Arrest ends 24-year-old murder mystery?

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This article was published 01/09/2006 (7163 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Canadian man who vanished 24 years ago after the death of his girlfriend in a mysterious U.S. plane crash has been arrested in an affluent suburb of Dallas, the fugitive’s whereabouts finally unravelled thanks to his violation of a no-watering order in drought-stricken Texas and a newspaper story about Montana’s most sensational unsolved crimes.

Jerry Ambrozuk — who disappeared after the August 1982 crash that killed 18-year-old Dianne Babcock of Vancouver, B.C. — was later found to have escaped the rented plane he was piloting before it sank to the bottom of Little Bitterroot Lake in northwest Montana.

Investigators concluded at the time that the crash may have been planned and that Babcock’s death was probably a premeditated killing.

But 19-year-old Ambrozuk, the Polish-born son of immigrants in Vancouver, had fled the scene and did not report the incident. The only clues pointing to his location were two phone calls from New York City to a B.C. friend several days after Babcock’s death, a third call from Dallas a few weeks later and a Texas postcard mailed to his parents that Christmas.

Ambrozuk told the friend he’d been unable to free Babcock from her seatbelt when the plane hit the water: “I tried to get her out,” he reportedly said in the phone call. “I feel like a murderer. I’m so depressed.”

But after swimming to shore and spending the night in front of a campfire, he fled without contacting authorities and inexplicably ended up days later in New York.

Nearly a quarter of a century after police in Canada and the U.S. began searching for Ambrozuk — a three-time target of the TV show America’s Most Wanted — the manhunt ended Wednesday at his home in Plano, Texas, one of the richest cities in the United States.

Investigators arrested a 43-year-old man calling himself Michael Lee Smith, who quickly admitted his true identity and now faces extradition to Montana to face a charge of negligent homicide.

“Yes, we have him, yes, he’s in jail, and, yes, it’s Ambrozuk,” said Plano police spokesman Rick McDonald.

Ambrozuk, a qualified pilot, had rented a Cessna 150 and registered a flight plan for Aug. 22 from Penticton to Vancouver.

It was later discovered, though, that Ambrozuk and Babcock had also inquired about flights between Penticton and Kalispell, Mont. And when the couple left on their supposed trip to Vancouver, they instead veered south across the U.S.-Canada border and over Montana’s remote northwest wilderness.

State police officials, who were later contacted by Ambrozuk’s B.C. friend about the phone calls from New York, searched Little Bitterroot Lake with sonar devices and eventually found the sunken aircraft. Inside was Babcock’s body, still strapped into the passenger seat.

A continent-wide arrest warrant was issued for Ambrozuk, but years passed without a hint of where he’d gone. Televised appeals produced tips but no solid leads. In December 2000, as part of a series about famous B.C. cold cases, the Vancouver Sun ran a front page story wondering: “Where is Jerry Ambrozuk?”

Last year, the Daily Inter Lake newspaper in Kalispell ran a similar story recounting Babcock’s mysterious death.

The story quoted Montana Sheriff Jim Dupont, one of the original investigators in the case, who said: “He didn’t do a hell of a lot to help her get out of the airplane. She wasn’t injured to the point she couldn’t get out of the aircraft. Why wouldn’t he help her out?”

The Daily Inter Lake story, written by reporter Chery Sabol, was posted on the paper’s website.

On Monday, a unnamed woman contacted Dupont and said that she had seen the article and believed Ambrozuk was in Plano, Texas.

The information was passed to Plano police and, equipped with an address given by the tipster, the next day they visited a home in the city’s exclusive Russell Creek Estates.

A Dodge Viper, a $100,000 sports car, was parked in the driveway. A violation notice from the city’s water department was posted on the front door.

But no one answered the police officer’s knock.

A second visit was made on Wednesday to no avail. The third time, when it was noticed that the ticket had been removed from the front door, the officers decided to pose as workers from the water commission.

“When they said they were from the water department, he opened the door right away,” said McDonald.

— CanWest News Service