Update, February 24, 2014: Halifax Regional Police and Halifax District RCMP have announced an independent review of the police investigation into Holly Bartlett’s death. For more information, click here.
Work finished early that Friday afternoon, but Holly Bartlett’s day was just getting started. She had to shop for a birthday present for her six-year-old nephew—Holly settled on a Wii controller—before going to a class at Dalhousie. After class came the bus ride home, to the northern edge of the peninsula, to her condo a block from the MacKay Bridge. She had to get ready for a night out.
She dressed in bold colours: blue jeans, knee-high black boots, a sequined royal blue blouse. She applied lip gloss. If she ran a brush through her brown hair no one would know. It was hopelessly mopish, unruly hair—matching her energetic lifestyle—so she kept it short, just over the ears. Heading for the door, she donned a red wool coat with a stand-up collar, and black leather gloves. She grabbed her purse, a small black pouch she wore like a backpack.
A few weeks before, Holly had started a job as a researcher for the province. She was also nearing the end of her grad program at Dal, and the coursework was intense. At the same time her father, who she adored, was dying of lung cancer. Every night that week she had gone to her parents’ house to sit with him, to be by his side, hold his hand and just talk.
But tonight, Holly needed a break. Some time to wind down, to hang with her friends. “I’ll be back Saturday,” she told her father.
Back downtown, she met her friend Moira for dinner at The Fireside Restaurant. After a quick meal and a drink, the pair stopped by a liquor store to buy a bottle for a small get-together at a mutual friend’s house. After an hour or so, the group headed off to the department of public administration’s year-end party at the University Club.
“There were 30 or 40 people,” recalls Holly’s friend and classmate Gabryel Joseph. “There was an open bar and gag prizes. Our program was incredibly demanding, and we had to unwind.”
Holly had a few drinks, but “if anyone is suggesting she was too drunk, I can assure you that was not the case,” says Joseph. “She was laughing, having a good time, not slurring her words.” At 11pm, Holly was ready to go home. A friend called a cab for her, but when the cab arrived the department proceedings were still going on, and Holly wanted to hear the last speaker. The cab was waved off.
After the last speech, another friend called a second cab. It arrived at 11:50pm, and the friend walked out to the waiting cab with Holly, making sure she was safe.
But Holly never made it home.
• • •
Saturday morning dawned cold—six degrees below freezing, a wind chill of minus 10—but Stuart Herlt and his crew had a schedule to keep, so they were off to the job site just as the sun rose. Herlt works for Cherubini Metal Works, which had been hired to install two towers beneath the MacKay Bridge, near where the two giant cables that hold up the suspension bridge make landfall on the Halifax side.
The cables are anchored by what’s called an abutment, a massive concrete wedge that slopes steeply up from the ground to a point nearly 10 metres high. The wedge, about as big around as a tennis court, is surrounded by a wide margin of land, more than the size of a football field. A chain-link fence two metres high borders the whole field, although its protective value is dubious—graffiti was scrawled over the abutment this Saturday morning. For sanctioned access, there is a padlocked gate in the fence.
The towers Herlt and his team were installing stretched from the land beside the wedge to the bridge itself, so the group split up, with Herlt and a couple other workers heading to the bridge deck. The ground crew went to the fence, where they met a bridge commissionaire.
“The commissionaire opened the gate and two of our guys went in,” says Herlt. “The first guy saw something laying there. He couldn’t make out what it was, and so they went over and they noticed it was a person. They thought she was dead, but then they noticed she was trying to breathe. They noticed she was really cold, so they put one of their coats—their ironworker coats—on her. And they ran back to get the commissionaire, and they got him to call 911. At that point, I was on the catwalk and looked down, and I saw the ironworker coat just laying there, and someone lying there. I kind of freaked out; I thought one of the ironworkers had fallen from up top.”
It was Holly. An ambulance soon arrived, and the EMTs who examined Holly found severe bruises on her face, cuts on her hands and knees. Her leg and some ribs were broken, her body temperature was 23 degrees and she had a blood alcohol content of 0.09 percent. The ambulance got her to the hospital at 7am, and she went into surgery at 8:04. Her condition was touch-and-go through the day, but overnight she declined. Sunday morning, two attending doctors agreed that “further support in this lady was futile and only served to prolong her death.”
With her family at her bedside, Holly’s life support system was turned off. She died at 10:45am, Sunday, March 28, 2010.
Even as Holly lay dying in the hospital, police were working to solve the mystery of how a capable 31-year-old could come to such harm 300 metres from her home. But just as quickly, the police started losing the trust of Holly’s family. Now, nearly four years later, people who knew Holly are frustrated and angry at the lack of answers, while the police department remains indifferent to new facts that could explain things, and to her family’s suffering.
• • •
Police constables Matthew Luck and Jason Marriot arrived beneath the bridge at 6:47am, while the EMTs were working on Holly. Marriot “noted a black baseball hat just to the south of where Bartlett’s body was laying,” he wrote in his report. “The hat had a Harley Davidson logo on the side of it.”
Holly was wearing her red coat. Her purse was lying on the ground near her head. It contained an expired school ID, a bus pass, a Tim Hortons card, gloves, sunglasses, lip gloss and her ID card from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
For the rest of Saturday, the integrated Halifax Regional Police/RCMP General Investigation Section reconstructed Holly’s movements from the day before, pulling her bank records, watching video from the liquor store and interviewing those who had been with her. The police confirmed with Holly’s family that she was blind. At the hospital, Holly was checked for signs of rape, and there were none. Police interviewed the cab driver, who said he’d dropped Holly off in front of her condo building around midnight.
Holly lived in a distinctive part of Halifax, where the MacKay Bridge is an unavoidable part of the landscape. Novalea Drive runs straight north for nearly two kilometres through residential neighbourhoods before it abruptly swings left, becoming North Ridge Road, parallel to the bridge jutting out over the harbour. Holly’s building, Convoy Towers, is less than 300 metres from Novalea—reached by a left off North Ridge, up through a sloped parking lot and to the circular driveway in front of the building.
