Author Archives: Garry Rodgers

About Garry Rodgers

After three decades as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police homicide detective and British Columbia coroner, International Best Selling author and blogger Garry Rodgers has an expertise in death and the craft of writing on it. Now retired, he wants to provoke your thoughts about death and help authors give life to their words.

WHY IT TAKES SO LONG TO MAKE A CORONAVIRUS VACCINE

We wish it would just go away—this stupid Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic. You’d think with today’s medical knowledge and advanced technology all it would take is leading scientists around the world to come together, snap their fingers, and immediately slop-out an effective vaccine. Then, we could get back to the “Old Normal”.

Not so fast. There’s nothing quick or easy about making an effective Covid-19/Coronavirus inoculation.

When this thing started, I wrote a post titled Just How Deadly is Novel Coronavirus and Covid-19? Like a lot of pieces, I looked for an intriguing subject, researched it to understand the basics, then wrote it to share with others. Creating a Coronavirus/Covid-19 vaccine is an evolving issue, and I wanted to know more about how long it will be before a preventive treatment is widely available.

An article on my HuffPost feed satisfied my curiosity, and it’ll inform you, too, about when we can expect an effective coronavirus vaccine. Unfortunately, the answer is no time soon. There are good reasons why it takes so long to make a vaccine. Rather than writing new content about this complicated issue, I’m sharing what I received from the Huff.

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As of the end of April, 2020, the World Health Organization was tracking 71 coronavirus vaccines in preclinical trials, with five additional candidates already in clinical trials. Given how recently the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading, it might seem promising that there’s already a lot of activity on the immunization front.

With so many potential vaccines in testing, you also may wonder why medical experts say it will take at least 12 to 18 months before one is ready to go. If a coronavirus vaccine did make it to market on such a timetable, it would actually be the fastest turnaround in history. Currently, that record belongs to the mumps vaccine, which was approved for use in just four years back in the 1960s. For Ebola, a vaccine took five years to develop.

More commonly, the development of a vaccine takes eight to 10 years. Can a COVID-19 vaccine be created any faster? There’s certainly hope, but no certainty.

“I’d say the 12 to 18 months that’s been bandied about by some experts is realistic, but it’s [also] optimistic,” said James Cutrell, director of the infectious disease fellowship program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “It is based on the assumption that each phase of trials goes according to plan, with an optimistic time frame at each of those stages.”

Here’s what goes into each phase of developing a vaccine.

We often think of vaccines as treatments for illness, but they’re not exactly that, said Kelvin Lee, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Delaware and director of the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals. Vaccines are given to people who are well to keep them from getting sick.

“It’s very different from developing medicine where someone is ill and you are trying to make them better. In a healthy population, you don’t want the vaccine to have negative consequences,” he said.

First, Lee said, researchers will study the virus and attempt to determine which type of vaccine may work best.

Microscopic view of Coronavirus, a pathogen that attacks the respiratory tract.

There are several kinds of vaccines. Some have a tiny, weakened bit of live virus, which triggers a protective immune response in your body but does not cause the actual illness. Some contain inactive virus that creates a similar response in the body. And some utilize genetically engineered RNA or DNA, which carries “directions” to make the type of protein that can prevent the virus from binding to our cells and making us ill.

Once researchers decide which vaccine route they think will work best, they get to testing.

“This is where time really comes into play,” Lee said. “Even after you do lab tests to make sure it works in the proverbial petri dish, in many cases vaccines will undergo tests in animals to ensure that it’s going to be safe for humans and has the desired response. And then, where it really starts to take time is in the human clinical trials.”

To roll out a vaccine requires a lot of safety testing. During Phase 1, researchers take a small number of healthy volunteers and test the vaccine for serious side effects, Cutrell explained.

Phase 2 involves smaller studies looking at efficacy, he said. This includes figuring out the best dosage of the vaccine, the scheduling of dosages if you need multiple ones, and more. Scientists will consider whether the vaccine still appears safe enough and whether the immune response or antibody buildup is great enough to warrant moving on to additional clinical studies.

