the day to collect all the guns and ammunition in the house, to be held until Maria’s return. David handed over four guns and ammunition, stating that that was everything they had.
Back at their offices, the detectives met in the conference room with their supervising sergeant, Paul Fiander, to discuss the case, sharing the information each of them had gathered from all sources, including David Tanasichuk’s interview, and testing the information David had supplied against that which had come from other sources. Once it was all out, they would decide how to proceed in their search for Maria Tanasichuk.
In evaluating the state of the couple’s relationship, the detectives shared what they had learned from Maria’s friends and neighbors—that while David and Maria had been a couple seemingly very much in love, since B.J.’s death Maria had experienced long bouts of depression, making her emotionally unavailable, while David had increasingly taken refuge in drugs. His drug use, in turn, had made Maria hyper-vigilant and suspicious. She wanted to know where he was going whenever he left the house. She had taken to inspecting his body, his pockets and even his socks when he returned home, looking for drugs, drug paraphernalia or signs of drug use. Maria was willing to do anything to help the man who was, witnesses told the investigators, the center of her universe. A man she had been willing to go to jail for, even if it meant being separated from her young son rather than end the relationship.
David’s response to Maria’s anxious questions and her efforts at supervision had been to stay away from home, often for days at a time, so that he could indulge his drug habit without being questioned. His behavior and deteriorating physical condition deeply worried Maria and she had taken to calling his friends to ask if he was with them. To prevent him from using their scarce cash for drugs, she had started hiding their money in her bra.
Despite her many years of total devotion to David, recently Maria had seemed to be reaching a terminal point, according to those closest to her. She told friends that she had grown sick of the arguing, the fights, David’s absences, drugged-out hazes and deception. After David had been too stoned to get off the couch and attend B.J.’s memorial fundraiser on January 4, Maria announced she’d had enough.
Something detectives do when they’re dealing with a crime victim, or, as in this case, where all they knew they had was a disappearance and thus a suspected crime victim, is to build a profile of the victim so that they know what would be her typical behavior, habits and routines. This profile, known as “victimology,” is created by speaking with people who knew the victim, as well as from information learned from searching the victim’s dwelling and reviewing phone, computer and other domestic records. In Maria’s case, where they knew that she was housebound and didn’t use credit cards, have an employer or own a car, their information came primarily from speaking with her sister, her niece, close friends who were regularly in touch and her neighbors.
From these sources, they had learned many details about Maria that didn’t mesh with what David had told them. Maria’s niece and her best friend both told investigators that Maria was deeply attached to the little red devil bear that had been her last gift from her dead son and would never leave home without it. David himself had said that Maria kissed it every night and couldn’t sleep without Baby B on her pillow.
Multiple witnesses confirmed Maria’s attachment to her apartment because it was where she had spent so many years raising her son. Because of her fondness for B.J.’s memory and his possessions, people told the investigators, she was very unlikely to be willing to leave the apartment for any length of time. Her niece reported that after Maria and David had journeyed to Saint John for her wedding, a trip on which Maria had taken her little bear and her “sooky” blanket, Maria told people in Miramichi that she wasn’t interested in ever going to Saint John again.
It was not just her attachment to the apartment that made Maria’s reported decision to go to Saint John so suspicious. Maria’s former sister-in-law, Cindy Richardson, told investigators that when she was at the cemetery visiting B.J.’s grave, it was untended. Maria had been very faithful about that.
Maria’s next door neighbor, John Paquet, an avuncular former military man who hunted with David and was very fond of Maria, reported that Maria had explicitly told him that if one of them were ever to leave, it would have to be David, because the place held too many memories for her.
Cindy Richardson had told Cummings, “Darlene Gertley called me and said she was worried about Maria and had I heard from her? I’d called Maria on the 11th, because the week before was [the fundraiser] and I know she was in bad shape then, and she told me Dave was back on the shit again, and she wanted to get back home to check on Dave, to see if he was still home, worried that he’d taken off. So she didn’t want to hang around and talk to people…Maria was real rundown looking. She had circles under her eyes and she was so stressed out and she hadn’t slept for days and who knew if she ate? And I hugged her and kissed her and said, Maria, call me anytime, you know. I’ll be there for you. So on the 11th, I called her, and that’s the last time we talked.
“So Darlene and I figured it had been enough time, and the first thing I thought of was, “I’m calling Saint John. So here I am calling up Saint John…I think this was the 23rd or something. And I told mum Maria was supposed to have gone to Saint John, and mum said, ‘Funny, I haven’t seen her. If Maria’s in town, she’ll surely come to see me or [her brother-in-law].’ So mum said she’d get [the brother-in-law] and Billy to go around and check up with old friends if anyone had seen her. And nobody had seen hide nor tail of her.”
What investigators are looking for, in the case of a missing person, is whether she has departed in significant ways from her usual behavior. Nearly every aspect of the story David was telling them marked a significant departure. It seemed unlikely to the investigators that Maria, who spent days at a time huddling in her pajamas on the sofa and who was so strongly attached to her apartment, would suddenly decide to leave town. It seemed improbable that a woman who regularly spoke by phone to her sister, her niece and her close friends and visited with them frequently would leave town without a word to anyone, or that she would be gone for two weeks without being in contact with anyone she knew either in Miramichi or in Saint John, where she still had many friends.
It seemed suspicious that a woman who, only a little more than a week before her sudden departure, had consulted her doctor for medicine to help her with anxiety and depression would leave town without it; yet David had given the medicine bottles, one barely touched, the other empty, to Cummings and reported that she’d left them behind.
Investigators found no one who knew of Maria taking any trips without David; just a week before, despite her discouragement and depression and the fact that they had been arguing frequently, Maria had been fearful of leaving David alone when he might need her and she had refused to leave for a mere three days with her best friend, Darlene.
Given how attached to her jewelry collection her friends said that Maria was, they felt she would never leave her cherished jewelry behind. Even David had said she wouldn’t do that. Yet immediately after the last date on which anyone had seen Maria, David had been pawning pieces of jewelry that he specifically told Detective Cummings that Maria had taken with her.
And then there was that small, but telling, comment that Paul Fiander had noticed while monitoring Tanasichuk’s interview with Cummings from another room. During their discussion about Maria’s jewelry, her attachment to it and her habits about wearing it, Tanasichuk had said: “…See, Maria was the type where one week she’d wear them all and the next week she’d wear none or just a couple.” Maria was. David had not used the word is, suggesting a present connection, but was, suggesting that Maria, and her choices about what jewelry she would select and wear, was a thing of the past. This comment acquired greater significance when meshed with what they were learning about the fate of some of Maria’s jewelry. In his book on statement analysis, I Know