Although vehicles have to make the left turn from Novalea to North Ridge in order to avoid the bridge, pedestrians can go straight at the intersection, walking on an asphalt footpath that leads under the bridge to Seaview Lookoff Park. Beside the footpath on the right is the fence around the cable abutment site where Holly was found.
The first thought when someone is found severely injured under a bridge is a suicide attempt. But police quickly ruled this out, as no motorist reported a pedestrian on the bridge Friday night, and bridge surveillance cameras didn’t show Holly. Moreover, if she wanted to jump to her death, she could have used her own eighth-storey balcony at home.
So what happened to Holly? Based on the first day’s investigations, sergeant Mark McKinley, supervisor of the Investigation Section, came up with a theory that he typed into the police file Saturday night.
McKinley noted that the cab driver said he remembered Holly and that he could tell she was drunk in the back seat. When he pulled up to Convoy Towers, the building was on the passenger side of the car, although after she paid the fare Holly got out of the cab on the driver’s side. The driver says he didn’t realize she was blind, so didn’t think anything of it, but getting out of the car on the driver’s side meant as the cab drove off, Holly was walking away from her building.
McKinley theorized that Holly was disoriented, and in this state he pictured her wandering from the wrong side of the cab, across the driveway and down the sloped parking lot. At North Ridge Road she must have turned toward Novalea, then walked almost 200 metres to reach the footpath under the bridge. Starting down the path, she either tripped or stumbled, landing next to the fence around the abutment site.
The police used a search dog when they were exploring the area during the day Saturday, and at one point the dog went through a small hole in the fence. The hole wasn’t much bigger than the dog, but it took on a large significance for McKinley. He figured Holly fell beside the hole, and when she got moving again she must have crawled through. Then she crossed the field to reach the abutment. In his mind, the concrete slope of the wedge felt to Holly like the inclined footpath she’d fallen from, so naturally she climbed onto it. Holly then went up the wedge on her hands and knees, until she got to the top and went over the edge, falling two-and-a-half storeys to the ground.
To McKinley, the journey from the condo’s driveway, across the parking lot, along the road by the bridge, down the path, through the fence and up the concrete wedge was a plausible misadventure for a disoriented blind person. There were only a couple of minor tasks to follow up on. The investigation, he wrote in the report, would be complete “next week.”
• • •
Wayne and Marion Bartlett had three children. The oldest is Kim, a medical researcher in the United States. The youngest is Amanda, an executive assistant with Jazz Air in Halifax. The middle daughter, Holly Elizabeth Bartlett, was born December 26, 1978 in Halifax.
“She was only hours old when they came and told us that there’s something wrong with her eyes,” says Marion.
Holly was diagnosed with microphthalmia, under-developed eyes, coupled with astigma, a difficulty in focusing. Through her childhood, Holly could still see with difficulty, but her sight deteriorated as she grew. She was also unusually small—4’11” and less than 100 pounds as an adult—and the target of bullying.
Holly would look back at this difficult period with humour. “When I lost my vision at the age of 13, that was a rather traumatic experience, but everything at 13 is traumatic,” says Holly, laughing, in a video called Sights Unseen. King’s College student Kim Hart Macneil made the video for a class project in 2009.
“So, at 13 or 14,” continues Holly in Sights Unseen, “it was like, I can struggle with social stuff, or I can study and be smart. I chose to study and be smart.”
From the time she entered school, Holly was helped by the Atlantic Provinces Special Education Authority, which provides services to children who are visually or hearing impaired. For grade nine, she attended the APSEA-run Sir Fredrick Fraser school for the blind and she learned “O&M” skills—orientation and mobility, how to get around as a blind person.
Holly attended Prince Andrew High School in Dartmouth, then became the first blind student who’d ever gone to Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish. She graduated in 2002, earning a BA in psychology, then moved to Ottawa, where she found work with the federal government. She also found a boyfriend, and moved in with him.
In 2005, when her boyfriend landed a job in Halifax, Holly decided it was time to move back to town. The pair got an apartment, and she started attending classes at NSCC to get a certificate in Human Resources.
“That’s when I met her,” says Peter Parsons, who was then an O&M specialist with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. “She called me to brush up on her cane skills, because they were rusty. Then I’d watch her with perfect cane skills and crossing the street so straight, and I was, ‘OK, you call that rusty.'”
Holly called Peter every time she had a new route to learn. “With Holly, you show her once, she was such a quick learner and for being totally blind,” says Peter. “She pretty much had it after showing her one time.”
Like many people in their 20s, Holly bounced around a lot before she found a life that worked for her. She broke up with her boyfriend, moved in with a friend for a few months, then got an apartment of her own. Another year passed, and Holly and her old high school buddy Andrew Seely decided to buy a condo together in Convoy Towers, on the top floor.
“We called it the penthouse,” says Seely. “I remember the first time we saw it, and I told Holly I really liked how spacious it was. ‘And the view is wonderful!’ she joked.”
Since moving back to Halifax, Holly couldn’t get a full-time job and, tired of part-time and contract work, she decided to go back to school. To improve her presentation skills as part of her masters program, Holly joined Toastmasters, the organization that helps people with public speaking. That’s where she met Kirk Furlotte.
“I had gone sky diving once, and wanted to go again,” says Furlotte. “We were at the meeting, and I don’t think I had finished saying, ‘I want to go again,’ and she was, ‘Can I come, too?!'”
The pair went to the the airfield in Berwick, where Holly went on a tandem jump with an instructor. “She went up, she came down,” Furlotte says. “She had this huge smile on her face.”
Another of her friends brought Holly to a swing dancing class. “When I started taking lessons, there were some awkward moments, because people weren’t sure how to help me,” says Holly in the Sights Unseen video. “And I guess the other thing is that I wasn’t exactly walking around with my cane, waving it around and dancing with it, so some people didn’t even know that I couldn’t see, until all of a sudden I’m right in front of them.”
“She loved to dance,” says David Bird, another of Holly’s friends. “I remember once we went to the Pogue Fado, and she danced all night.”
