Canada’s Most Notorious Cold Cases
These cold cases across Canada continue to baffle detectives, but armed with cutting-edge technology, breakthroughs remain a possibility.
www.readersdigest.ca
Canada’s Most Notorious Cold Cases
These cold cases across Canada continue to baffle detectives, but armed with cutting-edge technology, breakthroughs remain a possibility.
www.readersdigest.ca
''The Island Murder
Charlottetown | 1988
A terrified community and a killer who promised to strike againAround Charlottetown, Byron Carr was known as a caring schoolteacher, a gracious dinner party host and a lover of rock ’n’ roll. On the evening of November 10, 1988, the 36-year-old had some friends over for coffee and then went bar-hopping. As he was driving home alone in the early morning hours after dropping off a friend, he reportedly stopped next to a young man riding a bicycle in the road. The two spoke for a while, and then Carr drove off. The cyclist appeared to follow in the direction of Carr’s home. That was the last time anyone saw Carr alive.
When Carr failed to show up to a family function the next day, his relatives visited his house to find his door ajar and his lifeless body on the floor in his bedroom, strangled and stabbed. His wallet had been stolen, and on his wall, someone had written in pen, “I will kill again.”
Based on the scene of the crime, police suspected that Carr had been killed following a consensual same-sex encounter, perhaps with the man on the bike. Some believe the nature of the murder hindered the case. In a foreshadowing of the police failures in the case of Bruce McArthur, the serial killer who preyed on gay men in Toronto’s Church-Wellesley neighbourhood in the 2010s, Charlottetown’s gay community accused the police of treating Carr’s murder with indifference. Gay men and women told media they also feared speaking out, lest they out themselves or become the killer’s next target.
For nearly two decades, the investigation went nowhere. Then, in 2007, police reopened the case. A witness reported that a couple of months after Carr’s murder, a sexual partner matching the profile of Carr’s killer had become violent with him in his Charlottetown home, stolen his wallet at knifepoint and said he’d done this before.
In 2018, the case again evolved. An anonymous informant called police in July from a payphone at a mall in Charlottetown, suggesting they had a tip to deliver about the Carr murder. The source hung up before divulging any info, though, and police later put out a call encouraging him to come forward again to share what he knows. If Carr’s murderer is still on the loose, it could save someone’s life.''
