Sun, October 22, 2006
Body of evidenceCould a corpse pulled out of the Rideau Canal help unlock a 16-year-old murder mystery?
By MARK BONOKOSKI
A link to the unsolved 1990 killing of Melinda Sheppit came to light after the body of Mark McCaskill.
A month ago, on the morning of Sept. 17, a man's body was fished out of the quiet waters of the Rideau Canal, not far from the Pretoria Bridge in downtown Ottawa.
It had been afloat for approximately 12 hours.
Identification found on the body led police to a basement apartment at the north end of Lyon St., where a suicide note was found that, according to Ottawa Det. Frank Daoust, "covered the basics" but raised no eyebrows.
And then the detective punched the dead man's name into the police computer to check for possible criminal background, and came up with an unexpected hit that linked him -- albeit tenuously -- to the unsolved murder of a neophyte teenaged prostitute named Melinda Sheppit, and a cold-case file that is now 16 years old, the same age as Sheppit was on that day in 1990 when her partially-clad body was found in a parking lot near the Byward Market.
ALERT TO PROSTITUTES
Google the name Mark McCaskill and the first link out of 575,000 links retrieved by the search engine leads to the website of the Sex Professionals of Canada (SPOC), and a now-moot alert to prostitutes about alleged threats made by McCaskill to sex trade workers, as well as a play-by-play of his previous dealings with prostitutes in various provinces.
"Warning!" the message reads. "As of July 13/06, SPOC has received evidence that McCaskill is now threatening to 'physically hurt' sex professionals."
There are even pictures of the 39-year-old McCaskill -- his 40th birthday would have been next month -- that were lifted from webcam images captured during online video conversations with Internet-connected hookers.
One photograph has him with short-cropped hair; the more recent has him with his head shaved bald.
He makes his appearance on the SPOC website in its link to the Bad Client List, a lengthy charting of ongoing situations and past run-ins that warn hookers to be on the alert regarding certain individuals, and includes the pictures of various men who have allegedly crossed the line.
Until the sudden warning in July, the item on McCaskill, while lengthy, did not have him down as potentially violent. It had him down as being more of a nuisance.
Example: "SPOC has received reports about McCaskill since 2003. We now receive about two reports monthly, from women in Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba. He promises large amounts of $ for weekends or overnights at his place in Ottawa. When the woman arrives, he either doesn't answer the door or doesn't have any money, leaving sex professionals empty-handed. This is how he gets his kicks."
Farther down, it adds, "He lives in a shabby basement apt., and we suspect, is living on disability support cheques.
"He tells women he's living in that apt. because his 'house burnt down' and is waiting while a new one is built.
"McCaskill," SPOC warns, "has hatred for sex professionals and seems to blame us for everything wrong in his life."
Toronto prostitute Valerie Scott is the woman behind SPOC, an organization concerned with the safety of sex-trade workers across Canada, as well as an advocate for seeing prostitution decriminalized as opposed to legalized.
And McCaskill had been e-mailing and phoning Scott regularly. She has, in fact, tapes that total 47 minutes in voice messages -- including a 27-minute, 27-second epic in which he drops the name Melinda Sheppit.
"And it was not prompted," said Scott.
At one point Scott seemed willing to share the e-mails and phone recordings, and then backed off -- stating that she was instructed by Ottawa Det. Frank Daoust, or an officer with a similar name, not to co-operate with the media.
SISTER'S REQUEST
Daoust, however, denies this conversation happened, only stating that he had asked Scott -- at the request of McCaskill's sister -- to remove Mark McCaskill from the SPOC website now that his death was confirmed.
"But I don't think that will happen," said Daoust. "As (Scott) told me, she was going to keep the information on the website until she decided it was no longer relevant."
McCaskill's sister, who lives in Quebec, was unreachable.
Despite Daoust's statement, Scott has nonetheless refused to talk any more about McCaskill and, during one visit to her downtown Toronto home, refused to answer the door.
In one phone conversation, however, she recounted a June 2 e-mail from Mark McCaskill that "read like a press release" regarding his upcoming death -- accurately predicting that his body would be found floating in the Rideau Canal.
These missives have been confirmed by Ottawa police.
Ottawa Det. John Monette of the major-crime unit has the Sheppit file, one of 25 cold-case files that he is presently investigating, and one of the largest, as well -- with hundreds of names in that file being "persons of interest."
That said, he would not discuss Mark McCaskill's potential involvement in the unsolved Sheppit murder.
"Mark McCaskill is a 'subject' in the investigation," said Monette. "And not necessarily a 'person of interest.'
"But the investigation (regarding McCaskill) is still in its infancy, and one can understand that it can become complicated when certain things become public.
"The media is a double-edged sword. It can retraumatize the families involved, and it can also give them a sense of hope that can unfortunately end up false."
'NORMAL' UNTIL CRASH
According to Daoust, who spoke to McCaskill's sister after his body was pulled from the canal, Mark McCaskill was "normal in every sense of the word" until he was injured in a serious motorcycle accident east of Ottawa in 1984, the year he turned 18.
"According to his family, everything was fine before that," said Daoust. "And then everything changed."