In Phase 3, you will see larger field studies.

“You would take a susceptible population, vaccinate some while having a control group, and monitor the effect over time and see if there’s any difficulty,” Cutrell said.

Here, researchers may look for common, short-term side effects and at what dosages those side effects pop up.

“All that has to be done first, and then if Phase 3 shows the vaccine is safe and effective, that’s when you’d look at licensing,” Cutrell said.

Even after you have a working vaccine approved by the Food and Drug Administration, it still takes time to mass-produce and distribute it across the country.

The goal is to vaccinate huge numbers of people, “so you then develop immunity in the community that would protect against larger outbreaks,” Cutrell said.

Testing and monitoring ― essentially Phase 4 ― continue even after the vaccine is generally available because it takes time to ensure safety, Lee said. “You don’t know if something bad is going to happen a month later, two months later, a year later.”

Common side effects of vaccines include redness and pain at the site of injection and maybe a low-grade fever; side effects like seizures or allergic reactions are extremely rare. But the bottom line is that scientists and doctors aim to develop a vaccine where the protective benefits far outweigh the risks.

While it’s hard to say when researchers will have a viable vaccine, there are a few factors that could speed up the timeline for this coronavirus vaccine. Traditional approaches to creating vaccines ― like the use of chicken eggs ― are proven but not necessarily speedy.

“You have some newer technologies that some companies are trying to leverage, where they were already prepared to respond to a pandemic,” said Lee. “You can shorten some of that discovery and early development timeline.”

Newer biotechnology-based methods, sometimes called “cell culture methods,” could make for more rapid development, he said. Additionally, with a pandemic circling the world, American researchers are hardly alone.

“You’ve got private companies and scientists trying to work together on the vaccine. That collaboration can certainly help accelerate the timeline,” Lee said. “Scientists will still want to minimize risks and ensure the safest possible rollout of a vaccine. “But given the outbreak globally and the impact it’s having, I can imagine there are ways to design trials to accelerate testing,”

There could also be an unconventional study design for the coronavirus vaccine, according to a new report published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. In place of traditional Phase 3 trials, volunteers at low risk of developing a severe form of COVID-19 ― healthy people without chronic conditions in their 20s, for instance ― might opt in for a “human challenge study.” They could be exposed to the coronavirus, monitored closely and given the best care.

This type of study would involve fewer participants and could be done in less time than a traditional Phase 3. Of course, the idea would need to be rigorously discussed beforehand as ethics rules generally forbid deliberately infecting human beings with a serious disease.

Besides vaccine trials, researchers are testing potential treatments for COVID-19. Instead of preventing the disease, these aim to make sick people well again.

“One of the treatments that has gotten a lot of attention is remdesivir, but the data available so far is fairly limited,” Cutrell said. No trials comparing use of the antiviral drug against a control group have been published so far. That said, studies are coming, including a National Institutes of Health clinical trial comparing remdesivir against a placebo.

There are also drugs that could potentially address the immune system’s response to the virus.

“A lot of times patients with this virus get sicker in the second week of their illness ― and it’s not the virus, but the immune system that makes them get quite sick,” Cutrell said. “They experience an exaggerated state of inflammation or ‘cytokine storm.’”

Some drugs that might dampen the immune system’s effects are currently in clinical trials. Then there’s the now-controversial drug hydroxychloroquine, which has long been used for malaria or inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. Although the drug received a lot of early attention, the studies showing potential benefits for COVID-19 patients have been mostly anecdotal with no control groups to compare against.

“There are also concerns about safety, including cardiac issues and arrhythmias that give doctors pause,” Cutrell said, noting that the FDA recently advised Americans not to use hydroxychloroquine outside of a hospital setting.

Finally, COVID-19 might be treatable with convalescent plasma.

“This is where people who have had the disease and recovered donate plasma, and that plasma is given to someone with an active stage of disease,” Cutrell explained.

The antibodies and proteins in that plasma could potentially help someone with COVID-19 recover. (You may be able to donate plasma if you have recovered from the coronavirus.)

