“Welcome to ‘Insider information’, I’m your host, Jim LeGrand, and to-day we welcome Madison Hale as our guest
“Ms. Hale is a detective with the metropolitan police force; thank you for joining us Ms. Hale.”
“Happy to be here.”
“Let’s start with being a detective; what’s involved?”
“Well, not much officially, in Canada you have to be 18 years or older and a Canadian citizen.”
“So there’s no Bachelor of Detecting?”
(Laughing) “No, that would certainly simplify things.”
“Then let’s turn to you; why did you get interested in this profession and what did you do to become a detective?”
“Well this wasn’t my life’s dream, if that’s what you mean. I graduated with a science degree at university and guess I thought I’d end up in research or maybe teach or do graduate work. I was at a bit of a loose end, actually, and then I met my future partner in crime, excuse the pun, Jason, who had specialized in criminology a year before me and I thought if this relationship becomes serious I’d better learn a little bit about what he likes to do so I, too, took criminology courses which pretty well means you’re headed for police work of some kind.”
“Your science background would suggest forensics.”
“Yes, that was a possibility but maybe I was smitten by the imagined glamour of detective work over the behind-the-scenes quiet of the laboratory.”
“What was the next step?”
“Well, Jason was employed by a police force, graduated from their academy program and expressed an interest in detective work and started his career there. I followed roughly the same path. From there it was putting in time, gaining experience and working very hard; it’s a difficult profession. You have to do a lot of research, understand the many disciplines involved in solving crimes and put in long hours. And you have to like to solve problems; decide you think you’re smarter than the bad guys, if you will. I’ve been a detective in the serious crimes division now for thirteen years.”
“Glad you mentioned solving problems. The public probably doesn’t know how successful the police are in this regard. Would you please talk about that?”
“If you go by the television police shows, we solve everything and can pretty well do it in a day (laughing). The reality is somewhat less heady; dramatically less than TV would like you to believe. Depending on where you are in the world, the percentage of cases that go unsolved range anywhere from 40 to 80.”
“What are some of the principal reasons you don’t solve a serious crime?”
“Assuming we’re talking about murder, it varies but motivation is critical. For example, if you, sorry Jim, but if you, on your way home tonight murdered a stranger on the street and let’s assume you two were alone in a no-witness area, it would be practically impossible to link you with the crime.”
“Other factors?”
“Well, missing a body complicates things.”
“But couldn’t you be talking about a missing person?”
“Yes, but a person who’s been missing for a while, whose case has received a thorough exploration of all relevant factors, without a body you can assume the individual is dead and had probably been murdered.”
“What else?”
“Well, I hate to say this, but incompetence can’t be ruled out. We just don’t do a thorough enough job.”
“We won’t dwell on that (smiling) but let’s turn to your experience. Can you relate a case that tested you?”
“First of all, I should explain that there are many professionals involved in trying to understand what happens and I’m not the only detective in most cases. You can get fixated on an approach and it’s necessary to have others challenge your suppositions so you don’t miss key elements that could open things up. The case I brought with me took place a few years back up in cottage country. You may recall it, a couple were found shot in their cabin.”
“Ah yes, the ‘last resort’ case, but I don’t remember the details.”
“An unfortunate play on words. We were called in because there wasn’t a detective division with forensic services locally.”
“Please walk us through it.”
“When you come to the scene of the crime, you try to take in as much as you can that doesn’t seem to directly impact the victims. I look at the surroundings; try to put myself in the killer’s shoes; how did he or she get here? Why here? How come nobody saw anything? How easy would it be to commit the crime?
“Let me interrupt, Jim, and explain I use ‘he’ for consistency and simplicity but everyone should be aware that the guys aren’t the only ones with evil in their hearts. To continue, you finally have to ask yourself, of course, why? Why the killings?
“This case was unusual for me, at least, because I couldn’t determine a motive; nobody seemed to have anything to gain by the killings. When a partner is killed you immediately suspect the other person in the relationship. I’d researched the couple ahead of time and there was nothing to suggest they had enemies. Jackie and Bill Friend were a very ordinary couple living a very ordinary life and spending time at their cabin was a normal summer activity for them. Jackie stayed there most of the summer with Bill driving up on the weekends. They were both killed with a common gun, a Glock 17M, a standard issue used by the provincial police, for example, and there were no signs of forcible entry nor any struggle by the victims. It wasn’t a double homicide and no one in the area had any suspicions.”
