Death Dealer. Kate Clark Flora
asking, “What if she’s not all right?” David replied angrily and threatened to walk out. Then he began to cry.
After David’s statement was reviewed, agreed on and signed, Detective Cummings then made the distraught man a promise. He said, “I want to find Maria as much as you do, okay? And I will find Maria, all right? I will.”
Four Heads Are Better Than One
Following David Tanasichuk’s interview on January 29, Detective Cummings drove David back to his apartment. The next day, Cummings returned there to pick up the list of people David had contacted and to get the contact information for a friend of Maria’s in Ontario who had been mentioned during the interview. The man he found at home that morning seemed to have undergone yet another dramatic change. This was neither the edgy man with glazed eyes the detective had found following David’s phone call to report Maria missing on the 27th, nor the coughing, spitting, highly emotional, weeping and sometimes argumentative man he’d interviewed the day before.
On January 30, despite there being no new information regarding his missing wife, David Tanasichuk acted light-hearted and cheerful. He chatted easily about drug dealing on the river and then asked Cummings for a favor, saying he had a problem with which he needed help. He said two of his friends had given him a hydroponic plant-growing setup to hold for them because they were afraid they were about to be raided by the police. Then he’d grown nervous himself about the risks of being found with the equipment and had thrown it away, only to find that it was worth $5000. He was concerned, he told Cummings, that his friends might seek retribution. Would Cummings be willing to give him a fake appearance notice so that it would look like the materials had been seized by the police?
When Cummings complied and produced the requested appearance notice, David had another question. Since Maria was gone, he wondered, was he still allowed to have Maria’s guns in the house? Cummings told David that, in his opinion, the guns were okay because Maria still lived there, but he offered to run the question by the department’s firearms officer.
During the entire time that Cummings was at the Tanasichuks’ apartment, despite the fact he was there to obtain a list of people who might have information about Maria, David never mentioned her except to inquire about her guns. Far from acting like an anxious husband deeply concerned about his missing wife, he acted like someone relieved that he’d gotten over a hurdle—like the police interview he’d been avoiding—who believed his responses had been satisfactory and he was in the clear.
It was at that point, based on David’s bubbly, relaxed demeanor and conduct, that Cummings’s suspicions about David as a suspect firmed up. A review of the information gathered thus far in the investigation reinforced that feeling.
After consulting with the department’s firearms officer, Cummings returned later in the day to collect all the guns and ammunition in the house, to be held until Maria’s return. David handed over four guns and ammunition, stating that that was everything they had.
Back at their offices, the detectives met in the conference room with their supervising sergeant, Paul Fiander, to discuss the case, sharing the information each of them had gathered from all sources, including David Tanasichuk’s interview, and testing the information David had supplied against that which had come from other sources. Once it was all out, they would decide how to proceed in their search for Maria Tanasichuk.
In evaluating the state of the couple’s relationship, the detectives shared what they had learned from Maria’s friends and neighbors—that while David and Maria had been a couple seemingly very much in love, since B.J.’s death Maria had experienced long bouts of depression, making her emotionally unavailable, while David had increasingly taken refuge in drugs. His drug use, in turn, had made Maria hyper-vigilant and suspicious. She wanted to know where he was going whenever he left the house. She had taken to inspecting his body, his pockets and even his socks when he returned home, looking for drugs, drug paraphernalia or signs of drug use. Maria was willing to do anything to help the man who was, witnesses told the investigators, the center of her universe. A man she had been willing to go to jail for, even if it meant being separated from her young son rather than end the relationship.
David’s response to Maria’s anxious questions and her efforts at supervision had been to stay away from home, often for days at a time, so that he could indulge his drug habit without being questioned. His behavior and deteriorating physical condition deeply worried Maria and she had taken to calling his friends to ask if he was with them. To prevent him from using their scarce cash for drugs, she had started hiding their money in her bra.
Despite her many years of total devotion to David, recently Maria had seemed to be reaching a terminal point, according to those closest to her. She told friends that she had grown sick of the arguing, the fights, David’s absences, drugged-out hazes and deception. After David had been too stoned to get off the couch and attend B.J.’s memorial fundraiser on January 4, Maria announced she’d had enough.
Something detectives do when they’re dealing with a crime victim, or, as in this case, where all they knew they had was a disappearance and thus a suspected crime victim, is to build a profile of the victim so that they know what would be her typical behavior, habits and routines. This profile, known as “victimology,” is created by speaking with people who knew the victim, as well as from information learned from searching the victim’s dwelling and reviewing phone, computer and other domestic records. In Maria’s case, where they knew that she was housebound and didn’t use credit cards, have an employer or own a car, their information came primarily from speaking with her sister, her niece, close friends who were regularly in touch and her neighbors.
From these sources, they had learned many details about Maria that didn’t mesh with what David had told them. Maria’s niece and her best friend both told investigators that Maria was deeply attached to the little red devil bear that had been her last gift from her dead son and would never leave home without it. David himself had said that Maria kissed it every night and couldn’t sleep without Baby B on her pillow.
Multiple witnesses confirmed Maria’s attachment to her apartment because it was where she had spent so many years raising her son. Because of her fondness for B.J.’s memory and his possessions, people told the investigators, she was very unlikely to be willing to leave the apartment for any length of time. Her niece reported that after Maria and David had journeyed to Saint John for her wedding, a trip on which Maria had taken her little bear and her “sooky” blanket, Maria told people in Miramichi that she wasn’t interested in ever going to Saint John again.
It was not just her attachment to the apartment that made Maria’s reported decision to go to Saint John so suspicious. Maria’s former sister-in-law, Cindy Richardson, told investigators that when she was at the cemetery visiting B.J.’s grave, it was untended. Maria had been very faithful about that.
Maria’s next door neighbor, John Paquet, an avuncular former military man who hunted with David and was very fond of Maria, reported that Maria had explicitly told him that if one of them were ever to leave, it would have to be David, because the place held too many memories for her.
Cindy Richardson had told Cummings, “Darlene Gertley called me and said she was worried about Maria and had I heard from her? I’d called Maria on the 11th, because the week before was [the fundraiser] and I know she was in bad shape then, and she told me Dave was back on the shit again, and she wanted to get back home to check on Dave, to see if he was still home, worried that he’d taken off. So she didn’t want to hang around and talk to people…Maria was real rundown looking. She had circles under her eyes and she was so stressed out and she hadn’t slept for days and who knew if she ate? And I hugged her and kissed her and said, Maria, call me anytime, you know. I’ll