Park Predators - The Passenger

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

In May 1990, the resort town of Banff, Alberta Canada was gearing up for a busy tourist season, but the horrific stabbing of a young female taxi driver brings everything to a screeching halt. The perpetrator remains on the loose for nearly two years. Detectives in a race against the clock to find their killer never expected this monster would have the face of a teenager. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://parkpredators.com/episode-6-the-passenger/ Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and today our story takes place in the town of Banff, Canada, the highest town in the entire country. This scenic town sits over 4,500 feet above sea level, but it also has sections that go really deep underground. One of those areas is known as Castle Guard Cave, and it has twists and turns that one minute make you think you're going in the right direction, but then those paths lead to a dead end. The nature of this crazy cave system reflects the same situation the Royal Canadian Mounted Police found themselves in in May 1990. A murder investigation unfolded that seemed to drag on forever, with twists and turns that would turn all of Canada and the small town of Banff completely upside down. This is Park Predators. Around 8 o'clock on the night of May 16, 1990, cab driver Larry Landreau hears a woman's voice chirp over his company's radio system.

The voice is 23-year-old Lucy Turmel. She's calling to let everyone already working know that she's signing in for the night to start her taxi cab shift. The business that Larry and Lucy work for is called the Taxi Taxi Cab Company, and they operate in the resort town of Banff, Alberta. And for the next few hours, Larry and Lucy run their individual fares for customers, typically going to and from the downtown area. A lot of the customers wanted to go there for a good time, go out to dinner, or end up at a nightclub. According to an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, at 1.40 in the morning, Lucy is finishing up the tail end of her cabbie shift, and she pulls her taxi onto a street called Spray

Avenue. Spray Avenue is right in front of a bar in downtown called the Works Nightclub. The club wasn't a freestanding place. It actually sat inside the Banff Springs Hotel, but it had a convenient driveway area that taxi drivers would often use to catch customers who wanted to ride home. Now, Larry just happened to be parked in that area too, and he was next in line behind Lucy to get clients. Because the Works nightclub is so popular, good cabbies knew to go there to form their own queue to wait for clients to come out. There was sort of an unspoken rule that whoever was first in line would get customers and then leave, and then the next driver would pull up and so on and so forth. While they're waiting together

in line, Larry and Lucy start talking about their rides for the night and how much money they'd made. Lucy tells Larry that she only made a little over $100 and was hoping that her next shift would be better. She told him that at this point she was really tired for the night, but was going to do one more ride to get the next group of people coming out, and then she would clock out for the night. Larry says that's probably a good idea, and then he walks back to his cab right behind hers. Right at that moment, some people come out of the works nightclub and they hail Lucy down. The group was made up of a man and two women

and they get into the back of Lucy's cab. A few minutes later, Larry hears Lucy over the radio telling their supervisor Bruce that she's going to drop the people off and Bruce immediately chirps back going to drop the people off. And Bruce immediately chirps back, confirming that he got the information. It was a tiresome job, but in 1990, Lucy had decided to start working as a nighttime cabbie to save up as much money as possible.

You see, Lucy had a long-term boyfriend named Jeff, and they were both working in the service industry. Jeff was a waiter at a local tavern, and the two had secretly made plans to get married. Both Jeff and Lucy were working as many shifts as they could to save up money for their wedding, so Lucy had taken this cabbie job, and depending on the crowds downtown, she could earn a lot of money very fast. A few minutes after Lucy pulls away with her customers,

Larry decides to check in on her because she had said she was really tired. So he radios into their supervisor and asks him if he's heard from Lucy, and Bruce immediately calls back and says no. Larry decides to radio Lucy himself, but just like Bruce, he doesn't receive anything back. Another 20 minutes goes by, and Larry is growing more and more worried about Lucy. Another 20 minutes goes by, and Larry is growing more and more worried about Lucy. He decides to call off his shift for the night and go cruising around their normal routes to try and find her. It's completely out of character for her or any other cabbie to not answer on their radio when both their supervisor calls and a colleague.

