What happened to Marianne Schuett?
Back in 1981, The Spectator put together series of articles about obscure towns and villages around Hamilton.
I was a summer intern reporter at the time and assigned to write about a place called Kilbride, a small village five kilometres northeast of Carlisle.
It was not hard to come up with a story. Everyone I interviewed was quick to talk about 10-year-old Marianne Schuett who had been abducted out front of Kilbride Public School on April 27, 1967. She was coaxed by a middle-aged man into a dark-coloured station wagon and never seen again.
In that moment, a sleepy village lost its innocence, and the community of Kilbride would forever be tied to a horrific, tragic crime that happened within its borders.
So, it caught my attention when I recently learned that a couple of retired police officers, living in Muskoka, have been volunteering their time investigating the cold case over the past couple of years. They have organized a forensic site search in Acton where they believe Marianne's body may have been left all those years ago.
Linda Gillis Davidson is a former inspector with the RCMP, and Doug Collins worked as a forensic detective with Peel Regional Police. They have put together a team of anthropologists, cadaver-sniffing dogs and 35 volunteers to scrape through a section of field and woods near a quarry off Highway 25 and 22 Side Road in Acton in September.
After all these years, there won't be remains, just bits and pieces," says Davidson. But they hope to be able to extract DNA samples to compare to DNA provided by Marianne's brother Stephen, who has been assisting the investigation.
Halton Police have said they believe they know who is responsible. But the suspect - whose name was never revealed - committed suicide before he could be arrested in 1991.
He had been jailed in 1972 for the attempted abduction of a 17-year-old girl in Burlington and had also been investigated for two other sexual assaults of young girls later in the 1970s.
Marianne's remains have never been found despite numerous efforts over the years. Just after her disappearance, more than 18,000 people took part in a massive ground search.
The retired officers hope that fresh eyes on the case, specially trained dogs (that can detect the scent of human remains and distinguish it from animal remains) as well as advances in DNA technology can be used to help solve the puzzle of what happened to Marianne.
We have worked our way to a point that we know the suspect was within a three-kilometre radius of the area. From that and a jailhouse informant's information, we narrowed it down to two specific sites," says Davidson, who as an RCMP officer worked in border enforcement, human resources and the protective detail for the Prime Minister.
They have talked to retired detectives who worked on the case and interviewed victims who survived abduction attempts by the man believed to have murdered Marianne.
She said the cadaver dogs - owned by a dog-training company in Alliston - were brought in to sniff around for a preliminary check and each one marked the same spot independently."
So, on the weekend of Sept. 11, the team will return to the location where they have permission of the property owner to strip out sections of surface soil, put them on tarps and have dogs sniff through. From there, they hope to lift DNA samples that can be tested.
If the site searchers find human remains, they will contact Halton police who, with a coroner, will decide whether to take over.
Davidson said there is a second site nearby where the dogs picked up the scent of human remains as well. They plan to explore that location more fully at some point in the future.
There is no way to tell at this point whether the dogs detected something real or whether trace amounts of human remains at either site are related to the murder. They could be from an Indigenous burial or some other death.
Police believe the suspect in Marianne's murder may also have been involved in the disappearance four-year-old Cameron March of Burlington in May, 1975. His remains were never found. One possibility is the scent picked up by the dogs at one site relates to Marianne and the other to Cameron.
But that is just a theory the investigators are exploring.
Asked why they are so keen to continue doing work in their retirement that is so similar to what they did while they were employed, Davidson says, We still want to be active. We're retired but our skills didn't."
Collins says another reason is that he has a personal attachment to the Schuett case. He grew up in Burlington, a few kilometres from where the abduction took place. He was 14 years old at the time and remembers the intense emotions in the community at the time.
As an adult, while working as a Peel Regional police officer, he lived in Carlisle for a few years. I drove through Kilbride every day going to work in Mississauga. Every time I passed through the village the case was on my mind, wondering what happened to her," he said.
Stan Rogers stamp
In May, I wrote about Hamiltonians who have been honoured by Canada Post commemorative stamps over the years, after learning the great singer-songwriter Stan Rogers would be joining the list. The Stan stamp was still being refined when I wrote the column and not available for viewing.
But, last week, it was finally released, and it looks wonderful. It blends a picture of Rogers performing with an aerial shot of an area of Nova Scotia known by locals as Fogarty's Cove, a place that inspired much of his music.
Rogers, who lived in the Hamilton area for nearly all his life, died at the age of 33 in June 1983 in an Air Canada jetliner fire. At the time of his death, his songs were gaining recognition across the continent and since then many have become folk music classics.