Something Fuckeried This Way Comes / WKT5 #16

I once received an email from a psychic from western Canada who said she was meant to contact me, that she had certain information regarding the unsolved murder of Marie-Ève Larivière. Recall that on March 7th, 1992, 11-year-old Marie-Ève Larivière went missing while running an errand for her family in Laval. Her body was found near some railway tracks within 12 hours. She had been strangled and sexually assaulted. The psychic – we’ll call her Hannah – said she received information directly from Marie-Eve. In 2015 she had shared her information with the Laval police. They appeared uninterested. She was now turning to me because., “I think I am meant to contact you”. Hannah had no connection to Quebec, showed little interest in the provinces cold cases, and only tracked me down by doing a Google search on Marie-Ève Larivière. I get a lot of people contacting me claiming psychic abilities. One woman once wrote only because she said she was new to the awakening of her abilities and wanted to “practice” on my sister’s case. I take these things with a pound of salt. This is what Hannah told me and the Laval police:

“Prior to the spring of 2015 I had no knowledge regarding the case of Marie Eve Lariviere, or any of the other cases of the missing and murdered children now possibly linked to the same perpetrator.  I had a very lucid, vivid dream that I recognized as a vision not a regular dream.  I am aware I am dreaming and have control over my actions.  It begins I am in a house and I am me but I am younger, like a young teen maybe.  I see somewhere between 15-25 children fading in and out, like ghosts, but they are not fading in and out all at once, kind of like one after another.  I knew this meant they were dying, murdered to be specific.  I could only make out general features as it was happening quickly and they were literally transparent looking.  The children were all between the ages of roughly 4-14.  There was an almost equal mix of genders. Eventually they all fade out and there are only a few kids left kind of floating around.  Because I saw all the children in this house does not mean they died there, I believe this is the house of the perpetrator(s).  I see a man and a women sitting on the couch, I am aware they are the ones responsible for the deaths, the man is the main culprit.  He is around 50 years old ( I see this as a current age). He is dumpy looking, his belly hangs out of his shirt. The woman is around 45 years old, she is also dumpy looking, not well kept.  Both persons are mentally ill, they are capable of looking after themselves and all but have psychiatric issues.  It is like they are collecting these children in some way, not for any rational reason of course.  They keep taking these kids to fulfill something but they also feel killing them is necessary for sick illogical reasons.  People would know who they are see them as just strange. They do not socialize with others or neighbors.  I believe they are a couple, but not married. 

They cannot see me…..but I feel like I should still sneak around (someone else’s feelings I believe I am feeling).  Next I am lying on the floor like dog, I feel lethargic and very thirsty and I am thinking (again feeling someone else’s feelings) if I am quiet and lay still maybe they will see me as good and nothing bad will happen and maybe they will give me a drink of water.

I realize I need to find a way out of the house without being detected so I start to look around.  I go from the living room to the hallway and I stop as I see someone coming down the stairs, it is a little girl, but she is a ghost.  She looked different than the other children I had seen.  She was not taking steps but more floating down the stairs.  As soon as she was fully in sight she turned and looked at me straight in the eyes as she slowly passed by from down the stairs to the opening to the living room.  The hair on my neck stood up, this was another indicator to me she was real but not alive.  She appeared to be about 9 years old.  She was wearing a white or lighter colored dress. She is thin and has a small frame.  Her hair is a medium brown, just past her shoulders almost to the middle of her back.  It is wavy and thick.  She has bangs and only the top part of her hair is pulled back.  I did not follow her, it scared me.  So I turned to go towards the front door.

Once at the front door I notice a short china hutch or some kind of table or stand.  On it are what appear to be little trinkets with names.  I start to read the names and look at the items.  I am thinking this is strange….what is this?  Then it clicks that these are mementoes.  I read a handful of names and looked at the items.  Once I realized what it was I started to panic, my heart was pounding and it was too much to handle. Unfortunately I didn’t record these details upon awakening, if I had known the significance at the time I surely would have.  The only names and items I can recall are a pair of earrings I saw with the name Tiffany or Tammy, and the name Maurice but I cannot remember what item was with his name. I know that Maurice is a young white male around 5 or 6 years old.  

