By Tina Comeau
THE VANGUARD
NovaNewsNow.com
Over the years we’ve heard the name Mary Ann Lamrock many times.
So many times that, to use the cliché, it may seem like just yesterday that she went missing.
But in reality it has been 20 years since Lamrock went missing. And not just since she went missing, but 20 years since she was murdered.
And still, her homicide remains unsolved.
For Linda Lloyd of Halifax, these facts are heartbreaking. Lamrock was Lloyd’s sister, and the sibling says despite the passage of time it’s not any easier to accept that Ann was killed and no one has been charged with her death.
“It’s been a long time, but every time I go to bed I close my eyes and I think about her,” Lloyd says. “It really broke my heart the day it happened.”
Lamrock was reportedly last seen on March 6, 1990. It took nearly two years to find her remains. It wasn’t until three brothers out rabbit hunting found her remains in a wooded area alongside the Oak Park Road. Eight months earlier what appeared to be a shallow grave had been found on the opposite side of Highway 103, not far from where Lamrock’s remains were eventually found. Still, there is no proof that the chilling discovery was anything more than coincidence in terms of its geography.
Through the years there have been many investigators involved in the case, but none more so than Corporal Dana Parsons of the South West Nova Major Crime Unit. On the eve of the 20th anniversary of Lamrock’s death, Cpl, Parsons admits the case has been both baffling and frustrating.
“It just seems like we’re going around and around and around,” he says.
News of Lamrock’s disappearance in March 1990 was sandwiched between other news of the day. Across the province day care workers were staging protests over low wages. A fisheries crisis was bubbling in Yarmouth, Digby and Shelburne Counties where concern over unemployed fish plant workers in coastal communities was prompting public rallies and political rhetoric. On the big screen actor Morgan Freeman and actress Jessica Tandy paired up in the film Driving Miss Daisy. On Yarmouth’s waterfront shift after shift spilled into and out of the Dominion Textile cotton mill. It would be another eight months before the local economy was rocked by the news the mill would be shutting down.
“It’s been a long time, but every time I go to bed I close my eyes and I think about her. It really broke my heart the day it happened.” - Linda Lloyd, Mary Ann Lamrock's sister
Boomtown was not yet busted and Mary Ann Lamrock was no where to be seen.
While they suspected as much early on into their investigation, the police couldn’t confirm it was actually a murder they were probing until Lamrock’s remains were found nearly two years later in the woods off the Oak Park Road and an autopsy revealed she had been stabbed.
Twenty years later in 2010, tips about the case still come in. One of the most recent ones was during the last week of February. But Cpl. Parsons says most of the tips they receive, and it might be two or three a year, are usually treading over ground the police have already covered – and covered more than once.
It’s the same names – and there is about a half dozen that come up – and it’s the same theories, says the veteran RCMP officer. But the people have either already been cleared, or there’s no evidence to link them to the crime. Some are dead, or the theories passed on to the police equate to nothing more than a hunch.
And hunches aren’t enough to solve a case.
