Murder Best Unsolved

By Murray Moffatt

Are some secrets better left buried? Shane Daniels solved a murder when he was a teenager. Thirty years later, a convicted killer tells Shane he had it all wrong. Murder Best Unsolved follows Shane through four time periods in his life as he deals with a dream career shattered by violence and searches for answers to mysteries that hit too close to home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Murray Moffatt
• Release date: May 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005797799

Murray Moffatt

Murray Moffatt is a former broadcast journalist and senior public relations consultant. Over the course of 25 years, Murray wrote countless radio news stories and delivered tens of thousands of newscasts.As a public relations consultant, Murray wrote hundreds of media releases as well as briefing notes and magazine articles on behalf of clients. He delivered media relations training to executives from a wide variety of public and private companies and organizations.For years, Murray did extensive volunteer work with various organizations. He received a Mayor’s Award of Merit from the City of St.Catharines, Ontario and a provincial award (Ontario) for his work with Brant/Brantford CrimeStoppers.Murray previous published his autobiography (“A Different Kind Of Life”) through StoryWorth.Born and raised in Ontario, Murray now lives in Alberta.

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MURDER BEST UNSOLVED

A Novel by

Murray Moffatt

Also by Murray Moffatt

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A Different Kind of Life (autobiography)

Copyright 2022 © Murray Moffatt.

All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, and recording or otherwise - without the prior written permission of the author except for brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or magazine. To perform any of the above is an infringement of copyright law.

ISBN: 978-1-7782065-0-04

Cover Design: Sarah Autio

As always, to my wife Jill, Daughters Sarah and Laura, and Grandchildren Winnie, Archie, Wyatt and Hailey:

Family is always everything

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

The Shadow radio program (1937)

For all evils there are only two remedies - time and silence

Alexandre Dumas

A Brave man is a man who dares to look the devil in the face and tell him he is a devil

James A. Garfield

Hell is truth seen too late

Thomas Hobbes

Prologue

I wish I had never made the trip to Millhaven.

We all have regrets in our life and, for me, this was by far my biggest.

It cast a shadow that reached all the way back to the events that occurred when I was seventeen years old when I was convinced I knew exactly what I was going to do with my life.

Seems to me that nothing turns out the way it should.

It doesn't matter how many times you tell yourself that you're successfully going about your business, following the plan you have for your life, there's always this seed of doubt in the back of your mind that something is going to get screwed up.

I thought I had it all figured out back in the summer of 1991 when I solved a murder that no one knew had even occurred and I was heading off to college and a future career as a cop.

But my bravado, my confidence, was soon shattered and I fell to my bottom.

When I finally climbed out, I told myself that I was doing okay with the hand life had dealt me, but in the back of my mind, I was always thinking about when the next hammer will drop.

Then I drove to Millhaven and the hammer dropped.

I blame the insatiable curiosity I've had since I was a little kid. My father had hoped my curiosity would extend to things mechanical and I would be some kind of savant with engines, as I truly believe he was.

No, my curiosity was about my fellow humans and when they did things that didn't appear to be normal. I just had to know why.

I wanted to be the Sherlock Holmes of my generation.

The personal mistakes I have made are huge and I don't know if I have done enough good to overcome the impact those mistakes have had on my life and the lives of those around me.

I had really started to believe I had achieved a balance between coming to grips with the past and being confident in the future.

Then I made the mistake of opening a letter and driving to Millhaven.

Chapter One - 2022

Shane Daniels always felt that once you were east of Oshawa, the 401 to Kingston was one of the most boring stretches of highway in Ontario.

If you didn't set your cruise control to ten miles per hour over the speed limit you would be like a lot of the drivers going past Shane in the passing lane who didn't bother with what their speedometer said.

They just wanted to get down the eastbound 401 to their destination in as little time as possible. It also meant that at regular intervals you would see someone pulled over by the Ontario Provincial Police who probably considered the highway easy pickings for writing speeding tickets.

But Shane was in no particular hurry to get where he was going, still unsure if he even wanted to make the trip in the first place.

His destination was Millhaven Institution, a federal prison located near the Village of Bath, just north of Lake Ontario, about a half-hour away from Kingston and three and a half hours from Shane's home in Brantford.

As he drew closer to his exit off the 401 that would take him south on County Road 4 toward the prison, second thoughts about what he was doing rattled around in his head and he fought the urge to simply turn around and drive back home.

If I was still drinking, Shane thought, I would need a lot of swigs off a bottle of Vodka to steady my nerves for what's ahead. But those days are long gone, leaving only the constant pain from his ravaged left knee as a reminder of what booze had failed to do in his life.

Shane then took a cigarette from the pack sitting on the console beside him, lit it, and rolled down his window part way to let the smoke out. He had somehow found the willpower to stop drinking but not to quit smoking. Some day, he thought, but let's deal with one bad habit at a time. It was the same excuse he had been using for years.

Shane pulled his 1969 Dodge Charger into a spot in Millhaven's visitor parking lot, finished his smoke, and tossed the butt out the window. The classic car had an ashtray but Shane never used it, choosing to keep it pristine like the rest of the vehicle's interior.

The muscle car was his most prized possession, a gift from his father on his sixteenth birthday. The engine has been rebuilt several times and over the years he has managed to keep both the interior and exterior in the same perfect condition as the day he saw it for the first time.

