4 missing persons cases now homicides

FROM 1990S

VAUGHAN, ONT. • Provincial police say four historical missing persons cases involving a complex of retirement homes in Ontario’s cottage country are now being treated as homicides.

Det.-Insp. Rob Matthews said the former owners of three retirement properties in the central Ontario region of Muskoka are “of interest” in the disappearance of four seniors in the late 1990s.

Those owners previously were charged with fraud-related offences, Matthews said in a phone interview, though he would not elaborate.

“They are two different investigations, but they are certainly relevant to each other,” said Matthews, “The former owners were charged, but I can’t comment because of their current legal status.”

Joan Lawrence, then 77, disappeared in 1998. John Semple, 91, John Crofts, 72, and Ralph Grant, 73, all vanished between 1997 and 1999.

Matthews said all four are believed to be dead, but their remains have not been recovered.

OPP Interim Deputy Commissioner Paul Beesley said the police force has made significant strides in the investigation, but officers hope to solve the case to help bring closure to the seniors’ families.

“Our goal is to simply find out what happened to these poor souls,” Beesley said.

The retirement homes — which are no longer operating — were owned by four siblings who have not co-operated with police during the probe, he said.

He said the two homes and a farmhouse took in vulnerable seniors who no longer had contact with their families in the late ’90s, and police regularly received complaints and concerns over how the occupants were treated.

Matthews said investigators learned residents would escape from the retirement homes in the night and go to homeless shelters in Toronto or Ottawa.

He said 16 deaths occurred at the properties, but only 12 were reported to police. Those 12 were deemed not suspicious, but the four others are now being treated as homicides, he said.

Police were initially looking into possible fraud regarding Lawrence’s benefits in 1998, Matthews said. No charges were laid. Police also were investigating concerns over how the property owners took payments from residents, he said.

He said Lawrence, who was known at the time as “the cat lady,” lived in a small shed on the farm property for two years with “too many cats to count” and that the owners charged her $600 a month for rent.

Matthews said he visited the property after someone contacted police, then returned two days later with a health inspector. But he said by then, Lawrence was gone and the shed had been cleared out.

He said investigators now know Lawrence was moved about 600 metres to an abandoned van “where she met her end on that property.”