Another anniversary in the 33-year-old cold case slaying of Kerrie Ann Brown

Another year has come and gone in the Oct. 16, 1986 slaying of 15-year-old Kerrie Ann Brown, Thompson’s oldest unsolved murder case, which many 33 years later still believe is surrounded be a conspiracy of silence. But it was a year that saw the most comprehensive media ever done on the case, primarily by David Ridgen, a documentarian filmmaker whose original true-crime podcast “Someone Knows Something” spent season five looking at the Brown case. “Someone Knows Something” examines unsolved cases of missing or murdered individuals, and it is produced by CBC Radio One.

Ridgen’s earlier work has been credited with reopening other cold or historical cases, which have led to arrests and convictions (Mississippi Cold Case, Confession to Murder and A Garden of Tears).  In August, Ridgen noted he was working on season six, as well “as working on a new season five episode.”

“Someone Knows Something” is CBC’s most-downloaded original title, the network said Aug. 15. In its first-ever development slate of podcast-to-television series, the public broadcaster plans to adapt five popular, original CBC Podcasts, including “Someone Knows Something” with First Generation Films, a Toronto-based multi-media production company founded by Canadian producer Christina Piovesan, for the screen as a TV dramatic series.

Ridgen’s work last year on the Brown case featured a fascinating at-length interview with a key 1987 preliminary hearing Crown witness, Sean Simmans, living in Melfort, Saskatchewan at the time of the interview, as well as shining a spotlight on the early police investigative work done in 1986 by then Corp. Dennis Heald, and Const. John Tost, the two original lead investigators from the Thompson RCMP detachment, and Marnie Schaefer, a civilian RCMP telecom operator in Thompson at the time of the murder. Ridgen also took the investigation closer to home, talking to Ian Brown, Kerrie’s older half-brother, on a trip to Selkirk with their brother, Trevor Brown (https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1362084931649)  about his whereabouts the night Kerrie disappeared. Trevor was a year older than Kerrie.

Ridgen was also contacted by a woman in Thompson who said she remembers hearing her former boyfriend in Nelson House, Fred Spence, making reference to a white girl getting killed. Fred Spence has denied any involvement in Brown’s murder.

Schaefer, the former RCMP telecommunications operator, said she was working the night shift when the phone rang with an unknown caller around 2 a.m.

“He had said that he had just killed someone,” Schaefer recalled. “Seemed to be terrified that I was recording the conversation that we were having,” she told Ridgen.

The call came two hours after Kerrie Ann Brown vanished from the house party on Thursday, Oct. 16, 1986 – and almost 14 hours before she was reported missing.

That call may or may not have been followed up on, depending upon which RCMP officer you believe listening to “Someone Knows Something.”

Brown was slain sometime after attending a party at Doug Krokosz’s residence on Trout Avenue in Westwood on Thursday night Oct. 16, 1986.  Most of those in attendance at the Trout Avenue party were from ages 14 to 17. The party was held on a Thursday night because there was no school the next day for Kerrie and the others at R.D. Parker Collegiate. A 12-year-resident of Thompson at the time of her death in 1986, Kerrie’s family came to Thompson from Burk’s Falls, Ontario.  A Grade 10 student at R.D. Parker Collegiate, she had previously attended Juniper and Eastwood elementary schools. Her mom and dad, Ann and Jim Brown, had moved to Thompson like many so Jim could work in the mine at Inco, while Ann worked at Thompson General Hospital as a medical transcriptionist. Ann Brown died of cancer 15 years after Kerrie’s murder.

Kerrie was to walk home from the Trout Avenue residence that night with Nicole Zahorodny, who was the last person to see Kerrie at the party the night that she disappeared, but Zahorodny went back into the party for a few minutes. Krokosz, a year older than Kerrie, recalled for Ridgen trying to convince Kerrie to wait for Nicole instead of walking home alone. Kerrie asked Krokosz to find Nicole for her, he said, which he did while Kerrie waited at the stairs. When he returned some time later, Kerrie was gone, after stepping outside apparently to wait. When Zahorodny returned, Kerrie was gone. Several witnesses reported Kerrie was seen getting into a van between 10:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. Others believe she took a taxi to Brandon Crescent just before midnight. Or she may have walked somewhere from the party.

Two days after the party, Donna Covic, and another woman from the riding stable, discovered Kerrie’s nude body in a wooded area close to the hydro line between the horse stable and the golf course access roads. Her body was found on Saturday, Oct. 18, 1986, around 2 p.m. Brown had been sexually assaulted and severely beaten, bludgeoned repeatedly about the face and head causing massive injuries. A large, bloodstained stick was found at the scene.

