The Disappearance and Death of Dave Walker: A History
Page 11. The Investigation Part 8
Enter Edmonton Police - Getting the Cambodians to Move

THE INVESTIGATION WEEK TWO Part 8:  "SPOKESPERSON" ENTER EDMONTON POLICE - GETTING THE CAMBODIANS TO MOVE

"You asked me whether Cambodian authorities have declared Mr. Walker’s disappearance a criminal affair, a question I wasn’t able to answer..."

It was now into the second week since Dave Walker disappeared on the afternoon of Friday, February 14, 2014 in Siem Reap. Eleven days had passed and Dave Walker's room had not been sealed as a crime scene, his belonging, his laptop and digital camera remained in the room, no police investigators surveyed the scene of his disappearance, nobody was taking statements, seeking out witnesses or collecting evidence.  Nothing seemed to be happening in Cambodia.

In the wake of the Thayer debacle the night before with Canada Foreign Affairs, Tammy Madon, Dave Walker's family next-of-kin appointed me as sole spokesperson. [ See Page 10 ] My contact at Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Development (DFATD) was Jean-Francois Parizeau, a Consular Services Desk Officer in Ottawa responsible for the South East Asia region.  That Tuesday morning we had a long telephone conversation. At the end of the day Parizeau sent me the below e-mail summarizing our conversation. Parizeau continued the original "Nate Thayer Dave Walker" e-mail thread that he had first forwarded to me, for the remainder of our future correspondence.  At the bottom of each e-mail between myself and Parizeau, would be Thayer's moronic e-mail hanging there like rotting fruit.

It was my first day as "spokesman" and I could see from the e-mail this was going to be heavy going.

Edmonton Police Missing Persons Unit

The news that finally a Canadian police agency was getting involved made us dizzy with hope after eleven days of nothing happening. On the other hand, we were burnt the week before when we thought "the cavalry" was coming and instead a Vice-Consul from Bangkok paid a short visit to Siem Reap and apparently did nothing about getting a sworn statement from the man reporting Dave's disappearance, Sonny Chhoun, or securing Dave's things in the hotel room, especially his laptop and camera which potentially contained evidence of Dave's recent activities. [See Page 7] Tammy Madon, had been under the impression that the Canadian embassy had retained a private investigator, but Parizeau dismissed that notion.

Edmonton Police were chosen because Dave's immediate family, his cousin Tammy Madon lived in Edmonton, and it made sense that the nearest police agency to the next-of-kin be chosen to be the police "agency of record." After speaking with Parizeau, I eagerly phoned Constable Jim Gurney of the Edmonton Police Service and introduced myself. 

Gurney was at the time the head of Edmonton PD's missing persons unit. Within a minute of talking with him, my heart sank.  Firstly, Edmonton Police were not going to be initiating any investigation; they were merely taking a "missing persons" report into their system and acting as a liaison with Cambodian police, if and when, Cambodian police choose to contact them. 

Edmonton Police would act as a central repository of any information collected in Canada or coming from Canadians on Dave's disappearance, but there was nothing they could actually do with that information proactively, Gurney informed me, unless the Cambodians asked for it.  Gurney immediately dissuaded me of any hopes or illusions that Edmonton police would be directly engaged in any way in the investigation.  They were merely, Gurney warned me, a conduit of information between Canada and the Cambodian Police.

"Too bad he didn't disappear in Mexico..."

Gurney told me that before this would become a criminal investigation, authorities would first have to clear up "what did not happen" to Dave; they would need to determine that Dave did not choose to vanish, that he was not injured and in a hospital, that he did not run off with a woman, etc. Moreover, Gurney told me he had dozens of local missing persons cases in Edmonton, and some of them had not floated forward a single clue in 18 months or two years, since the person had been reported missing.  And that was at home in Edmonton!  Cambodia was going to be a much tougher going, he said. He explained that there would be no criminal investigation until they finished investigating "what did not happen" to Dave.

A contact of mine very familiar with Canadian police liaison procedures in investigation of the deaths of Canadians abroad, and specifically familiar with the current Cambodian police, advised me with a heavy tone of irony, "Too bad he didn't disappear in Mexico where things are all in good order and we have a history of liaisoning with Mexican police in the murders of Canadian tourists and visitors down there. We know who needs to be bribed. Unfortunately Cambodia is not as civilized and transparent as Mexico."  It was not a reassuring thing to hear considering how anarchic a state Mexico is in, that Cambodia is far worse.

Cambodian-Canadian connection paper trail to Canada?

I immediately told Gurney that we had information that current Canadian citizens of Cambodian origin, former refugees from the 1980s who had returned to Cambodia in the 2000s and established businesses over there,  Chandy "Andy" Long and Salao Mao, had been meeting with Dave two days prior to his disappearance to discuss business of an unknown nature and that Dave was supposed to have gone to another meeting with them on day of his disappearance, but did not show up reportedly. [See Page 3]  One of them, identified by Dave's business partner Sonny Chhoun, was Salao Mao who had lived in a house that Dave once owned in Canada. I suggested that perhaps a evidentiary paper-trail can be unearthed in Canada leading back to Dave's disappearance, if indeed the house proved to be of significance.