But not everything was going well. Holly’s father, Wayne, was dying, and she wasn’t taking it well. She was using anti-depressants to help deal with her pain. Holly tried to sit with her dad as often as she could, but she took that Friday night as her own time. She’d get back with her dad Saturday, after a morning meeting with classmates to finish a school project.
At 8:20 Saturday morning, however, Marion received a call from the police. “It’s about your daughter Holly,” the officer said. “You should come to the Queen Elizabeth right away.”
• • •
People who knew her have a hard time believing Holly could, as the police speculated, simply wander off disoriented and fall to her death. Her friends think the police hadn’t taken the investigation seriously.
For example, what about the black Harley Davidson hat found near Holly? There’s no indication that the hat was collected into evidence or examined.
Then there’s the issue of the Holly’s purse. While some of the contents were found Saturday morning in the purse, near her body, other items—her wallet, iPhone, lip gloss and loose change—were found Saturday morning at 7am, in the parking lot outside Convoy Towers, by a security guard returning home from working the night shift. The phone and other items were found between two cars, across the lot from where the cab driver said he had left Holly off. The security guard would later tell a private investigator that the items were spread across the lot, “as if they had been thrown from a passing car.”
And where was Holly’s cane? The Saturday Holly was found, police had secured the scene for over five hours, with at least four officers investigating. Constable Paul Jessen brought the search dog, named K93D, specifically to look for the cane. Jessen and K93D looked around the parking lot of Convoy Towers, then they walked along North Ridge to the footpath that goes under the bridge. There, they found the hole in the fence that McKinley’s theory would rely on, but no cane. Then they checked around an apartment building at the corner of Novalea and another side street, Kencrest Avenue, that is next to the bridge and the cable abutment fence. Still no cane.
The next day, however, a few of Holly’s friends went to the site. They were determined to walk all the way around the abutment fence, not just concentrating on the western edge, parallel to the footpath, where K93D found the hole. Sure enough, on the southern edge, perpendicular to the footpath, they found the cane. It was leaning against the fence, at the bottom of a slope leading up to the Kencrest apartment building. A few feet away they found a $5 bill, presumably also Holly’s. The cane was about 20 metres away from the footpath. Near the cane was a second hole in the fence, which the police had not reported the day before.
That a group of civilians could so readily find the cane on Sunday, after the investigating officers and search dog had found nothing Saturday, is odd. If the cane was there all along, then the police search wasn’t as thorough as they claimed. But if somebody put the cane there after the police left the scene, then it should have been entered into evidence and fingerprinted, and the investigation should’ve been expanded to look for whoever moved it.
However, the cane was not fingerprinted. And the search was not questioned. Instead, sergeant McKinley expanded his theory about Holly’s wandering to fit the cane’s appearance.
Where Saturday he’d assumed Holly had simply fallen off the path and landed beside the first hole in the fence, his Sunday report theorized that Holly successfully made it down the footpath to the point where it met a secondary path. She turned and followed that secondary path all the way to a service door at the Kencrest apartment, which was presumably locked. She then made her way through the shrubbery behind the building, tumbled down the slope and wound up at the second hole in the fence. McKinley thought maybe Holly went through the fence to look for her cane. (See McKinley’s revised theory here.)
Peter Parsons, the Orientation and Mobility specialist at CNIB, was out of town when he heard about Holly’s death. He missed her funeral, but the day Peter arrived back in Halifax, he took his lunch hour from work and met three colleagues from APSEA at the site under the MacKay Bridge.
“I was hoping to go there, look and make sense of it,” says Peter, “but instead, I went there, and it made less sense, after seeing—there’s no way.”
Nova Herring, another O&M specialist, was one of the four who met under the bridge. She knew Holly well, and after visiting the site she couldn’t believe McKinley’s theory: “If Holly had been dropped off in front of her condo, I don’t know how it would be possible.”
Soon after Holly had bought the condo in 2007, Herring gave Holly a ride home. “I had never been to her condo, and she gave me immaculate directions home that night,” Herring says. “She explained to me how to turn into the parking lot in front of her condo, and to stay to the right hand side of the little loop that goes around. She explained to me that I could stop so that her door was directly across from the condo. She would just have to get out of the door and walk straight ahead to the condo door.”
If the cab didn’t stop at the right spot, the sound of traffic on the bridge would be useful information to Holly. “She would’ve known that if she was going to her home, travelling to her condo, that traffic would be on her right-hand side,” says Herring. “If she had be walking away from her condo to where she was found, that traffic would be on her left. That really steep decline that leads from Novalea straight under the bridge, she would’ve known that that is not somewhere where she is supposed to be.”
The shape of the concrete wedge would help Holly navigate, too. Rather than a smooth, flat expanse all the way up the slope, the wedge has walls and ridges. Assuming she fell from a spot directly above where she was found, Holly’s path must have been up an edge of the cable abutment with a drop to her left and a wall of concrete to her right. “Even not knowing where she was,” says Herring, “she would’ve been able to perceive. Holly in particular.
“When we walked down a sidewalk, we would pass a guy wire, and she would ask me, ‘What is that?’ It’s called facial vision—the pressure changes in their ear, and they can tell that they’ve passed something. A bus shelter is a gimme, anyone could pick that up, but Holly could pick up a guy wire. She would not have climbed that cement abutment, with the cement wall on one side, a drop-off on the other. She would’ve heard the changes in that going up. She would not have thought it was that steep bank, or that steep pathway, because it had that cement wall.”
Then there’s the fall itself. The police theorize that Holly crawled up the cement incline, on hands and knees, one hand before the other. To have fallen off the end of the incline, she would’ve had to put one hand into the void, find nothing to hold, and then keep going.
Herring says even if Holly was so drunk as to be disoriented, the police theory of her long journey from the Convoy Towers parking lot to under the bridge, makes no sense. “If you ever see a blind person who is disoriented, trying to find their way…think about a dog sniffing,” she says. “They kind of go around, around, around the same area. They don’t travel that amount of distance. She would’ve wandered around in her parking lot, or wandered around that street with all of those houses lining it. And it wouldn’t have been above Holly to knock on a door and ask for help.”
