A Family of Evil

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Started reading this article based on an up and coming investigative exposure of people missing thinking that it might be something along the lines of 411 Missing, yet it wasn't. After reading the dot to connect were like bright targets which can be found in many threads here. It is rather a long story so I'll add the title, link and a number of opening paragraphs. Essentially, the story revolves around a family and their collective involvement in exploiting the elderly and worse in the guise of caregivers.

It is 20 years an unsolved case.


Muskoka mystery

Nearly 20 years ago, four seniors vanished in Ontario's cottage country. Was it murder? The Fifth Estate has the inside story about what police believe happened

By Timothy Sawa and Lisa Mayor
Sept. 15, 2017

http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/muskoka-mystery-missing-seniors/

Shortly after Susan Peleikis bought her dream home, a fixer-upper on the edge of a shimmering postcard-worthy lake in Ontario’s cottage country, she stumbled across something that nearly made her heart stop.

Peleikis had been slowly transforming the ragged edges of the lake that almost encircles her Muskoka home into a lush shoreline garden when her shovel turned over something white and shiny. A closer look revealed a set of false teeth.

It would be a startling discovery for anybody, but for Pelekis it was downright chilling.

That’s because she’d heard the grisly rumours about Siding Lake. Locals believe four seniors who went missing from this area nearly 20 years ago were killed and dumped in the lake.

“I don't want to swim in the lake till I know where they are,” says Peleikis as she points to where she found the teeth at the lake’s edge.

“It's shallow, it's muddy, it's weedy,” adds her spouse, Scott. “You could make somebody disappear pretty easy, right?”


No one has seen the seniors since they disappeared. It’s a mystery that remains unsolved to this day.

“And also the question of why,” says Peleikis. “Why it's not solved, like why are the old people still missing? We heard so many stories. Everybody's got a story.”

There is no shortage of stories, theories or rumours about what's become of those four seniors who went missing from nearby retirement homes in the late 1990s. Nearly 20 years later, almost anyone you talk to who lives near Siding Lake has something to say about the case.

“Oh yeah, people still talk about it,” says Tim Harrow. He lives across the lake from Peleikis.

“I still have friends who won't come up to visit me out here, who live in Huntsville. Everyone has their version on what happened.”

One version of this mystery that’s never been revealed in detail is what the police believe happened.

The Ontario Provincial Police spent years actively investigating the missing seniors, but the force has been largely mum about the details of the case.

In fact, they refused to be interviewed for this story.

So The Fifth Estate and The Walrus magazine teamed up for a joint investigation and went to court to have hundreds of pages of secret police warrants unsealed.

For the first time, we can shed new light on the police theories, including details never revealed before such as a potential motive that could have triggered four killings, an elaborate coverup intended to throw the police off the scent and new information about the controversial family who ran the care homes where the seniors were last seen alive.

II - The family

The Laans are a family of seven siblings who grew up in different parts of rural Ontario. Several, however, have checkered histories that stretch as far back as their teenage years — beginning in the 1970s. And in the Huntsville area, where many of them lived, the stories would grow with time.

One story has one of the siblings stealing skis from the local ski hill. Another has a sibling breaking into the local hospital to steal drugs. There are even stories about the boys cheating at baseball as youngsters.

As adults, however, it went from colourful town gossip to serious brushes with the law.

“It's unreal that one family can have so many criminals,” says Geoff Vander Kloet, a local contractor who knows the family from his dealings in the community.

According to court records, the oldest brother, David Laan, has a criminal record for breaking and entering and theft. His younger brother Walter Laan’s criminal record began at the age of 18 and continued over 24 years — with convictions for property offences, breaking and entering, fraud, and even impersonating a police officer.

And by the age of 25, their sister Kathrine Laan had spent time in jail for drug possession, theft and extortion. Then, in 1997, it was discovered that Kathrine Laan had stolen nearly $30,000 from the Muskoka Christian School. She was the school's volunteer treasurer at the time.

“I think the first word that comes to mind was betrayed,” says Alice Peddie.

Peddie taught at the Muskoka Christian School and was friends with Kathrine before she was caught embezzling money.

“My trust was broken,” says Peddie. “She professed to be a Christian and to do this when you profess to be a Christian is so unchristian-like.”

Kathrine was eventually convicted for fraud, but it was the Laans’ next business venture that landed five members of this family in the middle of a controversy that’s lasted nearly two decades.

Kathrine and her brothers Paul, Walter and David converted three family homes into facilities for the elderly, located in the woods outside Huntsville. Their uncle Ron Allen lived at one of the properties, where he helped with some of the residents.

One home called Cedar Pines was described as a “Christian Retirement Lodge” that offered “attractive, affordable rooms in a cozy homelike atmosphere.”

According to a brochure for the home, services included care from a registered nurse and meal planning by an in-house dietician. There were also the promises of bowling, woodwork, outings and parties.

“[Kathrine] would go to Toronto and find people who had no connection to any other people, really, and she would entice them and say, you know, I have a nice retirement home up north and it's a beautiful place,” says Peddie.

But Vander Kloet says it was a drastically different story inside the homes. He says Kathrine asked him to do some general contracting work on one of the homes and he was shocked by what he saw.

“They weren't in nice condition,” he says. “My dogs have a better place to stay, like a neater, cleaner place to stay than where those people were.”

Then, in 1998, police say one of the residents came forward with complaints about the conditions, and the police made inquiries.

According to police documents obtained by The Fifth Estate, they say they found as many as 11 seniors housed in a single four-bedroom house. Police found bedrooms with multiple beds, and later a realtor would find mattresses on the floor. One resident reported eating Kraft Dinner three times a day, with occasional “boiled eggs from the chickens that were on the farm.”

“[The residents] were hanging out in a little room with a little exhaust fan going,” Vander Kloet remembers from a visit to one of the homes. “They were all smoking cigarettes, playing cards, it was just a little — it looked like a little janitor's shed — just a little messy room.”

The most concerning of the police discoveries was a small, decrepit garden shed located close to one of the homes. The shed looked to be homemade and was built from chipboard. It had little in the way of insulation, no electricity or running water. The door didn’t close properly.

Inside lived an elderly woman with dozens of cats.

“No water, no toilet, no windows, just a little double door,” says Vander Kloet.

“Just something you put your lawn mower in or your rakes or your garden tools. You wouldn't even put anything that you really like in there, let alone a person, to live.”

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