William McIntyre was preparing for an out-of-town assignment on April 21, 1984.

The Ontario Provincial Police officer was no stranger to danger; much of his career was spent working undercover among bikers, thugs and mobsters.

“He was going to meet someone,” said Cal Millar, a retired Toronto Star reporter and author close to the case.

“He’d called in to his handler and advised that he was going on a meet.”

But it’s unclear who McIntyre was meeting. Around the time McIntyre was murdered, he was seen leaning over the second-floor balcony of his apartment at 1300 Marlborough Crt. in Oakville speaking with a young man with a motorcycle helmet tucked under his arm. While police sought to identify the individual, attempts were unsuccessful.

“I’m sure someone knows something,” Millar said. “But whether they’ll come forward is a big ‘if.’”

Some 35 years later, the perpetrator might already be dead.

“There was always a trail of information in the way he handled cases he was investigating,” Millar said.

But the days leading up to the murder are difficult to corroborate.

“The timeline is interrupted,” Millar said. “For some reason, they don’t know the last moments of his life. There’s a two-day window where they don’t have a picture.”

McIntyre’s body was found in his locked apartment. His personal vehicle and undercover vehicle were parked in the lot nearby. He had been shot at close range in the back of the head with a .22-calibre revolver — an unusual choice of weapon, according to Millar.

“A .22 is something someone who didn’t have $200 to buy a .38 would have,” he said. “It’s a target practice gun.”

“If we had a cop-killing today, it would be major news day after day,” Millar said, adding this particular case has been unusually dormant.

Professional criminals of the period would more likely favour .32- or .38- calibre firearms.

The standard-issue calibre for Halton police is a .40-calibre, while the RCMP and OPP standard-issue calibre is 9mm.

“The answer could be in the outlaw biker community,” Millar said. “He played the part. He hung around with bikers and all sorts of people on the underbelly of society.”

Born in 1951, McIntyre grew up in Oakville and spent three years as an apprentice mechanic before making the decision to become an officer with the Ontario Provincial Police in 1972.

“When you look at a picture of him, you can’t see a police officer at all,” he said. “He doesn’t look like a cop.”

Because of the nature of his work, the list of suspects was massive.

“He actually spent a lot of time in jail monitoring prisoners who police thought might confess to something,” Millar said.

Initially, police zeroed in on master thief Rex Yates, an accomplished locksmith who specialized in breaking into bank vaults. He had vowed revenge on McIntyre after he had posed as a thief and elicited a confession.

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“He could go to jail and people would think he wasn’t anything but a hardened criminal,” Millar said about the slain officer. “He fit in with the prison population.”

Detectives suspected Yates had learned McIntyre’s home address, made a key to his apartment and sneaked inside to ambush him.

However, several sources eventually placed Yates out of town near Orangeville during the murder.

Yates eventually served five years in prison based on the confession acquired by McIntyre.

Following his release, Yates drowned in a mysterious boating accident near Kingston, Ont.

Detectives also followed up on a tip that McIntyre was gay and members of the OPP had committed the murder to silence him from exposing officers.

McIntyre’s sister, Sally Ward, called the suggestion ridiculous and urged police to look elsewhere.

In 1994, a former RCMP constable, Arturo Nuosci, 34, was sentenced to 90 days in jail for fabricating evidence implicating a former male lover and another man in McIntyre’s death.

OPP doubled a $25,000 reward offered by the Halton Regional Police Service for information on McIntyre’s murder in 1997.

“If we had a cop-killing today, it would be major news day after day,” Millar said, adding this particular case has been unusually dormant.

Since 1961, according to Statistics Canada, only five murders of police officers, four per cent of the total, have remained unsolved. McIntyre’s death is one of those unsolved murders. That compares to a solve rate of 84 per cent of homicides in general.

While McIntyre has no surviving immediate family, the desire to solve the case is still strong.

“The family is still here,” Millar said. “His family is the 5,000 cops in the OPP and the extended family of all cops in the country. He still has a great family.”