restaurant.
Not long after these promising leads, the investigators finally got the break they were looking for. An employee at Wells Gray Park remembered noticing a truck and camper parked in a three-acre clearing at the old Bear Creek prison grounds, just before the Johnson/Bentley disappearances. Staff Sergeant Eastham and his colleagues drove immediately to the location. Within a matter of minutes they were convinced they had found the family campsite. Around the fire pit lay two sharpened sticks for roasting marshmallows, lids matching the cans recovered from the roof of the Plymouth, and perhaps most telling, three Extra Old Stock bottle caps — Bob Johnson’s favourite brand. In a nearby creek, Eastham retrieved four unopened beer bottles left to cool in the icy mountain stream. Hurrying back to tell the others, he learned that in his brief absence the team had discovered six empty .22 calibre cartridges with the metal detector — one for each victim. Ballistics tests would later reveal they had likely been fired by a Ruger.
When they learned that two men who matched the descriptions from North Battleford had been hired to slash and burn bush in the area, they were sure they were onto something. Composites of the suspects were drawn up by a police artist and circulated around the vicinity of the park. Meanwhile, sightings of the truck and camper travelling east continued to trickle in from across Canada. When illustrations of the vehicles and suspects were released to the national media, the trickle became a deluge. Witnesses from Vancouver to Quebec uniformly reported having spotted the missing truck and Vanguard being driven by two dishevelled twenty-somethings. This put the detectives in a Catch-22 situation — though many privately suspected the vehicles had never left B.C., the sheer volume of sightings mandated further investigation. As Eastham brusquely explains in his book The Seventh Shadow , “If you don’t follow up, it could bite you in the ass. If you do follow it up, and it doesn’t get you anything concrete, at least you know.” [30]
RCMP reward poster for information leading to the recovery of the Bentleys’ missing 1981 Ford truck and camper, circulated nationwide. Little did the investigators know that the vehicles had never left the provincial park.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Unlike with the Bernardo and Homolka murders a decade later, where the unreliable account of a single eyewitness led to millions being squandered, there had been three hundred tips relating to the truck, camper, and Francophones before the rash of sightings finally dwindled in April. Ten thousand reward posters were plastered across North America offering $7,500 for information leading to the vehicle’s recovery, along with another $35,000 for any tips resulting in the conviction of the killer or killers. Detectives worked gruelling sixteen-hour days checking every record of long-distance calls made from Clearwater to Quebec; employing psychics; fielding phone calls; speaking with customs, Interpol, and U.S. police; canvassing pawn shops; investigating every parking ticket in Canada for mention of the missing truck; cataloguing escaped convicts; and even mailing fifty thousand letters to people who had been visiting the park at the time of the slayings, asking for information or snapshots they might have taken — photographs which, in turn, would have to be scoured for details. Despite their exhaustive (and exhausting) efforts, the RCMP remained no closer to catching the Wells Gray Gunman, and the blackened remains of six innocent people weighed heavily on their minds. By now the Johnson/Bentley murder investigation had become the most expensive in Canadian history.
In an attempt to revitalize the flagging case, a re-enactment of the murders, featuring the exact model of truck, a red and grey Ford F-150, and an old worn Vanguard camper, was filmed by Global Television and aired across Canada. At the same time,
Not long after these promising leads, the investigators finally got the break they were looking for. An employee at Wells Gray Park remembered noticing a truck and camper parked in a three-acre clearing at the old Bear Creek prison grounds, just before the Johnson/Bentley disappearances. Staff Sergeant Eastham and his colleagues drove immediately to the location. Within a matter of minutes they were convinced they had found the family campsite. Around the fire pit lay two sharpened sticks for roasting marshmallows, lids matching the cans recovered from the roof of the Plymouth, and perhaps most telling, three Extra Old Stock bottle caps — Bob Johnson’s favourite brand. In a nearby creek, Eastham retrieved four unopened beer bottles left to cool in the icy mountain stream. Hurrying back to tell the others, he learned that in his brief absence the team had discovered six empty .22 calibre cartridges with the metal detector — one for each victim. Ballistics tests would later reveal they had likely been fired by a Ruger.
When they learned that two men who matched the descriptions from North Battleford had been hired to slash and burn bush in the area, they were sure they were onto something. Composites of the suspects were drawn up by a police artist and circulated around the vicinity of the park. Meanwhile, sightings of the truck and camper travelling east continued to trickle in from across Canada. When illustrations of the vehicles and suspects were released to the national media, the trickle became a deluge. Witnesses from Vancouver to Quebec uniformly reported having spotted the missing truck and Vanguard being driven by two dishevelled twenty-somethings. This put the detectives in a Catch-22 situation — though many privately suspected the vehicles had never left B.C., the sheer volume of sightings mandated further investigation. As Eastham brusquely explains in his book The Seventh Shadow , “If you don’t follow up, it could bite you in the ass. If you do follow it up, and it doesn’t get you anything concrete, at least you know.” [30]
RCMP reward poster for information leading to the recovery of the Bentleys’ missing 1981 Ford truck and camper, circulated nationwide. Little did the investigators know that the vehicles had never left the provincial park.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Unlike with the Bernardo and Homolka murders a decade later, where the unreliable account of a single eyewitness led to millions being squandered, there had been three hundred tips relating to the truck, camper, and Francophones before the rash of sightings finally dwindled in April. Ten thousand reward posters were plastered across North America offering $7,500 for information leading to the vehicle’s recovery, along with another $35,000 for any tips resulting in the conviction of the killer or killers. Detectives worked gruelling sixteen-hour days checking every record of long-distance calls made from Clearwater to Quebec; employing psychics; fielding phone calls; speaking with customs, Interpol, and U.S. police; canvassing pawn shops; investigating every parking ticket in Canada for mention of the missing truck; cataloguing escaped convicts; and even mailing fifty thousand letters to people who had been visiting the park at the time of the slayings, asking for information or snapshots they might have taken — photographs which, in turn, would have to be scoured for details. Despite their exhaustive (and exhausting) efforts, the RCMP remained no closer to catching the Wells Gray Gunman, and the blackened remains of six innocent people weighed heavily on their minds. By now the Johnson/Bentley murder investigation had become the most expensive in Canadian history.
In an attempt to revitalize the flagging case, a re-enactment of the murders, featuring the exact model of truck, a red and grey Ford F-150, and an old worn Vanguard camper, was filmed by Global Television and aired across Canada. At the same time,
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