National Post du lieu suivant : Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 26

B6 REVIEW NATIONAL POST, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1999 Although his Although a jury took only 45 minutes to acquit Steve Murray of the murder of Mistie, his 16-year-old daughter, the police continue to insist they were right. They're still spending tax dollars trying to prove their case while he's trying to find his daughter Life as a prime suspect BY DONNA LAFRAMBOISE he last time Steve hind Mistie, Murray year-old the she saw wheel sat his daughter, of be- the 16- family's red TransAm convertible with the top down and the engine running, laughing that soon she'd have her driver's licence. Steve had tousled her hair and teased her about women drivers before she'd slid over, her mother had climbed in and they'd departed for school. Nearly four months later, Steve was charged with Mistie's murder. Four years later, life for the Murrays could hardly be more different.

Their family business in Goderich, the TransAm, their powerboat and all their savings are gone. Although a jury took only 45 minutes to acquit Steve, the police still insist they were right. And, in the town of 7,500 on Lake Huron, people whisper that the cleverness of his big city lawyer rather than the feebleness of the case against him is the real reason he's free. Once intensely involved in his community as a school trustee, president of the PTA and head of the soccer association, Steve has spent the past two years in the cab of a tractor-trailer, trucking office furniture across the continent. "I need to be alone," he told the National Post in the only interview he has ever given.

"And do a little crying in private." Affixed to the back of Steve's rig is a large poster of a smiling Mistie accompanied by a Child Find telephone number. Sometimes the ache of not knowing what has become of her overwhelms him. "I've had a couple of breakdowns," admits this 6-foot, 3-inch, 230-pound man. Mistie was a disturbed, demanding five-year-old when she was adopted by Steve and Anne Murray in 1983. Born to a single mother from an unstable background, her early years were marked by a revolving door of babysitters and foster parents.

a teacher trained to assist children with learning disabilities, describes Mistie's integration into her family of two sons as "hell on Earth." Tormented by nightmares and given to uncontrollable sobbing, Mistie lost clumps of hair and repeatedly asked what she'd done to make her foster family get rid dot ofher. "Neither Steve nor I had ever imagined how distraught a little child could be," Anne says. "Things were bad and we were frightened." Today, Anne says it seems clear Mistie suffers from attachment disorder, a condition common in Romanian orphans who spent their early years in institutions. Profoundly emotionally neglected, these children exhibit long-term behavioural problems including a propensity to form indiscriminate relationships. 6 Like these children, Mistie had no fear of strangers.

She would "walk up to a stranger, male or female, and start talking," asking if she could live with them, Anne says. "If they were sitting down, she would crawl up on their lap." When 16-year-old Mistie did not come home in the early summer of 1995, Anne says the Goderich police force, assisted by the Ontario Provincial Police, made little attempt to understand the psychological history of the young woman they were searching for. Though the Murrays initially felt sure she hadn't run away (50,000 youths do so every year in Canada), they now think more attention should have been paid to her tendency to be easily led. While Mistie's disappearance began as a missing person case, police seem to have decided quickly she'd been murdered. Only one day of organized searches was devoted to looking for a live Mistie.

Though dozens of underwater dives and extensive canine, air and shoreline searches were conducted on the assumption she was dead, none recovered any trace of her. Just as police in another Ontario town inferred Guy Paul Morin was guilty because he didn't attend the funeral of the girl he was wrongly convicted of murdering, a small detail appears to have triggered the police belief in Steve's guilt. A few days after Mistie was reported missing, police interviewed her frantic parents. Steve neglected to mention he'd taken the family boat for a 15-minute spin on the day police say Mistie was last seen. MISSING MISTIE MURRAY AKA JEAN MARIE OLDFIELD D.O.B.: October 28, 1978 Height: 5 feet, 3 inches Weight: 115 pounds Hair: Reddish Brown Eyes: Characteristics: Space between two upper front teeth and mole on right cheek.

MISSING SINCE: May 31, 1995 FROM: Goderich, Ontario It has been reported that Mistie was last seen in the Goderich, London, and Toronto area in the summer of 1995. She was wearing a dark green jacket with on the left sleeve and a crest "Seaforth Girls Trumpet Mistie wore rings on every finger and has five piercings in the right ear and two in the left. ANYONE WITH INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT YOUR LOCAL POLICE OR GODERICH POLICE AT 519-524-8333 OR CHILD FIND 1-800-387-7962 Affixed to the back of Steve Murray's tractor-trailor rig is a large smiling Mistie Murray a Child Find telephone people believe they have but she is still missing. "I have a tremendously bad memory," Steve says now. The police "wanted to know what Anne and I were doing that night.

