On June 13th, 2001, nineteen-year-old Kathleen MacVicar vanished while walking on foot from a friend’s residence near Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Trenton in Ontario. Two days later, on June 15th, her body was discovered in a wooded area just west of Middleton Park on National Defence property at CFB Trenton. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed multiple times.
Kathleen, originally from Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, was a bright and vivacious young woman who had moved to live with relatives in the military married quarters at the base. She was working at a call center in nearby Belleville, where she was remembered by co-workers as warm, funny, and full of life.
Police described the killing as a murder involving multiple stab wounds and sexual assault. The exact weapon, a sharp-edged knife, was not publicly detailed to protect the integrity of the case. Her body was found in a relatively secluded wooded spot near private military quarters, raising immediate questions about access to the base area and potential suspects with ties to the military community or the surrounding Quinte West region.
The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) launched an investigation, later supported by “Project Shadow.” Despite appeals for information and reviews of the case, no arrests have been made.
Investigators used the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System (ViCLAS) and connected Kathleen MacVicar’s murder behaviorally to a brutal assault and attempted murder in London, Ontario, on October 19th, 2001. In that case, a woman was viciously stabbed and sexually assaulted on a pathway near Leroy Avenue and Sevilla Park Place early in the morning. She survived but was left with severe injuries. Similarities in method raised concerns that the same perpetrator might have struck again, though no DNA link was publicly confirmed between the cases, and the London attacker has not been identified.
In 2010, the case drew renewed attention when Col. Russell Williams, then-commander of CFB Trenton, was arrested and later convicted of multiple sexual assaults and murders (including those of Cpl. Marie-France Comeau and Jessica Lloyd). Police reviewed Kathleen MacVicar’s murder for possible links, but Williams was not charged in connection with it; he was already in Ottawa or elsewhere during the relevant period and the evidence did not connect him.
More than twenty-four years later, Kathleen MacVicar’s murder remains unsolved, and the $75,000 reward for information is still unclaimed.
Crime Immemorial 