After the meeting at the bridge, Peter Parsons went back to the office and called the police. He wanted “to express my professional opinion and concern that it didn’t seem right, being an orientation and mobility specialist,” he says. “It went in one ear and out the other.”
• • •
That weekend, Peter went to stay with his parents in Bridgewater, and discussed Holly’s death with his father, Brian. Before he retired from the field, the elder Parsons had been a military investigator, then worked as a private investigator, so he was intrigued by his son’s concerns about the police theory. Brian began investigating, and a loose group of Holly’s friends, family and professionals who had worked with her began meeting regularly, to discuss the case. The group calls itself Justice For Holly.
It didn’t take long for Brian to make progress. Convoy Towers is at the very end of the #7 bus route, and the bus typically waits at the stop on North Ridge Road for its schedule to catch up with it. Brian realized that Holly came home when the bus would be waiting to start its last run of the night, so he went to Metro Transit to retrieve the bus’s dashboard video recording. Transit officials refused to give the video to Brian, but it was found and given to detective Kim Robinson.
Sure enough, the bus’s camera caught the cab. Robinson wouldn’t tell Brian if Holly or any passenger can be seen in the video, but she said what she saw jibed with the driver’s story of a standard drop-off: The cab turning from North Ridge into Holly’s parking lot—where it was out of sight of the camera—and a short time later coming back out to head away. Brian sensed there was more to it. “I said, ‘Yeah, Kim, but what happened after that? You have to watch the whole thing.'”
When she called back, Robinson had something curious to report. As the bus starts its route and makes the turn onto Novalea to go back downtown, the video shows the cab at the nearby sidestreet, Kencrest Avenue, seemingly waiting for the bus to pass. To Brian the video suggested the cab was going back to Holly’s building. He set out to talk to the driver.
Robinson told Brian that the driver was named Paul Fraser, who drove with Casino Taxi. Brian contacted Fraser, and convinced Fraser to come with him to the scene where Holly was found.
The pair drove together in Brian’s truck, and parked in the Convoy Towers lot. They walked along North Ridge to the Seaview Lookoff path, and down the path to a park bench just past the bridge. The bench overlooks fenced land where Holly was found.
“We sat right here,” says Brian, sitting on the bench. “And I said to him, ‘Paul, I’ve been in this business a long time, and I definitely know I’ll get to the bottom of what occurred, one way or the other.’ I said, ‘I know one thing for certain: there’s something playing on your mind, that is really bugging you. It’s plain and obvious as can be. I’m going to find out anyway…’ And he sat there, and he stared in there and I let him think. I said, ‘If I lost a child in there, I tell you, I wouldn’t rest until I learned what was going on. I have no intentions of doing anything different for Marion.’
“And he sat there,” continues Brian, “and he said, ‘You’re right. I did something I’m not very proud of. I stole from her.’ I said, ‘You stole from her?’ He said, ‘She handed me a wad of bills that night, over my shoulder, three 20s and three fives.’ He gave her back, I think it was $1.50.”
Fraser’s new version of events was that when he dropped Holly off he purposefully gave her the wrong change. As he drove away, he told Brian, through his rearview mirror he saw Holly walking across the parking lot, away from the condo building entrance, and saw her trip over the curb on the opposite side. Almost immediately Fraser “felt bad” about cheating her, so he turned around on Kencrest Avenue, where he waited for the bus to pass, and drove back to the Convoy Towers parking lot. He got out of his car to search for Holly where he had seen her fall, but when he couldn’t find her, he drove away.
The Coast recently called Fraser to give him the opportunity to explain his side of the story. “I do not want to respond,” he said, and hung up the phone. Brian says Fraser told him he had given $60 to charity “to make up for what he had done.”
• • •
Halifax Regional Police will not allow The Coast to speak with the officers who investigated Holly’s death. But police chief Jean-Michel Blais says after being contacted by the Justice For Holly group, he was briefed on the investigation, and went to the MacKay Bridge site himself. “I’ve gone through the investigation,” he says. “I’m satisfied that a proper job was done, and it’s our hope the family can have closure.”
Blais says the police spoke with Fraser after his conversation with Brian Parsons, and Fraser told them the story he’d told Brian, including that he had cheated Holly. “He didn’t want to admit to taking money from a blind person,” says Blais.
Fraser’s new version of events was tested with a polygraph test which, say police, he “passed.” Members of the Justice For Holly group say police told them the test consisted of Fraser providing a written version of events, including having taken money from Holly, and then being asked if that written version was correct.
On November 17, 2010, Robinson wrote the concluding report for the file. “Ms. Bartlett had consumed a significant amount of alcohol, which placed her in a state of intoxication,” wrote Robinson. “This intoxicated state caused Ms. Bartlett to have an initial fall just outside of her residence at 5572 North Ridge Road, and a subsequent fatal fall near the location of the MacKay Bridge.”
The “initial fall just outside her residence” comes from Fraser’s changed story—it wasn’t part of McKinley’s first theories about what happened. Fraser taking money from Holly isn’t mentioned in the report, although the next three lines are redacted in the copy The Coast has reviewed. Next is written: “All evidence supported the conclusion that Ms. Bartlett’s fall was accidental.”
The police theory of what happened to Holly didn’t change substantially from the first report, written the day Holly was found, nearly eight months before. It’s the theory chief Blais uses when he talks about the case today. Extrapolating back from the .09 percent blood alcohol level Holly had Saturday morning, he estimates that at time Holly was dropped off Friday night, she had a blood alcohol level of around 0.2 percent.
“For a 95-pound person, that’s a lot of alcohol,” Blais says. “That in and of itself would be enough to kind of explain all of the movement. It’s incredible she makes it, she walks down this concrete path and hits, basically, a door, goes to her left, down a hill to the fence, where she stopped, walks back along the fence, turns, and there’s an opening in the fence and manages somehow to get onto the concrete.”