Until we have a vaccine or meaningful treatment, we need to proceed with caution, ramp up testing and isolate the sick quickly if we hope to get back to some “semblance of normalcy,” Cutrell said.

“In my opinion, before we have effective treatment or vaccine, we will have to behave similarly to South Korea, Singapore or Hong Kong, with widespread access to testing, contact tracing and isolation, quarantining people in cases of potential contact,” he said. “In doing this, they’ve been able to stave off having large scale epidemics in their country and are allowed to be a little more open than other places where those things are not in place.”

“Of course, those countries have not yet seen second waves of the virus.”

“That approach requires constant vigilance,” Cutrell acknowledged. But even as scientists and doctors work to develop effective treatments and a vaccine, he said “thoughtful and incremental” strategies can help us move forward to “a period of more normal activities.”

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Note from the HuffPost: Experts are still learning about the novel coronavirus. The information in this story is what was known or available as of the end of April, 2020, but it’s possible guidance around COVID-19 could change as scientists discover more about the virus. Please check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the most updated recommendations.

Here’s the link to my first DyingWords post titled Just How Deadly is Novel Coronavirus and Covid-19?

WHY CASEY ANTHONY GOT AWAY WITH MURDERING HER DAUGHTER

In October of 2008, Casey Marie Anthony of Orlando, Florida was charged with intentionally killing her two-year-old daughter, Caylee. Casey Anthony, then twenty-two, was indicted on first-degree murder and other homicide-related counts. She faced the death penalty. After a forty-three-day, media-sensation trial, the jury let Casey Anthony off on all matters relating to Caylee’s death with one-exception. That was lying to police during her toddler’s missing person investigation.

During the jury trial, Casey Anthony’s case became a social media sensation on par with the TV spectacle back in the O.J. Simpson days. At one point, Time Magazine labeled her as “the most hated woman in America”. The public who followed the proceedings overwhelmingly viewed Casey Anthony as an immoral, immature and incredible piece of “white trash”. Even Anthony’s high-profile lead lawyer, Jose Baez, referred to her as a “lying slut” during his closing remarks to the jury.

However, Jose Baez used those remarks to Anthony’s advantage. He portrayed how his client was misjudged by the mainstream and how the prosecution failed to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the evidence was sufficient to support a conclusion that Casey Anthony deliberately planned and premeditated Caylee’s death. Here’s a look at why Casey Anthony was wrongfully acquitted and got away with murdering her daughter.

The Background

Casey Anthony was born on March 19, 1986 to George and Cindy Anthony of Orlando. George Anthony was a police officer and his wife, Cindy, was a homemaker. They had a son, Lee, who was older than Casey. By all later accounts, this family was anything but functional.

Casey was an outgoing and highly social kid. She was also notorious for bending the truth and pushing boundaries. Casey became pregnant with Caylee at age nineteen and, to this day, there is no official record of who the biological father was.

Casey Anthony was also unemployable. She bounced between jobs including one she got fired from at Universal Studios. She remained living with her parents who financially supported Casey and Caylee. By the summer of 2008, Casey Anthony was partying hard and neglecting Caylee for extended periods during which the grandparents cared for the little girl.

Caylee Anthony was last seen alive on June 16, 2008. She was with her mother, Casey, and they left George and Cindy Anthony’s home to spend time with Casey’s new boyfriend. After not hearing from Casey and Caylee for days, the senior Anthony’s began to get worried and suspicious. Casey made numerous conflicting statements to her parents about Caylee including one story that a new nanny was sitting for her.

After one month of absence, George Anthony learned that Casey’s car was at a tow yard. He went to recover it and notices a strong smell coming from the trunk. He feared the worst and expected to find his dead and decomposing granddaughter when he opened it. Instead, the trunk only contained a bag of rotting garbage.

The Investigation

Still, the Anthony’s were concerned enough about Caylee’s condition that they called the Orange County Sheriff’s Office to file a missing person report. This was on July 15, 2008. The police interviewed Casey Anthony the next day who told them that a nanny by the name of Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez had been hired to look after Caylee but refused to return her. Effectively, this was now a kidnapping situation.

