Uncover - S23 E7: Needle in a haystack | "The Pit"

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

A close relative thinks Sheree was dumped somewhere near the gravel pit. Police and volunteers searched the area when she disappeared, and again after the arrest. Could the searchers have overlooked her remains?

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. The human body. It's made up of many moving parts, a network of intertwining systems. But what happens to it when we die? In Sherry Furtuck's case, her body has yet to be found. At this point in the making of the podcast, Sherry has been gone for four years. Teams of RCMP officers searched fields near the gravel pit where she vanished. If she was left outside, her body would have been exposed, year after year, to the harsh

Saskatchewan winter. Six months ago, her estranged husband, Greg Furtuck, was arrested. He was charged with her murder and committing an indignity to human remains. Nothing has been proven in court yet. Greg's in jail awaiting trial, and police are still searching for Sherry's body. I just told them I threw her in a bush. It's all fabricated. I still hold out hope, you know, that we will find her remains. I thought if at any time they maybe might be able to locate it,

maybe this year would have been a better year. If the police were coming back later to find a full skeleton, that's not what they would be finding. I'm Alicia Bridges. This is Episode 7 of The Pit. It's November of 2019, and Victoria Dinh and I are back on the road. I'm tired, I'm tired. I went a little sideways. Into the ditch?

For nearly two years, we've been searching for answers, wondering how Sherry Furtuck could seemingly vanish from a Saskatchewan gravel pit without a trace. Our questions have taken us across Western Canada. As we near the fourth anniversary of Sherry's disappearance, we find ourselves driving down an icy highway. Yeah, it's pretty slippery today. We're on our way back to Saskatoon from an interview with Sherry's sister, Michelle Kish.

She lives in the neighbouring province of Alberta. As the sun begins to set in the midst of our six-hour drive home, it's a text from another one of Sherry's sisters, Coralie White. She tells us she's open to an interview. We're not expecting this. The last time we had any contact with Coralie, Julianne had just passed away. Julianne was the matriarch of their family.

She died on July 13, 2018, leaving everyone in her wake devastated. At that time, Coralie did not want to speak with us. But now things have changed. A few days later, we find ourselves on the road again. We're headed to the town of Davidson to meet Coralie. It's about a 35-minute drive from the gravel pit where Sherry was last known to be. Once again, it's cold out, about minus 20, but at least the sun is shining. As we pull up, we see her inside by the door. She pokes her head out as we reach the front steps.

There's something familiar about her. Nice to meet you. You too. Thanks for having us. Hi. If you guys want to hang a close-up, there you go. Sure, yeah. Her mannerisms, the way she speaks, her petite frame, she's a lot like her mom. Do you want Coralie or do you want Tika?

What do you prefer? It's up to you, yeah. I prefer Tika just because that's probably what everybody knows me as. I am Sherry's youngest, I'll stress youngest, sister. Yeah, no. And I know there's a lot of people who you've asked to talk to that don't want to speak. And I get that. It took me a long time to get to here.

She's been through a lot lately. Tika leads us through her house to her basement living room. Her family is home, so we head downstairs for some privacy. We take a seat on a big grey couch, and we ask her to tell us more about Sherry. What was she like? What was her voice like? And we asked her to tell us more about Sherry. What was she like? What was her voice like?

Tika walks over to a shelf next to us, shuffles through a few videotapes, and grabs one from a small pile. She hands it to us. The label reads, Corey and Tika's Wedding. It's the only thing that she can think of that showcases Sherry's voice. Sherry was the master of ceremonies.

Greg was their videographer. He basically left the camera on the head table. Right. So you can hear Sherry talking in the back, but you don't. Like, there's a little bit of video, I guess, prior to our ceremony. Tika says we can take it with us, but we'll wait and check it out later. As we get settled in, Tika gets up and says she has something to show us. When she returns, she's holding a thick pink photo album.

She opens it and flips to a picture of a couple in a tropical setting. 91, I believe. Yes. So... There's a date on the bottom right-hand corner of the photo. January 17th, 1991. I'm speechless. It's a photo of Sherry and Greg on their wedding day. I'm speechless.

It's a photo of Sherry and Greg on their wedding day. The newlyweds are standing barefoot in lush green grass. Beside them, there's a short palm tree, and on the other side, there's this oversized heart woven out of leaves with large pink and red flowers running down the center. Greg looks happy. He's wearing a white button-down t-shirt with dark-colored slacks. His thinning brown hair is unneatly tousled. He's grinning from ear to ear under a thick dark brown mustache. One hand in his pocket, the other clenching Sherry's waist. Sherry's friends and family have always told us that she was not your typical girly girl.

