the shooter or another party, to confuse police? It all raced through Mike Holk’s mind—all questions, no answers. Even though he was a veteran cop, the whole scene left him feeling ill at ease, his head spinning. It was all so—big. The crime scene. The questions. Who comes to a place like this, he thought, on a miserable night like tonight, waits in the shadows and takes a shot at a physician?
At the hospital, Detective Mike Campbell met with Short’s wife, Katherine, her husband’s blood still fresh on her clothes. Dr. Short, meanwhile, was awake when Detective Peter Abi-Rashed came to his bedside in the trauma suite. He had been treated, was in stable condition and could talk. Abi-Rashed was broad shouldered, with dark hair, olive skin, dark eyes. He was a sharp investigator who had a playfully brusque manner. He followed the book on investigating. You put the biggest umbrella possible over the investigation, consider all angles.
“Is my family all right?” asked Short.
“They’re fine, Dr. Short.”
It’s not something a homicide detective telegraphs to a victim, but the cold fact is, the first suspect who needs to be eliminated in an attempted-murder investigation is—the victim himself. Suicide. But Abi-Rashed was satisfied, after conversations with medical staff, that Short’s wound from a high-powered rifle could not have been self-inflicted. He needed to start fishing for suspects.
“Dr. Short, can you think of any reason someone would want to do this to you?”
“I can’t think of any reason for the shooting,” he replied.
A doctor, any doctor, can have disgruntled patients, patients who might not be entirely mentally stable. Hugh Short was an OB. Delivered babies, performed standard gynecological services. Like most doctors, he had a couple of patients who had been unhappy about something—but there was nothing to suggest they’d want to shoot him.
Dr. Short mentioned one call that was a bit different, though. About ten years earlier a man named Randy Dyer had called Short’s office. Dyer had been bitter towards the doctor for a long time because his girlfriend had had an abortion against his wishes, and he was certain Short had performed the procedure and terminated his unborn son. There were days when the darker instincts inside Dyer urged him to hurt Dr. Short for what he had done. But in fact by the time Dyer actually phoned Short, in 1985, the bitterness was gone. He wanted the doctor to know he no longer felt ill will towards him. Hugh Short’s receptionist had put the call through. Short picked up.
“Hello?” Dr. Short had said.
“I want to say, as a Christian man, I forgive you for taking the life of my child in 1982.” A disquieting experience, but certainly no threat.
Peter Abi-Rashed met with the other detectives, then drove out to the house to take a look. He ducked under the police tape, went upstairs and saw the chair where Short had been sitting, saw the splinters on the floor from where the two rounds had punctured the wooden window frame. Camera flashes popped in the dark backyard. Ident was out there—forensic identification officers.
Detective Larry Penfold was out in the rain with his partner, Bill Cook. Time was short to gather evidence and take photos. The forecast was not good, snow on the way. It would cover the scene, transform it. The scientific ballistic work needed to be done to determine where the shots had come from, the bullet trajectory. In the critical early hours, Penfold and Cook tried to reconstruct what had happened. “Tell me a story,” Penfold beseeched his surroundings.
The bullets were easy enough to find. Inside the house, Penfold and Cook had already collected the rounds that had splintered the window frame—7.62 x 39 ammunition. They examined the inside of a tool shed in the backyard. Bingo. Someone had definitely been inside, and very recently, for an extended period. Items had been moved around, space made. Whoever was here had made himself at home, prepared. Eaten some food. They found earmuffs, the type worn by shooters at gun clubs. They collected the black ski mask from the driveway. A key piece of evidence, perhaps, there might be hairs on it.
Back at the station, Penfold walked through the main doors, past the desk, and turned left into the ident department. Then a quick right, into the storage section, his shoes clicking on the grayblue concrete floor, to the biohazard locker and the glass-doored cabinet for blood samples and other materials that would need drying out. Penfold stored the bullets, and the ski mask. He closed the door, signed in the check-in time and his case ident number, locked the door, wrote his report and went home in the early dawn. A few hours’ sleep, and then back to Sulphur Springs Road.
The search of the Short property intensified the morning after the shooting, Saturday, and lasted all day. Ten auxiliary officers were brought in to comb the outer perimeter, six for the inner perimeter. The day had dawned sunny and clear. The snow hadn’t materialized in the night, perhaps a good omen for the case. But the temperature had dropped and snow was still forecast. Inside the house, Detectives Mike Campbell, Frank Harild and Peter Abi- Rashed gathered, standing in a circle around the island in the kitchen, bouncing theories off each other.
The house bordered the Dundas Valley Conservation Area. AbiRashed wondered about a stray shot— poachers, perhaps, shooting at deer. But it could have been anything. A malicious, random act of violence in which Hugh Short happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? You start big, then you eliminate, eliminate. Don’t pursue one path and use all your resources only to hit a dead end.
Campbell knew all that. But his instincts told him there was only one possibility. It sliced through all the other noise. Deer? No.
“If it was stray shots from a hunter, the guy’s misfires were awfully consistent,” he said. “It’s abortion. I’m sure of it.”
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.
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.
