Haunting homicide case captivates police

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/06/2016 (3417 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There has always seemed to be something personal about the Irene Pearson homicide case for the Winnipeg police.

Maybe for good reason.

The police service seems to have been haunted since the November 1979 morning when construction workers found the pretty blonde real-estate agent in the unfinished basement of a vacant Tyndall Park side-by-side, bludgeoned and stabbed 31 times.

One wound for each year of her life.

She also had been sexually assaulted, but she was fully clothed.

It was a slaying with all the elements of a hate-driven, crime of passion, that over the decades would come to be investigated with a different kind of passion by police who would exhume the cold case — and Irene Pearson with it — again and again.

Over those 36 years, successive teams of detectives seem to have become beguiled when they reopened the file. In fact, a cop who spoke to me about it some years ago confessed to being drawn to both the case and the woman with the double life at the centre of it.

As I, too, was intrigued, in my own way, when I began looking into the case — if not the actual pages from the file — in the early 1990s.

Cops want to solve every homicide, of course, but this one had an added incentive early on.

Pearson was not only the only daughter of a former city police officer.

Investigators would learn that cops were on the list of her many rumoured and real boyfriends.

Among them was a junior homicide detective who dated Pearson in high school.

But Bob Clarke didn’t recognize her — didn’t know that she was the murder victim — when he saw the bloated and bloodied death mask of the former teen queen contest winner.

“She was indistinguishable,” Clarke told me years later.

Yet, even then he sensed he knew her.

Clarke confessed to becoming obsessed with helping to solve it, as would many others, including detective partners Ken Dowson and Rex Keatinge.

As the first anniversary of the murder approached, the police pals would take charge and obsessively work on their off time to find the killer; who was probably the man seen walking with her to the murder scene at 114 Kinver St., just across from the display home she had left unlocked, with the TV on and her purse under a table.

It seemed personal for them, and it probably was.

Pearson, they would report, led two lives, with two sets of friends who didn’t know each other. One life characterized as a lover of German shepherds; the other as a woman with that long list of boyfriends, who played among high rollers and shady characters.

Dowson and Keatinge had taken up the investigation on their own because the case seemed to go cold fast.

Perhaps — no, probably — because investigators who reviewed the file years later, believed the case was bungled at the beginning. It was a time, after all, before identity officers took charge of a scene before it could be contaminated by too many flatfoots. Although, in fairness, this never was an easy case. Police would later report that they hadn’t found the murder weapon, or weapons, And then there was that long list of boyfriends and potential suspects.

Pearson’s boyfriend at the time, flamboyant 50-year-old city animal services superintendent Lawrence Anonychuk, became the No. 1 suspect. But he was out of town when it happened. Allan Pearson, her handsome former husband, who ultimately was divorced from her a year before the murder, had to be counted among the persons of interest.

But every trail, and every one over the decades since, has ended in the same way as the set of footprints in the first snow of the season that police followed from the murder scene.

Going nowhere.

Except, maybe, to the next attempt at resurrecting the case.

In 1993 — after a Free Press investigation resulted in a tip police believed might finally lead them to the killer — the homicide unit would excitedly announce a full follow-up and review of the case.

“It’s plausible,” then Crime Insp. Conrad Gislason said of the tantalizing tip, “and it would tend to fill the void that seems to have occurred around the issue of motive and opportunity.”

I don’t recall hearing where that went.

In 2007, police called a news conference to announce they had DNA from the case, even though there was no guarantee it could result in a conviction.

And, then on Tuesday, nearly 10 years later, police summoned reporters to news conference about the Irene Pearson “historical homicide case.”

Alas, it was just another cold case call-out, with a reenactment video and a request for anyone who had worked at constructing 114 Kinver to contact police.

Another Hail Mary, by the sounds of it.

The Winnipeg Police Service, if not obsessed with the case — as were detectives Dowson, Keatinge and Clarke — has refused to let it die.

Why the Irene Pearson homicide, when there are so many other unsolved historic murders that have received so little public attention?

I don’t know.

But I will tell you this.

When I was looking into the case, I interviewed someone who lived in the house where Irene Pearson was murdered who swears she saw her ghost come up the basement stairs. And she isn’t the only one who has seen the apparition. A city cop reported seeing her, too.

Maybe that explains why so many cops have been so haunted by the case for so many years.

Maybe it’s the beguiling beauty herself who won’t let them let it die.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca