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Howe, Dennis Melvyn 1983; Winnipeg
Topic Started: Nov 23 2007, 10:30 PM (1,118 Views)
truthseeker
Advanced Member
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(Link edited by tatertot 7-26-10. Howe is the last perpetrator on the list.)

http://www.torontopolice.on.ca/homicide/mostwanted.php
Debbie

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. Leo Buscaglia
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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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This case has haunted me for years. If Howe isn’t dead, he could be living in your community. He’s a true bogeyman, a sexual psychopath who preys on young girls. He was sent to prison for assaulting a 13-year-old girl and again for kidnapping and raping a young woman. If he’s not caught soon, at least he’ll get his just reward in h**l.



It’s been 25 years since the kidnap, rape, and murder of Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan shocked the peaceful city of Toronto, Canada. The pretty nine-year-old was playing in Jean Sibelius Park when a convicted child rapist named Dennis Melvyn Howe (sometimes spelled Dennis Melvin Howe) abducted her.

Ten days later, after one of the largest searches in Canadian history, Sharin’ was found in a cheap flat across from the park. A recent story in Sun Media, written by Thane Burnett, relates how she was found. As cops searched the apartment, an investigator opened a refrigerator and the child’s body spilled out. She'd been raped and strangled. (One of the two investigators who found her later committed suicide--he couldn't bear the thought that they had been too late to save the innocent girl.)


At the time, it was thought that Howe would be quickly captured. But while he was not a sophisticated man, he was street-smart and had a ten-day head-start. Immediately after the crime, he took a bus to Winnipeg, but there his trail ran cold. Somehow, he has managed to avoid police for a quarter of a century.

Police have followed thousands of leads, even going so far as to exhume a man they thought might be Howe. It wasn’t.


Today, the murderer would be 67-years-old. He is 5’9” tall and at the time of the murder weighed 165 pounds. He’s probably gained weight. He has brown eyes and had brown hair, although it may be gray by now. Howe has a small gap between his front teeth and a scar under his chin.


According to a police file, the murderer is left-handed. At the time of the murder, he was a chain-smoker, and liked Players unfiltered cigarettes. He was also a heavy drinker who listened to country-western music. If you've seen Dennis Melvyn Howe, call the Toronto Police Homicide Squad at 416-808-7400.

Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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~*Mia*~
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Revolutionary
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Link to RCMP page for Howe: http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/wanted-recherche...xu/howe-eng.htm
~*Mia*~

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tatertot
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http://www.torontosun.com/news/torontoandg...4/14815856.html

Monday, July 26, 2010
A chilling catalogue of cold cases
By IAN ROBERTSON, Toronto Sun
Last Updated: July 24, 2010 4:21pm

Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan was only nine when a man snatched the Toronto youngster from a park near her Annex area home just over 27 years ago.

Raped, strangled, then stuffed inside a fridge at the roominghouse of still-missing Dennis Melvyn Howe, police keep her cold case open — even the fridge preserved for a trial they fear may never occur.

Sharin’s smiling face, those of three other children, a young woman plus a man’s skull stare from the cover of a new book that updates more than a dozen GTA mysteries.

Some names in Unsolved: True Canadian Cold Cases will be familiar, author Robert J. Hoshowsky said in an interview. Others are barely remembered, though for those close to victims, “sometimes the memories have never, ever stopped, even after 40 years.”

A freelance journalist, ex-Maclean’s writer and former security guard, the Torontonian deliberately narrowed his choice from hundreds of unsolved Canadian murders to those from the past four decades.

“Whoever killed them may still be alive and could still be prosecuted,” Hoshowsky, 46, said in an interview.

By retelling stories, whatever conscience exists in a stone cold heart may be shaken loose in their waning years, he hopes. Or perhaps someone no longer fears an aging relative or acquaintance and “will do the right thing,” a common police appeal.

Instead of using clippings, Hoshowsky interviewed people linked to the silent bodies or the vanished, whose whereabouts and fates remain unknown.

He talked with relatives, friends, detectives, retired homicide hunters, lawyers, private detectives, TV producers, victim advocates and forensics experts.

“DNA testing didn’t exist when some were killed,” but yielded new clues in several cases, he said. “In others, samples no longer exist or were never collected the way they are now.”

In two cases, an expert’s work gave names to skulls kept for decades, after relatives recognized his clay reconstructions.

Encouraged by a Dundurn Press editor after his first book in 2007, about Canada’s last two executions, in Toronto, Hoshowsky eliminated cases police say were solved during his research.

One was Glen Davis, a multi-millionaire philanthropist he met as a 12-year-old Sun carrier — the year Sharin’ vanished.

Her story haunts Hoshowsky the most, from her sweet innocence to the “collateral damage.

“Nothing gets people so upset as the murder of a child.”

In addition to her parent’s pain, the weight of investigating another children’s murder drove one detective to quit Toronto’s force and his partner to suicide.

Since Sharin’s kidnapping Jan. 23, 1983, the fate of one man keeps that pain and hope of a resolution alive, Hoshowsky wrote.

Howe’s photo remains on global most-wanted lists.

Police hopes were rekindled with a body exhumed in Sudbury in 1999, but shattered when found to be yet another false lead.

If alive, Hoshowsky wrote, the low-level conman who sparked one of Canada’s largest manhunts will soon turn 70.