At this point I am feeling traumatized and overwhelmed, I looked out the front window for several seconds staring at a tree in the front yard with a crooked looking branch that hangs lower blocking view of what is past it.  
This is where the dream basically ends, I wake up with my heart still pounding.

To detail the house I know it is in a small community, maybe right on the outside of one. There is a field that basically starts at the end of the back yard.  It is large, like acres and acres of field.  The front of the house has lots of trees but I don’t know what is past them. Directly right (when looking out the front door) is a neighbors house, it looks like it needs a paint job.  I think it was like a pale blue green color. Nothing I can see to the left, not sure of the closest house or structure.  I feel like it is a 1 1/2 story house but I can’t be certain of that.  Inside there is a main level and upper level.  I have attached a hand drawn floor plan of what I saw.  

This dream bugged me so I started to look into it.  I figured it was within North America because of the geography and the style of the house and items and furniture in it.  Also I figured the name Maurice wasn’t that common so I had a couple things to go on. Eventually I came across the case of Maurice Viens and it led to all the other cases and things started seeming very similar with what I had been shown through that dream.  I thought it possible it could be the same thing but who knows.  It wasn’t until last month when I decided I needed to contact someone.  I saw a photo of Marie Eve Lariviere for the first time and she was the dead little girl staring into my eyes in that hallway. I felt like throwing up.  A couple weeks ago out of nowhere while driving to the store I receive the word Charlemagne.  I asked my husband “what’s a Charlemagne?” He says he doesn’t know and neither did I so I didn’t put anymore thought into it.  The next morning as soon as I wake up I am feeling urged to look at a map of the area where all these murders have been happening for whatever reason.  What’s the first thing I see…..Charlemagne Quebec!  I am sure I swore and proceeded to google if there was any other Charlemagne even in different spellings. Nothing that applies to me receiving a random word besides Charlemagne Quebec.  The only other info I received is the name Martin, repeatedly.  Personally I believe very little in life is actually coincidence.  I am not sure how the name is connected but I know it is somehow because I hear it with a french accent. 

In closing I would like to assure you I am an honest mentally sound person, this is not a sick joke and I truly hope something good will come from the information I have been given to pass onto you.  I honestly feel it has been Marie Eve Lariviere guiding me since this past spring……as strange as it may sound.  I can see dead people, I can speak to dead people and they can speak to me.  I can also see past events. All my life this has been happening and I have had been able to find information on certain things that confirm my accuracy, I guess you could call it.  I know psychic type visions are tough to be credible a lot of times and I am sure you get many of these types of tips….”

Certainly, “Maurice” could be Maurice Viens – a 4-year-old boy who disappeared from the streets of Montreal, his remains were found in a barn on the outskirts, November 6, 1984. “Tiffany” or “Tammy” might be Tammy Leakey, a 12-year-old girl abducted from Pointe Saint Charles whose body was found near the Dorval airport in 1981. The dumpy looking man could be the offenders, Claude Larouche or Richard Bouillon. Viens, Leakey and Lariviere all appeared in stories written in 2013 about the possibility of a serial killer being responsible for the deaths of seven children in the Montreal area in the 1980s. and 90s. The story, “Quebec police believe serial killer behind 7 cold cases”, made national headlines, including Canada’ National Post newspaper. Hannah contacted Laval police two years later in 2015, so it’s possible her dream was influenced from reading the newspaper story. Possible. There’s a great episode of The Rockford Files where Jim tries to unmask a medium he believes is misleading the LAPD, but you’re never quite sure whether the Great Clementi – A Los Angeles version of Reveen The Impossibilist or The Amazing Kreskin – is hoodwinking the police, or blind to his own self-manipulation, or truly possesses psychic insight.