A vehicle got stuck in the mud there and a blue and red air mattress and a black rubber floor mat were used to try and gain traction and extricate the vehicle, RCMP said publicly in 1996. Two eyewitnesses had spotted a white van and an older model mid-60s green sedan-type car at the scene just hours after Brown, who had been wearing a Pittsburgh Penguins hockey jacket earlier in the evening, disappeared from the party. Crime scene DNA samples gathered in 1986 came from at least two different men RCMP said in 1996, adding they have always believed more than person was involved in the killing.

In 2012, the RCMP began conducting a full review of Kerrie Ann Brown’s murder investigation. They rehired a retired homicide investigator, Sgt. Bert Clarke, who retired in 2009 as the commander-in-charge of the RCMP’s homicide unit in Manitoba, to assist in the review of the investigation, along with a second rehired former homicide investigator.

The two retired homicide investigators did not work on the Brown murder originally, although they were aware of it, but were brought into assist the historical case unit, which is the official RCMP name for Manitoba’s cold case squad, by bringing their expertise to the complex case by taking a fresh look at it. A daunting task given there were more than 2,000 subjects recorded and documented in the file.

DNA samples searching for suspect matches have been taken, most voluntarily, some pursuant to court orders, from more than 100 people across Canada in the decades since the crime. Administrative personnel were assigned to the case to “digitize” the investigation for present and future purposes.

The Brown cold case is the largest unsolved homicide investigation (more than three dozen banker boxes of investigative file material) that the RCMP have in Manitoba.

A remarkable letter to the editor of the Thompson Citizen appeared in the newspaper a few days after Kerrie Ann Brown’s murder. Written anonymously and signed with the nom de plume, “From her friends who want justice,” the author says in the singular that she is a 14-year-old girl and was a “good friend of Kerrie Brown.” She goes onto write – and remember, this appeared in print, published as a letter to the editor: “I have also heard that their (sic) was another murder on Wednesday [Oct. 15, 1986] and if that is true, how come we weren’t warned. I can understand trying to keep the whole thing quiet, but not warning the public just doesn’t seem right to me.” The same woman, age 20, apparently wrote a second letter to the editor six years later, signed again anonymously, but this time with a slight variation and the nom de plume being, “Her friends who believe in justice. ”

Shortly after Kerrie Ann Brown’s murder, Krokosz, Zahorodny, Brian Lundmark, now a Thompson city councillor, Vince Nowlin, who served as a trustee for School District of Mystery Lake school board between 2010 and 2014, Craig Jordan, Guido Oliveira, also a trustee, who who now chairs the finance, property and personnel committees of the School District of Mystery Lake, Kathy McGee and Janet McGee, were among those who formed an ad hoc group called “Youth for Tomorrow,” and began to raise money to create the Kerrie Brown Memorial Scholarship.

It was Brian Lundmark and Geraldine Hornan who came to the Brown residence about an hour after Kerrie’s body was discovered and told Trevor the news that a body had been discovered.

Ridgen also learned in the course of his investigation that there is no transcript of the 1987 preliminary hearing for a man charged with Kerrie Brown’s murder – the charges were dismissed by the judge due to lack of evidence.

Patrick Sumner, the only suspect ever charged to date in connection with the case, still lives in Thompson. His family moved here in 1968. He was 22 when he was charged in 1986 days after the crime with first-degree murder in connection with Brown’s murder in a case that was largely circumstantial. There were about 120 people in the courtroom for Sumner’s arraignment in 1986, while another 60 or so waited outside.

Sumner was freed four months later after being discharged by provincial court Judge Charles Newcombe without being committed to trial after a three-day preliminary hearing ended Feb. 20, 1987. Crown attorney Dale Perezowski prosecuted the case at the preliminary hearing. Richard Wolson, a Winnipeg criminal lawyer, recognized as one of the best in the country, represented Sumner. Newcombe ruled there wasn’t admissible evidence upon which a reasonable jury properly instructed could return a verdict of guilty, which is the legal test in Canadian law for committal to trial. Then NDP Manitoba attorney general Roland Penner did not exercise his discretion to issue a rare preferred indictment, which would have sent the case directly to trial, although his department considered that option. Ridgen also learned that the Brown family can’t obtain a new copy of her autopsy report to replace the one they lost. “The RCMP have told the chief medical examiner not to give it to us,” Trevor Brown said last year.

Carlton Jackson and Robert Delaronde were also looked at as persons of interest by Ridgen.