Sharin’, whose middle name was for the star her parents saw the morning she was born, “will never be older than nine.”
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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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http://kidnappingmurderandmayhem.blogspot....d-fugitive.html

At 70, is Dennis Melvyn Howe still alive?
by Robert A. Waters

The crime Dennis Melvyn Howe committed on the afternoon of January 23, 1983 was a stain on humanity. At about four o’clock that afternoon, he stepped outside his boarding house in downtown Toronto, walked about a hundred yards, and slithered into Jean Sibelius Park. It had been raining off and on all day, and just one lone child was playing there, a nine-year-old girl named Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan.

Somehow, no one saw Howe and Sharin’ walk back through the neighborhood and climb the stairs to his second-story room. What ruse he used to get the creative, intelligent girl to accompany him is unknown. That night, the child was reported missing. Hundreds of investigators and volunteers searched the park and the row houses surrounding it. They spoke with neighbors, checked nearby businesses, and even drove through the streets with a megaphone urging tipsters to come forward. For nine long, depressing days, cops and a stunned public searched for the missing child.

Then detectives got a call from the landlord at 482 Brunswick Avenue informing them that one of her tenants had unexpectedly dropped out of sight the day after Sharin’ vanished. Investigators entered the boarder’s drab room and noticed shelving from the refrigerator lying on the floor. When they opened the door, a half-frozen body spilled out.

The scene was so horrible, so gruesome, so surreal that ten days later, one of the detectives who found the body quit the force. (The second, never able to forget that heart-grinding scene, killed himself a few years later.)

It seemed almost beyond belief. In the heart of Toronto, a child had been kidnapped, raped, and strangled to death. In one fell swoop, the innocence of a city was lost.

The boarder turned out to be a parole violator living and working in the city using an alias. Dennis Melvyn Howe had spent most of his adult life in prison. He’d recently been paroled from Prince Albert Penitentiary in Saskatchewan after serving 17 years. His 20-year rap sheet included theft, armed robbery, unlawful imprisonment, indecent assault on a thirteen-year-old girl, kidnapping a woman and holding her hostage, as well as dozens of other crimes. Many questioned why this obviously dangerous felon was out on the streets at all.

After murdering Sharin’, Howe borrowed $200 from his employer and bought a bus ticket. A day later, he arrived in North Bay. Howe is then thought to have continued to Winnipeg, a city of a half-million souls. After that, he vanished.

Investigators were confident that the fugitive would soon be captured. Yet Dennis Melvyn Howe somehow escaped. Twenty-eight years later, he is still Canada’s most wanted fugitive. In those years, he has been featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and other television shows. A $100,000 reward has been in effect for many years. Cops have checked out thousands of leads over the years, all to no avail. A newspaper campaign called “Nowhere to Hide” was launched by the Canadian Community Newspapers Association in 1998--it was an attempt to get an age-enhanced photograph of Howe to ten million Canadians.

How did the career criminal who was unable to avoid being arrested for more than a few weeks while out of the streets manage to evade cops for decades? Is he even still alive? At 70, time is ticking away for cops to bring him to justice. A few years ago, the current lead investigator, Detective-Sergeant Jim Crowley, said: “There are those who think Howe may be dead, but I don’t think so. After so many years in this business, you get gut feelings. I figure he is in a small out of the way Western town or lumber camp. He may have found a safe haven with female company.” Wayne Oldham, another investigator who was once involved in the search for Howe, said: “Presuming he’s alive, and with each passing year that assumption dwindles a little, I can see him in a rural setting, essentially a recluse, employed in a menial job where identity is not critical.”

A great deal is known about Howe. He was born on September 26, 1940. Howe is five feet ten inches tall and at the time of Sharin’s murder weighed about 170 pounds. His hair was brown when he fled, but now would be gray or white. His eyes are brown. He has a scar under the left side of his chin and short, crooked fingers. Howe is left-handed and has a hairy chest, hairy arms, and square shoulders. He walks quickly and is a heavy smoker.

He goes by many aliases, all common names. A few of his known aliases were: Michael Burns; Wayne King; Ralph Ferguson; and Jim Meyers.

At the time of Sharin’s murder, Howe’s teeth were black and abscessed. Due to the constant pain he endured, investigators believe Howe would have been forced to get dental assistance. It’s possible that he now has dentures. In fact, after the murder, Royal Canadian Mounted Police published Howe’s dental charts in the Canadian Dental Journal with the hope that a dentist would spot the killer.

Howe’s DNA has been linked to Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan. It is available to law enforcement officials in North America.

While most Canadian investigators think Howe would never have left the country of his birth, it is possible that he fled to the United States. (What better way to throw the hounds off your tracks than to go somewhere totally unexpected?) While Howe was estranged from most of his family, he had a brother who occasionally loaned him money. In the years following the murder of Sharin’, cops learned that his brother made a dozen trips to Montana and Washington. After being questioned about the reasons for those visits, they suddenly stopped. His brother died several years ago, taking any secret he may have had to his grave.

Is Dennis Melvyn Howe still alive? Is he hiding in plain sight, maybe in some small town, cared for by a wife and children? Is he languishing in a nursing facility, his identity unknown?

To me, the most likely scenario is that he died shortly after the murder, while still on the run. Otherwise, with his deviant sexual compulsions and anti-social personality, he would have quickly come into contact with law enforcement officials, either in Canada or the United States.

Wherever Howe is, hell will be his final destination.

Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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