As the police dug deeper, they found Casey Anthony’s statements to be false and misleading on four points. She was arrested and charged with the felony offenses of misleading the police and obstructing a criminal investigation. Casey spent a month in jail before she was able to raise a bail bond.

Meanwhile, the police moved their investigation focus from a missing child to a murder case. They processed Casey Anthony’s car and used a novel forensic technique to analyze the trunk air. Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIDS) examination identified airborne particulates consistent with a decomposing body. Two cadaver dogs also gave positive indications when smelling the car.

One human hair was removed from the trunk. It was matched as similar and consistent with Caylee’s known samples from her hairbrush. However, no DNA testing was done to make a positive identification and would become an evidentiary enigma at trial.

The police also searched computer drives on devices that Casey had access. Data retrieval experts found searches for key words and phrases like “chloroform”, “how to make chloroform” and “neck+breaking”. One examiner stated he had retrieved 84 incidents where Casey Anthony allegedly searched the word “chloroform”.

This information or evidence was brought to a grand jury. They returned a Capital murder indictment on October 18, 2008. Casey Anthony was re-arrested and, this time, she was denied bail.

Caylee Anthony’s body was found by a utility worker on December 11, 2008. It was in a wooded area near the Anthony family home about a ten minute walk from the property. Little Caylee was in an advanced decomposition state and had been stuffed inside a plastic garbage bag and wrapped in a blanket identified to her bedroom.

A forensic pathology examination did not determine the exact cause of Caylee’s death. She was too decomposed for that. There was, however, a highly-incriminating piece of evidence indicating foul play. A piece of duct tape—the duct tape murder weapon—was stuck across what would have been her nose and mouth. Caylee Anthony’s death classification was ruled a homicide.

The Jury Trial

From the moment Casey Anthony was arrested on her obstruction of justice charges, her case took on a life of its own. This was the dawning of social media outlets and the height of cable news networks. This sad and serious situation seconded the attention of people across the nation and around the world.

It had the stuff of crime novels and horror movies. Here was a lying and cheating promiscuous young mother who not only abandoned her female child but murdered her. Then, the blood-relative offender callously tossed the remains of a toddler in the bush. Mainstream America wanted Casey Anthony’s head and the prosecution team promised to deliver it. They elevated their game and filed for the death penalty.

Orlando was aflame with rumor and speculation. So much so that it was unlikely to find an impartial juror. The state extended its jury poll range 100 west to Clearwater in Pinellas County. Selection started on May 9, 2011 and by May 24, the panel was selected, transported to Orlando and sequestered for the next forty-three days until they delivered a verdict.

Lorraine Drane Burdick headed the state prosecution. Jeff Ashton and Frank George aided her. Jose Baez led Casey Anthony’s defense and Cheney Mason, Dorothy Clay Simms and Ann Finnell backed him. Mark Lippman represented the parents/grandparents, George and Cindy Anthony.

The prosecution opened their remarks to the jury by painting Casey Anthony as a thing of evil who deserved to die. They claimed Casey murdered her child so she could be free from parental responsibility and carry on a life of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. An example was her excessive partying while Caylee was missing. To top it off, Casey got a new “Bella Vita” tattoo (meaning “Beautiful Life”) while Caylee was rotting in the rough. It was what the social media frenzy wanted to hear, and the state representatives assumed the jurors liked it too.

The defense took a different approach. They emphasized to jurors the state had absolutely no forensic evidence to prove their case and everything the jurors would hear was circumstantial or hearsay. Jose Baez took a calculated move. He told the jurist panel the state would offer no motive, no cause of death and no proof Caylee Anthony was intentionally killed. In fact, Baez said, there was every reason to believe Caylee accidentally drowned in the family swimming pool and it was George Anthony who covered-up and hid the body.

The hook was set and the jurors sat through 106 prosecution and defense witnesses. Some were forensic specialists. Some were civilians. And, some were members of the Anthony family.