Larry first decides to go to the destination that Lucy was supposed to be taking her customers, which was a residential neighborhood across town, but he doesn't find her there. Then he decides to drive by her house, thinking that maybe she just went home and turned off her radio early or something, but he doesn't see her or her cab there either. So Larry just keeps driving, and he's growing more and more concerned that he can't locate his co-worker. As he's just driving around, he gets a block away from her house, and then he suddenly spots her cab. It's in traffic, and someone else is driving it. Larry calls into the supervisor to report he's found Lucy's cab, but he thinks somebody's stolen it. Fearful the police won't get there in time, Larry decides to start following the car.

And at first, this pursuit is very subtle. Larry doesn't think the driver in front of him notices that he's behind him, but it goes on for two more miles and they begin entering parts of town that have much less traffic. So the driver in Lucy's cab begins to speed up. Likely he spotted Larry. And it's at this point that Larry is certain that this driver has stolen Lucy's cab and is up to something. So he keeps tailing the car and they go up to speeds over 80 miles per hour. During this, Larry radios into their supervisor to tell him to call the police. But remember, it's 1990. Personal cell phones are not really a thing at this point. Larry is just

doing the best he can to find out who this person is driving Lucy's cab and what's happened to her. After they go a few more miles, Larry is finally able to force the driver of the stolen cab onto a dead-end street called Mountain Avenue. This area is a dirt road that's completely surrounded by trees. When the two cars come to a screeching halt, Larry keeps a safe distance, and while he's opening his door to get out, he sees a man jump out of the driver's side door of Lucy's cab and run off into the woods. Larry tries to chase him, but the guy is too fast, and with the cover of the woods, he's out of sight in seconds. Helpless and confused, Larry looks on into the darkness, and he sees some

faint lights and believes that on the other side of the woods, there are likely houses. He's on foot now, and by the time he could drive over there, the suspect would probably be gone, but at least he got a good glimpse of the guy to give a description to police. As Larry makes his way back to his cab, he's obviously distressed, and he's really confused about what just happened. He saw a man get out of Lucy's cab and run off into the night. He's wondering where his co-worker is, why this guy stole her cab, and if he hurt her to do it. As he's catching his breath, he knows his supervisor on the taxi radio that says that some drivers in traffic across town, near where he'd been looking for Lucy earlier, have found Lucy's

body in the middle of a street. When he hears the name of that street, Larry recognizes the address because it's literally only a few miles away from where he is on Mountain Avenue, but it's on a road that's just beyond where he was cruising around earlier. At this point, Larry is running on full adrenaline, but his heart absolutely breaks when he discovers this horrible news that Lucy's dead. As day breaks, he rushes over to the scene to speak with police and tell them what he'd seen and where Lucy's cab was abandoned by this carjacker. By the time he gets across town, Royal Canadian Mounted Police detectives are already on scene. They determined that Lucy had

been stabbed at least 17 times in the neck and the face and dumped out on the road in plain view of other drivers in traffic. She had defensive wounds and cuts on her hands and arms, but hadn't been sexually assaulted. The only things missing from her person were her jacket, wallet, and the $130 that she'd made while driving that night. Larry immediately tells the investigators that he knows where Lucy's cab is, and he saw a man jump out of it just 30 minutes prior. He showed them the way over to Mountain Avenue, where the car was still sitting idle. Investigators start combing over the inside of the taxi cab and they find blood on the seat, on the dashboard and the steering wheel.

The blood spatter inside of the car didn't look like it had come from Lucy. The way it was dotted on the steering wheel and driver's door looked like the mystery man that Larry saw, might have been bleeding too. With this information in hand, and based on the way her body was positioned in the street she was left at, detectives believed that Lucy had bled out almost entirely in the road, almost like she had been forced out of her cab and then stabbed over and over again, which would match with a carjacking scenario. Aside from Larry and the police, the next people to find out Lucy was dead were her family members living in Quebec. Denise, her mother, was the person who picked up the phone and got that heartbreaking news from police that Lucy had been murdered. She told the Calgary