This immediately perked Gurney's interest.  He was not aware that there was a possible Canadian connection to Dave's disappearance in Cambodia, having been just assigned the case.  Gurney asked me to furnish him all the available details. That could be a game changer. 

I said I would update him on the latest information available and prepare a formal statement on everything I know later that day.  We discussed perhaps conferencing the Canadian Cambodian connection with the RCMP, or OPP in Ontario.  Now I turned to Richard Ehrlich for an update on the investigation I had been told was making progress in Cambodia in order that I could better brief the Edmonton Police and the RCMP if such a conference was going to take place.

"there are *no* new developments on that front."

Three days earlier, Richard Ehrlich asked me not to contact Sonny and to take down my lure of Salao Mao on Facebook because "I have been told that we should not make it public... while they search it themselves instead of having others..." [See Page 6] He had sent me the following request which I complied with immediately.

In the two days that followed I no longer received any further updates as to what had developed with Salao Mao.  Thayer had suggested on the phone on Sunday when we spoke that it was a 'dead end' and I need not further look into the house in Keswick.  I was pretty frustrated pulling the lure off Facebook because when I had posted it, it had immediately within minutes brought in new information. 

While Thayer and Ehrlich seemed to argue for suppressing it in the name of investigative confidentiality, I thought their understanding of strategic investigative confidentiality was amateurish.  It's a very common practice in investigations when a suspect is known to police to actually manipulate and panic the suspect into exposing and incriminating themselves by strategically releasing certain information and misinformation into the public domain where the suspect will become aware of it and react to it.  That was the strategy I adopted with Salao Mao on Facebook.  Salao Mao from the phone calls put to him by Sonny, was already aware "of being looked for." There was no benefit to concealing our interest in him, in fact, if Dave was alive, it would be detrimental to Dave's safety for us to conceal our awareness of Salao Mao.  If he had anything to do with Dave's disappearance, and Dave was still alive, I wanted Salao Mao to know we were already on to him.  "Dave better be alive than not, when we come for you" would be the message directed to anybody holding Dave.  Only in deference and respect to people I thought were "in the field" I complied with Ehrlich's request immediately when he made it and I pulled the lure from the Find Dave Walker Facebook Page that Sunday.

Now I needed an update from Ehrlich and Thayer on what we have achieved since I dropped the lure and asked for one repeatedly.  After ignoring previous requests,  Ehrlich finally replied, invoking the typical bureaucrat scoundrel's refuge "the need to know" in responding to my request for an update.  He stated to me that there were "no new developments."  Instead he asked me for the RCMP contact claiming that "it can be given to someone who may appear with actual on-the-ground information, who wants to be speak immediately only to the RCMP... there are some people who would need that direct RCMP contact now..."  I was beginning to smell bullshit in these e-mail exchanges.

*a closed sesame seed*

There was other bullshit that only made sense to me afterwards.  Nate Thayer had been falsely claiming to people that he was in charge of the investigation and the sole family spokesperson and advisor, except I did not know that until later when I pieced together what happened to the investigator Peter Slade. [See Page 8] Thayer had threatened to advise people in Cambodia not to cooperate with Peeter Slade and throw other roadblocks into his way if Slade attempted to come to Siem Reap to help us with the search for Dave.  After Thayer was fired as my co-spokesperson, and we had that stormy exchange of "cocksucker" e-mail, [See Page 10] Ehrlich sent me this e-mail that speaks for itself (between the lines of its, again, strangely inebriated-like incoherence.)

With no cooperation from Ehrlich and Thayer, I filed a statement with the Edmonton Police with as much information as I had collected.  It began like this:

In it I described what I thought was for Dave the unusual purchase of a house in Keswick and the strange coincidence that one of the people he had apparently been meeting with at the time of his disappearance, having lived in it. (I have chosen not publish my statement in full here to the Edmonton Police in order to preserve its integrity should an investigation into Dave's death be undertaken by Canadian authorities in the futured.)

Getting the Cambodians to move: "If the police in Cambodia did not have anything directly to do with Dave's disappearance, then they will know whose cousin on the force did." 

In the meantime, Jim Gurney was telling me that Edmonton Police had not been contacted by the Cambodian authorities.  My informants in Siem Reap were reporting that no Cambodian police activity of note was taking place.  Dave's belongings were still in the hotel room, the room had not been sealed as a crime scene, no police investigators had surveyed the location of Dave's last sighting, nobody was interviewing local shopkeepers, tuk-tuk drivers or street vendors in the vicinity of Dave's disappearance, nobody was showing recent photos of Dave to locals, nothing was being done.  There were no posters that Sonny Chhoun was claiming he was hanging in Siem Reap, Chhoun still had Dave's cell phone in his position and nobody had taken a formal statement from the one person who first noted and reported Dave Walker's disappearance and its circumstances and timeline. 