The Case Falls Apart

Bit by bit, the defense team cross-examined expert and lay witnesses alike. Their constant focus was that no hard forensic evidence or “smoking gun” existed and therefore there was no conclusive proof of how Caylee Anthony died… or who killed her. All the while, the defense led by Baez suggested an accidental drowning and a panicked attempt at an in-family cover-up that Casey was not part of.

A big blow to the state was when the computer analyst evidence of “chloroform” searching fell apart. It turns out one expert witness used a flawed algorithm and the truth seemed to be that “chloroform” might have only been searched once. On the stand, Cindy Anthony (Casey’s mother) claimed it was she who searched  “chloroform” but couldn’t explain why. The prosecution asserted Cindy was covering up for Casey. The defense used the issue as a wide and unsettling smokescreen.

George Anthony became a lightning rod for the defense. They painted him as a sadistic child molester who sexually, physically and psychologically abused Casey as she grew up and caused her to be the loose and lying character she was. The stress was so bad that George Anthony threatened suicide and had to be hospitalized for psychiatric observation.

During the trial, the Baez team never entered a lick of evidence that Caylee drowned or that George Anthony had one bit of involvement in her death, never mind abusing Casey. They accomplished their strategy through suggestion, innuendo and letting their powerful opening statement stay planted in the jurors’ minds while the prosecution failed to squash that misleading bug.

In closing to the jury, prosecution lawyer Jeff Ashton told the panel to use their common sense when deciding their verdict. “No one makes an accident look like a murder,” Ashton said.

Jose Baez took a more strategic summation. He sensed jurors would base their verdict on emotion, not evidence. It might have been a gamble when Baez said, “If you hate her, if you think she’s a lying no-good slut then you’ll look at the evidence in that light. I told you at the very beginning of this case that this was an accident that snowballed out of control. What made it unique is not what happened, but who it happened to.”

He continued. “The burden rests on the shoulders of my colleagues at the state attorney’s office. They must prove their case beyond all reasonable doubt and jurors are required, whether they like it or not, to find the defendant not guilty if the state did not adequately prove its case against Casey Anthony.”

The jury deliberated for 10 hours and 40 minutes. On July 5, 2001 they returned with an acquittal on Casey Anthony for all charges except for the minor one of lying to police. Casey Anthony was granted time served, and she was out on the street in a week.

Why the Jury Acquitted Casey Anthony

There are two principles dear to Anglo-American criminal law. One is an accused is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt. Second is an accused has the right to be tried by a jury of their peers. The peers must unanimously agree that all elements of the state’s case were supported by evidence that convinced them—beyond all reasonable doubt—that the accused committed the crime they were charged with.

That’s a big burden to carry. In Casey Anthony’s case, the jurors were not split on their decision. Each of the twelve jurors—unanimously—voted to acquit her because they felt—as a group—the prosecution failed to meet their burden of proof and did not take them—the jurors—over the threshold of doubt. Reasonable suspicion? Yes, in spades. But… not past reasonable doubt.

Why did this happen? There are twelve reasons. Some were acknowledged in public interviews jurors gave to media sources after the trial. Others are identified by psychologists and criminologists who’ve had nearly a decade to dissect the Casey Anthony case.

1. Casey Anthony’s legal defense team did a better job relating to the jury than the prosecution did. Jose Baez led a masterful coup of jurors’ emotions and used them to neutralize their feelings against Anthony. From his opening remarks, he and his support staff implanted seeds of doubt to have jurors discharge their duty in Anthony’s favor.

2. George and Cindy Anthony were unreliable witnesses. The jurors saw enough of their dysfunctional home structure to truly wonder if the grandparents had some part they weren’t telling. It was one more brick in the reasonable doubt wall. Jurors were initiated with the accidental drowning theory and they never got past it, regardless that no proof of an accident ever surfaced.

3. The “CSI Effect” came into play. This is a relatively new phenomenon with juries who’ve been exposed to TV shows and movies where the screenwriters manage to solve—beyond all reasonable doubt—their plot within their time frame through some sort of scientific or forensic proof. This didn’t happen in the Anthony trial, and throughout the defense kept using the term “fantasy forensics”.