Herald Lucy was their only adopted daughter. They'd adopted her when she was only three months old. In fact, all of the couple's children were adopted. Lucy had two older brothers that the couple had adopted a few years before her. Denise had to call the men at work and break the devastating news to them. She also had to call her husband's doctor before telling him the news. She was fearful Jean would have a second heart attack when he found out about it. Lucy's parents had allowed her to move to Banff and start working and living on her own just three years earlier in 1987. Before that, Lucy had

decided to stay home in Quebec City, and she forewent higher education to save up money. But she was working as a nanny learning several world languages from the family she babysat for. She'd moved from the Tram's family home in Montreal to begin working in the tourism industry of Banff. She had hopes of earning a lot of money and being closer to nature. To paint a little bit more of a fuller picture of Banff for you, it's a place where three million people come to ski, hike, bike, and enjoy the beautiful landscapes. A lot of trail systems are in Banff National Park, and the area is an international resort destination that really doesn't see a lot of major crime, mostly just

burglaries, theft, and petty crimes. So Lucy's family felt safe with her transplanting to the area to find good work. After they learned that Lucy had been murdered, the entire Turmel family was destroyed. But they very quickly built a relationship with police working on the case so that they could be updated on anything and everything going on with the investigation. But right away, the information was slim. The only description police had to go off of was the one Larry had given them. Lucy's attacker was believed to be in his early 20s with possibly dark hair and a slender build. Another piece of evidence that detectives found was Lucy's taxi log. It was in her car and they used that lead

to find out where she'd been and when. They also started to look into her personal life and one really sad detail in all of this is that according to the Canadian taxi driver homicide stats, Lucy's boyfriend Jeff was actually detoured around the police barricade in the early morning hours that Lucy was found. He had been driving on his way home from work and actually saw the covered body lying on the ground, but he didn't learn who it was until later and police notified him about it. According to Jeff, he told officers that he and Lucy had plans to get married and they were both working service industry jobs to make ends meet. He told detectives that earlier in that night before she died, she stopped by to see him at work. She told him she was somewhat disappointed that she'd only made 130 bucks. Investigators saw that Jeff was completely

devastated by the crime and they had no evidence that pointed to him being involved or having motive. He also had a rock-solid alibi of being at work during the time Lucy was attacked, so they really just didn't think it was him. Some other people besides Jeff that the investigators wanted to talk to were those customers that Lucy had picked up at the works nightclub. They also wanted to speak with anyone who had been in the club that night. When they went to the club, they got a tip from the bartender that a man named Luke Benoit had been inside the club the night of the crime. He had been acting extremely drunk and threatening

people with a hunting knife. When they brought him in for questioning, he quickly admitted to being completely blackout drunk, and he even said he thought he might have killed Lucy. Officers held Luke in custody while they tried to find more evidence to prove he was their man. At this point, what he told them bordered on a confession, but the problem was that they didn't have the murder weapon, and they couldn't prove he'd even been in Lucy's cab. Almost a day after Lucy's body is discovered and Luke is in custody,

police in the Canadian Mounties, combing the woods where the mystery man had fled into, found what they believed was the murder weapon. And this was huge. A homeowner walking down their driveway found a knife that had some unique features to it. The knife was large, long, and had a mahogany wood handle that was something one would primarily use for hunting. It also had blood on the blade and on the hilt, and a quick check of it showed that it was Lucy's blood type.

So with this in hand, detectives go back to Luke and they ask him about the knife, and he denied that it was his. They continued to press him and they kept him in jail, but in the meantime, they needed to get back out and pursue other leads that could help them build their case. In the back of their minds this entire time, the police believe that the three people Larry saw Lucy pick up at the works nightclub

may have seen who her killer was. Detectives looked through Lucy's cabbie logbook, and that indicated that she dropped someone off in that last ride on Cougar Street. That was a residential neighborhood in town. Officers go to that street and they canvass every house, but they didn't get any information from anyone. No one had seen Lucy's cab there or remembered anything about her passengers. Most of the people who'd been staying at the homes on that street on May 16th were no longer in the area by the time detectives came by a few days into their search. Because of the high

turnover of tourists, the nightly and weekly rentals meant a lot of witnesses had already left the area. Eventually, after a few weeks of hitting the pavement, the detectives tracked down the two women who'd ridden in the back of Lucy's cab from the Banff Springs Hotel. They said that, yes, Lucy had dropped them off at a house party on Cougar Street, right before the time she was murdered. But they said that the guy that had ridden with them, they didn't know who he was. He hadn't been with them in the nightclub, and he just wanted to share a cab ride back. They provided police with the same description that Larry had,