The case is closed, but that doesn’t give closure to the people who knew Holly. At one point during the investigation, Holly’s mom spoke with detective Robinson about the unsettling lack of facts in the seven hours between Holly leaving Dalhousie in a cab and her being found by the abutment.
Robinson had a suggestion: “Maybe you should go see a psychic.”
From the police investigators’ perspective, the polygraph test had exonerated Fraser from responsibility for Holly’s death. But at the same time, it seemed to Holly’s sister Amanda that the polygraph provided conclusive proof that Fraser had stolen money from a fare.
Amanda took that knowledge to Brian Herman, owner of Casino Taxi, and to representatives of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, but got no results. “They just all pointed in different directions,” says Amanda.
Herman acknowledges that he heard Fraser had stolen money from Holly. “We interviewed him, and he denied everything,” says Herman. “With this one, you know, the driver in question has been a driver with us for, I don’t know, 25, 30 years, and I don’t think I’ve had a single complaint, not a driving infraction, or a customer service issue—nothing. To make a decision to affect someone’s livelihood is a very serious thing. We couldn’t really do a whole heck of a lot without a conviction and without any further information from the police.”
While police chief Blais acknowledges Fraser admitted to taking money from Holly, he says “that evidence in that context could not be used against him in a court of law.” This suggests that when police called Fraser in to ask him about the theft, and to take the polygraph test, they did not read him his rights. Had they done so, any statements he made about the theft could be used against him, but without the rights being read to him, his admission wouldn’t stand up in court.
Fraser continues to drive for Casino Taxi, and is fully licensed by the city.
• • •
The missing seven hours before Holly was found are frustrating for her family and friends, and the Justice For Holly group meets regularly, hoping to find answers. A continued theme of their meetings is what they consider a weak police investigation.
As they see it, police had essentially wrapped up their investigation on Saturday, when Holly was in the hospital and McKinley first wrote his theory of her wandering the 300 metres from the condo driveway to the top of the abutment. That theory didn’t change much even as new facts were uncovered—facts the police needed help to get.
The police hadn’t found Holly’s cane, but a group of Holly’s friends did. And it was Brian Parsons who moved the investigation along: It was Brian, not the police, who thought to look for the bus video, and Brian who prodded detective Robinson to watch the whole video, not just the beginning of it. And it was Brian, not the police, who got Paul Fraser to admit to stealing money from Holly.
There’s no indication that police took fingerprints from Holly’s cane or any of the items found in the parking lot, including her phone and wallet. Also, Justice For Holly insists that police only canvassed for witnesses in the Kencrest apartment—the building overlooking the site under the bridge where Holly was found—after Brian urged them to. Police say they also canvassed Convoy Towers, where Holly lived, but Justice For Holly members say they’ve done their own canvassing of the building and found no one who spoke with police.
Moreover, the Justice For Holly group rankles at what they consider insensitivity from the police. McKinley behaved flippantly towards her mother, says Amanda, and at one point McKinley told Marion she had been “watching too much CSI.” The group says police show continued distrust of Brian, perhaps because he’s a civilian, even though, whatever his credentials, Brian discovered relevant information. And then there’s Robinson’s suggestion that Marion see a psychic.
Marion has had a particularly difficult time. She unexpectedly lost her daughter, and then, just 10 weeks later, her husband lost his battle with lung cancer. As Justice For Holly collected more information that had apparently been missed by police, Marion became increasingly frustrated.
With the help of a lawyer, this past summer, on July 15, Marion filed a Freedom of Information request with the police department. She asked for the investigative file on Holly, and essentially everything connected to the case: investigators’ notes, transcripts of interviews, the bus video, the polygraph test, toxicology results and more.
As Marion is Holly’s next of kin, she felt legally entitled to all the information she requested. On September 10, the police department sent Marion a handful of police occurrence reports—the notes officers place into the record after they are dispatched to a scene—and McKinley’s supervisor’s notes, but nothing else.
All of rest of the information requested was denied, explained deputy chief of police Bill Moore, who cited a section of the Freedom of Information Act that allows the withholding of information that “would be an unreasonable invasion of a third party’s personal privacy.”
Marion’s lawyer has filed an appeal with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Review Office, but that office is backed up. The appeal won’t even be looked at for the next two years.
“When something like this happens to you, you trust the people in authority,” says Marion. “I had 110 percent confidence in the police department. I had 100 percent confidence that the taxi driver would do what he was supposed to do. I was just, you know, a little cashier manager from Shoppers Drug Mart. And my husband was a carpenter. And we just went along and minded our own business and nothing bad ever happened to us. Right?”
Tim Bousquet is The Coast’s news editor.
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Telling Holly’s Bartlett’s story, again
This article appears in Dec 12-18, 2013.
Holly was a friend and a member of my Toastmasters club in Halifax. She was a bright, vivacious person. I do not know what happened to her that evening, but there are enough holes in the police report to drive my car through. It seemed to be a perfunctory investigation at best.
I hope that the truth comes out.
Bev in Halifax
One piece of information not provided in this story is whether the condo units directly overlooked the scene described. Would someone standing at the windows have a clear view of the area, and is it lit at night? This is a tragic set of unexplained consequences but no clear motive is presented that points to foul play. Condolences to Holly’s family.
Ask the Minister of Justice for a review of the case.
To halifax Resident – no her condo does not overlook the area directly, and it would probably have been fairly dark. The concrete wedge is under the bridge and the area adjacent would have been hidden from anyone unless they were very close on the path.
Tim Bousquet and The Coast – thank you for writing and publishing this story. Please keep pushing it.
I have no connection to Holly or her family, though I recognized her from the bus route we both took sometimes. I am familiar with this area and this park, and I never believed the news reports about the supposed cause of her death. The police appear to have no idea what happened, as evidenced by their own wording in the reports: they “believed” and “surmised”; she “may have” etc. If only their investigative skills were as strong as their imaginative skills.
Why the hell would Holly’s friends say that she was not too drunk while clearly, it seems she was. Drunk people helping drunk people is not University logic. In University and stupid enough to send a blind person home drunk. Tell me that’s not stupid to begin with.