4. Jury members got hung up on issues of motive and cause of death. Neither is a required element in proving a murder case, although they’re certainly nice to have to shore up a prosecution. Because the state never proved either motive or cause of death, the defense capitalized on this to further form doubt in the jurors’ view.

5. The prosecution became overzealous in persecuting Casey Anthony. Long before the trial, the state attorney’s office sought and got death penalty approval. They never relaxed on it. It was too much responsibility for the jury to know might send a young woman to her end if they convicted Casey Anthony with any sort of doubt in their minds.

6. The defense did an outstanding job of deselecting jury members. They “deselected” people rather than “selected” them. This was a truly unique approach. The defense team painstakingly used social media boards to build a profile of what a sympathetic (to the defense) juror would look like. They used this formula to question potential jurors and deselect or disqualify 392 candidates who didn’t fit their ideal profile.

7. The selected and accepted jury members were analytical types. They were interested in hard proof and not circumstantial evidence. When the “fantasy forensic” ruse set in, the jurors became more and more doubtful  they had any concrete evidence to convict Casey Anthony.

8. The jury was sequestered. They spent nearly a month and a half locked together. Humans being what they are, jurors quickly became a tribe. Leaders and followers emerged through group dynamics. Most humans prefer harmony to discord, and they naturally compromised in agreements. The Casey Anthony jury became one unit during their sequester period, and they solidified towards giving Anthony the benefit of the doubt despite compelling circumstantial evidence.

9. The jury played favorites with the lawyers. Jose Baez came across as a genuine, likeable person. In the words of one juror later interviewed, “He seemed like the only one in the room who cared. Jeff Ashton was ambitious and arrogant. He was mechanical and cold and we didn’t like him.”

10.  Jury members caved-in. In another interview, a Casey Anthony juror said, “We did our first vote and it came out half to acquit and half to convict. We talked about it for a while going through the evidence. I’d say some people got intense, but there were no personal attacks, no yelling. Then the vote was 11-1 to acquit. The one guy who wanted to convict basically looked at us and said, ‘Okay. Whatever you all want.’ He knew he wasn’t going to convince us.”

11. The prosecution failed to deliver clear, relatable and understandable circumstantial evidence. Still another juror had this to say. “The prosecutors didn’t give us enough evidence to convict. They gave us a lot of stuff that made us think she probably did something wrong, but not beyond a reasonable doubt. The prosecution didn’t even paint a picture for me to consider. How can you punish someone if you don’t know what they did?”

12. The jury members gradually diminished their common sense.  “No one makes an accident look like a murder.” They forgot the big picture—the duct tape murder weapon. This became not a trial about who intentionally killed an innocent and defenseless child. Here was a horrible mother who did not report her missing daughter and compounded the tragedy by lying to the police about what happened.

Casey Anthony refused to take the witness stand.

She had her chance to explain. There’s no other rational conclusion. Casey Anthony murdered Caylee and the jury wrongfully acquitted her.

FROM THE SHADOWS — NEW CRIME BOOK RELEASE FROM GARRY RODGERS

What if six members—three generations—of your family were slain in a monstrous mass murder?

From The Shadows is based on the horrific true crime story of grandparents, Ed and Patricia Bartley, parents Gunner and Trisha Jephsen, and their two prepubescent girls who disappeared on a Vancouver Island camping trip. Ella was just eleven. Lily was only nine.

This terrible tragedy shocked North America and riveted the Canadian public as Serious Crimes investigators scoured British Columbia’s west coast for any sign of the Jephsen and Bartley families. Where they were, what happened, and who did it captivated all.

Police used massive resources and every available investigation aid to locate the bodies and track down suspects. That involved major media cooperation, highly-creative techniques, and the questionable help of an unsavory for-hire agent.

Then, a break came. In a “never saw it coming” conclusion, detectives learned why the Jephsens and Bartleys were savagely slaughtered then carefully concealed after being stealthily stalked and wantonly watched by eyes that looked on from the shadows.

