Death's Shadow (13 page)

Trisha was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery on Tuesday, March 9, a bitter day with biting wind, blowing snow. Father Ron Cote presided over the funeral at St. John the Baptist, at Edgemont and King Street, a few blocks from the house on Montclair. Don Crath and Dave Matteson stood at the back of the church, watching who attended. Mauro Iacoboni was there; the family had asked him to attend.

The detectives took aside one of Mauro’s friends after the funeral. The guy had showed up with a cup of coffee from Tim Hortons. Mauro figured his friend had looked a little too detached, nonchalant, so they questioned why he was there. Terry did not show at the visitation or funeral, nor did anyone from his family, or his friends. Crath was not surprised. He knew relations between Terry and the Roaches had been sour for a long time, and they were especially so now.

On March 16 police announced that Trisha’s death had been a homicide. The next day Terry was quoted in the
Spectator
: “I knew right off the bat that it must have been a murder,” he said. “There’s no way in the world that she would do it herself.... She had absolutely no reason to kill herself. All she wanted to do was help people. For someone to cause so much harm to her is just amazing.... Yes I’m upset. I’m obviously very upset.” He said that they had signed papers a week before her death in order to sell the house, and that it “was a very amicable” agreement.

A senior police officer was quoted saying “we have our ideas” about what might have happened. “But we’re not saying anything, for obvious reasons.”

Crath continued to meet and question Terry. With no one else jumping out on his radar, an ex-husband had to remain a person of interest, even though Terry continued to maintain that he had been with his girlfriend at the time Trisha was killed. He appeared to lack a strong motive as well. He had not benefited in a substantial financial way from her death. Trisha had moved her life insurance benefit to her mother after their separation.

Had he been angry about Trisha dating again? When she was killed he had been living with his girlfriend, a woman who also worked with Canada Customs. The detectives questioned friends of Terry, including John Pajek, asked him about Terry’s character. John felt police were barking up the wrong tree.

They interviewed Terry’s father, Michael Paraszczuk, who lived on Balmoral Avenue South, 200 metres from Trisha’s house. Ray Roach said Michael had his own key to Trisha’s place. Crath was told Michael had hard feelings toward Trisha as a result of her separation from his son. She had been killed before the lawsuit had been settled over his handyman expenses for doing work in the basement. (Michael and his wife eventually moved from the neighbourhood and could not be located to comment for this story. He later died, on February 18, 2012.)

The detectives revisited Mauro Iacoboni. Mauro took three weeks off work after Trisha died. He could not sleep at night; instead, he lay awake, agonizing over what had happened to Trisha, wondering what might have been. Crath returned to Mauro’s workplace at American Can, questioned his supervisors. Was there any way Mauro could have left the factory for a while and come back on shift before punching out? Next to impossible. Everyone had seen him there, and he had been on the phone during his break. He could not have left until midnight, and by then Trisha was dead.

Crath and Dave Matteson met with friends of Trisha’s at Mellows, a restaurant and bar at Highway 20 and Queenston Road, where she had gone on occasion. The detectives interviewed another man she had dated. It had been nothing serious, went nowhere.

Terry had suggested a theory: perhaps the killer had a connection to someone Trisha knew at the hospital where she worked? Crath looked into the hospital angle; there was nothing, and, in any case, she had been highly respected at work.

They had already canvassed the neighbourhood around Montclair Avenue. Trisha’s sister, Cathy, continued to replay that night in her mind, especially the incident with the neighbour of Trisha who had asked her to come and talk. She should have gone. Maybe he had seen something: a car, someone approaching the house. If anyone had seen anything, they hadn’t told the police. But then, it had been bitterly cold, and no one had been walking around. And the fire-damaged house had yielded no physical evidence.

Crath had come up empty. He interviewed everyone remotely connected to Trisha, and had given people of most interest a rough ride, leaning on them, old school, questioning them repeatedly. Everyone had an alibi. Not all were air-tight, but none could be disproved. He was not about to lay a charge on speculation. You only had one crack at a conviction.