The advice I received from people who were involved in recently training the Cambodian police was that the best way to get them to move was either to "very generously" bribe the right officials (Siem Reap police because of the massive tourist trade visiting Angkor Wat was particularly corrupt with large sums of money changing hands) or threaten them with losing face.  As one person put it to me, "If the police in Cambodia did not have anything directly to do with Dave's disappearance, then they will know whose cousin on the force did." 

With Tammy's approval I drafted my first public statement and update since I became the spokesperson.  In it I addressed the issue of Nate Thayer having been fired, putting it in a face-saving context that Department of Foreign Affairs only wanted "one spokesperson" and expressed both mine and Tammy Madon's confidence in him, in the hope that it would smooth his ruffled feathers. I described the pessimistic outlook from Canada Department of Foreign Affairs as to how much they will be able to do inside of Cambodia.  I then quoted some of my sources on the lack of apparent movement by the Cambodian police and made the quotes sharable with the intention of them coming to the Cambodian authorities' attention in the hope that it will spur them to avoid further embarrassment and save face by initiating a proper professional and transparent investigation, at least, as far as Cambodians were capable of it.

Tammy Madon had reviewed the draft of the above statement and approved it a day prior to its release.

"Now, in other news, fighting erupted in Turkey..."

In response I received this bizarrely long and evolved e-mail from Ehrlich, in which he seemed to have expended an enormous amount of energy into writing, I thought.

My response this confusing and rambling e-mail was irritable.  I was beginning to question not only Richard Ehrlich's judgement, his focus on the challenges at hand, but his sobriety as well.

Shortly after this, Richard Ehrlich "unfriended" me on his Facebook page and removed me from the e-mail threads that he had been overseeing.  Like Lovisa Inserra and who knows how many others who were contributing to the investigation of Dave's disappearance, I was now made a persona non grata by Ehrlich.  Despite the fact (or perhaps because of it) of Tammy Madon appointing me as the family spokesperson, when I had been appointed, Ehrlich removed my name from a long list of contacts routinely being distributed for media to seek comments or information from and he and Sonny Chhoun removed my e-mail contact from Dave Walker Missing Posters.

I had remained in contact with Sonny Chhoun, on the premise that if he had anything to do with Dave's disappearance, the more he remained in contact with us the more the chances he would expose himself eventually.  On the other hand, if he truly was the friend Dave deserved to have, he would be of great help.  I saw it as a win/win scenario. Again, despite being asked on Sunday by Ehrlich for reasons unclear to me not to further contact Sonny Chhoun,  I now sent him the following e-mail, appealing to his karmic providential sense of things.  

Sonny did not respond.

"dental records are used in a worst case scenario..."

In the meantime, in the absence of updated information from Cambodia, I received this grimly pessimistic e-mail from Constable Gurney. I knew it was a 'fill in the blank' standard procedure for a missing persons case but at the same time it frustrated me that this was the only thing that Edmonton PD could do at the moment.  At least I was able to help with information that Dave's family in Edmonton did not have.  Dave was not really that close to his Edmonton cousins, and rarely spent time in Edmonton, so there was a lot they did not know about Dave.  The e-mail was the first foreboding foresight into the reality of how Dave's disappearance might resolve itself in the future.  

Operation Find Dave Walker (OFDW): "it sickens me to say it, but to remain effective for a long period beyond the immediate crisis, we will have to become a bureaucracy."

As we were now approaching the third Friday of Dave's disappearance, Tammy Madon and I felt that at least we had succeeded preventing Dave's disappearance from vanishing between the cracks. The Department of Foreign Affairs did the minimum they were required, and having achieved that, next we needed to start looking at how to manage Dave's investigation over a long term period if no developments were forthcoming in the next few days.  We still had immediately urgent business in managing Foreign Affairs and the Cambodian authorities, but we also needed to start looking into a long-term strategy as now after three weeks it didn't look like Dave was going to be coming in on his own with some lame excuse.  This could now become a long protracted investigation, perhaps one that could go for years, which we needed to prepare to augment in many different ways.  I spent the rest of the day drafting a proposed action plan that I dubbed "Operation Find Dave Walker" (OFDW) that would address both short-term issues and long-term strategy.  We needed to prepare for a long haul, I advised Tammy Madon. 

After discussing with Tammy Madon the long term challenges facing us if no break on Dave's disappearance would be forthcoming in the next few days,  I contacted the remaining core members of the Ad Hoc group that Ehrlich did not expel, to see who was still willing commit to a long term effort in finding Dave.

Other than Tammy Madon, with whom I had spoken about it before sending it, inexplicably not one of the people on the above e-mail list acknowledged, commented, contributed or replied to my appeal.               

COMING NEXT: WEEK THREE -INSIDE THE INVESTIGATION PART 9