a white guy in his early 20s with possibly dark hair and a slender build. Detectives knew this description could be thousands of young men working or living in Banff. Their search was going to be hard. And this was a case they just weren't used to working in Banff. It had been three decades since there was a murder in the town, and this crime literally stunned everyone. The bloody nature of Lucy's wounds were excessively brutal, and people were gripped with fear that a homicidal monster was out there on the loose. There was no telling if they could strike again, and young women in particular said that they were worried to walk alone at night or even take taxis

anymore. Lucy's murder had been so public and a lot of people had seen the crime scene, but to this day, I don't know why, but I'm assuming years later, somehow her autopsy pictures have found their way onto the internet. I stumbled across some of them while researching this case, and don't go and look at these for yourself. They are horrible, but I can imagine, based on what I saw and what the people in the town were hearing, that this would scare me into not leaving the house if I lived in Banff at the time of this crime. Everyone, including Lucy's family, so desperately wanted answers that even the owner of Taxi Taxi Cab Company, where she worked, put up a $5,000 reward for someone to come forward with useful information. In a short amount of time, more funds started flowing in for a reward, coming from four other cab companies, including a rival one.

After a few days, investigators got the results back from the crime lab for the blood found in Lucy's cab, the smears that had been on the steering wheel, the seat, and the visor, and the tests confirmed what investigators had thought from the start, which was that the blood was not Lucy's. It was a blood type from a white male, so they tested that blood type against Luke's DNA, and it came back that it was not a match. At this point, detectives had to let him go

because the forensics showed there was no way he was the person who'd cut himself inside of Lucy's cab. He couldn't have left those bloodstains behind. Luke's alleged confession was bogus and likely the ramblings of a drunk guy who was just unsure of what he did when he consumed alcohol. It was disappointing, but detectives now needed to shift their focus to finding the man who matched that blood type in the cab. And just like everything else so far in this case, that task would be overwhelming and bring them face to face with an unlikely suspect. After the forensic results came back that Luke couldn't be their suspect,

police were back to square one in finding Lucy's killer. So they began interviewing everyone they could in town who would have been all of the places that she had been the night she was killed. And right away, investigators realized this task is monumental. There were thousands of people visiting the area at the time of the murder. Lots of transient people who maybe could have seen something, but tracking them down was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. The pool of young men in Banff who fit the suspect's description was also super big. Investigators estimated close to 2,000 young men had to be spoken with and cleared somehow. The process of interviewing all of these

people, checking their work records, and their criminal records was painstaking. Detectives tried to eliminate male suspects among the thousands of men working in the town, but as they did this, they determined that 70% of them had criminal records of some kind. But police keep going. One by one, they track each and every man down and vet them. And many of the guys agreed that Lucy's killer should be caught. A lot of them were willing to provide DNA samples to the crime lab. And the investigation just dragged on like this for months.

Eventually, detectives crossed the one-year mark, and they still didn't have a suspect. No one that they talked to matched the DNA found in Lucy's cab. So it's at this point, a year into their investigation, that the police decide to change tactics. They release pictures of the actual hunting knife they'd found, and they knew was involved in the murder. They fanned out to put posters up all across town. But even after doing this, nothing turned up. RCMP dispatched these flyers along with more than 2,000 letters to countries around the globe. They hoped that maybe someone who'd visited from out of the country would see this bulletin and call in and provide information. Like we said, tourists that come to Banff are international, so they hoped that maybe someone even in a foreign country could see the case and it would jog their memory. that maybe someone even in a foreign country could see the case and it would jog their memory.