“But something obviously caught your attention.”
“A couple of things, actually. First of all, could it be a professional killing? Everything was too neat. An amateur gets sloppy, leaving clues everywhere. And secondly, there was a disparity in their ages. She was mid to late forties but he was at least ten years younger and, as it struck me at the time, quite handsome. He had Hollywood looks while she had let herself go somewhat. Now, that doesn’t mean anything normally, and they’d been married several years, but he travelled a lot and I wondered how faithful he’d been.”
“But they were both killed.”
Yes, that I didn’t understand. Let’s say he was philandering and the wife suspected something and had him killed. Then why was she shot?”
“Then what happened?”
“Well, not much, this is where the TV and the real worlds part. In most TV plots the phone rings or somebody finds a note hidden in the freezer that leads to the killer but we didn’t have any of that luck. We’d hit a dead end (no pun), so we started to put together a picture of the husband’s life.
“Bill Friend was a successful IT consultant with clients around the country necessitating his travelling. His travels also took him to conventions and I decided to start there; who attended these conventions?”
“Why did you start there, why not with the clients?”
“For practical reasons, there were a lot of clients and I was still on this philandering approach and conventions, so the saying goes, if you believe the Las Vegas ads, you get to meet people at conventions that you can leave at these conventions; clients are a little more circumspect. So we contacted his company and got the list of conventions he’d attended in the last five years and from the conventions, got the list of attendees.”
“Why five years?”
“We were looking for attendees who kept showing up at these conventions. In other words, were these the rendezvous points?”
“But wouldn’t the same names show up often?”
“Indeed, but then the detective work kicks in. And the numbers drop quite a bit when you’re looking for women. And we were looking for attractive, single women in their thirties that lived here.
“We narrowed the search down to three possible suspects: Carol Bell, Samantha Adams and Rosanne Dewitt.”
“Sorry, but I have to come back to this, why would the femme fatale, who, say, wants to knock off the wife to get the husband, kill the husband?”
“Good question, you have a future after television.”
“But, not to get ahead of ourselves, we had to break down the background of the three suspects. All three were single, attractive, knew Bill, successful professionals who lived in the city and were linked in various capacities to the IT industry. And most unfortunately, none of them were solid suspects to do the killing.”
“So this supports your theory of a professional killer.”
“Yes, one of them would have had to engage someone to kill Bill or Jackie Friend.”
“So, how do you engage a professional killer?”
“Good question and the answer is, ‘Not easily. They don’t staple their resumés to telephone poles.
“But this helped us; who would have the possible connections to hire a killer? We now looked more deeply into their backgrounds so we brought them all in for questioning.
All three admitted that they’d had an affair with Bill and all three were shocked at his death. We decided they weren’t acting; they were truly emotionally upset so that ruled them out initially, in our mind, as the killer.
“Carol Bell, one of the suspects, had a grandfather who fought in the second world war. Sepp Krafft was captured by the British and turned to act as a double agent. This would give her a plausible link to a professional hit man.
“Samantha Adams only met Bill at the conventions that were held in Las Vegas. Las Vegas, as you can imagine, or know, has a lot of acts with skilled performers and marksmen are a popular act so Samantha could have easily made friends with someone who could handle firearms.
“Rosanne DeWitt, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any obvious connections with a professional hit man. We drew a blank with her as a suspect.”
“But you solved the case.”
(smiling) “Again, I have to explain that luck enters into it. I believe it was Louis Pasteur who said, ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’ So, I dragged Jason into this and we tried to re-enact the crime.
“If we were right and it was a crime of passion, and one of the women wanted to get rid of Jackie and have Bill to herself, then the hit man was to kill Jackie, not Bill. So let’s assume that’s what happened, during the week, when Jackie was alone at the cabin, the hit man killed Jackie. Done. But, you may well ask, ‘what about Bill?’
“And Jason had an idea, someone wanted to kill Bill, not Jackie. There was a woman scorned. Only a man would figure that angle. So, when Bill went up on the weekend, the hit man killed him.”
“You mean there were two hit killings? Unbelievable.”
