“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.
In the final test results, the balaclava produced a DNA profile for an individual. But it meant little at that point. A DNA profile, in isolation, means nothing when there is nothing to compare it to. Whoever wore the balaclava was still merely a chart of colorcoded numbers.
Detectives Mike Campbell and Frank Harild chased the ballistics angle. No rifle was recovered. But there were the bullets and casings. The two rounds fired at Dr. Short had been found—the one that shattered the doctor’s arm, and the one that had landed in the den. Both were taken to CFS. Bullets from a shooting scene are often crushed, looking like fillings that have been knocked out of someone’s mouth. Empty shells, however, indicate the type of weapon used. Two shell casings had been found behind Short’s house on the small slope down towards the woods. Curious that the shooter wouldn’t have used a brass-catcher to prevent the casings from ending up in police hands. They were from ammunition for an M-14 rifle.
Even though the bullets had been mangled, it still was useful to examine them. The police had caught a break. Even though the bullets had passed through a wooden window frame, they were sufficiently intact to be examined. Under a microscope, scratches and grooves were visible; the bullets were a four-groove with a right- hand twist. A technician got on the phone to Harild. The barrel markings suggested that the bullets were fired from either an AK-47 or SKS rifle, he said.
“What?!” Harild exclaimed. It didn’t add up. What about the casings from an M-14? They didn’t match the bullets. It was a nice little diversion, getting police to look for the wrong weapon. “The sneaky bastard left different casings on purpose—he’s dropping phony ammunition.”
Harild phoned Detective George Kristenson in Vancouver for a comparison with the live ammunition Vancouver police found in the composter behind Dr. Garson Romalis’s house the day he was shot. “You better double-check the rounds you found in the house against the unused live rounds you found in the alley,” Harild advised Kristenson. Sure enough, the hard-point military rounds found in the composter were different from the soft-point rounds that had blown a hole in the doctor’s thigh.
Detective Mike Campbell tried to use the ballistics information they had to trace the firearm. Ballistics fingerprinting was a relatively new technology, used at that time in the United States, but not Canada. He sent the bullets for testing to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). Best-case scenario, the ballistics fingerprint would come back saying that the bullet came from a weapon within a probable serial number range, which could then be traced to one of several possible firearms purchases at specific stores. Campbell got a return call from the ATF. The round was, as CFS had said, a four-groove with a right-hand twist. Yes, but were the markings unusual, or traceable to a particular weapon? The ATF gave Campbell his answer: Those particular bullets could have come from any one of 30 to 40 million AK or SKS weapons purchased in the United States. A needle in a haystack, in a field of haystacks, Campbell reflected.
The detectives kept in close touch with the Shorts. One day Katherine Short, a small woman, with a plainspoken manner, looked up at big Frank Harild. “Honestly,” she said. “Do you think you will ever identify the person who did this?” Harild paused, and looked into the eyes of the woman who had wrapped her husband’s bloody wounds.
“The fact is,” he said, “he may well act again, and the more times he does this, with every shot, there are more clues.”
“But will you catch him?”
“Not unless we get international resources behind this.”
Chapter 10 ~ “I’m hemorrhaging here”