The detectives' persistence eventually paid off because about a year and a half into their investigation, a tip came in. This information was about an 18-year-old man who might be involved. The tipster came in for an interview and they told police that their former roommate, Ryan Jason Love, had once owned the hunting knife in the pictures on the poster. They said they remembered seeing the knife in an apartment they once shared with Love back in May 1990. After talking with this roommate more, detectives looked back into their files to see if they'd ever spoken to Ryan, and they realized they had attempted to talk with him early on in the investigation, but at that time, they were told by his friends that he left Banff the day before Lucy's murder, which meant he couldn't

have done it. But detectives looked harder, and they checked Ryan's employment time card for the hotel he worked at, just to make sure that he wasn't in town on May 16th. But that's when they discovered that he had actually left Banff the day after Lucy's murder. This mistake at the time had inadvertently cleared Ryan, and because the police had so many people to interview in this case, the incorrect information about Ryan had simply gotten lost in the workload. After talking with a few more people, detectives learned that Ryan hadn't been back to Banff since May 1990, so they decide to take a drive to Duncan,

British Columbia, to his parents' house to question him. They wanted to know more about his alibi and his whereabouts the night of the crime, and Ryan tells police that the knife in their poster was his, but his grandfather had bought it for him, and he said it was stolen from him several weeks before the crime while he was living in Banff. He said he didn't know who had stolen it from him, and he said it was stolen from him several weeks before the crime while he was living in Banff. He said he didn't know who had stolen it from him or the specific day it disappeared, just that it went missing before the murder. The detectives found this to be pretty convenient for Ryan, and during the interview with him, they noticed superficial wounds and cuts on his hand that appeared they had healed, but they left scars behind. Ryan's sketchy answers, combined with the fact that he admitted the knife had been his at one point, made police even more suspicious of him, but they still didn't have enough evidence to make an arrest. When they ask him for his DNA,

he refuses to give one and stops the interview and asks for an attorney. So police say fine, and they leave the interview, but now they're convinced that 18-year-old Ryan could be the person who stabbed Lucy to rob her of her earnings for the night. Then he took off to his parents' house in British Columbia to remain in hiding for the next year and a half. Because their conversation with Ryan had ended short and they weren't able to get his DNA, investigators devised a plan to somehow get his DNA and build a rock-solid case against him. And at this point, he was their only lead

they'd followed up on that looked good. They were determined to prove that Ryan was the one who'd shed that blood inside of Lucy's cab the night of the crime. A few months after speaking with Ryan in British Columbia, the detectives launched an undercover operation to try and get his DNA. The plan involved two undercover officers posing as criminal gang members, and they would hook up with Ryan to do a robbery together. They earned his trust and said they were looking for recruits in their gang.

Eventually, the undercover officers employed Ryan as their lookout man for a robbery at a marina. The night before the planned heist, the officers ordered sex workers to lookout man for a robbery at a marina. The night before the planned heist, the officers ordered sex workers to join them at a hotel. Ryan was there too. The workers were actually also undercover police officers, but Ryan didn't know that. One of the women got close to Ryan and retrieved some strands of his hair. Unsure if that would hold up in court, detectives waited until Ryan spent the night in the hotel room, and then the next morning they went back to check if he had discarded any items that maybe he'd touched. They looked into a trash can by the bed and found a used tissue.

They collected that, hoping that the mucus inside would have his DNA and that would be admissible in court. When police submitted those items to the crime lab, they compared them to the blood found in Lucy's cab, and those results came back a 100% match. So in November of 1992, police arrested Ryan, and they charged him with second-degree murder for killing Lucy. At the time, he was 21 years old, and his family backed him the entire way. They maintained his innocence, and he fought the charges. When he went to trial, one of his defense attorney's main arguments was that the DNA evidence that the state had used against him was an unreasonable search and seizure. He said that the DNA from the hair strands and the used tissue needed to be thrown out. The court ruled that the hair the undercover officers had plucked from Ryan's head during the undercover operation shouldn't be allowed as

evidence because Ryan didn't willingly provide it. But the mucus found inside the tissue that harbored his DNA was allowable. The judge said because Ryan had willfully discarded it, the moment it touched the ground, it became free game. Prosecutors felt their case was clear and straightforward based on this good forensic evidence they had against Ryan. They believed Ryan had overpowered Lucy in her cab that night after she dropped off the two women, and his intention the whole time was to rob her. But when she put up a fight, he forced her out of the cab and just started stabbing her, eventually stabbing over 17 times. But in the process, he cut himself.