“Not so fast. Logically it would take incredible co-operation and luck between two hit men to pull this off but the idea that there were two distinct murders was compelling.
“We started with Samantha.
“We broke down each of her visits to Las Vegas to see if there were any events that could suggest a tie to a shooter. There were no stage shows but there was a major gun show during one of her visits. Las Vegas is an attractive destination if you’re interested in firearms. Las Vegas and the state of Nevada are, to put it politely, gun crazy. There are gun shows held regularly, a gazillion shooting ranges and, by our standards, lax guns laws: you do not need a permit to buy a gun, rifle or shotgun in Nevada; you do not need a permit to possess a rifle, gun or shotgun in Nevada; semi-automatic guns are legal in Nevada as are fully automatic guns.
“We sent an undercover team to Las Vegas to attend one of the larger gun shows to determine if it would be possible to hire someone. The quick answer is, ‘yes,’ but it’s a qualified, ‘yes’. People are naturally suspicious and reluctant to be open about such an idea, even when a lot of money is involved. But the team came away with an idea of what it would take to hire a hit man; close to $US 100,000. So that gave us the idea to see how financially well off Samantha was and issued a summons to seize her financial records.
“Samantha was financially sound but neither had the cash nor assets to liquidate nor family connections to cover the sums involved. And we assumed it would be a challenge for her to get a loan and disguise its purpose. That would leave a loan shark which we dismissed so we cooled on Samantha as a strong suspect.
“Unless Rosanna DeWitt was the killer, herself, we had pretty well ruled her out based on her background checks so we focused on Carol Bell.
“We felt confident Carol was somehow involved because of her grandfather and her phone calls to him around that time so we arrested her on suspicion of conspiracy to murder. In Canada the Crown needs only prove that there was a meeting of the minds with regard to a common design to do something unlawful.
“We felt we had enough circumstantial evidence and we also wanted to put pressure on her.
“Jumping ahead, after several interrogations where we presented witness’s testimony that confirmed Carol’s almost blind infatuation with Bill followed by details of her phone conversations with her grandfather, under advisement of her lawyer, Carol confessed to conspiracy. I’ll read from her testimony:”
My grandfather, who’s still alive at 94, never lost contact with his war time comrades so when I went to him with my plan he reluctantly agreed to give me a name, Walther Model, a person, he said, who had saved his life during the war and that’s the person I contacted to have Jackie Friend killed. Walther hired a professional hit man, Franz Boas.
I provided all the details and $US 25,000 up front with $US 25,000 on completion of the assignment.
Walther left a message that Franz had killed Jackie and I wired him the balance.
“But, we haven’t addressed Bill’s death.”
“No, so we went back to our other suspects, Samantha and Rosanna, to see if we had missed anything and went through all their records to try to somehow connect them with a killer or put them at the cabin at that time.
“We looked at everything during the period in question: airline passenger checks; passport checks; rental car records; even did forensics on their own cars; we examined credit card records, phone records, anything we could think of that would link them with the crime but nothing surfaced. We even distributed pictures of them throughout the town. We were stumped.
“So on a hunch, I contacted Carol’s lawyer to give him a heads up that we were going to subpoena Carol’s grandfather. This broke things open.”
Carol couldn’t see her grandfather suffer and, negotiating through her lawyer, said she had further information if we would drop the subpoena and agree to a lesser sentence for her. We agreed and I’ll read the continuation of Carol’s testimony.”
“The next day, when I found out on the news that Bill had been shot, too, I immediately contacted Walther.
“He said, when Franz got there, he found this man on the floor, evidently a burglar. Jackie, who was sitting dazed in a chair, had dropped the gun by her side. Franz decided it would cause less suspicion if he killed Jackie with her own gun.”
Epilogue
Jackie’s dad, a retired Superintendent with the provincial police, discovered the bodies and recognized the gun he’d given his daughter.
Carol Bell was sentenced to life for conspiracy to murder. In return for her testimony, the sentence was reduced to eighteen years. Carol’s eligible for parole in ten years.
Madison and Jason Hale are still active as detectives and live with their three daughters in a small town just outside metropolitan Toronto.
Franz Boas returned to his native Austria. Canada does not have an extradition treaty with Austria.