Anyway, today’s story isn’t about a psychic we call Hannah. It’s about how we sometimes shine or vibe or fixate on things or people or places. For me it’s a place – rather a region. A peninsula formed by the merging of the Ottawa and Saint Lawrence rivers in the southwest region of Quebec and Ontario. For me, a spooky place, my mind often travels there.

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Pattern Recognition

In her message to the Laval police – who by the way were totally uninterested in her information, I don’t think they even bothered to respond – Hannah mentioned a drawing she had made of the floor plan of the house from her dream. Hannah came to believe that the house did not belong to the dumpy couple, but was in fact the childhood home of Marie-Ève Larivière. She managed to track down that house on Google. Interestingly, Marie-Ève did not live in Montreal or Laval. She resided in a country home far to the west of Montreal in Sainte Polycarpe:

Marie-Ève Larivière’s home was never discussed in any national news article. Indeed, it took quite a bit of sleuthing for me to track it down. It is very much like the description in Hannah’s fever dream – a very rural setting, large acreage, a fair amount of trees and bushes. It is a modest 1 1/2 story house. There’s no house needing a paint job to the right, in fact there’s nothing left and right but fields and open country. It’s weird. It looks very much like Orange County, North Carolina, and the back roads where I cycle every day. This is why in the episode, Hyperthymesia from last summer I mentioned Marie-Ève Larivière. When you cycle, the mind wanders. I find myself looking out for that house, like Natalie Wood’s frantic search at the conclusion of Miracle on 34th Street. It’s not unusual. At the crossroads of Woodcrest Farm there is an outbuilding that looks exactly like the wooden garage outside Ste. Therese where Carole Dupont’s body was found in the snow in 1974 – pattern recognition.

Hannah later wrote:

“There are some details I see a little different now due to my own interpretation of the experience. But one I still can’t find anything about or any connection to is the town Charlemagne. I received that word or name one day and I know there is a strong connection with this case or the whole possible serial killer related to this/these case(s). I want you to know this in particular, Charlemagne is significant… Another detail that gave me literal chills is how in your podcast you say Marie-Eve had felt like she was going to die in a bad way or something to the sort……This is significant for me as she is obviously a “sensitive” person, which would explain how she was able to communicate with me so well. Not all spirits can do that. I asked the question to myself back in 2015, why did she talk to me and how is she able to so clearly, she has strong capabilities relating to mediumship I concluded. These capabilities typically remain the same for person whether alive or dead. So when she was alive she would have been a sensitive person to other worldly things. For her to be able to potentially foresee (feel) her death, even vaguely is huge for me. “

 Charlemagne is an interesting area. It borders Terrebonne, at the very tip of the east end, off the island of Montreal. Terrebonne is where Julie Surprenant disappeared in 1999, the deceased offender, Richard Bouillon has long been suspected in her disappearance, he lived in the apartment above her. But the murderer Claude Larouche, convicted in the 2009 strangulation murder of Natasha Cournoyer, for a time also lived near Charlemagne. In 1989 Larouche was living in an apartment at 97 Richelieu in Repentigny, the community just east of Charlemagne.

Returning to Saint Polycarpe

I often drive to Quebec. My usual route takes me through New York or New Hampshire, depending if I’m traveling to Montreal or Sherbrooke. More recently – prior to being contacted by Hannah – I’ve begun taking a new route, crossing the Saint Lawrence at Cornwall, Ontario, and coming through the back channels of Quebec to avoid metropolitan Montreal. This new route takes me very close to Saint Polycarpe, crossing the Ottawa river at Hawkesbury. My last exit before getting off the highway is Ste Therese, Quebec. The offramp is adjacent to the mall where in 1994 the body of 10-year-old Marie Chantale Desjardins was found in the woods behind the mall. Claude Larouche is a suspect in that murder – and the mind wanders.