Likely scared of getting caught at this point, the prosecution said that he got in the cab and stole it and left Lucy's body in the street. In the end, he'd only gotten away with $130 in cash. In 1994, the jury convicted Ryan of second-degree murder, and they sentenced him to life in cash. In 1994, the jury convicted Ryan of second-degree murder and they sentenced him to life in prison. Because of Canadian law, his life sentence allowed him to be eligible for parole after he spent 20 years behind bars. By June of 1996, Ryan had exhausted all of his appeals. Ultimately, he confessed to the murder in hopes that maybe that gesture would weigh favorably when it came time for him to be eligible for parole. He expressed to his family and his attorney that he was a murderer, but did want to get out of prison someday and reform his life.

According to reporting by the CBC, after Ryan's conviction, this case led to changes in the Canadian Criminal Code. These changes allowed police to use warrants to collect people's DNA without their consent. In his confession, Ryan told prosecutors that on the night of May 16, 1990, he hatched a plan to flag down a cab driver in order to rob them. He said he planned to use the money from the robbery to impress his family at a reunion that was planned for the next day. Now you've got to remember at this point Ryan was 18 years old in May 1990. He clearly was old enough to know the difference between right and wrong but he had this sort of imaginative fantasia that a lot of teenage boys do. They want to appear that they have it all together and Ryan said he did this for his family. He wanted to show

them he had a stable life. Nobody wants to be known as the person who's an alcoholic and a drug addict by the age of 18 and can't pay their bills. Plus, Ryan's family was from a pretty affluent community in Duncan, and he said the pressure of not meeting their expectations drove them to desperation. Ryan said that night he saw Lucy and he hailed her down and got in. Once inside alone with her, they headed to a bogus destination he'd given her, but then he directed her down a road that had no lights and no people going by. It's at that point he says he pulls out a hunting knife and began stabbing her in the face and neck. He says he pushed her out of the cab, still stabbing her, and he cut himself

in the process. Then he jumped in the driver's seat and drove off. He recounts this same story for the Canadian parole board at his scheduled hearing. Ryan told the panel that at the time of the murder, he'd blown through his weekly earnings as a housekeeper. He said his money came and went so fast because he'd been on a 10-month drinking binge and was using drugs every day. When he left Banff the day after the murder, his family actually paid for his airfare to that family reunion, and he used the cash he stole from Lucy to show his family that he was doing all right. As the years passed, Ryan kept serving his time in prison,

and people sort of forgot about the case, and the world just moved on. But Ryan was about to make headlines yet again in a very public way. In 2000, after spending nine years in prison, Ryan Love was now in his mid-20s, and he'd become deeply involved in an inmate theater program at William Head Institution in British Columbia. Remember, he was 18 when he murdered Lucy, so he spent all of the years a normal person would, going to college or getting married or starting a business, locked up for his crimes.

He was also a high school dropout prior to murdering Lucy, so he had never experienced any kind of organized group project like a play. He told reporters over the years that he'd found purpose in the prison's theater program. He would often perform in, write, and direct the plays with other inmates. When he did frequent interviews with the Canadian press about that program, he said that it benefited him as well as other offenders at the prison. But one interview he did with the National Post in 2000 talking about this new hobby really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. In fact, many people across the entire country of Canada felt his comments in the piece were

insensitive. He said, quote, the experience was amazing. I'm supposed to be punished in here, and I think a lot of people might be upset because I'm having the time of my life here. He obviously was referring to the enjoyment he got from performing in the troupe, but to a lot of people, these comments came across as proud and unremorseful for anything he'd done. Ryan later went on to backpedal and said that he was unhappy with the interview write-up, saying that the writer used a partial quote and he wished it would have been corrected. it would have been corrected. Years after this, in 2011, Ryan petitioned for parole, and in July 2012, the Canadian Parole Board granted him day parole. Now, day parole in Canada is this kind of prison release program that allows a prisoner to participate in public activities during the day, but requires them to return to their prison cell or a halfway house at night. It's actually a pretty common thing in Canada, and in some cases

an offender can get special exceptions, which pretty much means they don't have to return to anywhere. There's no entity in place holding them accountable. They literally can just promise to be good boys and good little girls, and the government is like, yeah, that sounds good. When Ryan got day parole, he was 41 years old, and according to a report from the Calgary Herald, he had some trouble keeping the right company. By September of that year, just two months out of prison, he'd already received a warning from police in British Columbia after he was seen exiting a strip club and bar. A big part of his parole requirements were that he couldn't use alcohol and drugs, and he wasn't supposed to be around any people who did those things. After he and this friend were spotted leaving the strip club, police pulled them over and made his friend take a breathalyzer test, which he failed. All of these events were documented by the Parole Board of Canada, but oddly, nowhere in their report was it mentioned if Ryan had admitted to drinking.