This news has touched me. I was Holly’s class mate in grade 1 and 2 in Dartmouth. I moved away and just saw this article today. After 29 years I finally get to see her face again and this is what happened. She was a bright kid even when she was in grade 1 & 2.
I hope someone finds out what happened. She was an amazing person. God rest her soul. I can’t believe she’s gone.
The last known person to have seen another prior their unexplained death becomes a person of interest .
When that person changes their story substantially with respect to the last interactions between the two then he has created a real problem for himself .
Why make major changes ?
Typically perps do this changing story routine to conform with what they believe others have found out ..
This weary web has big holes ..
What was the motive for robbing a blind person ?
What was the reason to return to the person just robbed ? No reason given or sketchy one at best ..
Seems impossible for Holly to get from the Apt building lot to where she was found without the Taxi driver not seeing her as he would have seen her while parked or on return . Also he is a professional at locating people on foot ..She would be moving slowly ..
There is the Blue Wall .
Taxi Drivers are Blue Wall Associates ..
Was there a Coriner’s Enquiry ?
Justice Dept needs to get to work here pronto !!
All IMO
Frank Speaker
To the person who said no foul play, will I can’t prove that there was but I will ask you this question did you know Holly? The Holly that I knew if she couldn’t figure out were she was because of her blindness if she couldn’t find a door to knock on she would have stood her ground and screamed her head of until someone heard her.
My condolences go out to Holly’s family and friends. What a horrific way to lose a loved one. Even if the authorities do not want to concede that there are unanswered questions, I’m confused why some closure cannot be given to Holly’s mother by providing her with all the information gathered regarding her daughter’s case. Even if one assumes that no errors were made during the investigation, isn’t providing the evidence to her mother something that could be granted without holding up her life for the coming years in court? I’m certainly no expert, but having another external body review this investigation seems like something that should be possible due to the circumstances surrounding Holly’s death. As a community isn’t that something we should at least be able to offer to Holly’s family? Is there a change.org petition available to sign? Something that perhaps Peter McKay, no stranger to the St. FX community could have a look at, if there were enough signatures. I didn’t know Holly, but attended St. FX during the same years she did and I would be happy to place my name on that petition as I’m sure other St. FX alumni would. – Amanda Guignion
Fred Harrison please read my comment again. I said no evidence of a motive was provided that points to foul play. I don’t know this cabbie. He confessed to stealing. There is no evidence that he did much more, and no motive is suggested that points to foul play. Also, police investigative documents are excluded from Freedom of Information requests.
If she was blind she didn’t have experience with visual details of objects (she might not have even known about what was under the bridge, could have been yelling for help, not be receiving a voice and simply thought she was walking up to the top of the bridge to hail a car, or just a high point where someone could see her waving. How would she know how something felt if she never felt it before; like the concrete on the anchor) as we take for granted. She simply didn’t know where she was after turning left and right so many times. James Sheppard, a blind man from birth and good friend of mine as well as room mate for years had the same problem with or without his cane. I know because I used to accompany him to bars and venues for bands countless times as someone looking out for him. He would feel the side of the building and would never be right about where he was. Why haven’t there been other blind people interviewed about these circumstances (assuming there weren’t)??
After the event type reasoning is extremely difficult, and this article assumes more than it provides. Good to shed attention on a death that could have been prevented, and may be unsolved, but Still too much baseless speculation. The police were sloppy in jumping the gun and cutting corners where more investigation could have better shed light on other possible causes of the trajedy.
As for the biker hat, it definitely could have been there before. Also, how did the “assaulter or murderer” drag her through that small hole unless he or she had assaulted her first to the point where she (Holly) couldn’t simply extend her arms or legs to not be dragged through the difficult hole in the fence? Furthermore, her injuries as being consistent as from a fall from that height hasn’t been brought up in this article in terms of police and doctor cooperation. The police must have asked the doctors about their professional opinion about her injuries, and whether of not the injuries were consistent with such a fall. As for someone throwing her off the concrete bridge anchor that is possible, but why? How could a blind woman identify someone who robbed her without speaking or her even seeing who did it? Why would the cab driver rob her and kill her if she wouldn’t be able to determine who robbed her?? As for family members possibly killing her, don’t put them through any more greif unless you have solid evidence instead of weak abductive inference. I’m not impressed. At all.
I had 3 typos in there. The end was too condescending also I’ll admit. Article had more good than bad.
Halifax Resident .. And you please re-read my comment . I made no mention of foul play but feel this is an “unexplained” situation .
The cabbie changed his story in a material manner . Confessed to robbing Holly didn’t he ? and immediately returning to the location of the robbery ..Changing a story in such a situation .. Are you comfortable with that ?
In the US if someone ends up dead during a robbery then the charge is —Guess what ???
It is hard to see how she could go from the robbery location to where she ended up without not being seem by the cabbie isn’t it ? Northridge road has a fence on one side and buildings on the other side . The cab was on Nova Lea ,top of Northridge, then went back down Northridge . How could a pedestrian not be seen by someone watching the only route with the intent of interacting with her again ?
Why did he want to interact with her again ? What was the motive for that ? The article wasn’t clear on that point …
Whether or not Holly was “too drunk” has very little significance to
this story. Also, noone is assuming that she was murdered. Holly was
amazing at navigating and its difficult to beleive that she got so
lost, she had only had a few drinks over the span of many hours. I am
blind and I often find that The general public often assumes that I
don’t know where I am or where I’m going even though I usually am
fine, especially in places I am familiar with like my apartment
building. When I’m lost I ask for help, stop and think and problem
solve. The real problem here is that the police acted on their own
assumptions, stereo types andignorence. The investigation was not completed
properly. The second issue is that the cab driver did not do his job
and the company he works with did not penalize him or discipline him
for his negligence or theft. It seems as though the cab company feels
worse for the driver than it does for Holly or her family which is
completely unacceptable. It doesn’t matter if he has had complaints
against him in the past; he lied to his boss and to the police in the
suspicious death of one of his customers, that alone should be enough
to have him dismissed, its simply a business decision. I refuse to
use casino taxi until he is dismissed
from his position and I encourage everyone to do the same.
