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The photograph from their wedding day in Moncton four years ago shows the groom in his red serge RCMP dress uniform. His dark hair is clipped short, and he is smiling the smile of a deliriously happy man. They are cheek-to-cheek, he and his bride. And she is stunning, wearing an off-white gown, clutching a bouquet with one hand and holding him, drawing him near, with the other.

It was obvious to anyone that was there that day that Dave Ross and Rachael Vander Ploeg were crazy about one another. He was a cop. She was a nurse. It was meant to be.

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“I don’t know, maybe I am biased,” says Raquel Vander Ploeg, the bride’s sister-in-law. “But Rachael was the most beautiful bride I have ever seen. You could just tell that she and Dave were so in love with each other. And now…”

And now Constable Dave Ross, a police dog services handler with the Codiac RCMP, is dead. Slaughtered in Moncton along with two other officers in what RCMP Assistant Commissioner Roger Brown, the top Mountie in the province, described as “perhaps the darkest day in the history of the New Brunswick RCMP.”