Death in the Ravine

I grew up in a small, lively neighbourhood boarding our city’s river valley. Until I was 12, I lived in a little white bungalow, blocks from the ravine where my parents used to take my little brother and me for walks, or to meet up with other family’s to spend hot afternoons splashing in the creek. I wandered the maze of paths that weaved through the forest of trees, playing with friends when we were old enough to go off on our own, or sometimes alone. I thought walking through the woods was an adventure, that each turn could lead to something unexpected. On nice days the pathways were crowded with people out walking or biking, but other days it felt like I had a whole forest to myself. Filled with possibilities.

In 1975, 25 years before I was born my mother lived in that same neighbourhood. In a white bungalow just 3 and a half blocks from where I would one day grow up. Although she has 5 siblings, she grew up almost an only child. Her brothers and sisters were all so much older than her that they had grown up and moved out by the time she was 8. She had an inseparable friendship with two other girls her age that lived on the same street as her. They were almost always together; walking to school, delivering their paper routes, riding their bikes through the neighbourhood. Or sometimes exploring the mysterious yet enticing trails of the river valley.

One April afternoon, two girls only a couple of years older than my mother and her friends decided to enter the ravine instead of delivering their flyers. They lived in a neighbourhood I knew well. Not far from where my mother and I grew up, it was the same community where my best childhood friend would one day live. As a child and eventually an adolescent, I used to walk home with her after school, sometimes just the two of us. We were two young girls occasionally wandering alone through the neighbourhood. We used to play in the field in front of her house not knowing that we were across the road from where, decades earlier, two young girls entered the river valley, and only one left alive.

They walked a path I know well, descending into the trees beside the high school my brother would attend many years later. After noticing some odd items on the forest floor, the girls slid down a small hill. While 10- year-old Shelley gathered her spilled flyers, her 11-year-old best friend Karen walked off almost as if she were in a trance, until she disappeared from Shelley’s view, who would never see her alive again. Shelley searched for Karen until the terror of being alone in the creek caused her to run back up the hill and go home, thinking she would catch up with her friend later. She was unaware that her life would never be the same, as not even a day later a jogger would find a brutally beaten body of a little girl that would be identified as Karen through dental records. The circumstances of her death would remain relatively uncertain as her killer would never be caught.

This unsolved murder so close to where I grew up, of a girl almost the same age as my mother was at that time, has always stuck with me. Knowing that her murderer could have continued to live in my community when my mother and eventually I were young girls not so different from Karen. The story of her tragic death has always lingered in our river valley. Since my mother told me her story I can’t walk through the ravine without thinking about her. All those times my mother and I played in the creek when we were the same age as Karen, how her murderer could have still been lurking in the shadows or living in broad daylight never paying the price for the life he stole from that little girl.

Karen’s story has nothing to do with me, although I’ve inserted myself into this retelling. Neither my mother nor I knew her, she was simply a girl who lived and died in the same area of the city that we grew up. Her story is not very well known in our area, I only knew it because my mother remembers the fear it spread throughout the community all those years ago. Those of us who still live in the area and know what happened to Karen will not soon forget. The brutal unsolved murder of a little girl in an area of our city prided for its natural beauty continues to be a tragic irony that haunts those of us in the community who know her story.