Well said Runner27. I also made a comment earlier that I would not use Casino Taxi for the same reason – that they have not disciplined or dismissed a driver who has admitted to stealing from a customer. My earlier comment seems to have been removed from this board.
I work in the downtown core and would regularly see this young woman either going to work or from work. I remember how nervous I was for her, being that she was clearly blind and there was no one there to help her. It didn’t take me long to realize that she wasn’t in need of help or in any way “helpless”. She navigated the streets just as well as I did and better than a lot of others I have seen downtown walking the streets. One day she happened to be in front of me as I walked from Brunswick Street to Barrington Street and I can use no other word than to say I was in awe of her. She knew where she was going, she was street/traffic smart. There was never at any point that I saw her waiver or that she appeared to be nervous or unsure of herself, which is why when after hearing the story on the radio and then catching it on the evening news and seeing her face, I have no other words to say than that I was shocked. How could someone who could not see but yet navigate the city the way she did get “turned around” when all she was doing was simply getting out of a cab that was letting her off right in front of her home? Something is missing here, whether she had a few drinks, was intoxicated or not. It just doesn’t make sense and it never did.
Halifax Regional Police chief Jean-Michel Blais gets a “D” in simple math if he thinks that “0.2% (blood alcohol)…is a lot for (a 95-pound person)”.
In fact, being a percentage, it’s the SAME concentration of alcohol for a 95 lb person, as it is for a 320 lb linebacker. Of course, the linebacker would have to drink 3-4 times MORE in order to achieve this concentration – so our chief gets it doubly wrong.
It’s been in the news that Nova Scotians lag behind the nation in math skills. I did not think this applied to our police force.
Excellent story Tim. Great writing.
If .08 is the cutoff for drunk driving, wouldn’t .2 be twice the legal limit and then some?
Also, I’m pretty sure ALL unsolved crimes have theories and holes that you can drive a car through, that’s why they’re theories and unsolved. As well, investigators like to withhold key details from the public on the off-chance that it could be used later to solve a crime. There have been a few murders solved in recent years in NS that benefited from the withholding of information to some degree.
Words like “believed” and “surmised”; she “may have” etc. have to be used by the police for what appears to me, pretty obvious reasons when dealing with an unsolved murder.
Ten Drinks
With a Blood Alcohol Concentration of 0.2, most people experience a “blackout,” having no memory of all or part of what happened during the period their Blood Alcohol Concentration was at this level. In younger people, this level can be fatal.
from http://addictions.about.com/od/substancede…
Someone who will rob a blind woman is capable of ANYTHING.
I knew Holly pretty well. Her O and M was very good, however clearly she was somewhat impaired. She would have had no visual references for where she was, esp having lost her cane. Disorientation happens to blind people. – I know because I am – Not sure there are answers to be found here – they probably went with Holly. My hope, is for her family and friends to find peace with this tragedy. Holly was full of life and would want people to go on living their life, I’m pretty sure
For those making the assumption that the blood alcohol reported in the story is accurate, I would suggest you wait for the facts. This is yet to be determined and trying to extrapolate forward or backward in this case is just useless. There are far more variables that need to be taken into account and Chief Blais failed to consider them before he made such a ridiculous public statement. The facts suggest nothing more than a social evening out and basically an early evening. Dinner with a friend, followed by a private social gathering, where a bottle of wine was shared and the Master’s function. 6:00 PM to 11:50 PM, all inclusive. Holly had a prearranged study group scheduled for the next day.
Witness interviews suggest Holy had been drinking, but she was certainly capable of sound decision and normal motor skills. It is important to understand the police base their entire theory on this and it is not backed by toxicology, it was concluded on one person saying she was drunk. When that person was interviewed by the independent investigator in detail, the account is just a little different. So please do not draw any conclusions until all the facts are in. The same goes for whomever commented on “her friends letting her get in a cab”. They did nothing wrong, nor did Holly. Assuming is what the police investigator did!
A police officer in this case has tried to prove a theory, instead of investigating the case. It is not that uncommon; however it is wrong. When important and relative facts were uncovered and handed to police, they theorized even more, trying to substantiate their lack of investigation into the case. It doesn’t mean the police are incompetent, just this individual failed to do the job. There are some exceptionally good investigators within the department, it is just unfortunate one of them didn’t get this case.
The facts speak for themselves:
1. Holly Bartlett entered a Casino Cab, with the intention of getting a ride home to her front door. She did not make it home.
2. The cab driver alleges he took her to her front door, where she paid him for the service. He further alleges, she exited the cab and walked away from her building and he drove off, end of story. Why did he even make a mental note of which way she walked?
3. After prompting from a third party, the police watch the bus video in it’s entirety, which basically shows the cab driver waiting to return to her building. As a result, the police are compelled to interview the cab driver again and now he changes his story and says Holly fell after she walked across the parking lot. He feels guilty, so he returns to the site of the fall to check on her, but she is nowhere to be found. (Remember this is a blind girl and allegedly it is only minutes later.) Instead of focusing on a very suspicious omission by the cab driver, the police investigator adds to his theory that the fall probably added to her confusion. (Are you getting the problem here?)
4. After being confronted by an independent investigator, the cab driver adds another piece to the puzzle and admits to stealing money from Holly. (His fare) He later admits this to police, yet for some inexplicable reason this man, that has lied to police, misled the investigation and admitted to stealing money from the deceased is given a free pass by police! I guess if you want to speculate and theorize, then one must consider what charging the cab driver for the offences would have done to the theory proposed by the police investigator.
5. The article suggests that the police may not have read the cab driver his rights prior the interview. If this was the case, then it is a serious error on the part of the interviewer. It is likely a tape of that interview would suggest otherwise, but it has not been made available in any disclosure.
