it was a grudge thing," and that Troy knew his killer.

King believes the sequence of events in the months prior to Troy's death offers the strongest hint it was murder.

He says that 18 months before Troy was killed, police launched an undercover drug operation in the Dunnville area called Project C.D.

Troy got caught in the net. He was charged in May 1997 with trafficking a narcotic, after trying to sell one gram of marijuana with a street value of $20 to an undercover police officer in the Queen's Hotel bar. Don showed the Spectator a copy of Troy's arrest report.

King believes that local members of biker gangs who were later arrested in the bust, blamed Troy, incorrectly, for being a paid informant.

King interviewed a Dunnville man who described an incident that took place two days prior to Troy's death.

The man said he had been in the Victoria Hotel bar with his wife, when he heard someone yelling outside. He went out the door and saw a large tatted-up biker, who he recognized, throwing full beer cans at Troy, and screaming: You're a rat! I'm going to kill you!"

The man told the Spectator he remembers the incident like it was yesterday, but asked that his name not be published for reasons of personal safety.

King believes the one who threatened Troy didn't kill him, but knows who was in the truck that night.

In 2004, Don's campaign for more attention to the case paid off, when Hamilton Police revived the investigation.

Detectives travelled to B.C. to interview a suspect, who admitted he owned the truck that ran over Troy, but denied being in it at the time. The Spectator reported that the man passed a polygraph.

No arrests were made.

King says the suspect - who he is convinced lied to police - died from cancer a few years ago. But he believes the driver continues to live in the Hamilton area.

King had planned to travel to Ontario from the U.K. this spring, in part to spend time on the case with Don, and to meet with Hamilton Police, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed his return.

They still hope for an arrest, or a coroner's inquest or investigation; King has written Ontario's Office of the Chief Coroner requesting it.

In 2008, the coroner's office re-examined the file, but ruled an inquest was not warranted. Cheryl Mahyr, issues manager in the coroner's office, told the Spectator in an email: Our office has voluminous correspondence on this case ... Our investigation has concluded and will not be revisited until the Hamilton Police Services alters its conclusions."

King says Don Armstrong will not go away quietly. He shares a burden with other parents who have lost a loved one to murder."

Troy's friend, Terry Reid, applauds Don for keeping the case in the public eye.

It should not be forgotten," Reid says. Whoever did this to Troy, that guy is out there walking around, living life and my friend's life is taken from me and it's not right."

In January, Don suffered what appeared to be a stroke. His face drooped from paralysis. It was Bell's palsy, related to a viral infection, and he recovered.

He turns 67 on June 25. His blood pressure is too high. He has slept poorly ever since that night in 1998.

He takes medication to soothe his stomach and stop the shakes each morning.

He is broken financially and earns money as a handyman for a retired judge in Hamilton.

And he is still on the case.

I'm mad as hell, just as much as that first day," he says. Every morning I wonder if today is the day justice will prevail."

He recently bumped into the man who had seen Troy threatened outside the bar 22 years ago. Don asked him if the details are still fresh.

He does this, checks-up on witnesses, keeps his ducks in a row so he's ready if the case ever makes it to court.

In the end, he says, it's not about getting a conviction.

I just want that call from the police where they say: This is what happened that night, and this is the guy who did it, and it's going in the Spectator.' I just want the damn truth told."

It remains an open investigation, according to Hamilton Police Det. Const. Hendrik Vandercraats.

It's not unprecedented for an arrest in a hit-and-run case long after the death.

Vandercraats remembers a case from the 1970s, in which the driver was found in Florida 20 years later, and brought back to Hamilton to face charges.

As for the Armstrong investigation, I believe there are people who know what happened but have not come forward to provide information to the police," he wrote in an email.

There are more people that need to be interviewed."

Don Armstrong parks his truck off a laneway winding through Riverside Cemetery in Dunnville.

He shows material from his investigation; three briefcases stuffed with reports, statements, audio tapes and newspaper clippings.

He's got more back in his shop.

He is dressed in black from head to toe, his preferred shade, despite his wife's efforts to vary his colours.

Her name is Grace. She has often accompanied him on his sleuthing, but he says it's taken a toll on her.

Troy's mother, Mary, is alive, but she and Don divorced years ago. One reason for their breakup was emotional strain from loss - but it wasn't Troy's death.

It was their second child, Tracy May. She is buried next to Troy.

She died of a congenital heart defect five days after her second birthday.

Maybe the hardest part was telling Troy," Don says. He was seven at the time."

He lowers himself to the ground and places a hand on Troy's stone, that is marked by the weathered cross upon which friends have hung beads.

His weary eyes stare at a place right in front of him, and perhaps long ago.

As a parent you protect your kids. You'd take a bullet for them ... Troy-boy. I miss him so much."

What if Troy was able to tell Don to just let the case go?

He might say something like that to me, to let it go. But he knows I won't quit on him. I come here and I tell him: Buddy, your dad is on the job.' "

He says if it's resolved he will gladly snap shut his briefcases for good. Maybe no longer deny himself a peaceful day fishing.

But then, what might he lose?

He wouldn't think of it this way, but so long as he chases ghosts from 1998, armed with sorrow and rage, he remains on a journey with Troy, riding down that road with him to the end.

Some evenings, Don has come to the cemetery late, the old river black and still. He sits at the grave, candles flickering. He lays down his head and drifts away in the darkness, until first light revives him from his sleep of the dead.

Jon Wells is a Hamilton-based reporter and feature writer for The Spectator. Reach him via email: jwells@thespec.com

If you have information about the Troy Armstrong case, call Hamilton Police Det. Const. Hendrik Vandercraats at 905-546-4755, or to remain anonymous Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or go to crimestoppershamilton.com. Don Armstrong asked that his number be published as well: 289-377-8631