It has been decades since the death of 13-year-old Valerie Anastacia Drew. It has been decades since the disappearance of 24-year-old Tom Gencarelli. It has been decades since 27-year-old Christine Ziomkiewicz mysteriously vanished.

It has been decades, but Kingston Police investigators, past and present, and the victims’ families, have not forgotten.

“There’s probably not a police investigator out there that doesn’t have a case, or many cases, that just sit idle in the back of their brains all the time,” retired Kingston Police inspector Brian Cookman told the Whig-Standard on Thursday. “It’s the ones that got away.”

Cold cases are investigations that have stalled. Today, Kingston Police have nine cold cases involving 10 victims. Evidence has been analyzed, interviews have been conducted and avenues have been exhausted, but still, solid answers elude investigators.

Kingston Police’s Sgt. Jay Finn now leads the Cold Case Unit, which was reopened in 2005. Whenever there’s the slightest lead or clue, the unit follows it, does interviews and grasps for a link. Since reopening, Finn said they’ve resubmitted DNA samples to the Centre for Forensic Science in Toronto for re-examination a number of times.

“Things change … DNA technology has increased dramatically,” Finn said. “When they first started testing, they needed quite a large quantity. Now what they need, in terms of pictograms, is way less than what they needed 15 to 20 years ago.”

In one of the nine cases, new technology has produced the DNA profile of a possible suspect, but it hasn’t been matched to anyone specifically, Finn said. The discovery was both exciting and extremely frustrating.

“If the DNA tests came back with the results that we wanted, there’d be people under arrest for these murders,” Finn said.

Despite working against time, with time comes evolution and developments in technologies — technologies that weren’t around 48 years ago.

On Sept. 27, 1970, Valerie Anastacia Drew was found dead in a wooded area that is now the present-day Compton Street apartment complexes. She’d been reported missing a day prior when a searcher found her at about 10:30 p.m., gagged by her own clothes and hit over the head with a large rock.

Drew was last seen alive two days earlier, when she left her Wiley Street home. She walked north with two teenage male friends, who then hitchhiked to Peterborough. Her family reported her missing the next day.

Former chief of Kingston Police Bill Hackett assisted Earl McCullough, who was the first lead investigator on the case. While Hackett retired in July 1995, he said this past Wednesday that the case has stuck with him.

“It was a terrible case,” Hackett admitted. “I still think that the perpetrator is still in that area. She was a smart young girl. Intelligent and well liked, and there’s been a lot of officers who put a lot of time into her case.

“I think the day will come that perhaps it will be solved.”

Hackett said the case has affected so many officers that he thinks any one of them would “go the extra mile” immediately should they receive any information.

“I’d love to see something come out of the woodwork for little Valerie Drew,” Hackett said. “I think it’s solvable. Just because of all the information that has been gathered, put together and investigated so far, it leads one to believe that it should be solved.”

In the case of 24-year-old Tom Gencarelli, Kingston Police gathered enough evidence to charge Mitchiel “Micky” McArthur in 1996, but a key witness, a witness Finn says potentially helped McArthur, died before trial in 1998.

McArthur, who has changed his name to Michiel Hollinger, is 65 years old and is currently serving life in prison after being convicted of four counts of attempted murder and a slew of other violent crimes, including robbery, aggravated assault and use of a firearm to commit an offence, following a 1994 bank robbery in Port Perry.

“A lot of times in policing, we know who has done something, but we just can’t prove it, which is the worst situation to find yourself in,” Cookman said, referring to the Gencarelli case. With the death of that key witness, he said the investigation had to start from scratch again. Finn said they’ve attempted to interview McArthur a number of times, but with no obligation to talk, he stays quiet.

Gencarelli was a drywaller who left his Bayswater Place home to pick up his paycheque at work on Nov. 12, 1982, but he never arrived. His body was never found. The original investigators on the case were Harry Hickling and Gord Patterson. In 1999, it was handed over to Cookman.

“Cold cases never stop being investigated,” Cookman said. “It’s always in somebody’s hands. It’s never just shelved. It may not be active right now, but a phone call later today and all of a sudden it is active.”

The Gencarelli case piqued every officer’s interested at the time, Cookman said.

“Everyone had their ear to the ground. Every police officer was always thinking and listening and talking and trying to shake the trees to see what they could find out,” Cookman said. “It was just such a nasty bit of business, that whole thing.”

Cookman said he’ll never forget the look on the Gencarelli family’s faces when he explained to them that he was taking over and that the case hadn’t been forgotten.

“The look in their eyes, there was a pleading look of ‘please don’t let this not be investigated,’” Cookman said. “That’s what’s really stuck.”

Finn said Kingston Police are still adamantly against McArthur ever receiving parole. Cookman noted that McArthur’s track record is reasonably public and that his 1990 book, “I’d Rather be Wanted Than Had: The Memoirs of an Unrepentant Bank Robber,” speaks volumes of his character.

“He’s self-professed to be an outlaw,” Cookman said, noting that he estimates McArthur is approaching 300 prior convictions.

On June 23, 1978, 27-year-old Christine Ziomkiewicz mysteriously disappeared from her basement apartment on Park Street. With her car still parked outside the building, the Queen’s University lab technician had purchased groceries that day after work and left them on the kitchen table. Dirty dishes were found the sink waiting to be washed, a new sweater still in a bag was on her bed waiting to be worn, and there was no sign of a struggle, Finn said. Her body has never been found and police suspect foul play.

