Inside the fire-lookout murder mystery that still haunts Alberta
HINTON, ALTA.-A valley of trees, an old railroad, and peaceful mountain ranges splay out for hikers who summit the tranquil William Switzer Fire Tower Trail near Hinton.
But pieces of an old murder mystery also lie scattered there for visitors who take a closer look - a cabin, a wildfire watchtower and RCMP missing-person poster asking for information with an offer of a $20,000 reward.
Stephanie Stewart, 70, vanished 16 years ago this week.
She'd served at the Athabasca lookout tower - watching for wildfire and dangerous weather - for 13 years during fire season, from April through September.
Described by those who knew her as a capable outdoorswomen who liked crafts, gardening and reading, Stewart was living alone in the woods at a cabin set up for seasonal Alberta Sustainable Resource Development employees.
She'd climb up into a nearby lookout tower - a warden of the Prairie forests, spending time in nature, which people described as her happy place, according to old newspaper articles.
To this day, her disappearance has confounded Albertans; police are still investigating.
It's believed that Stewart disappeared sometime between the evening of Friday, Aug. 25, 2006 and the next morning. She failed to do a regular check-in on the Saturday morning, prompting another employee to travel out to her cabin 25 kilometres northwest of the town of Hinton, itself about three hours west of Edmonton.
The employee found a pot of boiling water on the stove, Stewart's grey truck in the driveway and blood on the steps outside the cabin.
Some items were missing as well; two pillows with blue covers, a burgundy bedsheet, a comforter with a Navajo pattern on it, and a gold watch. Stewart had spoken with at least one family member on Friday.
Police described the fire spotter as five-foot-two, 105 pounds, with grey shoulder-length hair, and in very good physical condition. Before going missing, Stewart had recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and had, at one point, cycled across Canada.
Hundreds scoured the surrounding area in the days afterward, covering an area of seven square kilometres on foot, making it one of the largest ground searches in the province's history. Several aircraft also searched 7,500 square kilometres in the surrounding area.
But Stewart was never found.
The tower people are a tight community," says Mike Dempsey, vice-president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees.
When one of them disappears - and an experienced one at that, who knew what she was doing and just disappeared one day - then the rest of them, who are also experienced, wonder, Well, am I next?'
There's always some fear out there that we live in a more dangerous world now."
Police eventually ruled it a homicide, dismissing the possibility that it could have been an animal attack or a case of her wandering off.
The fact that there was nothing revealed is still disturbing," says Dempsey. Because that tells us that the perpetrator is probably still on the loose and there's still people who have to work in there."
Police won't speak publicly about the ongoing investigation, but Sgt. Luke Halvorson, the acting non-commissioned officer in charge of the historical homicide unit in K Division (Alberta), says Stewart's case is one that they still regularly receive tips on.
Her story seems to resonate.
Albertans love the mountains. They love forests," he says. Here you have a lady seemingly just minding her own business, doing her job, and then she vanishes.
She was much beloved by her colleagues at Alberta Environment and Forestry and so I think that just all of that keeps it alive in people's minds."
The tower where she worked, one of 128 in the province at the time, was one of the lesser remote ones, being so close to Hinton. The lookout got a stream of visitors throughout wildfire season.
In the years that followed, significant policy changes were enacted for wildfire spotters like Stewart. A review regarding lookout tower safety was conducted and an expert panel recommended changes that the government adopted.
Now, fire spotters are trained in self-defence, have improved security features at their sites like more fences and better lighting, and are equipped with panic buttons.
The search for Stewart hasn't stopped, either. In 2018, about 100 people, including search and rescue volunteers and RCMP officers, set out to look for clues in an area of nearly 8,000 hectares around the tower.
It's not clear what, if any, progress has been made on the file recently.
Halvorson, speaking generally about the work his unit does in Alberta, says much of it involves reviewing exhibits to see what kind of forensic analysis was done, and then seeing if there are new kinds of technology that can be used. From genealogy and DNA analysis to ground-penetrating radar, police tool boxes have expanded over the years.
These days, DNA is usually behind a break on a historic case, says Halvorson, as over the last 10 years labs have significantly reduced how much material is needed to create a profile, using picograms (a trillionth of a gram) of DNA now instead of nanograms (a billionth).
He says files he oversees can be put roughly into two categories, the whodunits" where it's totally unknown who did it and then cases where a likely culprit has been found but we just don't have enough evidence to lay a charge."
It's often more aggravating to have almost enough to charge someone than it is to have a mountain of evidence but no suspect, he says.
They're quite a bit more frustrating," says Halvorson.
He added that there are more than 200 unsolved homicides in Alberta and his unit is pretty active" in its day-to-day work.
We touch these files every day on probably a dozen investigations," he says. There's probably at least a dozen, maybe another two dozen, that are in our regular purview."
On average each year, police solve one case that's at least a few years old, says Halvorson.
I would lie if I said I wasn't frustrated and sometimes disappointed," he says of the work.
I firmly believe that the information is probably in the files to take you where you need to go. You just have to develop it and follow it to the end."
Kieran Leavitt is an Edmonton-based political reporter for the Toronto Star. Follow him on Twitter: @kieranleavitt