Hawkesbury is interesting. Last spring, Stephane Luce’s group, Meurtres et Disparitions Irrésolus du Québec – MDIQ put up a billboard in Hawkesbury for information concerning the 2011 disappearance of Marilyn Bergeron. Although she lived in Montreal, and was last seen near Quebec City, information has come forward suggesting Marilyn might have actually been held captive in the Hawkesbury region as part of a sex trafficking ring. Now Gaston Lapage is a member of MDIQ, and resident of Hawkesbury who recently started an Ontario chapter of MDIQ. Recently Gaston put up a similar billboard on his brother’s land in nearby Fournier, Ontario looking for information on the death of Jessica Godin, victim of a hit-and-run in 2011.

Offramp

Have you heard of the Casselman / Nation River Lady case? Around 10 a.m. on Saturday, May 3, 1975, farmer Claude Legault was repairing a fence when he came upon the body of a woman floating face down beneath the 417 highway overpass crossing the Nation River near Casselman, Ontario, about 30 kilometres southeast of Ottawa, and 80 kilometres west of Saint Polycarpe. Officers from the Long Sault Ontario Provincial Police force (OPP) determined the victim had been strangled, with her hands and feet bound by neckties before she was dumped in the river approximately two weeks to a month before being found. The victim was naked, except for a blue blouse which was fully buttoned up the front. She was believed to be between 20 and 30 years of age, five feet and three inches tall, with long bleached blonde hair, and weighed approximately 115 pounds. The autopsy would reveal that she had not been sexually assaulted, and had been strangled with an antenna wire.

In the days that followed, the OPP were looking for a dentist who made a partial set of dental plates to help identify the victim. The dentures were said to have been the type used in the armed forces. Made from a chrome-cobalt alloy, they were determined to have been very expensive. Detectives from the Ottawa police joined the OPP to assist with the identification, and released a composite drawing of the Nation River woman:

Two years later, with no leads and the case of the Casselman woman still cold, police release another, more detailed sketch:

In 1979, the body of a man is discovered in the Nation River about 5 miles north of Casselman. Like the Nation River Lady, the OPP say the body has been in the water for quite some time. Police later identify the man as 74-year-old George Chitouas, a resident of the Casselman Nursing Home, who regularly went for walks near the river:

Eight years after her discovery, police try to revive interest in the Casselman cold case. In a 1983 interview with the Ottawa Citizen, Inspector Carl Manneke speculates that the secret to the Nation River Lady’s identity, “is probably in Ottawa, maybe Montreal… it points that way. All the leads we came up with dead-ended in Ottawa.” Manneke elaborates that Eastern Ontario is sometimes a “dumping ground” for Montreal murders, like Windsor is for Detroit and Hamilton is for Toronto:

“What some will do to confuse police is drive the body to the Ontario side and bury it on the side of the road.”

Inspector Carl Manneke – “Police still trying o identify body from eight-year-old murder mystery”, Hugh Adami, Ottawa Citizen, January 17, 1983

Manneke then cited a case from Windsor, Ontario where the body of a prostitute from Detroit was dumped by her pimp in Canada over a drug deal dispute.

After lying in the Toronto morgue for over a decade, in 1987 the body of the Nation River Lady is finally laid to rest in plot 1654 of the city’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Toronto’s Chief Coroner says he needs the space for new bodies. Police reveal that the antenna wire used to strangle her was a 24-inch piece of television coaxial cable found around her neck when the body was discovered. The cable was made by a Renfrew, Ontario manufacturer for only a short period in the 1970s, and only shipped to companies in Ottawa, Hull, Brockville and Montreal.

By 1990, 15-years have passed since the Casselman slaying. A new decade brings new investigative technologies. Police release a computer-generated picture of the victim which looks quite different and younger than the two earlier hand-drawn composites, with a smaller nose and wider eyes:

In 1991, police release more information, practically giving away the store in hopes of identifying the Nation River Lady. Police reveal that a small piece of curtain rod was impaled under her armpit, probably from the result of a struggle. Towels were wrapped around her head, one being a distinctive tea towel from Ireland which lead investigators to believe she was English-speaking. Blood stains were found on the north side of the 417 bridge, which lead investigators to believe she was dumped off the bridge and the car was traveling east to west. The neckties used to bind her were made in Montreal and sold in Quebec and Ontario.

