How My Family Learned the Truth of My Aunt’s Cold Case Murder

In the early morning hours of August 4, 2009, a homeless man searching for a place to sleep stumbled onto Montreal's 18th murder victim of that year. Pierre Painchaud was on a four-day bender that culminated with his desire to get out of the rain that had started. He found a small shed behind an abandoned car dealership just outside Montreal's core, and thinking himself lucky—the door happened to be unlocked. It was not until he entered the structure, huddling down away from the downpour, that he noticed the smell—that of decomposing flesh and the remnants of a fire. The source was Pina Rizzi, a woman so petite that when Painchaud first spotted her delicate feet sticking out from a rolled-up carpet, his first thought was that he had found a dead child. Calling the police, Painchaud set in motion a chain of events that would change lives forever—including mine. You see, Pina was my aunt and I'd spend years awaiting justice.

I was 18 years old in the summer of 2009, anticipating going to Laurier university in the fall to study archaeology. On a day that started like any other in that idyllic summer, I prepared to go to my shift at a local call centre after just chatting with my sister in Cambodia over Skype. My father and mother were in Jamaica with my younger brother on a vacation, meaning I was the only one of my immediate family in the country. The phone rang, and the caller ID announced it was my uncle I answered with a cheery, "Hello uncle Tony!" and then fell silent as I heard the first three words that came tearing through the phone line—"they've killed her."

Without any context, I immediately started asking questions and trying to break through his hysteria to get answers. He demanded to speak to my mother and father, and when I explained they were on vacation, the situation only escalated. He began to scream into the phone that he was at the police station and that "she" or, my aunt Pina, had been killed. I've never heard a grown man wail like that—a keening like that of a wounded animal, something so primal, so visceral that I can still hear it to this day if I concentrate hard enough. After telling me to call and tell my parents, he hung up the phone on my tears, leaving a silence so vast it felt like I was choking on it. The first person I spoke to was my sister—I woke her up in Cambodia at 2 AM to tell her what had just happened. I felt like evil incarnate, shattering her world with news like that, but the worst phone call was yet to come. I desperately hoped that when the resort receptionists left messages for my parents, it would be my father's calm baritone that phoned me back. Instead, my mother was the one who frantically dialed me back, thinking I was the one in danger.

I can never and will never be able to describe adequately to someone else the feeling of telling my mother her sister had been murdered. My father has a voicemail saved on his old cell phone of my teenage self, begging my parents to call me back, and my voice is unrecognizable.

Arriving in Montreal was a blur, a veritable grey haze of train rides, cab rides and the final arrival at my grandmother's house. My uncle had been drinking, the grandfather clock mounted on the wall had been shattered when he threw a beer bottle in a fit of helpless rage. He barely looked at me, and often stormed out of the house for hours on end. My grandmother, already frail, looked impossibly lost and sad as her neighbours and friends (most who have known her since she immigrated to Canada from Italy after WWII), buried us under well-meaning frozen casseroles.

Shaking hands with the two detectives assigned to our case was surreal—like a chance meeting with a movie star or professional athlete. I was scared of making some sort of detective faux pas—how long do you shake their hands for? Do you smile? Their hands engulfed mine and sympathetically rested on my shoulders. They asked me questions gently, holding eye contact while taking notes.

The detectives walked us through what they knew at the time, carefully doling out pieces of information while simultaneously asking us to keep certain details (like the sexual aspect of the crime) to ourselves. A sketched out timeline was the only connection I had to her last moments, that and the knowledge that the physical brutality visited upon my aunt had disturbed the officers.

My father was the one they asked to go view the remains, and although he did recognize the jaguar tattoo on her hip, it still took DNA to confirm her identity. Such was the nature of her injuries. After an agonizing two weeks, the funeral was held—but there was no body. The medical examiner still needed to process her remains for evidence. Eventually, my aunt's ashes were spread across the globe by her friends and my family—an attempt to placate her perpetual wandering spirit.

It didn't take long for the media to find us. My uncle worked at CTV for almost 30 years in the editing department, and my aunt's career as a hair stylist and makeup artist meant that her credentials were known in Hollywood and the international fashion community. My parents only gave one interview—to Le Journal de Montreal, pleading with the public to come forward with any information they might have about the night my aunt was murdered. The public was quiet.

At a certain point, when no new evidence is being investigated, a open case becomes the dreaded "cold case." The thought was devastating to my family whose trauma would only be heightened by the perpetual "what ifs" of a case never closed. My mother spoke of how she feared nothing would ever come from the investigation, that Pina's murder would remain unsolved. The detectives told us that to them, the case was never closed—that they "took this one to heart." Regular emails from the detectives to my mother spoke of the way my aunt's case file had a permanent residency on the corner of their desk, a small victory, the smallest of consolation prizes.

