Police secrecy in 1971 murder case misguided

Last week, a Chicago-area police department revealed it had solved an old murder with eerie similarities to the Ljubica Topic slaying in Windsor, but the headline-grabbing announcement came with one fundamental difference — full disclosure, including photographs, of the dead killer’s identity.

When the Windsor Police Service revealed before Christmas that it had, at last, identified the monster who sexually tortured and murdered six-year-old Ljubica in 1971, it chose to leave the public in the dark, as if it were none of our damned business, in a horribly misguided decision to protect the recently deceased murderer’s privacy.

What a dismal contrast with the way the authorities in Dupage County, in the western suburbs of Chicago, population 930,000, chose to reveal they had solved, with the help of DNA, the vicious 1976 killing of a 16-year-old high school girl.

In sharing all or nearly all of its information about the killer with the public, in seeing an informed citizenry as a valuable resource rather than an inquisitive nuisance, Dupage law enforcement officials triggered dozens of tips that have linked the murderer, Bruce Lindahl, who died in 1981, to multiple killings and rapes in the Chicago area.

The Chicago Tribune reported that police now say Lindahl, who sexually assaulted and strangled 16-year-old Pamela Mauer after she left a friend’s house to get a pop before heading home, could be linked to a dozen other murders and multiple rapes in the Chicago area.

There’s more than a five-hour drive from Windsor to the Chicago area. There’s a gulf, growing ever wider, in how law enforcement in Canada and the U.S. approach information sharing with the public.

I remember Windsor officers marvelling, back in the 1970s when they were relatively transparent compared to now, at how the code of behaviour for Detroit officers required them to fully co-operate with the media.

Dupage officers did more than co-operate. They laid bare what they knew about the killer and his actions and provided a series of photos and a composite drawing of him, useful tools to help the public exhume long-buried memories. As one detective put it: We finally put a name and a face to this monster.”

I was a young police reporter at the time of the Ljubica Topic killing and it still bothers me to recall, half a century later, the gruesome, unprintable details related to me by Windsor detectives, some of them battle-scarred Second World War veterans, who were deeply affected.

And now? Sorry. Nothing to see here, folks. We’ve solved one of the most appalling crimes Windsor has witnessed, thanks to hard work and DNA, but you’ll just have to take our word for it. That’s just not good enough for folks like Larry Cookson, a 70-year-old Ford of Canada retiree who celebrated the arrival of his third great-grandson on New Year’s Eve day but remains haunted by memories of the day Ljubica Topic died and infuriated over how the killer’s identity is being kept secret.

Cookson, who had a newborn son in 1971, remembers leaving the plant with co-worker to search the railway tracks, alleys and rear yards near Drouillard Road hoping to find the little girl alive. “We were devastated when they found her,” he said, “but also enraged when news of how she died leaked out.” He said the Drouillard Road neighbourhood was both shaken up and scared to death. “You didn’t see kids playing outside for a long time.”

When a police buddy shared photos of the crime scene with him, Cookson, a rough-andready, motorcycle-loving 21-year-old at the time, had a melt down.

He said the police refusal to share the killer’s identity sickens him. “Now there will never be justice for that little girl. Now there will never be peace for her. ”

Mayor Drew Dilkens, chairman of the police services board, told me he appreciates how people like Cookson feel, but the service cannot identity the individual without the absolute certainty of guilt a trial would have provided. “It would amount to disparaging the man’s name without due process. I get how frustrating that is. I don’t know the name myself. They won’t tell me.”

Perhaps the nice folks in Dupage County could lend the Windsor Police Service a bit of common sense and an injection of spinal fortitude.