IV - The investigation

In late November 1998, when Lawrence was reported missing, the Ontario Provincial Police assigned a young up-and-coming detective named Erin Burke to the case. The 28-year-old had been a police officer for six years, but she’d made a name for herself working several high profile cases — including a 1996 killing that, at the time, was Huntsville’s first murder in 10 years. Burke, who has since left the force, wouldn't be interviewed on camera after the OPP advised her not to. The current officers assigned to the case also declined to be interviewed because they say it’s still open. So The Fifth Estate and The Walrus magazine went to court to get access to hundreds of pages of previously sealed search warrants. They explain in detail how Burke and her colleagues worked the case.

OPP Det. Const. Erin Burke was assigned to look into the disappearance of Joan Lawrence in 1998. (OPP)

They also, for the first time, allow us to reveal who police believe was responsible for Lawrence's disappearance. According to the documents, it wasn't long before Burke believed she had another murder on her hands. “I do not believe that Lawrence moved off of the property,” Burke wrote in a search warrant request just weeks after The Cat Lady was reported missing. “Her body may be buried on the property.” That initial request to search the Laan property where Lawrence was last seen alive was the beginning of an active case that would last for years and expand well beyond a routine missing persons case. “I think there was a number of suspicions around town,” says Ron House, who was the mayor of Huntsville during the police investigation. House believes at the time Lawrence went missing, some members of the Laan family were working hard to distance themselves from the investigation. He remembers an interaction he had with one of the brothers, Walter Laan.

Former Hunstville mayor Ron House remembers the 'suspicions' around town. (CBC)

“He was making me very well aware that they had taken [Lawrence] in and they were the good people and she all of a sudden disappeared,” he says. “And they had no idea what happened to her.” But soon police had two other family members in their sights. They learned that David Laan owned the section of the property where Lawrence lived, and that his uncle, Ron Allen, lived in the house next to her shack. “It has been determined from several witness interviews that Allen had a great deal of contact with Lawrence,” Det. Burke wrote. “Allen ... picked up her mail, or would drive her to pick up her mail, he drove her to the food bank, he drove her to pick up her cat food, and he would drive her to the bank to get her money.” Witnesses also reported seeing Lawrence around town with David Laan, including at a local store where she would buy cat food. “They often came in together [to the Country Depot] and paid their bills,” Burke wrote. David Laan told police he had nothing to do with Lawrence going missing. But The Fifth Estate has learned that when police confronted David Laan several times over the next few weeks, they say he offered more than a dozen different explanations for Lawrence’s sudden disappearance. First he told police she was afraid of them and was hiding. Then he said she was visiting a wealthy friend in New York. Then police were told she was on vacation in Vancouver. And finally, she had taken a trip to Hawaii. “From what I saw and knew of Joan Lawrence, I don't think she'd be at any of those three places,” says House. “I don't imagine Joan Lawrence — in the 10 years previous to her disappearance — got any farther south of [the nearby town of] Bracebridge.” But the biggest revelation in the police investigation came when they began to dig deeper into Lawrence’s finances. They discovered one of the Laan siblings somehow managed to get a joint bank account with Lawrence allowing them the freedom to access her money. They also discovered the last time her money was accessed, around the time she disappeared, was with a bank card at the Canadian Tire in Bracebridge — 30 kilometres from where Lawrence was living. But police quickly noticed something: No bank card had been issued in Lawrence’s name. The only card issued on the account was in the name of the account’s joint owner -- Lawrence’s landlord, David Laan.

Police did multiple searches of the Laan property, at times using a helicopter. (CBC)

And then there was Lawrence’s missing tax return cheque. Police interviewed an employee at a local law firm who had become friends with Lawrence and was volunteering to help her look into what happened to the missing cheque. Lawrence would stop in the law office every other day or so, the employee said, to check on the progress. “[The employee] last observed Lawrence at the National Trust Bank in early October 1998 and told Lawrence the papers were ready and to come in,” wrote Burke. The Fifth Estate has learned those “papers” included proof that Lawrence’s tax refund had been stolen. The police believe the signature on the back of the cashed cheque wasn’t hers. Lawrence “seemed very eager to pursue the matter concerning her tax return,” adds Burke, “but never attended” to pick up the papers. In fact, the employee at the law office never saw her again after that. This series of events ultimately led police to spell out what they believe happened to Lawrence, and who did it. In June 1999, police believed Lawrence had been murdered and applied for a warrant to search the lake that bordered the Laan residence where Lawrence lived. It has never been reported until now, but the justification police offered for that warrant includes this: “David Laan and Ron Allen, sometime between the 28th day of October in the year 1998 and the 27th day of November … did commit first-degree murder on the person of Joan Dorothy Lawrence.”

A police sketch shows the Laan property where Joan Lawrence lived before she was reported missing. (OPP)