Jackson was questioned following Kerrie’s disappearance, according to her brother Trevor and father Jim, and afterwards came to their house to tell Jim that he had nothing to do with her killing. Delaronde was implicated after the fact, mainly due to the fact that he had a somewhat violent history and had hanged himself in 1992, leading people to speculate that he may have been involved, though he was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Ridgen was told that Delaronde’s parents had not consented to his DNA being taken because they were worried that police would try to pin the crime on him after Sumner’s experience. Delaronde’s former girlfriend Heather McIvor also said that she had not let police take DNA from the child she had with Delaronde when police begin re-investigating the case more thoroughly several year’s after Delaronde’s death.

McIvor said Delaronde had been having a party on the night of Kerrie’s disappearance and that he had noticed Jackson and another man in attendance had left for a long time before returning.  Ridgen was told that Jackson may not have been able to remember what happened back then after receiving a blow to the head in a beating, but Delaronde’s sister told him that she had been recognized by Jackson in Winnipeg and that she didn’t notice anything off about him.

Trevor Brown first contacted David Ridgen to see if he would be interested in investigating the case in the spring of 2017, CBC says.

Ridgen, who first became involved in investigating unsolved crimes while working on a documentary about civil rights workers killed in Mississippi in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan, said he was aware of the case before Brown reached out to him, but when he was contacted it hadn’t moved from the pile of possible Canadian crimes to investigate onto his active investigation subjects.

In early January, “Snow Day Podcast,” a local society and culture podcast, featuring Bruce Krentz, Les Hansen, George Alvarez, and special guest, Guy Hansen, which has been broadcast since early 2017, took a look at the case (https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-iiy7w-a4270a?fbclid=IwAR1DApTH4ZrfpVfx_qg2zBmlOWNQ3xbO2hx8LHcAgtt-aJfSfYmDyosiJj0#.XEdxdR4XmdM.facebook), offering an insightful discussion of the mindset, worldview, class issues, and historical issues at play among Kerrie Ann Brown’s high school peers in October 1986. It no doubt broke some previous taboos regarding what was and was not discussed around the kitchen table, and why or why not, in Thompson that long-ago fall.

Darren Lovell from Wimborne Minster, a market town in East Dorset in southwest England, has recently  written a song as a reflection about the unsolved murder of 15-year-old Kerrie Brown. You can listen to it at: https://soundcloud.com/darrenwlovell/kerrie-brown?fbclid=IwAR3Q95S43q8THHTi2Zi3mRPHjhYdYAy8NE-n5OvwlPWWGGq1EOJKdqK8PlI

Lovell says he was inspired by season five of “Someone Knows Something.”

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John McCandlish Phillips

John McCandlish Phillips, who died in 2013 at the age of 85, lived in relative obscurity in New York City, where he was affiliated with the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small evangelical Pentecostal congregation of perhaps three-dozen members; it is a church he helped co-found in 1962.

From time to time, as part of their evangelization effort, Phillips could be heard proselytizing for Christianity in Central Park or the Columbia University campus, near his home. Phillips also spent part of his time managing Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd., a small religious publishing house that buys remaindered religious books and reprints a few others, selling them to Christian bookstores.

John McCandlish Phillips, with his plain-sounding declarative writing voice, also happens to have been perhaps the single best writer who ever tapped the typewriter keys as a reporter at the New York Times. That is until he retired after 21 years at the age of 46 in December 1973. He had joined the paper as a night copy boy in 1952.

Just how good was McCandlish Phillips, the byline he would eventually write under after first writing as John M. Phillips, although colleagues knew him as John in the newsroom, as a reporter and writer? According to Timesmen, he was without peer. Fellow New York Times writer and noted author Gay Talese described Phillips as the “Ted Williams of the young reporters” after the legendary baseball slugger. “He was a natural. There was only one guy I thought I was not the equal of, and that was McCandlish Phillips.” His stories often focused on forgotten people and he was best known as a feature writer with a flair for style.

A lanky 6’6” tall, Phillips, known also as “Long John,” kept a Bible on his desk. Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor at the New York Times, described him as “the most original stylist I’d ever edited.”

Abe Rosenthal, Times city editor in the early 1960s and later executive editor, said of Phillips: “He was an original. He had a very telling eye. He had a quiet merriment. His writing wasn’t heavy.”

When an editor wanted to chronicle the last piece of cheesecake sold at Lindy’s, the famed Times Square eatery in early 1969, Phillips got the nod. “What kind of a day is today?” wrote Phillips. “It’s the kind of a day that if you wanted a slice of cheesecake at Lindy’s, you couldn’t get it.” He once described Wisconsin as the state that “bobs on a sea of curdled milk.”