And God help me, they thought I was covering up because I didn't remember what I did. We were trying to find our daughter. I thought my whereabouts didn't mean anything." At trial, the police theory was that Steve had ordered Mistie to clean the boat on Wednesday, May 31. They say he joined her around 7 p.m., took her out on the lake, murdered her and then disposed of her body. In the words of the judge, "no motive found in the evidence." Nor was this a case in which witnesses reported incriminating news and police drew the logical conclusions.

Mistie's high school guidance counsellor told police she felt threatened by the possessiveness of an ex-boyfriend. Another young man with whom she was associating had a criminal record and later lied under oath about how he'd spent May 31. Yet Steve was the only person police asked a "truth expert" to interview. his charge to the jury, the judge paraphrased Steve's testimony in these words: "I did not realize that, starting about a week after Mistie disappeared, the true nature of the police activity was to microscopically examine my movements and my statements, looking for some innocent inconsistency and then claiming that was evidence of guilt." The irony is that the officers who were so unforgiving toward Steve were themselves conducting a profoundly flawed investigation. Goderich is a port town.

Great Lake freighters regularly dock in its harbour, where they are loaded with local grain as well as salt from a nearby Sifto salt mine. During the long hours it takes to fill one of these ships, dozens of sailors go ashore frequently returning to their vessels drunk. All Calls Confidential No Name Required ACAWA- CANYON STE. MARIE poster of a accompanied by number. Several seen her alive, It took police in ship named the It took police four months to pay attention to the fact that a salt ship named the Agawa Canyon was in port on the day they insist Mistie was killed.

The possibility that a 16-year-old girl might have been accosted by one or more intoxicated sailors doesn't appear to have crossed police minds. Constable Mark Johnston a central investigator since promoted to Detective Constable testified he didn't become aware of the presence of the Agawa Canyon until Sept. 18 three days after he had arrested Steve. On Sept. 19, five officers boarded the Agawa Canyon and spoke to some of its crew.

Even though Ontario law requires officers to keep detailed notes of every interview they conduct, police records on this occasion consist only of brief lists of names accompanied by comments such as "none of the above persons could be of assistance." There is no indication police ran a criminal records check on the freighter's crew. Shortly after Mistie was reported missing, police invited students at the Goderich high school to come forward with information. Two reported being passengers in a car that had driven past Mistie in the town of Clinton (a 15-minute ride from Goderich) two days after police insist she was last seen. One of the students said it was Mistie "for sure." Both described her as wearing a green marchingband jacket. The officer spoke to these students for only five minutes.

A full year later, police contacted them to take written statements. The students reported seeing Mistie near a bus stop. Police appear to have dismissed this as a case of mistaken identity when they learned her best friend had caught a bus from Clinton the same day. But such a conclusion was questionable for two reasons: While Mistie owned a green band jacket, her friend did not. And the friend's bus had left hours earlier.

Eight more people independent- CUPS to the fact that a salt insist Mistie was killed. The one-day search for a live Mistie occurred on June 15 when six Goderich-area police officers drove for an hour to London to investigate these sightings. But when Anne Murray canvassed the same section of town the next year, the result was a dozen sworn affidavits from individuals such as pawnbrokers and fast food outlet employees who claimed to remember Mistie clearly, but said they'd never been interviewed by police. Steve Murray recalls the weeks he spent in London during the summer of 1995. "I was down into some pretty raunchy areas," he says.

On one occasion "my heart went into my mouth when I thought I saw, from the back end, Mistie with a boy in an alley. I slammed on the breaks and ran across. I had no regard where I'd left my car; it was still in the street. I scared the couple pretty badly, but it obviously wasn't Mistie." James Donnelly, the judge at Steve's 1997 trial, has a reputation for being pro-police, partly because he presided over the wrongful conviction of Mr. Morin in 1992.

But in his summation to the jury in Steve's case, Judge Donnelly said: "The whole Crown theory unreasonable within itself." In addition to being "riddled with internal inconsistency," he suggested the police version of events had been "demolished by the sighting evidence." While he praised defence witnesses, Judge Donnelly expressed skepticism about the reliability of the three people on whose evidence the case of Robert Morris, the Crown attorney, had turned. Two were a couple who owned one of the other boats docked in Goderich Harbour. They told police they had been at the harbour all day on May 31 and had seen Steve and Mistie leave in the Murray boat. But despite being aware that Mistie was missing, they didn't mention this until police contacted them three months after the alleged murder. The couple told the court Steve's boat had not returned, yet two fishermen helped Steve load it on a trailer within feet of them that evening.