Shane didn't make a move to get out of the car, choosing instead to just sit in the vehicle and gather his thoughts.

He looked at himself in the rear view mirror and saw a man he thought other people would think was older than forty-eight years of age. Lots of booze and pills when you were a young man will do that to you, he thought.

Shane kept his dark hair cut short, not quite a brush cut, and it was peppered with gray. He always had a dark, five o'clock shadow, no matter how many times he shaved during the day. He had blue eyes, his most attractive feature according to his lady friends.

Shane reached over, opened the glove box, and removed the letter that had prompted today's trip. It was like the others he had received years ago; a standard envelope with his name and address printed in pencil and in the top left corner the return name and address: Maxim Ivanov, Millhaven Institution.

Shane received the first letter in the fall of 1992, a year after Max, the shortened name he went by, was arrested, and shortly after he was sentenced to life in prison.

The letter had a stamp indicating it had been opened and read by prison staff before being mailed, but none of the content had been redacted:

Dear Shane,

I'm sure you are feeling very proud of yourself these days. The big hero! But remember how close you came to be you know what? Then you would be a hero in the past tense. You think you have everything figured out, but you are not even close.

But I'm sure that time will come.

Will you be ready?

Regards,

Maxim Ivanov

Max's signature looked like a series of upside-down V's, his written version of his first initial, Shane assumed, followed by a single vertical line for Ivanov.

Back in 1992 when he received it, Shane considered the letter to be nothing more than the ranting of a sick, vengeful man, and he threw it in the garbage.

Over the next four months after that first letter, Shane received a letter every two weeks, postmarked from Millhaven, so he assumed they were from Max. He assumed because he didn't open any of them. He simply threw them out because he wasn't interested in reading any more of Max's taunts.

The letters eventually stopped until two days ago, thirty years after the first, when one arrived at Shane's home in Brantford.

Shane stood at the mailbox beside the front door of his house looking at his address on the envelope because even though so many years had passed, he recognized the handwriting, albeit it was a lot shakier than he remembered.

But the first thing Shane thought about when he saw the letter was how the hell did Max Ivanov get his address. The other letters went to Shane's address in Paisley when he was still living with his father. How did a lifer at Millhaven Penitentiary find out not only that Shane lived in Brantford, but his exact address? Shane assumed that somehow Max managed to get access to the internet and searched his name. He knew that if you Googled his name it would show up in several Brantford Expositor articles about cases he was involved in.

Shane opened the front door and walked into the house, the letter gripped by itself in his right hand while the rest of his mail was in his left.

Once inside, he tossed the mail in his left hand onto the kitchen table and again stood staring at the letter from a man he had not thought much about for a long time.

The question now is, does this one go in the garbage like the others? Why is Max writing him now after so many years? Why has he gone to the trouble of tracking down Shane's address, which wouldn't have been very easy to do considering the fact Max is in a maximum-security prison.

There was only one way to find out and that was by opening the letter. But by doing that, was Shane allowing himself to dredge up what happened back when he was a teenager?

In the end, he gave in to the curiosity that was such a big part of who he was and opened the letter:

Dear Shane,

I'm dying.

I hope by stating that fact upfront that you will continue to read this letter and will consider the request I am going to make. I wrote to you many times early in my incarceration but I received no response so I assume you ignored what I had to say or simply tossed my letters unopened.

If by some chance you are reading this letter then I'm writing to request that you come and visit me before the disease that is ravaging my body finally kills me. Please don't reject my request because you think a dying old man wants to repent his sins or suddenly proclaim his innocence. I have no intention of doing that because I know what I am and what I did.

I simply don't want to die without offering to tell you the truth about what really happened back in the summer of 1991and not what you, the cops, and the jury at my trial believed happened. I think you deserve that.

If you decide to come don't waste too much time doing it because I don't have much time left.

Regards,

Maxim Ivanov

Shane tossed the letter on the kitchen table and sat down. He thought perhaps he should have read the rest of Max's original letters just to see what kind of bullshit he was trying to sell back then and now wants to repeat.

His mind made up, Shane got his laptop, went online to the Millhaven website, and completed the form for an inmate visit.

Now, Shane was sitting in his car in the Millhaven parking lot readying himself for what was about to happen.

He was just starting to open the car door when his cellphone rang and the caller ID showed it was Emma calling.

Hi, he said after touching the answer icon.

I'm calling to see if you're okay and wish you luck with your meeting, Emma said.

I'm fine, Shane answered. I was just about to go into the jail.

Are you still sure this is what you want to do? Emma asked and Shane could hear the concern in her voice.

I'm worried that bringing up the past like this might spark a setback after you've worked so hard to turn your life around, Emma said.

It's fine, Emma, really, Shane replied. There's nothing this guy can say that's going to change anything. This about satisfying my curiosity about whatever bullshit this guy has been trying to sell for the past thirty years.

Okay, but call me as soon as you're done, Emma said.

I will, Shane said, thinking about how lucky he was to have Emma in his life.

Shane disconnected the call, got out of his car, and started walking across the parking lot. It was a hot summer day and he started to sweat from the heat radiating off the pavement.

Millhaven was an imposing facility, originally built in 1971 to replace the old Kingston Pen, and housed over four hundred inmates. The inmates are in direct observation units that radiate out of a central control post. There are observation towers at