Since then, Howe has been on the run. Some believe he may still be alive in Canada, the United States, or Mexico. In this program Sharin's mother Lynda comes forward publicly for the first time in nearly 20 years to work with David Ridgen on the case to explore the evidence and help memorialize Sharin' as the young artist that she was.Most wanted fugitiveshttp://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Microgalleries/mostwanted/?&pic=13
Murder victim Sharin' Morningstar Keenan
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In the quiet corners of in his mind, Brian Lawrie still waits. Now and then, reviewing the testimony of a very bad day he's saved, in detail, for a quarter of a century.
The former policeman struggled with the fact that he, and fellow officers, weren't in time to save a young girl. Now, so long after, he wonders whether he'll ever get the chance to give his first-hand account, which could send her suspected killer, Dennis Melvyn Howe, to prison.
It was 25 years ago today that a Toronto murder, and the manhunt that followed, captivated a nation. And like any true bogeyman, Howe - alive or now dead - has managed to stay out of the light ever since.
The Jan. 23, 1983, abduction, and killing, of Sharin' Morningstar Keenan, is still recalled as one of the city's most notorious slayings.
Sharin', a pretty nine-year-old, was last seen playing in Toronto's Jean Sibelius Park. More than a week later, Lawrie - once a seasoned police officer in the U.K. and then in Canada - would pry open a fridge in Howe's former low-rent flat. A garbage bag with a shirt sticking out could be seen.
"Who keeps clothes in the fridge," he wondered.
Then, after another tug to free the jammed door, and Sharin's remains would spill out. Her nightmare was over. But for many, who lived hoping she'd be found alive, the torture and torment were just beginning.
Const. Lawrie's close friend and partner that day, Det. Mike Pedley - a sensitive cop, Lawrie recalls - would later commit suicide.
Who knows why any man chooses that as a solution, Lawrie says, when asked how much the grim discovery of Sharin' had to do with a good cop taking his own life. But Lawrie recalls the moment the weight of the discovery began to crush him - or, at least, his future plans as a police officer. It wasn't at the moment he noticed the fridge, with its racks removed. Or even when it opened wide, and Sharin's hair tumbling out of the bag.
"I said, 'Mike, she's in the fridge,' " he now recalls, having to rush up to Pedley, who was in the flat's doorway. At first, Pedley didn't hear - or couldn't comprehend - what he was being told.
"The last thing you imagine (during a massive search) is finding the person.
"But that doesn't stop you from looking at all the details."
It was Pedley - as he and Lawrie were armed with a vague composite - who put the pieces together, to find the room where Sharin' was found.
That was after investigators - including detectives Wayne Oldham and David Boothby, who later became Toronto's chief of police - decided to do a second sweep of homes around Sharin's residence.
For hours after their discovery of the body, tipped off by a landlady who hadn't seen one of her roomers for days, Lawrie and Pedley were pushed forward by the momentum of training and adrenaline. Even by the urgent need to find a phone, since they didn't have radios.
"A lot of deep breaths," he recalls.
But the next morning, as he sat eating toast and drinking coffee, Lawrie says the clash between that routine pleasure and having found a dead child hours before began a rush to question his future. The fact he would be called to an unrelated suicide the day after Sharin's discovery simply set things in concrete.
He told Pedley: "I don't know if I want to do this anymore."
Hardest for the pair, he recalls, was the frustration over not being there in time to save Sharin'. Pedley would often mention the day afterward. For awhile, Lawrie would have flashbacks to Sharin's hair falling down. He would think of her when he would see a little girl looking back at him from a car window.
"What would she be now … a 34-year-old woman?" he considers. "Until you called, I didn't think it was a quarter of a century.
"I don't dwell on it as much as I did, but I do think of it … every time I hear of a child going missing or assaulted or of a pedophile on the loose."
The search for Howe - an early note in his police file says it would only be a short while before he was caught - has been a frustrating marathon.
He was tracked to Winnipeg, then nothing.
It's led to hundreds of sightings across North America, the exhumation of a body in Sudbury - which turned out not to be him - and a dentist figuring he had the suspect in his chair.
The man had teeth that were almost as bad as Howe's. And like Howe, he was, by his bad luck, also wanted by the police.
"A ghost … that's a good way to put it," says Det. Sgt. Reg Pitts, of the Toronto police homicide squad.
He believes there's a good chance Howe couldn't have stayed out of trouble for 25 years, and that he may well be dead.
"We still get ten to 12 calls a year," Pitts says of the notorious case. "No one has ever completely forgotten it."
Legendary crime writer Max Haines - who's retired from Sun Media, and has taken up a consulting position with the Toronto force - says Howe's legend was born from the vision of a child in a refrigerator, and the fact he's remained out there, somewhere. Haines, for years, kept Howe's picture in his wallet. He took it out, only because he thought the exhumed body was arguably Canada's most wanted man.
"It would be a happy day to see the headline that he's been found," says Haines.
For Lawrie - who went on to establish POINTTS, a successful traffic court representation firm - he routinely goes over the details, preparing testimony he may never give.
"I go over all the evidence … what I would have to say," he explains.
That, he finally adds, would be a very good day. One too long in coming.
If you have information on Howe, please phone Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or Toronto Police Homicide Squad at 416-808-7400.
vanrijngo says;Well my friends, and readers of my blog, you all know it has been just like it is said,... "yes that guy is a bit all over the place but then again his suspicions are not impossible". That is correct my friends, they are not impossible, in fact they are factual and about the absolute truth whether you believe what I say or not. I've seen myself in these videos made about this crime thing that other will not see. I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears exactly what may have went down an quite possibly who exactly these bounty hunters talked about may have been in watching these videos.I think it was said in my original post about two gentlemen who very much intrigued me about there appearance and the happenings of what had occurred at the front of my art Gallery in Boise, Idaho and who they might very well have been at the time. Like I say, if my own eyes and mind are not deceiving me, these two guys themselves pretty much have expose themselves to me and maybe others in their own actions and lack of eye contact when discussing important things about Howe's disappearance and the way he has been able to evade capture by the authorities for all these years.At the very starting of this video Sharons mother starts off as saying, "a long time ago someone had told her the bounty hunters had killed him." In her second breath she says she can't understand why someone would want to kill him when they could turn him in for the 50 thousand dollar reward. She also said after thinking about it if they did kill him, they wern't doing her any favor.
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