On April 27 Hamilton Police offered a $10,000 reward for information that would solve the case. Soon after the Roaches added $15,000 to the reward. “We’ d pay anything to put the person behind bars,” Ray said in the
Spectator
. “It’s all the savings we have, but it’s not much when your daughter’s life is involved.”

Matteson moved on to other assignments. Crath stayed with it, putting more work into the homicide than any case in his career. Each day he took a phone call from Floria, who asked him for the latest news. She could not sleep; she would burst into tears in public on occasion. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe, waiting for a break in the case. She prayed every night that someone would come forward in the neighbourhood — someone who saw something, or someone who knew the killer.

As spring weather began to set in, she could think only that the killer was walking around enjoying the warmth, while her daughter was under the ground. One day Ray visited the stone in Holy Sepulchre and saw flowers had been left with no name attached. Why? He went home and called the police. Crath, hungry for something, anything, showed up at his door, picked Ray up and bombed down the Sherman Cut en route to the cemetery, Ray white-knuckling all the way. Crath traced where the flowers had been purchased. He found the buyer. Turned out to be nothing, just a couple of Trisha’s old friends.

Ultimately Crath’s supervisor asked if he was not just treading water on the case. He was taken off it, and he locked the case file away in his desk. Floria continued calling. Don’t forget about Trisha, she told him.

A cold case never closes. But no one was actively looking for Trisha’s killer.

Crath continued working in CID, homicide, and drugs. During the last few years of his career, he closed out his old homicide cases in court while working out of the coroner’s office, regularly attending autopsies as part of the job. He grew hardened to them. But when Don Crath came home from work after attending one, he would always undress in the garage and stuff a laundry bag with the clothes that smelled of formaldehyde and death.

On Christmas Day for five years, 10 years, 20 years after Trisha was killed, Floria set the table for a family dinner in their little house on the east Mountain. Each time, when everyone had eaten, the plate and cutlery at one of the settings went untouched, remained sparkling clean. That was Trisha’s place, still set every Christmas.

Pictures of her decorated the living-room walls: Trisha as a little girl; Trisha as a teenager; and, most prominently, a large one of her in the iconic nurse uniform, hair up under the hat. In that photo she looked so young and so mature at the same time. She had a look that said the future had no bounds. It was the photo that, every year, the Roaches put in the
Spectator
obituaries on the anniversary of her death with a write-up: “Why was she taken so young and so fair when earth held so many it better could spare. Hard was the blow that compelled us to part with our loving daughter so dear to our heart. She was taken without any warning, her going left hearts filled with pain, but although she’s gone from amongst us in our hearts she will always remain.”

Ray and Floria continued to visit her grave regularly. For a couple of years after she died, they would go three times a day: visit, linger, go for coffee, and return. Ray kept a shovel in the trunk of his car in winter. Each morning he shoveled a narrow pathway from the cemetery driveway up several metres to the stone.

Floria was never the same. She was a gregarious woman, more talkative than Ray, and put on a good face for others, but she was damaged inside. She and Ray lived in fear, for one thing, increasing the security in the house, making it impossible for anyone to break in. But mostly it was just missing Trisha and living in a dark hole with no answers or justice.

Cathy continued working as a nurse in orthopedics at St. Joseph’s Hospital, but never recovered. Losing a sister who felt like a twin was like losing both arms. She couldn’t tuck the pain away. She lamented that her young son, Michael, would never know Trisha.

When Cathy got talking about that horrible night, it would bring her down for weeks. As Michael grew older, he came to understand why his mom sometimes seemed so angry at the world when he was little, why she would often wear sunglasses to cover eyes swollen from shedding tears.