She would always choose pants over skirts and dresses. So what she wore on her wedding day wasn't too surprising to us. She looked super cool. She's dressed up, glamorous really, but in a way that's very Sherry. She's wearing this bright red satin blouse. It's tucked into white high-waisted pants. She's got that 90s blue eyeshadow on. Her hair is curled and she's smiling faintly, focusing just beyond the camera. Her left arm is wrapped around Greg. Oh, so there was family there. We thought

maybe they eloped or something. No. So Sherry, Greg, and my sister Glenda and myself. Well, it was very, like, relaxed and very casual right like it was not yeah i think we i don't know got up and went to the beach that day and it was whatever time we put our dresses on and did our hair and went down it was like very short right like five ten minutes tops maybe and then we, I'm not sure where we went. We went somewhere.

Yeah, so it was, Sherry wasn't an overly fancy person, as you can see, right? Pants and a shirt. Yeah, but that was her, right? That was Sherry. Yeah, that was her, right? That was Sherry. This picture is part of a series we didn't think existed. It shows the newlyweds clinking glasses and drinking champagne, their arms interlocked. There's even a picture of Sherry singing karaoke on her wedding night.

Two of Sherry's siblings, Tika and Glenda, were also there. The sisters wore matching white off-the-shoulder dresses. Tika remembers buying the dresses from a beach vendor earlier that day. Yeah, I think she was happy. You know, we, well, you should be on your wedding day, I guess, right? Maybe you shouldn't be getting married then. Yeah, I think she was happy. And I mean, we had fun and, you know, spent the week together or whatever in Mexico. So, yeah, like I said, you know, I'm sure they had lots of good times.

But I know she lived a lot of hell too, right? She says Greg was Sherry's first real relationship. But back home in Saskatchewan, not everyone in Sherry's family approved of him. That's why Tika says not everyone came to the wedding. So I don't know if it was father's intuition, but dad had him pegged right from the get-go. So, and now when I think back, I'm thinking maybe that's

part of the reason mom and dad didn't go to the wedding. So, um, I'm sure they had some good times. Um, like they went on a few vacations together. I mean, they had three kids together. So, yeah, there were, I'm not going to say that her entire time with him was terrible. Greg, I'll stress could, could be sometimes okay. Tika says she and Sherry were close, but then they began to drift apart as time went on.

They had their own lives and their own families, but they still kept in contact. And then a phone call in December of 2015 changed that forever. Tika was at work. It was, I think, shortly after lunch, mum called me and told me that Sherry was missing. And I said, Terri, I said, what do you mean she's missing? And mom said, well, she went to the gravel pit to haul gravel and she didn't come home all night.

I said, okay. And then my immediate response, well, I guess prior to that, I got this really sick feeling in my gut. I know Sherry. I know she didn't just wander off. I know somebody didn't kidnap her. I know that nobody would just take her. I knew, I knew at that instant that she was gone. In June of 2019, RCMP officers searched a large rural area near the gravel pit. It happened the same week Sherry's estranged husband, Greg, was arrested on the outskirts of Saskatoon. Any time there's a murder charge before a body is found is very surprising to me. We've had a few recent examples in Canada of the body not being recovered and a charge being laid. In fact, the Court of Appeal just upheld a recent conviction where there was no body found. That's criminal defense lawyer

Brian Pfefferle. I was surprised just because that's such an unusual step because that's usually such a key piece to the puzzle for the police to do that. They need to have reasonable grounds to believe that the offense has been committed, and they must have believed based on the other stuff that they had enough there. But yes, I'm surprised. Oftentimes it's an interesting investigative tool. I've had situations before where the police will lay a charge against someone to see how they react, and it can be a useful technique. As we put this episode together, Greg is still awaiting trial.

Here's what Greg told us when we spoke to him in jail shortly after his arrest. Are you able to say what you told them you did with the body? Oh, what I told Mr Big? I just told him I threw her in a bush. All fabricated. Greg says he's innocent. As you heard in previous episodes, Mr Big is a character in an undercover sting operation

fronted by the RCMP. It's a controversial technique, used to elicit a confession from a murder suspect. We figured it's because of what Greg allegedly told the undercover officers, that the RCMP focused their search in an area just north of the pit. But that wasn't all. Following his arrest, police released more information to the public about their search. They asked those living near the pit to keep an eye out for pieces of dark coloured tarp or polyethylene material. Was this something Greg had told the undercover officers?

