The Walrus � n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 7
crime
Cottage Country Murder Police have dragged the lake. They’ve dug up property. They’ve brought in dogs. But after twenty years, they still can’t find the bodies of four missing seniors in Muskoka by zander sherman illustrations by clay rodery
A j o i n t i n v e s t i g at i o n b y T h e Wa l r u s a n d t h e C B C ’ s T h e F i ft h E s tat e
P
olice descended on the farm at dawn, speeding past the gate and down the long driveway. Through her car window, twentyeight-year-old Ontario Provincial Police detective constable Erin Burke appraised the mountains of junk that came into view — old snowmobiles, water heaters, drywall. The sixty-eight-acre property, located in Huntsville, about 230 kilometres north of Toronto, was being used as a de facto landfill. And somewhere among the rusted ruins, Burke believed, was the body of seventy-seven-year-old Joan Lawrence. 32
It was December 17, 1998. The previous morning, Burke had submitted a request for a search warrant, otherwise known as an “information to obtain.” In it, she outlined the facts of her then-three-week-old investigation into Lawrence’s disappearance. These notes and others — totalling hundreds of pages — were recently unsealed by a judge at the request of The Walrus and the CBC’s The Fifth Estate. The details contained within, which are currently unproven in court, offer new insight into one of Canada’s most notorious cold cases. Lawrence was born in Ottawa in 1921. Petite, with brown eyes and grammarschool-neat handwriting, she had once worked as a poet and a copywriter. Lawrence got married then divorced, and, around 1963, she moved to the Muskoka