What advance readers say about From The Shadows:

~ From The Shadows is Garry Rodgers’ best book yet. Garry keeps getting better all the time.
~ I thought From The Shadows was an awesome, super read and very hard to put down.
~ Really nice job of putting the reader on a skewer and roasting them slowly.
~ Horrifying crime story with a wicked twist! Cannot make this stuff up.
~ Excellent, excellent book! I love reading all Garry Rodgers’ work.
~ Absolutely loved it! Would make a great TV series.
~ Wow, what a read! What a ride! Wow!

*   *   *

From The Shadows is the newest based-on-true-crime story in the In The Attic and Under The Ground series.  It involves real people, real dialogue and real police procedures happening in a fast-moving and high-profile, real-life murder investigation. Here’s a sample of From The Shadows …

Chapter 1 — Tuesday, August 23rd – 8:10 am

“What the fuck happened to them?” Harry wondered out loud. She gripped her Starbucks and frowned at her newspaper.

“Happened to who?” I didn’t look up—busy with a cold case email. I was in the cubicle beside Harry, my homicide investigation partner at the Serious Crimes Section.

“This missing family of six.” Harry pointed at the paper. “This shit’s lighting the news. Global TV did a lead story last night. Now it’s headlining this morning’s Vancouver Sun.”

Six missing people? One family? That got my attention. I rolled my seat next to Harry.

Three Generations Vanish On Vancouver Island Camping Trip

Above the fold were their photos. Grandparents Ed and Patricia Bartley. Parents Gunner and Trisha Jephsen. And their two prepubescent girls.

Ella was just eleven.

Lily was only nine.

“I got a bad feeling.” Harry sucked her teeth. Harry always sucked her teeth when feeling bad, and I’d worked with Harry long enough to ignore her teeth sucking but to know Harry’s bad feelings were usually right.

“This is not good.” She gulped her Grande. Harry lowered her specs, squinted at their images, and shook her head. “Not good at all.”

——

I hadn’t followed any news for the last ten days. My wife and I’d been out on our boat in Desolation Sound, seventy nautical miles from our home in Nanaimo where the unspeakable Jephsen-Bartley family mass-murders went down.

Nanaimo is a small, seaside city of a hundred thousand on the east side of Vancouver Island in southern British Columbia, Canada. The community is straight across from the craziness of Vancouver—one of the world’s most expensive, exotic, and erotic cities. Nanaimo is world-class, too—a mecca for international students and tourists. It’s a cruise ship port, a hub of higher learning, and the gateway to unlimited outdoor adventures for campers from across the country, plus around the world.

Nanaimo also has an unusually high murder rate.

——

“What’s this about?” I scanned the article.

“You haven’t been following?” Harry gave me a look like I’d not heard about climate change or what Trump just pulled off. “Fuck, you have been off the grid.”

Harry and I were part of a detective squad based in Nanaimo. We worked in teams of two, responsible for investigating major crimes around central Vancouver Island. The population isn’t big, but the area is huge. It includes vast tracks of unspoiled wilderness making “The Island” a camping paradise.

“Fill me in.” I knew Harry would fill me in—whether I liked it or not—so I gave her the opener. Harry could be annoying at times, but she said the same about me. Still, I loved her as my partner and as a friend despite being a gossipy train wreck in her personal life. We’d been partners three years, and I hoped to keep Harry till I retired. That wasn’t far off.

Retirement was a way off for Harry, though. And her name’s Sheryl, not Harry. Sheryl Henderson. Sheryl’s a large lady with larger hair and an even larger personality. We called her Harry after the Bigfoot in Harry And The Hendersons.

——

Harry squeezed her stainless mug, dented by gravity encounters. “This family is from the mainland interior. There’s Ed Bartley and his wife Patricia.” She pointed at their photos. “They’re seniors in their seventies. Pensioners who live in Summerland. Trisha Jephsen is their daughter. She’s married to Gunner Jephsen, and they have two pre-teen girls.”

Harry touched one girl’s picture. “Ella.” She touched the other. “Lily.” Then she touched their parents. “The Jephsens are also from the Okanagan. Penticton, I think.”