In 2010 police release another updated sketch. The OPP also invite the public to view a post-mortem photo of the victim on their cold case website. 35-years-later, the OPP now say it’s possible the body had been lying in the Nation River for as long as six months. A $50,000 reward offered by police remained uncollected.

In 2017, 42-years after the discovery, a 3-D clay bust of the woman is released thanks to new investigative and modeling technologies. The two sketch composites, two computer generated images and the 3-D bust all look completely distinct from each other – they are five different women:

In 2021 a Reddit user predicted that thanks to advances in DNA technology, the identity of the Nation River Lady (NRL) would soon be known.

“Des assassinats similaires”

Most of the public information on the Nation River Lady case comes from English stories in Ontario newspapers – the Ottawa Citizen, the Ottawa Journal, The National Post. In 2017 the Journal de Montreal published a story that was never seen in English Canada. The OPP was investigating whether the Casselman slaying was related to a murder that occurred in Quebec ten days before the discovery of the Nation River Lady.

On April 22, 1975, Lise Choquette, a 30-year-old resident of Montreal was found near the construction site of the new highway in Laval, Quebec. Like the NRL, Choquette’s body was found near a bridge, in her case the Vimont viaduct which was under construction as part of the 440 Laval autoroute. Also like NRL, Choquette had been strangled, and a men’s necktie was tied tight around her neck (a grey tie with a black circles made by “Caporicci”). Choquette was found without her identification papers, and there were no obvious signs of sexual assault. Police point out that the distance between the Laval site and Casselman is only 150 kilometres.

The investigating force for the Choquette case is the Laval police, the same disinterested agency from the Marie-Ève Larivière cold case. As with Larivière, they have shown little effort to solve the Choquette case, they don’t even have a cold case unit. Laval is not even represented in the Journal de Montreal article, it is the OPP who do all the talking:

“It is true there are several striking commonalities and that the two murders took place at the same time. Investigators will surely examine the possibility of a link between these two cases.”

OPP Constable Guy Prevost – “Des assassinats similaires”, Camille Garnier, Journal de Montreal, August 2, 2017

I will say here that unlike their counterparts in Quebec, the Ontario Provincial Police worked the Nation River Lady case hard. Officers did go door to door in the surrounding area looking for answers. Hundreds of witness over many decades were interviewed. The OPP spent approximately three weeks in Trois Rivieres running down a lead. They entered NRL’s DNA into the NamUs missing persons database. They checked dental records, and national dental associations to try to identify NRL’s military made bridge plates (there is an abandoned military base, CFB Gloucester about 40 kilometres west of Casselman which closed in 1972 – giving the story an eerie Larkhill – V for Vendetta quality, put perhaps that’s for another day). By contrast, I don’t think the Laval police ever bothered to lift a fraternal brotherhood ring-finger to help solve Lise Choquette’s cold case.

Seen And Not Seen

I did not drive through Cornwall and Hawkesbury to avoid the traffic of Montreal. I came to visit Nation River. Because when you travel, the mind wanders.

And one more mystery. My mother’s people were from Winchester, Ontario, about 40 kilometres west of Casselman. There had been a tragic story handed down through her family for almost 100 years. It was said that her father – my grandfather – had caused an accidental fire that killed his younger brother. As a young boy, Mac had been smoking in the farm barn. He carelessly threw his cigarette butt on the dirt floor, and the ember ignited some hay. His brother, who had been hiding in the barn burned to death. It was said that this is what in later life caused Mac to drink, it was the source of all his troubles. It wasn’t true. The fire that killed Richard Justus occurred in 1910. Mac wasn’t born until 1917:

One year after our initial contact I received another message from the psychic, Hannah. It read:

“Your guides want you to know they are with you, helping you, and now is the time….no more think just do. I don’t know what it means but it is your sign from them. I was busy working and it hit me like someone slapped me in the back of the head.”