The only thing the board noted was that his friend got a warning ticket for drinking and driving, and then Ryan promised to distance himself from that guy. Other documents from the parole board showed that Ryan's history of substance abuse had stopped in 2005, and he'd been sober ever since. In their final summary on whether he should have been granted full parole, the board members wrote that they considered Ryan a low risk and felt that he would not reoffend in a violent way. They noted his family supported him in his sobriety, and they felt he was motivated to succeed in the community. But in all of this, the parole board didn't ignore the heinous and cruel elements of Ryan's crime. They noted in their report that they still didn't understand and weren't sure if Ryan even

understood what his actual motivation was for the savage attack on Lucy. They kept going back to the fact that he'd only gotten away with a small amount of cash and the attack seemed entirely unprovoked. They said, quote, the rage indicated by the trauma to the body of the victim and the efforts you made to conceal your involvement may suggest deeper-rooted issues that defy explanation. Because of this, Ryan was referred to see a psychiatrist regularly and attend psychotherapy sessions for the rest of his life. One report from his psychological assessment read that the therapist was concerned that Ryan's true character and personality might never be known. They said there was nothing in his community or prison history that could explain the brutality and prolonged

nature of his offense. On top of this, Ryan even described himself to doctors while in prison as suffering from being institutionalized and that he had social disorders. Whether those social disorders existed prior to Lucy's murder and could have been a factor in it may never be known. Ryan's 2012 full parole deeply concerned the Trammell family, but one of Lucy's brothers was quoted by the Calgary Herald as saying that after the crime had passed, they just wanted to put the whole ordeal behind them.

They felt that whatever the parole board was going to do, they couldn't change. They were glad that Ryan had strict conditions and was required to abide by some rules, but at that point, the family said they felt that he'd served his time for the crime. As a part of their healing process, Lucy's family had flown to Banff after having her funeral back in Quebec. They even toured the spot where her body was dumped. The family said it was a healing experience, and they were convinced then that it was not the town of Banff that had killed their daughter. It was the actions of one evil young man who'd made wrong decisions. Lucy's mother, Denise, told reporters that she had come to terms with Lucy's murder

a few months after it happened, even before they caught Ryan. to terms with Lucy's murder a few months after it happened, even before they caught Ryan. Denise said that she had a spiritual encounter with her daughter in their living room one afternoon. She said it was so vivid she could smell the scent of Lucy's hair and saw her figure standing in the room and it walked over towards her. Denise said Lucy had a warm smile on her face and rested her head against her shoulder. She said she and Lucy both began to cry and her daughter told her, Mom, I will stay with you. I will never leave you. Denise said in that moment she was engulfed in complete calmness and the images of her daughter's bloody body laying in that street that had plagued her for months just went away and she never saw them in her mind again.

Lucy's father told the Calgary Herald that he prayed to God often about Lucy's murder and wrote her a letter after her death. He said his most important line to her in that letter was, quote, 23 years of age is young to die. But if you can tell at the end of your life you have done your best, that is the most important thing. After his release, Ryan told authorities in the Canadian corrections system that he considered his actions and the brutal nature of Lucy's murder as uncharacteristic for him. He said, quote, I'm a good person who's done a very, very bad thing.

That can never happen again. That will never happen again. Prison hasn't been easy. It's been a long 19 years, but any hardships I've had have been nothing compared to my family's, and the Tramiel family, and the entire town of Banff was hurt. I won't hurt again. But that remains to be seen. Park Predators is an AudioChuck original podcast. This series was executive produced by Ashley Flowers. Research and writing by Delia D'Ambra with writing assistance by Ashley Flowers.

Sound design by David Flowers with production assistance from Alyssa Gastola. You can find all of our source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?