Covering New York City’s famed St. Patrick’s Day parade in as a general assignment reporter in 1961, Phillips wrote,“The sun was high to their backs and the wind was fast in their faces and 100,000 sons and daughters of Ireland, and those who would hold with them, matched strides with their shadows for 52 blocks. It seemed they marched from Midtown to exhaustion.”

Or consider these two sentences from a routine story: “Two kinds of people wait in the Port Authority Bus Terminal near Times Square. Some are waiting for buses. Others are waiting for death.”

A competitor, Pete Hamill, then a columnist for the New York Post, said of Phillips: “He used the senses. He looked. He listened. He smelled. He touched. There was a texture to his writing that was sensual.”

The New Yorker magazine described Phillips as “legendary,” “brilliant,” “much talented,” and “more interested in the truth and texture of a story than in scoring a scoop.”

An anomaly in almost every way, unlike most reporters, Phillips was not a particularly great story idea generator. He was rather the go-to-guy or the literary gun-for-hire when an editor had a bright idea for an assignment and he wanted it executed with grace.

Phillips’ most memorable story was written in 1965, on Daniel Burros, the 28-year-old leader of the state Ku Klux Klan. It ran on Page 1 on Sunday, Oct. 31, 1965, under the headline “State Klan Leader Hides Secret of Jewish Origin.” It profiled the Grand Dragon of the New York State Ku Klux Klan, a chief organizer of the national Klan and a former national secretary of the American Nazi Party. It also went on to document that Burros was also a Jew – a former Hebrew school student who had been bar mitzvahed at 13. Burros committed suicide, shooting himself the day the article was published.

In the 1950s and 1960s, newsrooms were loud and chaotic places, with phones incessantly ringing and typewriter keys clanging, that didn’t resemble the quiet and orderly cubicle-divided insurance offices most do today. To say many of the characters that inhabited them as reporters and editors were rough around the edges, in their rumpled white shirts and flask of whiskey in the bottom desk drawer, would have been more simple observation than stereotype.

Phillips didn’t drink, smoke or gamble. And just as he felt called by God to unexpectedly get off the train at Penn Station in New York City en route from Baltimore to Boston, as a master sergeant being discharged from the army at the end of his service in 1952, and apply for a job, still in uniform, at the New York Times, with his only journalism experience having been brief stints at Boston Sport-Light and the weekly Brookline Citizen in Massachusetts after graduating from high school in 1947 so, too, he felt called to leave daily newspaper journalism behind in 1973.

By that time, he had written his first book, The Bible, the Supernatural, and the Jews in 1970, published by Bethany House Publishers in Minneapolis. Unlike his newspaper writing, the prose is for the most part turgid and largely impenetrable, interspersed with huge blocs of Biblical quotations that destroy what little flow there is to the text. I can testify to this personally having taken about 16 months to plough through it. That’s not to say the book’s thesis – the Devil, or the “Enemy” as we Catholics like to say – was plotting in the late 1960s and early 1970s to get the younger generation interested in the supernatural and mysticism of eastern religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, in order to lead them down the “path of spiritual ruination” is uninteresting.

Phillips denounced drugs, promiscuity, protest, long hair, short skirts, free love and the Sixties’ counterculture in general in a way that seems particularly and perhaps unavoidably historically dated today – sort of like looking at pictures of protests on U.S. colleges campuses, as one might see them now, through the prism of an old sepia photograph.

In fairness to Phillips writing in 1970, the events were contemporaneous with the times and not historical artifacts as they are 44 years later in 2014.

Phillips didn’t quite disappear completely from daily journalism. For the next eight years after leaving the New York Times in 1973, his byline appeared occasionally as a freelancer. In more recent years, he had had three opinion pieces published in the Washington Post on topics ranging from media ethics to what he saw as the excessive complexity of the U.S. tax system. In 2005 he took on two columnists at his old journalism alma mater, the New York Times, namely Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, for heaping “fear and loathing” on evangelicals and traditional Catholics. “I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, … in a ghastly arcade mirror lately,” he wrote.

The World Journalism Institute, founded in 1999 after discussions between Joel Belz, Marvin Olasky, Nick Eicher and Robert Case, and located on the campus of The King’s College in New York City, established a McCandlish Phillips Chair of Journalism. The institute published Phillips monograph, Faith in the Daily News Chase in 2001.

He also wrote two other books, The Spirit World: A Christian newsman investigates the hidden powers of the supernatural, and his 1974 collection, City Notebook: A Reporter’s Portrait of a Vanishing New York, which was published by Liveright.

But for the most, John McCandlish Phillips, by all accounts, did not miss being a daily newspaper journalist during the second half of his life, even if he was the most gifted newspaper writer of his generation. John McCandlish Phillips died April 9, 2013.

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