A dark tarp now is also in the mix of things, right? So which could, I don't know, I don't know. Part of me, I don't know. Part of me thinks that maybe they have, he has sent them on a bit of a wild goose chase. I don't know. Um, yeah, but I know, I know that I think they plan to continue searching, but they, they likely won't now, like with the snow and everything. It was getting difficult at harvest time, right, because they had to get permission to go on people's land, and they didn't want to be destroying crops and all of that. But then in the spring, right, there's still a lot of the crop laying out in the field, there's still a lot of the crop laying out in the field.

So, you know, they're not going to probably want to go out and search until those, you know, until the crop is off, if the farmers can get it off or whatever. So, yeah, I don't know. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal.

I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Sherry's been missing for four years now, and we don't know what happened to her. But we did see the police searching in a rural area near the gravel pit. We're looking at that possibility now. If her body was left, quote, in the bush, like Greg had mentioned, what could the police find?

We searched for someone who might know and came across Inspector Diane Cockle. I was a forensic crime scene investigator just up until this past July. So I have been a forensic crime scene investigator for the last 19 years. I have a PhD in forensic anthropology and was a specialized resource for the Royal Canadian Metro Police. Diane has worked in Saskatchewan, so she understands the landscape. It's actually where she got involved with forensic cases with the RCMP. Now she works out of Ontario. I think people, there's a lot of ignorance when it comes to just general lack of knowledge

when it comes to what happens to a body after death. And most people, they avoid the topic because it's uncomfortable. Nobody wants to sort of deal with death. And I think they find that I am a bit odd because it's been a topic of research for me in order to understand these things so it can help us do our job a little bit better. So there's a lot of myths that people think that your hair and your nails grow after you die.

It doesn't happen. People think that a lot of the shows that you bruise after death, that doesn't happen. A lot of the shows that you bruise after death, that doesn't happen. There's a whole range of things that people have misconceptions about death. She's worked on hundreds of cases across the country and around the world, like that of Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton. He was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder more than a decade ago.

The remains or DNA of 33 women were found on his pig farm near Vancouver. Diane Cockle is an expert in investigating cases like Sherry's. It's interesting that it was winter. So obviously the biggest issue with recovering human remains that have been put outside is the interference with the scavengers. covering human remains that have been put outside, is the interference with the scavengers. So the bigger the scavenger, the more the ability they have to move it. So, for example, if it was a bear, a bear is big enough to pick up a whole human being and move that human being, and often what they do, they pick it up, they'll move it, and they'll cache it. So they'll actually camouflage it, and then they'll consume it over a period of time.

The biggest scavengers we have in Canada however are domestic dogs so they will actually because they're not big enough to move one full body will actually take a body apart and sort of take those pieces and then move to cover where they feel sort of safe

to consume what they have. And what happens is if there's a lot of dogs in the area, all the bits and pieces get removed. So if there's a lot of scavengers in the area, it can be disarticulated and distributed over a large area. So if the police were coming back later to find a full skeleton, that's not what they would be finding. So when you say a large area, how big might that be? If you had wolves, for example, pack of wolves, domestic dogs, if you had range of other scavengers, avian scavengers sometimes, you can actually up to about 400 or 500 meters from the original point of where the body started from.

What about coyotes? Because I know that there would be coyotes around this area. Coyotes, in my experience, are not one of the most prolific scavengers. I think if a coyote came across a body, they might opportunistically feed. But in my experience, it's more often the bigger canids, like the domestic dogs and wolves, that will do the most damage and the most disarticulation. Diane says if there was a top involved, it would slow the scavengers down. They avoid clothing or coverings. When scavengers come across fully clothed bodies, they don't really know what to do with the body,

so they will actually try and scavenge anything that's exposed. That's why faces and hands tend to go first. They will, if they work hard enough, they'll actually peel the clothing off of the remains. But sometimes they'll just eat around so that anything that's covered with the clothing is protected. So sometimes they will get into the, if it's covered, but coverings of any kind actually decrease scavenging. And we did hear that police were searching in sloughs, so kind of little bodies of water around the area where she was last seen. What about bodies tossed into maybe water? What would happen to that? maybe water, what would happen to that? If the body went into the water and then the slew froze over,

what happens to the body is that if the body freezes, a lot of the bacteria that participates in the putrefaction is killed. So that delays the ongoing decomposition. So we expect bodies to bloat over time, but if there's no bacteria in the gut anymore, it doesn't trigger that putrefaction. So it's less likely to float to the surface, even in the spring and summer of the following year. If the body was in the slough, there's a much bigger chance that the body, the skeleton at least, would be intact. There's also something else that happens in water, is that a lot of our fatty tissues convert to something called adipocere,

which is grave wax or saponification. So we basically convert into a soap-like structure over a period of time. So it could be that some of the tissues for this individual converges to adipocere, and they may still be relatively intact on the bottom of the slough. So these are sort of the area where we saw the police searching was sort of open farming fields that I imagine would be harvested and farmed at a certain time of the year. And there are sort of small pockets of bush.

