First published April 1, 2012
ST. ALBERT AND NITON JUNCTION - The phone used to ring almost non-stop. Thirty or more calls a day at first, people with tips and information, all wanting to help.
Some calls were from inmates, others from members of the public, or from psychics claiming to have had visions of what happened. Two people flew from the United States and spent days walking in the dense northern forest, convinced they knew where to find the bodies of Lyle and Marie McCann.
The McCanns' son, Bret, drove recently to meet one of those callers, hoping the man might have that one, crucial piece of information that could change everything.
He didn't. They never do. The McCann case is one of Alberta's biggest ongoing homicide investigations, and one of the province's highestprofile crimes.
The victims were a kindly, well-respected couple in their 70s; "gentle souls," as their nephew called them at a memorial service last summer.
"Quiet people who did no one any harm."
Their disappearance in July 2010 remains a mystery, the details of their deaths hidden within the gaps of an unfinished puzzle.
There is their motorhome in flames near an isolated campground, and their SUV abandoned down the road. There is the place they left, and the place where they never arrived.
And there is Travis Vader, a tall 40-year-old with bright red hair and a crooked smile, the only person ever named as a suspect in their deaths, though he has never been charged.
Travis Vader spent most of his childhood in Houston, Texas, with his father, stepmother and sisters, then moved back to the Niton Junction area in his mid-teens when the family relocated.
Ed Vader describes his son as a "fairly normal kid who got into a few fairly normal boy problems," drinking, fighting and using his Texas drawl to full effect picking up local girls. Travis struggled in high school, but made it through, then went to the oilpatch where he quickly worked his way up to become a successful directional driller and oilfield consultant. Travis married a woman from the area. They had six daughters together, and Travis became the stepfather to her son.
But the marriage of Travis and Victoria Vader had problems. In 2004, Victoria took the children - all under the age of 13 - and moved in with her mother. Going home to pick up some clothes, Victoria found the couple's house in flames. She stayed at the Niton Junction acreage for more than five hours watching it burn.
"I'm looking at this as a sign that now my marriage is over," she told the Journal at the time. "This is a new beginning for us. This has been a bad year, but hopefully we'll have a better year next year and in the years down the road."
Travis and Victoria later reconciled and moved to the Okanagan, where they bought a new house in Summerland with a big swimming pool.
"I was basically working my ass off, supporting my family with a good living," Travis said, speaking by phone from the Edmonton Remand Centre. "We had a good life."