In 2013, a second phone call from Montreal turned our world upside down again. The detectives had arrested someone. Jean-Philippe Tremblay had been a soldier in the Canadian Armed Forces living on the nearby base of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu at the time of my aunt's murder, but then had quit and moved back up north to the town of Alma. Local police arrested him in 2013 for an unrelated offence of uttering a death threat at a woman, and after being processed at the local police station—his fingerprints sent an alert to the desks of the detectives in Montreal. Multiple fingerprint impressions taken from the shed back in 2009 were a match to Tremblay's, as was DNA found on evidence and saliva found on my aunt's body. His mug shot sat on my desktop for days. The detectives asked us if we had ever seen him before, did we recognize him, was he a friend of my aunt's—the answers were all no. The faceless apparition that had been haunting my nightmares now had the features of a small ex-soldier, a terribly pathetic villain.

After the pre-trial in 2015, an exhaustive a tete-a-tete between the Crown and the defence in front of a judge, it was determined that Tremblay would be tried in front of a jury on first degree murder charges.

The trial began this spring, with 12 jurors being plucked from obscurity and placed in two neat rows for hours at a time in a windowless courtroom. My family struggled to read relevant meaning in every facial expression, twitch and adjustment of reading glasses.

After opening arguments and presentation of evidence from the Crown, next was expert witness testimony; that of crime scene investigators, photographers, and a pathologist followed in quick succession—one after each other. Their words were always accompanied by gruesome photos, sketches and countless bags marked "evidence." My aunt's life had been reduced to boxes of DNA, bloody clothes, a piece of gum—empty of the woman who was at the centre of this case.

The Crown played the entirety of Tremblay's confession to the jury, almost nine hours of watching him complain about being the victim his entire life, from his adoption as a child to elementary school and beyond. He plays dumb when the detective initially asks him about my aunt, saying "Pina Rizzi? That name means nothing to me [sic]." The jury watched as his initial stories about never going to Montreal fell apart, and the more lies he told to cover up the holes in this story, the more the interrogator closed the noose around his neck. Tremblay eventually confessed to killing Pina, but put the onus on her for setting him off—going so far as to claim it was in self-defence.

CCTV footage of Tremblay and Pina showed her leaving the shed and walking to the end of the parking lot, clearly leaving the scene. Tremblay rushes up behind her in the video and can be seen dragging her back into the little structure and then closing the door. It was excruciating to watch, knowing that she had tried to leave and if he had just let her go, my family wouldn't have to endure this.

The pathologist, Dr. Caroline Tanguay, sat in the witness box and began explaining the wounds my aunt received at the time of her death. Blunt force trauma (most likely with an object like a rock or brick) to the head and face meant that her face was disfigured beyond recognition, even the bones making up her Adam's apple were fractured. Dr. Tanguay continued to explain the process of collecting evidence, swabbing skin, scraping under nails and combing through my aunt's hair to pick up the minutiae of DNA and other particles left behind or transferred.

I felt all the air leave my lungs when it was made clear that due to defensive wounds on her hands and forearms, my aunt was alive and conscious when Tremblay first attacked her. The last few moments of her life were hysterical, visceral and bloody.

The process of going through a homicide investigation is similar to that of Dante's descent into hell, but in this version the towering columns of Satan's realm were made from paperwork, phone calls, files and courtroom procedure. No arms on the backs of the courtroom chairs, no gum, no water, keep a straight face, stay silent. The litany of rules in a Superior Court is meant to show respect to the institution—but for members of the public, for members of my family, they were suffocating.

After the closing arguments were made, the judge instructed the jury on what exactly each charge meant in Canadian court, and to base their decision solely on the evidence they had been shown. On Friday June 16, 2017, the jury found Jean-Philippe Tremblay guilty of murder in the first degree—an automatic 25 year sentence. Factoring in time served, it will be 21 years before Tremblay can apply for parole.

The news crashed into me and took a while to percolate through my system. It has been such a long process to receive justice, that when the jury decided on the guilty verdict, I felt hollow more than anything else. There has always been so many steps left in this story, that at its conclusion, the feeling of being bereft is stronger than ever. I still don't have my aunt to call when I am upset, she wasn't there for my undergrad or my post-grad graduation. All of those moments are meant to be crowning achievements in your life, happy memories to be cherished, but they all have that shadow for me—there will always be something missing.

That is the true cost of Tremblay's crime, not just in the blood he spilled—but in the memories and moments he has taken away from my family and me. Writing about her, and writing about this process is one small measure to keep her memory with me, to speak out on what this experience has done to my family, the toll it has taken. "You never think it will happen to you"—one of the most cliche phrases in the English language, but this time it turned out to be true.

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