What would you need to keep in mind under those in those conditions? those in those conditions well it's it's actually relatively unusual to have a dump unless it's from a from a car for example um in an open area because my experience is often that there's a little bit of they try to camouflage a little bit the suspects try to hide the bodies so it's often in brush or it's in water or there's something you know we'll put some items on top of the body because of course if it's a if it's a body in an in a cultivated field chances are that the farmer will find the body and the following spring what happens to the you know it'll be if it's if it's scavenged extensively then then that's an issue but if it's if it's frozen quite quickly, then there'll be a larger mass that the farmer would hopefully come across.

Tika knows what it's like in those fields. She grew up around here. She says it's not likely a farmer would spot anything while working in the field. I guess depends how big your seeder is, how long your, how big your equipment is. It's getting, you know, bigger and longer, right? Like 60 feet. So if you're in the tractor, you know, you might see something. But if you're going around sloughs and there's lots of grass and stuff like that, you're not going to see anything. And I don't know how many people are still conscious of, you know,

or how many people are still thinking of Sherry when they're out doing that, right? or how many people are still thinking of Sherry when they're out doing that, right? You know, it's going to take a lot of luck, I think, you know, for somebody to stumble across it, you know. And maybe we'll have some good fortune, I don't know. Maybe we'll luck out and have a hunter or something. I mean, I hope for their sake, no, but for our sake, yes. Um, so I don't know. It's, but yeah, it's, yeah, you probably wouldn't, probably wouldn't see a lot. And I mean, and that's the thing, like if she was drug into bush,

you're not going to see that from any kind of equipment. I don't even know that you would see that like a plane helicopter, right? I mean, especially when the trees are all, in the spring, summer, when the leaves are on the trees and all of that type of thing, right? And if the grass is high, you're not going to see that. So, yeah, that would be the difficult part of it.

Diane says it's nearly impossible to find any trace of a body four years after the fact, especially with no starting point in a large area. Yeah, it's really difficult because what happens to the remains is they get weathered, they change color, you know, they get bleached by the sun or they get stained by the soil. The vegetation gets deposited on top of the area over time so that they end up being buried. And it becomes less and less visible every year. So if they're searching four years after the event, it's an incredibly difficult task. Finding any trace of her now could be like finding a needle in a haystack. Any trace of her now could be like finding a needle in a haystack.

But scavenging animals are not the only creatures attracted to human remains. If you've ever been to Saskatchewan, you know there are a lot of bugs. If the body was not scavenged, then it would have just lain there until insects got to it. And then when the insects got involved, and of course you've got all the bacteria and enzyme breakdown of the body at that point, then you're going to get insects pretty much skeletonising the body over a period of a few weeks and leaving the body pretty much intact.

That's Gail Anderson. She's a forensic entomologist. And I was an innocent little grad student walking past my supervisor's office, and he said, Hey Gail, do you fancy being a forensic entomologist? I said, cool, what's that? And I explained it to him. I said, well, it sounds really gross. I'll give it a year. And that was in the late 80s. So I mean, it's really, I always wanted to do something with insects that was

useful and you can't get more useful than this. Gail is the Associate Director of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. We meet her on campus in Burnaby, British Columbia. We're already here for another interview, but when we heard about Gail's expertise, we knew we had to talk to her. We track her down in the halls of the school. She's wearing this yellow lanyard that says, Crime Scene, Do Not Cross. Luckily, she has some time to spare. She warmly invites us into her office. There's a large fish tank by the door.

That's the water you hear in the background. Her space is what you might expect from a university professor. Stacks of books and quirky knickknacks. She moves a rubber chicken out of view as we enter the room. She clears a couple of chairs for us. We get right into it. How long would it take to break down soft tissue for insects to break it down? If the weather's good, if it's warm, not very long at all. I mean, flies will be

attracted to the body if the weather is warm instantly, pretty much. They don't fly at night, but at least the cairn insects that colonize at first don't fly at night. So they colonize the next morning if the person died at night. And they'd lay their eggs. Those eggs will hatch into maggots. And those maggots will voraciously feed on the tissue. So the face is usually skeletonized within two or three days. The rest of the body in a couple of weeks, the bulk of the soft tissue. And then there's still a lot of soft tissue left.

