was the Tanasichuks’ next door neighbor. It was her baby shower that David had told Darlene Gertley, in their telephone conversation, that Maria was attending on the 16th, as a reason why she wasn’t at home when Darlene called.
Amanda said she considered herself a close friend of Maria’s, seeing Maria a few times a week and speaking with her on the phone even more often. She told the detective that her baby shower had been held in November and Maria had been there. She had had her baby on January 7. On the 12th, she had spoken with Maria around midday and they’d made plans for Amanda to bring the baby for a visit the following day. Maria had congratulated Amanda on the baby and made no mention of any plans to go to Saint John. On the 13th, the baby was sick, so the visit did not take place.
Asked about the state of the relationship between Maria and David, Amanda told the detective that the last time she had seen Maria was on January 4 at the B.J. Breau Basketball Fundraiser, an annual event held in memory of Maria’s son, B.J., to raise money for scholarships. For the first time, David, who enjoyed social events and loved being the life of the party, did not attend. Maria, who did attend, seemed sad and subdued and said that the couple was not getting along well because David was back on drugs again. Maria told her friend that she’d given David an ultimatum—either he got clean or she was going to leave him.
As an aside in their interview, referring to Maria’s passionate attachment to her jewelry collection, Amanda Malley told Cummings that if any of Maria’s jewelry was still in the house, he should consider it a serious problem, because Maria would never go away for any period of time and leave her jewelry behind with David.
After he left the interview, following a hunch born of his long experience with drug users descending into addiction, Cummings visited a pawn shop on King George Highway. The proprietor confirmed that on and around January 16 and 17, David Tanasichuk had been into the shop and, over the course of those visits, he had sold some jewelry outright and pawned a number of pieces of women’s gold jewelry, including several rings and a chain with a pendant reading “#1 Wife.”
It’s a common thing and something Cummings had seen far too much of in his career—the devastation that drug use can cause a family. As the addiction takes hold and use becomes more frequent, the allure of drugs can become so powerful it outweighs duty to spouses and children, dragging users down until they’ve destroyed everything around them. First it’s a bit of the grocery money, then money to pay the bills and the rent, all accompanied by tears and promises to stop, along with endless lies and deception. There is no liar like a drug user.
And it doesn’t stop there. Far too often, a woman will come home to find the house missing a piece of furniture or that the television has been sold to buy drugs. As the need for the next fix comes to control the addict’s life, he or she will sell the car, the washing machine, the children’s beds, their clothes, occasionally even the children themselves—anything to satisfy that craving. And now Cummings was hearing that David was selling or pawning Maria’s treasured jewelry the day after Darlene Gertley said she had last seen Maria at home in her apartment.
There was no way to ignore what he was hearing. Every interview, every report, every story that friends and neighbors were telling him increased the urgency of Cummings’s need to sit down with his friend David and get the straight story.
David’s initial statements and interviews with family, friends and neighbors had raised so many questions. What had been the true state of their marriage in recent weeks and months? What day had Maria actually left? What had she been wearing? What had she taken in her suitcase—clothes for a few days, a few weeks? Had she in fact taken her jewelry? David had mentioned prescriptions, so what had her state of mind and health been? Might she have told him she was going to Saint John and gone to stay with friends somewhere else? If she wasn’t in touch with him, who might she have been in touch with? Could he provide the names and addresses of people she might have gone to stay with? Had he recalled Cathy’s last name?
On January 29, at around 2:00 P.M., three full days after he’d first reported his wife missing, David Tanasichuk came to the police department and sat down with Cummings to give a statement. He had a miserable cold and requested a paper cup as a place to spit phlegm. Before embarking on his questions, to show Maria’s husband that they were taking the situation seriously, Cummings showed David the reports in the provincial papers of Maria’s disappearance, noting that usually the papers don’t react to missing persons so quickly.
“It’s out of character for her, we told them. Run this story,” Cummings said. Then he asked David to start wherever he thought relevant and describe the circumstances leading up to Maria’s disappearance.
David then described in detail how Maria would come with him to his counseling sessions with addiction services and how Maria was reluctant to give him any time to himself, so the counselor had proposed that one of them should get away from the other. He explained that initially he had wanted to stay at his brother Joe’s house, but Maria disliked Joe’s girlfriend and insisted that there would be “too many girls around.” He had also suggested going to his mother’s in Saint John, but again Maria believed that there would be a problem with too many women. Maria countered that she would travel to Saint John instead and stay with her friend Cathy.
David said he had phoned home on the 11th from the pay phone in the lobby of a grocery store to ask if he should get more dog food. She told him that they didn’t need it, they still had half a bag and added that she would be leaving the following day on the bus. Initially, he thought that her threat to leave was just a ploy to make him come home, so he went back to their apartment. When he realized she was serious, they discussed her plan to leave. He told the detective that Maria thought it would be better for him to be at home where people were around who could look after him.
David said that the following morning, January 12, he brought Maria coffee in bed and they discussed her plans—how she was glad to be seeing her old friends and maybe she’d go drinking with them. She already had some stuff packed and she said she was leaving on the bus at 2:00. They promised to always be good to each other. Soon he left to go to his friend’s house to work on his three-wheeler. When he got back around five, Maria was gone. She hadn’t left any note, but she’d said she would be gone about a week and that she’d be in touch with his mother, who lived in Saint John, so he should call his mother if he wanted to contact her.
Cummings asked whether he had heard from her since, or spoken with anyone who had seen her. David said that the closest he’d come to any sighting or word about Maria was that Darlene Gertley claimed to have seen her on the 15th at their house. Since in his version of events Maria had already gone, he thought that this meant Darlene must have been taking too many prescription pills and only imagined it. And no, he told the detective, there were no bank cards or credit cards she might have used that could help track her because he had screwed up their credit.
When Cummings asked for more information about who the person was that Maria had gone to visit, David repeated that her name was Cathy and added that earlier in the month, Maria had had a call from an old friend named Cathy who lived in Saint John. When he’d gone down to Saint John to look for Maria, he’d spoken with a friend who had told him it was probably a woman named Cathy Penny.
Getting down to identifying details, Cummings asked what Maria was wearing on the day she left. David said she was still in her pajamas when he left, so he didn’t know. He did describe her yellow and black winter jacket in detail and agreed that while he knew nothing about women’s pants, he thought she was likely to be wearing jeans and hiking boots. He told Cummings Maria would have had over eight hundred dollars with her, money she had taken (David actually said that Maria had stolen the money) from their safe, funds they had been saving for their headstones.
Then he described Maria’s tattoos. On her right breast there was an open locket that