“Travelling as a group?”

“Yeah.” Harry nodded. She stayed on their images. “In two vehicles. Bartley’s have a truck and camper. Jephsen’s have a car and were tenting. The whole works disappeared. Looks like twenty-one days now. Not a word. Dick-all. Nuthin.”

I let it sink in. Six people? Four adults? Two kids? Two vehicles? Three weeks?

Harry went on. “Only thing known is they were on Vancouver Island. That’s for sure. Where exactly? No one knows. I saw the internal bulletin Friday… it’s been in the news all weekend.”

I got ashore late yesterday afternoon—still hadn’t got my land-legs, let alone dug into the news. “When did this start?”

Harry drained her drink. “Gunner Jephsen was supposed to be back at work last Monday, the fifteenth. When he didn’t show up by Wednesday, his boss filed a missing person report. Missing persons, I should say. I guess he’s been at the same sawmill job for over twenty years. Totally reliable.”

“Someone knows where they are.” I quizzed Harry. “Six people and two vehicles don’t just up and disappear for three weeks. Whose case is this? Not ours, I hope.”

By “ours” I meant the Nanaimo police, not specifically our Serious Crimes Section. Detectives don’t have time to get involved in missing person investigations—unless there’s a realistic reason to suspect foul play—and the last thing a detective wants is six murder victims from one family.

“No.” Harry shook her head. She still stared at the photos. “There’s no file opened here. At least not that I know of… then maybe an assistance thing. The missing persons report was filed in Penticton so it’s their baby. But the last sighting… the last contact with them… according to what I’ve seen and heard in the news… is they got off the goddamn ferry here in Nanaimo, then phoned a relative saying they made it to the Island and were looking for a campsite. That was Tuesday, the second. Right after the long weekend. They were going camping on the Island and checking a spot. No one’s heard fuck all from them since.”

“Looking for a campsite on the Island?” I smiled at Harry, raising my brow.

——

Vancouver Island is huge. It’s enormous as islands go—forty-third largest island in the world. It’s bigger than the whole chain of Hawaii. Larger than Timor. Four Rhode Islands in one. It’s superior to Sicily. Longer than Ireland. Wider than Taiwan. And higher than Iceland.

But Vancouver Island’s population is sparse. Less than a million. It’s tiny in human density and small for its size. People are confined to a narrow strip along the southeastern shore. The vast majority of the Island is rugged wilderness—mountains, glaciers, lakes, and rivers—but it’s connected north to south and east to west by a network of highways, secondary roads, and a spider-web of logging trails.

Vancouver Island is an outdoors mecca. It has the mildest weather in Canada. The Goldilocks zone. Not too hot. Not too cold. Just about right. It’s a place where families can ski and surf, golf and fish, hike, climb, and camp from one station.

That camping spot could be a pay-for-stay site with wood and water to a help-yourself slot off a forest service road. It might host hundreds or be secluded away and suit only a truck with its camper and a car with its tent like the Jephsen and Bartley families had.

The Island has thousands of campsites from full-service resorts with fabulous food to isolated pull-offs beside fast-flowing rivers. And the Island has local, municipal, provincial, and federal parks. Some are pure wilderness. Some are too touristy.

Folks like the Jephsens and Bartley’s could have been at many places up or down the Island, across at Tofino, or secluded at smaller ferry-served hops like the Gulf Islands, the Mid Islands, or the Northern Islands near Port McNeil. They might’ve been somewhere within a few hour drive of their departure point in Nanaimo—Pacific Rim National Park, Strathcona Provincial Park, Cape Scott, or Port Renfrew. They could have camped beside Cameron Lake. Retreated to Rathtrevor. Parked outside Port Hardy. Or settled in Saratoga.

Yes, the Jephsens and Bartleys could have been anywhere on Vancouver Island. Lost somewhere within twelve thousand square miles.

But they were here—right in our own backyard—savagely slaughtered then carefully concealed after stealthily stalked and wantonly watched by eyes that looked on from the shadows.

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