And although the salt ship had dominated the harbour from the early hours of May 31 until 7 p.m., neither of these people saw it. In the words of the judge: "The Agawa Canyon is the leviathan of the lakes, it's 600-odd feet long It was busy, it was It was there all during this time, and witnesses remember it." The last of the crown's pivotal witnesses was a man who contacted police following Steve's arrest. He testified that when he and three relatives went for a boat ride on May 31, he'd seen Steve and an unidentified young woman go on to the lake, but only Steve had returned. The man's testimony didn't match that of his relatives, however, who said they saw Steve only once, by himself. The judge also noted that despite the gravity of the case, this witness seemed unconcerned that four different parts of his testimony were wrong.

When the jury returned with a not-guilty verdict in less than an hour, Steve's lawyer Toronto's Brian Greenspan said it was the fastest jury decision of his career. Anne later received a note from one of the jurors that read: "If they thought 45 minutes was fast, 12 people went to the bathroom and two had a smoke in that time!" This is "not just a 'not guilty' verdict," Mr. Greenspan says. "This is an 'innocent' verdict. This is a vindication verdict." Yet while the Murrays won that battle (at huge financial cost), the police appear determined to win the war.

Unable to admit they were wrong, they insist Mistie's body is at the bottom of Lake Huron. In a front-page Toronto Star story almost a year to the day after Steve's acquittal, OPP Detective Inspector Wally Baker, the person long in charge of the Mistie case, declared: "Make no mistake. She's out there the I know it. And we'll find her." The article described how Det. Insp.

Baker had telephoned "all over North America" in search of a sonar device to assist in locating underwater objects. Since then, Det. Insp. Baker has repeatedly told the media: "This is not a missing child." He responded to the sight of a transport truck bearing Mistie's Child Find photo by bellowing, in the presence of one journalist: "She's not missing, she's dead. This is a homicide investigation." Yet, despite the involvement of nine OPP officers, two coast guard personnel and boats fitted with high-tech equipment, the searchers have still found nothing.

Mr. Greenspan says it isn't uncommon for police officers to lose perspective while working on a case. But "what may be unique is the extent to which the tunnel vision" has gripped the officers in this instance. "I don't think he's insincere in his belief," says Mr. Greenspan of Det.

Insp. Baker. "I just think he's wrong-minded and mean-spirited. What he forgets is that it's not his role in the justice system. He's usurped the role of jury and judge.

He thinks only Wally Baker could possibly be right. But it was the jury's role to make that determination." The Murrays remain outraged by the waste of tax dollars they feel the continuing underwater searches represent, and by the refusal of police authorities to assign an independent team to Mistie's case. Anne's complaints through the police complaints process have fallen on deaf ears. As an example of how she has been treated, she points to a deal she was offered by Sergeant Major Dave Hutchingame of the OPP's Professional Standards Bureau: If she'd drop her complaint, police would return Mistie's last letter. When Anne declined, she says she was told: "Then you don't get the letter." The letter, read into the court record, was written during the week prior to Mistie's disappearance.

Addressing both her parents, Mistie apologizes for being a difficult daughter, thanks them, and asks for their forgiveness. "IfI were yous along time ago I would have given up on me, but I know you love me," it says. The letter is signed, "your daughter 4-ever always, Mistie Nicole Murray." National Post Goderich, four months to pay Canyon was in port on the day they ly told police Mistie had been very much alive when they'd seen her on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday after police say she was killed. Three fellow students spotted her in Goderich at different times and places. One of them even reported having a conversation with her in a store.

Yet police did not interview the store's staff. Among the witnesses who said they, too, had seen Mistie in nearby Clinton were three more fellow students and a pair of employees of a midway that had been part of the annual Clinton Fair. When police showed him a photograph of Mistie a few weeks later, one man said he "distinctly remembered" Mistie and her two female companions because one of the teens was so drunk he wouldn't allow her on the ride he was operating. The other told police: "I'm positive it was your girl." After the media reported Mistie had been spotted in London, MISTIE SUFFERS FROM 'ATTACHMENT DISORDER' police admitted this to her parents. (The full extent of the Mistie sightings didn't become apparent until a year later, when police acknowledged in court they'd received 93 reports in total.) Six London residents said they'd seen 1 Mistie in London during the two weeks following her disappearance.

A man said a girl who looked like her had asked him for change at a bus stop, while a woman said she'd spoken to a girl matching Mistie's description who'd been crying at a local mall. More disturbing were reports from others who claimed they'd seen Mistie more than once in the same seedy part of town. According to those people, she was "strung out on crack" and working as a prostitute. A.