RCMP still searching for answers in decade-old unsolved killing

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This article was published 03/11/2017 (2953 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was a normal night.

Bernie and Elva Carlson went to bed in Thompson, left the light on and expected to wake up in the morning.

Instead, within hours, the couple was the target of a terrifying home invasion, Bernie shot dead in the hallway outside their bedroom.

Ten years later, RCMP continue to look for answers.

“This case has haunted investigators,” said Sgt. Dan Barnabe, head of the RCMP historical case unit in a public appeal for leads issued Friday. If anyone has any information on what happened in the early morning hours of Oct. 26, 2007, they are asked to call RCMP, the statement read.

“Here was a guy asleep in his home and seconds later, he was dead. Investigators at the time did everything they could, and now it sits with my team who specialize in investigating historical homicides. We need to find out what happened to Mr. Carlson,” Barnabe said.

In Thompson, Carlson’s widow still lives on the same street. She wakes up with her husband on her mind, goes to sleep the same way and he’s never far from her thoughts throughout the day.

Bernie was a steady man, a man Elva had known all her life. He’d retired from the Inco smelter after 38 years and was an avid hunter, known as Boom-boom or Bowanna to his friends, according to his obituary. There was nothing special about his rifle collection, said police who ruled out the guns as a motive for the home invasion.

Carlson’s widow said both she and her husband attended the Cranberry Portage residential school, along with scores of northern people from Indigenous First Nations in their teens. At the time, her hometown Wabowden had no high school. Bernie was raised on Matheson Island and it didn’t have a high school either, so it was common  for non-Indigenous children to attend the residential school.

“It was the place to go for your education and then move on,” Carlson said. The pair moved on together from then until the night that ended her husband’s life.

“If you’re looking for a story, I’ll tell you there’s no story. There’s a nightmare. . . It’s always right close to the surface,” Carlson said Friday.

“I relive that night over and over,” Carlson said. “I want to know who did this. I want to know why they did this. Somebody knows what happened that night and I beg them to come forward to police.”

In a phone interview Friday, Carlson broke down in tears as she tried to describe the raw state of her grief a decade later.

“It’s a heart wrenching thing. I’m not so sure I’ll be able to get through it. That’s why I asked Constable Curtis to be with me,” Carlson said.

The head of Thompson RCMP Major  Crimes, Const. Curtis Yausie sat at Carlson’s side, in her home, to get her through the interview.

Even now, Carlson can’t take a call from a stranger without wondering if they are who they say they are and she keeps in ‘constant’ touch with detachment officers.

“If somebody did this to get even with my late husband, they didn’t. It’s not him that suffers,” Carlson said in the phone call.

“Thank gosh for the good Lord, he took him very quickly. So he obviously didn’t suffer. As for Bernard’s family, well, we certainly do. And I would really really like to know the reasons why,” Carlson said.

The night everything changed was Thursday, Oct. 25, 2007. The couple had gone to bed, front and back doors locked. Their dog Missy inside the house. They woke to Missy’s barking. Bernie got up to check on the dog. Seconds later, Elva heard gunshots and fast footsteps. She rushed to the bedroom door, saw her husband of 40 years lying on the floor. 

Elva hid in the bedroom and dialed 911.

“I was in a state of shock,” Carlson said. Through tears, Carlson remembered being “absolutely petrified.” 

She remembered clinging to the 911 dispatcher’s voice, begging her to keep talking.

“When I look back I know she was never going to stop talking to me.. . .  I was probably on the phone for minutes before they were at the door but it took me a lot longer than that, before I realized they were actually there.”

At first, Carlson couldn’t be talked into opening the bedroom door, not even for the Mounties, until she was sure they weren’t the armed intruder  or intruders returning for her.

“I was too frightened, I didn’t believe it was them that was outside the door,”  Carlson told the Free Press.

Sgt. Sean Grunewald is posted at division headquarters in Winnipeg but back in 2007, as head of major crimes in Thompson, he was the lead investigator in the Carlson homicide.

To say the case has stayed with him would be an understatement. He’s described Carlson’s 911 call as “harrowing” in earlier news accounts. And it still is, he said.

“It’s just terrifying,” Grunewald said. “How can I explain it.. . .  I just imagine (it’s) a family member of mine, being in that position, at home knowing there’s armed intruders in the house who have obviously just shot a family member. I mean that fear can be heard on the phone,” Grunewald said.

Thompson was a violent city in those days, Grunewald recalled. RCMP had a lot of cases and this was the case the Mounties should have caught a break on and never did.

Even mother nature didn’t cut the force an ounce of slack. The first snowfall of the season fell from the skies as the intruders escaped, possibly on foot through the many paths through the woods behind the house. Earlier news accounts recorded RCMP throwing roadblocks up immediately on access roads in and out of the northern city.

“Within the next few hours, every RCMP officer on duty in Thompson that early morning. along with some called in, would make their way at some point to the Carlson residence,” wrote Thompson writer John Barker in his online account of the cold case on the blog soundingsjohnbarker.

“We just never got the break that we needed,” Grunewald said from his Winnipeg desk. 

“It would have helped to have another day or two without that snow fall. . .Foot prints, those are all things that get lost very fast in snowfall,” Grunewald said.

Grunewald grew to know the Carlson family, the widow and her two sons very well. It’s probably one of the reasons this case has stuck with him, he admitted.

“I know enough about the evidence to know we just need the right tip. That’s all we need on this. The right tip and I believe we can solve this,” Grunewald said.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca