Hamilton had had its share of violent crime, but if Campbell was right, this would be a first: a shooting for a cause, a belief. So many questions. The sniper had planned meticulously, had likely cased out the scene in advance. Yet how could he be so sloppy as to leave a ski mask there? And if he was an abortion sniper, why Ancaster, of all places?
Later that day the search party found something: spent cartridges in wet grass in the backyard, not far from the house. Larry Penfold examined the location and the empty casings. Penfold’s official title was forensic identification officer. Cops called him an ident officer. In the American vernacular, he was a crime scene investigator. Penfold and Cook bounced ideas off each other. How could they determine where the shot had come from? Penfold put in a call to the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. CFS had lasers that could pinpoint such things. But CFS didn’t have anyone available that day. Penfold didn’t want to wait. Time to break out the tackle box.
Later, in the backyard, a nearly invisible thread stretched from the second-floor window to the ground. It was fishing line. Penfold and Cook had invented their own low-tech machinery to determine the trajectory of the shots. Penfold had once worked on the Hamilton police tactical team, knew how to use power scopes. Using the scope he estimated the line of fire from the holes in the window and frame to a spot on the ground near where the casings and footprints were found. They stretched fishing line from the holes to the spot. Between the two points, taking into account the angle of probable entry of the rounds, and other calculations, Penfold and Cook established where the shot had probably come from on the grass. When CFS did show up with their laser beams and other special equipment, technicians took their measurements. Penfold’s fishing expedition had come within inches of the CFS finding.
Central Station
Hamilton, Ontario
Saturday, November 11, 1995
The detectives were soon made aware of a similar case from the year before in Vancouver—the sniper attack on Dr. Garson Romalis. Romalis performed abortions, too. In spite of the similarities, the link did not seem conclusive to a few of the Hamilton cops. What did a shooting on the west coast have to do with a shooting in Ancaster? The bizarre nature of the case raised so many questions. If the sniper in both cases was the same person, what was the intent? Murder? Detective Frank Harild thought that, in hitting Short’s arm, the sniper had simply missed. He had wanted to put a hole through Short that would kill. The sniper’s lousy aim saved the doctor’s life.
“It’s not a hard shot, hitting centre mass from 123 feet,” he said. “I mean, you can just about throw a baseball with accuracy from that distance.” Moreover, the sniper had put one bullet in the window frame. “If you’re such a great shot, so great that you are specifically intending to wound the doctor, trying to be that particular, wouldn’t you at least hit the windowpane? But the shot hits the frame.”
On the other hand, if anti-abortion was the motive, clearly the sniper did not have the mind-set of a typical criminal. Someone with a grandiose, ideologically driven mission could have all kinds of notions in his head. Also, military-style firearms like those used in the two attacks are designed to propel rounds through metal, wood, without losing much accuracy. The path of the bullet is unlikely to change dramatically. So maybe he had intended to hit the doctors in an extremity. It was an interesting debate. But the task at hand was not proving intent, it was building a list of suspects and finding the shooter.
Mike Campbell explored the abortion angle. There were no previous examples of anti-abortion violence in Hamilton. The city did have a vigorous pro-life movement, however, and that fact was common knowledge to pro-lifers in other parts of Canada. Hamilton typically had big turnouts for events such as the annual “Life Chain,” which drew 5,000 people a year in the early 1990s. Those silent protests were, however, a far cry from the abortion clinic rescues in the United States, or the raucous protests and arrests in Toronto in the late 1980s, or in nearby Buffalo. Hamilton Right to Life, its officials always stressed, was the “educational arm” of the movement. It wasn’t political, and confrontation wasn’t their game, they said. Out west, in Winnipeg, pro-lifers had drafted a list of doctors who provided abortions. Was it so activists could harass them? Or to let the public at large know what was going on? There was no evidence of any similar list in Hamilton.
Campbell started to make a list of local pro-lifers, activists, those who picketed at local hospitals. But once police identify a name in their investigation, the name has to be pursued completely. “Calm down with all the goddam anti-abortion suspects,” one cop warned Campbell. “You throw your net too wide, and we’ll have to clear them all.”
There was one name that needed to be checked—Randy Dyer, the man who had been angry at Dr. Short for performing an abortion on his girlfriend. Dyer had even cut a CD of his own songs soon before the Short shooting, and they included one number called “Daniel’s Song,” named for his aborted child. The doctor was referred to in the song as the executioner. Dyer was sorting through boxes of the new CD the day a police cruiser pulled in front of the house on Highcliffe Avenue in central Hamilton. It was about two weeks after the attack on Dr. Short.
Dyer lived alone in the basement apartment., used to drive a truck for a living but, after being injured in a traffic accident, had lived on a pension and was taking courses at Redeemer College in social work and religion. He was not surprised to see the police at his door. Surely he was a suspect. The detectives invited him to join them in the cruiser for a chat. Ever own firearms? No. Ever belong to a gun club? No. “Where were you, the night of Friday, November 10?” Much to his relief, Dyer had an alibi.
He didn’t drink, didn’t go out much. Most nights he would have been at home, alone, with no witness to corroborate his whereabouts. But as it happened, that night he had been in church, at Flamborough Christian Fellowship in nearby Millgrove. He worked the sound board that night for the pastor’s microphone and the musical instruments. In theory Dyer could have popped out, gone to Hugh Short’s place, shot him and returned to the church—except there was a woman at the church who could put Randy in the building, at nearly the exact time of the shooting.
Funny how things work out. That night, the woman had gone into labor right in the church. She had walked gingerly down the aisle, helped by someone else, and she had recalled seeing Randy at the back of the room, at the sound board. Then, after church that night, Dyer had gone to Tim Hortons, met a buddy there for coffee. He made a call on his cell phone. The police checked out phone records to confirm the story. After he talked to police, he went back to Hortons and saw the waitress who had served him. She remembered getting his order wrong.
“Hey, if the police come and talk to you, make sure you tell them I was here,” he said to her with a smile. Dyer got the feeling, though, that the detectives knew pretty quickly that he was a dead end. Although, as it happened, it was not the last he would hear from Hamilton police about the case.
The black balaclava that Hamilton police recovered from Dr. Hugh Short’s driveway was delivered to the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. Technicians found fibers from a carpet, and from an animal, perhaps a cat or a dog. And there was human hair. They also tested for saliva and mucus around the mouth and nose hole of the mask. November 10 had been a cold and wet night, and the shooter was under pressure. Perhaps he drooled, or maybe his nose ran. Testing for saliva and mucus was relatively straightforward. In order to find nuclear DNA on human hair fibers, however, the hair root must be present. Hair is essentially dead material, but the root contains the blueprint of life.