“It’s a true mystery,” Finn said. “When you vanish without a trace, leaving no physical evidence, it makes a case very challenging. With Christine, it’s sad. The family was always looking for answers.”

In 2017, two men — one of whom the family’s private investigator believed to be Christine’s boyfriend — were located and interviewed by Kingston Police, Finn said. Travelling to British Columbia and the Maritimes to speak with both of them in person, investigators determined neither of them were in a romantic relationship with Christine.

Finn said they also explored a possible connection with an inmate who hung himself in Kingston Penitentiary. In the inmate’s 1989 suicide note, the man “ranted” of the multiple murders he’d committed across the country, Finn said. That same inmate had a girlfriend, later his wife, who lived a few blocks away from Christine on Park Street. Prior to Christine’s disappearance, the inmate was given day passes to visit his girlfriend, but by the time Christine vanished, the couple were in Alberta.

In May, Christine’s brother Bernie Ziomkiewicz retired from Queen’s University, where he was a technician in the physics department. He was 25 when his sister disappeared and told the Whig-Standard this past Thursday that he remembers feeling very vulnerable.

“When something very unexpected happens like that, you start to wonder if it is going to happen again, and who’s next,” Bernie said. “When something so odd and unexpected happens, it opens the floodgates to what other odd and unexpected things can happen?”

In January 2017, Bernie also spoke with Finn and handed over three DNA samples: one to stay with the local force, one to go to the RCMP and one to go to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the U.S. Finn confirmed that Bernie’s DNA will be uploaded to the RCMP’s National Missing Persons DNA Program databank to compare to unidentified human remains that have been found over the past 50 years.

Despite the recent interviews, re-examination of evidence and handing over his DNA, Bernie is realistic. He doesn’t believe she left her apartment voluntarily, and if she hasn’t been found in 40 years, he’s not sure she’ll ever be found.

Bernie lives on Park Street and often drives past Christine’s old apartment, located at the corner of Park and Regent streets.

“I look at the apartment, wonder about the people living in there now,” Bernie mused. “I wonder if they have any idea of what happened there, the history of that apartment.”

Kingston Police have six other cold cases they continue to investigate whenever they get a lead, including:

On Aug. 26, 1978 Eleanor McGeachie, 63, was found dead in her 795 Victoria St. home from an apparent home invasion. Finn said that while McGeachie’s family wishes for the case to be solved, they do not wish for any extra media attention.

On May 2, 1989, 21-year-old Jeffrey Thomas Leveque and 20-year-old Steven Wallace Hefford were killed when a homemade bomb exploded at a residence at 13 Shaw St. Three other people were injured but survived. Finn said that though the investigation was thorough, individuals involved weren’t talking. He is hoping as time has gone on, they may change their minds.

“There was a drug element to those murders, but these victims are still good people,” Finn said. “It’s horrible for what their families have gone through.”

Gordon Cameron was last seen in Ottawa in February 1993. In the spring of 2015, Ontario Provincial Police and Kingston Police scoured a 300-acre property on North Shore Road for two and a half weeks. Cameron’s disappearance has long been believed to be linked to the murder of Kevin John MacPherson. MacPherson went missing at the end of 1992, just before Cameron. McPherson’s body was found in two barrels that were welded together in Holleford Creek — just a 15-to-20-minute drive from the North Shore Road property. At the time, it was believed that MacPherson was shot to death at Gord’s Auto Body, a Westbrook area garage owned by Cameron.

Robert Shaw, then the president of the Kingston chapter of the Outlaws motorcycle gang, pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact in the murder of MacPherson and was sentenced to three years in prison.

On Nov. 3, 1993, 65-year-old Viva Mack was found dead in her ground-floor apartment at 1508 Princess St., where she lived alone. Finn said the investigation suggests her death was the result of a home invasion and robbery. Police have never released the circumstances of her death.

Henrietta Knight was the victim of a violent home invasion on June 2, 1995. The 92-year-old lived in her Macdonnell Street home for more than 45 years when it was entered, she was tied up and beaten during the robbery. She survived the attack and spoke with investigators but died as a result of her injuries in November 1995.

“It’s rare in these investigations where we actually get to speak to our victim,” Finn said. “She was able to provide a statement and sketches [of the suspects].”

On March 30, 2002, Marion Joyce was found dead in her Meadowcrest Road home by her son. Finn said investigators determined the 74-year-old was murdered and possibly knew her killer, but they couldn’t say if it was targeted.



“Some of these families feel that we’ve failed them,” Finn said. “I don’t think we’ve completely failed them, but we’ve done our best and sometimes the results are what they are. I can assure you no detective wants to have an unsolved, cold case murder and to think about that for the rest of their life — and they do.”

As time passes, Finn hopes that anyone with information will finally come forward. It may be small and appear insignificant, but any piece of information can break a case.

“We can’t do it alone, never have been able to do it alone,” Cookman said. “It’s always the community rallying around its police service and helping.”

Hackett says that, for now, the families and the multiple investigators once assigned to the cases have no closure.

“Some of these cases are so close to being solved, in my opinion, that it’s scary.”

scrosier@postmedia.com

Twitter: @StephattheWhig

— With files from Postmedia Network