Twenty-three-year-old Melanie Carpenter lived in her native Vancouver with her boyfriend, and managed a tanning salon called Island Tan in the suburb of Surrey. On the afternoon of January 6th, 1995, in fact, she was working at the salon alone, and had received several phone calls, purportedly from a man representing a Japanese investment firm that was interested in purchasing a franchise. The man asked Melanie if she could close the store for an hour between one and two p.m. so the potential investors could come in and have a look around.
It is unclear whether Melanie believed this story, but what is known without a doubt is that sometime before two p.m., she was abducted from the salon. A little while later, two truck drivers reported seeing her in a red Hyundai Excel driven by a man; the car was spotted in the area of Hope, British Columbia.
Later on that same day, the man and the red car were captured on camera as the individual in question withdrew three-hundred dollars from Melanie’s account using her bank card. Melanie Carpenter was nowhere to be seen. The following day, the same man was spotted accosting two teenage girls in a doughnut shop in Lethbridge, Alberta.
The man on the security camera was no stranger to police; he was thirty-seven-year-old Fernand Auger, who was originally from Ontario and had been working as a waiter in a Greek restaurant in Calgary until shortly before Melanie’s abduction.
Even more to the point, Auger had recently served sixteen months of a two-year prison sentence for armed robbery; he had been released from jail in Bowden, Alberta in August of 1994, and told friends that he was going to be moving soon, though he didn’t specify where. The conviction hadn’t been his first; he had also served time back in 1985 for sexual assault against a fourteen-year-old sex worker.
Investigators were certain they had their culprit, but only nine days after Melanie’s kidnapping, on January 15th, a real estate agent showing a vacant property in High River, Alberta discovered the dead, frozen body of Fernand Auger in the garage of the empty house. He had committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide fumes from the tailpipe of his rented Hyundai Excel.
A search of the vehicle turned up a few blonde hairs believed to belong to Melanie Carpenter, but her whereabouts were still unknown. All that would change on Thursday, January 26th.
Two men—Art Tooke and Steve Emery—were out looking for old fishing nets in Fraser Canyon near Hope, British Columbia when they spotted a rope hanging down from the steep riverbank. Upon moving closer, the men realized that there was something covered in a white blanket lying in a rock cleft near the water, and this turned out to be the body of Melanie Carpenter. She was found fully clothed, with her hands tied behind her back. She had been stabbed to death, though it was unclear if she had been sexually assaulted.
Though authorities were convinced that Fernand Auger had murdered Melanie Carpenter, his suicide meant that he could never be tried for the crime. No motive for the homicide was ever established, and the case is regarded as unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 