There's a lot of sinew and more dried tissue. And other insects will come in and feed on that. So, I mean, mean well it'll be skeletonized in a few weeks if the weather is conducive uh but there'll still be grease and tissue left over you know if you have a dog and you give it a bone and it goes out and takes it in the yard and three years later it digs it up brings it back in puts it down in your nice white carpet or something it'll leave a grease mark it's still greasy there's still fat there there's still tissue there uh so the insects will keep on feeding but from our point

of view just looking at it it's going to look skeletonized in a few weeks and if it's frozen will the bugs does that affect how the insects react to it when it's defrosted no they don't care uh frozen fresh frozen like freshly defrosted or fresh, it doesn't really bother them. But when it's actually frozen, obviously they can't eat it. And if it's cold enough to be frozen, insects aren't active. Below about 10 or 12 degrees, we don't have a lot of insect activity. And once you're getting into winter in Saskatchewan, we're going to be talking very cold. Back in Saskatchewan, Sherry's sister Tika still thinks of the weather that day.

When Sherry did go missing, it was a very warm December, right? There wasn't any snow either. So at that point, you could have driven and went anywhere and gotten to any point in any field. And then it was, what, a week later that we got all the snow that made it difficult to search. But then also the police wouldn't let anybody go and really start searching until they had kind of done their search. So by the time any public was allowed to go out and search,

that's when you had the snow right and same thing like I was out you know in some of the abandoned yards and same thing like you would step in snow in your ankle and then a foot away it was up to your knee right so it was like you know it was hard and everything would have been covered up too, right? Tika tells us she knows Sherry is gone, but there's a part of her that still holds out hope that she might still be out there, alive. It's something that mum Julianne felt too.

Because I'm sure there was a there was a part of mom that that held out hope you know that she was still going to come back so and I mean I can't say that I would be any different as a mother right I don't know right I guess you always kind of gotta hold out hope. So, yeah. But, no, hopefully, hopefully once the trial is over and done,

maybe we'll get more evidence as to maybe exactly where Sherry is. I don't know. But I personally don't think she's far. You know, I've always said I don't think she's far from the gravel pit. She says with the anniversary of Sherry's disappearance coming up, the family wants one thing.

I'm still hoping that, you know, at some point her remains are found, you know, so we can all have closure. Yeah, but no, it's just, right, we just remember the day that that she went missing so we know we don't we don't do anything so yeah I'm I'm hopeful that you know, bury her remains and get closure. Tika says she's planning to attend Greg's preliminary hearing in January. It'll be the first time in a long time they've been in the same room. Yeah, no, I'm not really looking forward to seeing him, but face it head on, I guess. I don't know.

I was a little fearful of him. Like, I kind of thought, no, I don't want to say anything. And I thought, well, the only thing to fear is fear itself. And I mean, I don't know. I'm not going to let him dictate my life. to let him dictate my life. We're finally going to watch the video of Tika's wedding. This will be the first time we'll see actual footage of the woman who has been our focus for almost two years.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Sherry Furta. I'm the oldest sister of the bride and your emcee for tonight. Tika and Corey, congratulations. I'm honored to have been chosen emcee for your wedding. I'd like to welcome everyone to the social and dance this evening, and I hope you all enjoy yourselves. I could not allow you to need to pass. Um, yeah, just like I think very surreal, not ever expecting that we would be in a situation like this, you know. And I guess like anything, right, you're, you know, as the years go by, right,

you'll probably talk less about it and whatnot. And I mean, you're never going to forget, right? You don't forget family, right? And like I said, when I think of Sherry, I don't always think of our bad times and our indifferences that we had. Like, I think a lot of the good times that we had together, you know, and so, like, yes, there is animosity, but she's my sister, and I, I will always love her, so yeah I'm sure anyone here tonight who's been married for any length of time will agree that it takes a lot to make a marriage work on

different occasions I recall complaining to Tika about something my husband had done to take me on Tika's response was always the same, you're the stupid one who got married. Well I'm glad to see that stupidity runs in the family, I wasn't the only one. When this episode came out, Greg Furtack's trial was still a long way off. A preliminary hearing is set for January 2020. Under Canadian law, we won't be able to report on the evidence, but we'll keep you up to date as the story develops.

If you subscribe to the podcast, you'll get notified when the new episodes come out. The Pit is a CBC investigative podcast. The story was written, produced and mixed by Victoria Dinh and me, Alicia Bridges. Our senior producer is Corrine Larson. Editorial guidance came from Paul Dornstader and David Hutton. Additional help from Karen Yeske, Courtney Markowicz and Keisha Williams. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or just tell your friends. You can also contact us directly by emailing thepit at cbc.ca.

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