Some people wished Ray, Floria, and Cathy would move on.
Why could they not let go?
some asked. The killer had taken Trisha — why were they letting him slowly kill each of them as well? But no one could possibly understand their pain. Trisha had been ripped from their lives on purpose and no one had been held accountable. The wound was an open one, eternal; their anger had no release. The homicide investigation, stone-cold though it was, served to taunt them. It would remain forever an open case technically. Something could break. Couldn’t it?

In 1996 veteran homicide detective Steve Hrab took over the file. Hrab, an abrasive personality, had worked some of Hamilton’s highest profile murder investigations, and had been a lightning rod for controversy on the police service. He was quoted in the
Spectator
in March 1997 suggesting he knew the killer’s identity.

“I’m confident that if certain things occur this case is solvable. Certain people have to come forward and tell the truth,” Hrab said. “We know these people exist.”

The story said Ray and Floria believed they knew who had killed Trisha. “I concur with what they believe,” Hrab added. “The major focus goes back to one area. We feel we know what happened, but the evidence isn’t there to proceed with criminal charges.”

In a story marking the 25th anniversary of Trisha’s death, in March 2007, Hrab sounded an even more aggressive tone, speaking directly to a person he believed knew the killer. That person, he said, is living a horrible life. “I know your living hell is continuing. The only way for it to end is to come forward. Open the door and step out of that life.” Was Hrab using provocative tactics, trying to incite a reaction? Hrab had met with the Roaches on occasion, they liked him, believed he felt their pain and would not stop trying to find justice for them.

For Floria, time was running out to see the case solved. She had been diagnosed with leukemia in the winter of 2006. They gave her three months to live. She lasted five, but finally died, aged 73. The family took her on a final trip, driving up to Winterlude in Ottawa. They saw the ice sculptures, swam in an indoor-outdoor pool. It was wonderful. In the hospital the family had a chance to say their final words. Floria, alert and feisty to the end, made sure they heard her final message.

“Don’t give up on Trisha,” she said. “Don’t ever stop.”

The violent, tragic end to Trisha’s life and the mystery behind the cold case struck a chord with some outside Trisha’s family. In 1982 Julie Neadles, a neighbour of the Roaches, was 16 when she came home during a spare at her high school the morning after the fire. She saw her mother at the kitchen table crying. She told her that Trisha had been murdered. Julie’s parents were close friends of Ray and Floria, and Julie had gone to Trisha’s wedding when she was a little girl.

For a long time after Trisha died, Julie would hear her mom and Floria talking about who Floria believed was the killer, sharing bits of information, speculation. Julie made a vow to herself: one day she would attend police college, become a detective, and try to crack the case. She didn’t follow through on her vow and regrets it to this day. She still cannot let go of the case.

Jeanne Barnes was another Hamilton woman who was touched by the case. Every March she would look for the memoriam to the young nurse in the
Spectator
. She felt a connection to Trisha. Around 1996 she started dating a man named Doug. She visited his house at 944 Montclair Ave. He had bought it for a low price after the fire and fixed it up. Jeanne did not realize the significance of the address, not until she was inside the house and Doug showed her a photo. It was of Trisha Roach. Jeanne couldn’t believe it. What are the chances that a new boyfriend lives in the house where Trisha died, and that he has a picture of her?

Mauro Iacoboni sometimes visits Trisha’s grave.
Hamilton Police Service.

Jeanne plunged into the case, researching. She believed the answer was in that house — not physical evidence, but perhaps something else. She wanted to have a psychic visit. On March 3, 2007, she sat in the house on Montclair and wrote about how her connection to Trisha haunted her, but was drawing her “closer to the truth and perhaps even justice one day.... I sit alone in Trisha’s house on the 25th anniversary of her death, the moon is full tonight. If only it could light the way to the truth.”

The next day Jeanne went to the grocery store, bought some flowers and left them at the gravestone along with the note. Before long Steve Hrab came to interview Jeanne and Doug. He asked them what they knew, why they had an interest in the case. Jeanne still thinks of Trisha often.

“I really believe Trisha is using me, in a good sense, as a conduit between the past and present,” she said. “The answer is out there.”