6. I believe Chief Blais alludes to the fact the cab driver was ashamed that he stole from a “blind” girl. I am not sure if that means he wouldn’t have been ashamed if she was sighted, or if Blais considers this substantiation, but in any case, if you read the police report highlighted in the article, the cab driver claims he did not know she was blind. So which is it? Furthermore, when does a thief gain a conscience and go back to check on the well being of a person they just robbed. If he didn’t know she was blind, then how did he think he could get away with stealing her money?
7. Several items from Holly’s purse were found in a parking space in front of her building; which included her cell phone, some change and her wallet (void of cash). These items were not found where the cab driver’s late admission suggests she fell. How did they get there and who dropped them there. If Holly had dropped them, then why would she not be there trying to pick them up when the guilt stricken cab driver returns to save his victim? Why is she not seen by anyone coming home to her building? Why was her backpack purse with her when she was found and the contents 300 meters away?
8. Holly is found some 300 meters or more away from her building inside a fenced compound. Think about that for just one minute. (fenced compound) Do you really believe she walked that distance in a straight line intentional and unnoticed on a Friday night at or around midnight? Negotiating the many obstacles, tumbling down a side hill, crawling through a hole in the fence, crossing the compound to climb a concrete abutment on her hands and knees to somehow reach the top and just continue one hand in front of the other to crawl off the abutment. This is some serious speculating.
9. If she was lost, dazed, confused, she would have been wandering around in circles, not walking in a straight line. (Read Herrings comments, a trained professional in orientation and mobility) More importantly, why would she wander down the street when she was allegedly delivered to her door. The “Justice For Holly” group conducted a canvass of the area, knocking on 97 doors and not one of those canvassed had been spoken to by police. Two people had come home within a few minutes of Holly’s alleged arrival, yet no one had seen Holly! I would suggest there are many more that could and should be canvassed in that area and just maybe one person might be able to shed some light on this.
10. The police did not find Holly’s cane despite the fact they were on site for five hours and specifically returned a second time to look for her cane. How is it, that it is found by a family friend the next day leaning on the fence, within 50 feet of where the police thought she crawled through the tiny hole in the fence. Did police miss it in their thorough sweep?
11. Four professionals, trained in the skill set of “orientation and mobility”, attended the scene within a few days of Holly’s passing and tried to determine how this tragedy unfolded. They all agreed, the theory suggested by police was not only unlikely, but not even probable. They attempted to share this with police and were quite rudely shut down. The lead police investigator suggested a highly trained team of investigators had conducted a thorough investigation. (Wrapped up in less than 48 hours remember.)
12. Det. Cst. Robinson was handed more than enough information that proved their theory was flawed and she knew it. She was under command of a much senior investigator. They had a person of serious interest that warranted further investigation. This is when they choose to not read someone their rights! Something went really wrong in this case and someone needs to step up and fix it. That someone knows who he is and he should be honest with his bosses before they make anymore public statements that will bring unnecessary discredit to the department.
In my opinion, the lead investigator in this case wrapped up the investigation with unbelievable bias. He quickly assumed that because Holly had consumed alcohol that she was very intoxicated and that she was blind, therefore she must have become disoriented resulting in her tragic accident. It is no secret that he was not happy with an independent investigators involvement and as such he stuck to his theory regardless of evidence to the contrary.
Without doubt, the police investigators in this case failed Holly Bartlett and her family. They violated her human rights and the rights of every unsighted person. The investigation was sloppy and based on uneducated assumptions of a “blind” person’s ability. Had the investigator even bothered to first learn how a “blind” person functioned, who Holly was, her skills and ability, he would have been better armed to investigate properly. I should hope he and those who assisted him would never make the same mistakes again.
This case needs to be reopened and investigated by a competent investigator and interviews conducted by someone who actually wants the truth. You can be certain had this been a police officer’s daughter, accidental death would not be the concluding results, without a thorough investigation.
Based on facts, not speculation and all in my opinion of course.
Justice for Holly member
Even without using science to determine what her BAC was when she died, it still stands at .09 when she was in the hospital, which means she was not legally fit to drive. Based on that, it is easy to make assumptions one way or another, which is unfortunate. Another example of how alcohol can ruin lives.
Oops, should have said “Another example of how alcohol can affect lives.”, not ruin.
The taxi driver first says he didn’t know she was blind, so didn’t think anything of her getting out of the wrong side of the car. Later, he admits to robbing her, so he thought she was that drunk that she wouldn’t notice she was getting the wrong change…or he lied and had realized she was blind?
Did the person who called the cab for her tell the dispatcher they would be picking up a blind person? Most people do inform the taxi service if someone has special needs. Has this been checked?
If she was so drunk she couldn’t manage to get out of the right side of the car, how…and WHY did she manage to lean the cane against a fence? Why would she do that and continue walking without any guidance?
Without the cane, how did she find the hole? Her blood alcohol was only .09 (not confirmed), that’s really not that drunk and a novice can get there in a drink or two, yet she was again too drunk to know left from right, and crawled across a car seat, but not too drunk to maneuver a small hole in a fence that was located quite low?
If she never walked on the side of the street where her building was, how did her belongings get there?
I have followed this case, I knew Holy through her room mate. I only knew her in a small amount. however given my limited knowledge of Holy, I really find it very hard to believe that her death was not attributed to someone. I had worked in the area back in 2003/2004 (area where her body was found). I would have found it difficult back then to access the area as a “non visually impaired” individual. by 2010 access advancements would have been made that would limit access by individuals. has anyone requested video footage from the bridge commission?
There’s a reason Halifax has so many unsolved murders over the years…
Perhaps the cab driver was an informant for the police and that is why he was never investigated properly?
looks like Paul Fraser was involved/ someone probally got piisssssed off big time when that cab that was waiting for holly outside the club got told she wasn’t ready to go.
Who the hell are the people hitting the dislikes on a story like this??? Is it the cops who obviously didnt care at all? Or the obvious person who caused her death? Explain to us how any of these comments on people just trying to get at the truth get any dislikes….qui
Local PD do not investigate. They decide on their version of events and that is the end of it.