TORONTO – The unsolved murder of a Toronto business tycoon continues to irk retired detective Ray Zarb even though it’s been almost 18 years since that summer morning when he first arrived at the bloody crime scene.
It was 7:24 a.m. on Aug. 13, 1998 when Zarb and his partner responded to a report of a shooting at an industrial parking lot.
When they arrived, the body of Frank Roberts – the millionaire inventor of the Obus Forme backrest – lay on the ground next to his Mercedes Benz SL 500 with one bullet hole to the head and two to the chest.
“I know who did it,” says Zarb, who investigated the killing first as a fresh murder and then as an unsolved crime when he transferred to the Toronto police cold case squad years later.
He won’t get into the details of the case, but Zarb says he had two “huge tips,” both leading him down a trail to organized crime. He believes there was a wheelman, a triggerman and someone who ordered the hit.
But the evidence gathered by detectives wasn’t strong enough for prosecutors, he says, and the case remains unsolved.
“It irks me, it bugs me,” Zarb says at his home in Burlington, Ont.
“Police officers don’t forget. I’ll never forget. And we’ll catch the guys. We’ll get them.”
Now he’s pushing the leader of the cold case squad, Det. Sgt. Stacy Gallant, to look into the case again.
It’s one of more than 500 cold cases Gallant’s small team of dedicated investigators have on file – all of them featured on a recently launched Toronto police website.
Vancouver police launched a similar website in 2014 featuring 13 cold cases, among more than 300 unsolved homicides over the past four decades in the city.
“We haven’t solved a case since the site launched, but it’s generated plenty of tips we’re following up on,” said Sgt. Randy Fincham of the Vancouver police.
He said each member of their homicide squad – 18 detectives and three sergeants – is assigned several cold cases that they work on when they’re not investigating fresh homicides.
Canadian police forces handle cold cases differently. Police in Montreal and Ottawa do not have dedicated cold case teams, while Ontario’s York Regional Police has two detectives working full-time on long-unsolved murders.
In British Columbia’s lower mainland, the RCMP’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team has five detectives who look into cold cases dating back to 2003.
There is no national cold case database and no known national data exists, according to multiple forces interviewed by The Canadian Press.
In 2014, Brian Borg, who ran Toronto’s cold case unit until December 2014, wrote a report about overhauling the squad, parts of which Gallant is now implementing.
Since launching the website in February, Gallant says tips have started to come in – exactly what an old case needs to spur a new investigation, he says.
The oldest cold case on the site – that of 12-year-old Patricia Lupton – dates back to March 9, 1959. She was last seen leaving home around 5:30 p.m. after receiving a call from a man who was responding to her babysitting ad. She was found strangled on a snowbank less than two hours later.
Once a homicide case sits for about three years with no new leads, the case is considered cold and is transferred to Gallant’s unit, where investigators sift through the evidence looking for anything that could help solve the case using new technology.
Despite the inherent difficulties of working cold cases, “no one is forgotten,” says Gallant.
“This is incredibly important to us, to me and especially to the families. If you’ve killed someone, you are stressed. You are looking over your shoulder wondering when we’re coming. And we’re coming for them.”
Gallant’s goal is to bring the unit from the dark ages of case management to the standards of modern-day policing.
On the sixth floor of police headquarters in downtown Toronto, his team continues to pore over thousands of bankers’ boxes filled with details of old homicide cases as they hunt for evidence and scan documents to create electronic files, just as they do with current cases.
Gallant says the number of cases the unit has solved in the last 10 years “would likely be in the range of five to eight,” adding that solving one cold case a year would be huge for his team.
Canada is a uniquely difficult place for cold case detectives, according to both academics and investigators.
They point the finger at stringent privacy laws that limit the effectiveness of a DNA data bank combined with bureaucratic court processes and limited forensic and financial resources – all of which leave Canada’s resolution rate lagging behind those in countries that include the United States and the United Kingdom.
Regardless of the challenges, Gallant says his team continues to delve deep into old cases, re-examining every piece of evidence – with the help of scientists at the Centre of Forensic Sciences – and are “very close” to solving about a dozen cases.
The detective needs help from the public, he says. An anonymous phone call with a name is all that’s needed, Gallant says, then he and his team and the “magical” scientists at the lab will do the rest.
The unit has already had its first prospect of success since Gallant took over in January 2015 – Rupert Richards, 61, of Toronto, was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Surinder Singh Parmar, who was fatally stabbed while working at a gas station in the city’s east end on Nov. 19, 1990.
Gallant says his team found evidence – both DNA and fingerprints – that they ran in the databank, and they believe they got a hit. Just three months after dusting off the old banker’s box of evidence, they had a suspect in cuffs. The case is in the early stages and the accused has yet to face trial on the murder charge.
One of the original detectives will gladly testify if needed, Gallant says.
“When you solve a case after 25 years and you walk up to a guy and you tell him he’s under arrest for a murder from 25 years ago and you see that look on their face, you can’t really put words to that,” Gallant says.
For the families of victims, cold cases mean struggling for years – even decades – with questions about who killed their loved ones and why. The pain doesn’t retreat, but for some families, resolution helps, although closure never truly comes.
Zarb says he needs some closure, too, which he hopes will come if the Frank Roberts case is solved.
“Whatever I can do, I’ll do it,” he says. “I’ll gladly go back in and help.”