Colleagues remember 2 Moncton police officers slain 50 years ago
Little support at the time for officers grieving loss
Fifty years after a tragedy that changed Moncton, police officers who helped search for two of their murdered colleagues are reflecting back on the harrowing scene and the days and years that followed.
On Dec. 13, 1974, two masked men abducted Raymond Stein, the 14-year-old son of local restaurant owner Cy Stein.
Stein agreed to pay a $15,000 ransom and his son was released unharmed.
Moncton police Cpl. Aurèle Bourgeois and Const. Mike O'Leary were working on the case, and reported that they were following a suspicious car as part of the investigation.
It was the last anyone heard from them, as their bodies were discovered two days later in shallow graves.
A remembrance ceremony was held in Moncton on Friday to mark the anniversary.
Lionel Hebert, Michael Boudreau, Ozzie Auffrey and Paul DesRoches all aided in the search spoke with CBC's Information Morning Moncton.
Hebert worked the midnight shift that night, and remembers officers being called back to the station after the missing boy was located.
"Everyone else went back [to the station], but they weren't coming back," Hebert said of Bourgeois and O'Leary.
When Hebert returned at the end of his shift at 8 a.m., he was shocked to hear the two officers were still missing. He and others offered to stay and help search.
"We don't want overtime, we're not going to go to bed. There's two guys missing," he said, remembering the ordeal.
Boudreau said the search was intense.
"You're not scared, your adrenaline is going like crazy," he said.
"We're all out there searching, we're looking for bodies, we're not worried about the two [suspects], we'll get them later."
Hebert said he still believed the officers were alive during the search until a tip came in about two buried bodies. He was there as they were slowly unearthed on Sunday, Dec.15.
"I had to go. I was really screwed up. I couldn't believe that that was them there," Hebert said.
Police later picked up Richard Bergeron, who was known as Richard Ambrose at the time, and James Hutchinson. They were charged with kidnapping, then later capital murder.
For the first time in three days, Hebert went home to his family.
"I hugged my little daughter. She came running to me. I would just break down crying all the time. I wouldn't want to relive it again."
Auffrey said the ensuing days were chaos for the force as everyone tried to resume their lives.
"We all went back to work after we got the last guy arrested. Everybody just resumed their shifts."
Auffrey said the tragedy also changed public perception in Moncton.
"I think it probably woke them up to the fact that it can happen," Auffrey said of the murders.
Boudreau said the timing of the murders just before Christmas was an added challenge.
"Everybody's getting ready for Christmas, and the mood was sober, I found," he said.
"It wasn't till about two days later that your body realized what happened. That's when you break."
Hebert added: "PTSD didn't exist. They never called it PTSD, we didn't know what to call it."
While Christmas used to be his favourite time of year, an annual depression set in each year after the tragedy.
"The minute the 13th came along, that's all I was thinking, and you just don't get over it. You don't," Hebert said.
All four officers were only in their early 20s at the time, leaving a mark on their young policing careers.
DesRoches wasn't only an officer, but Bourgeois's son-in-law.
Christmas was a blur that year, he said.
"I was just a kid at the time, just 22, getting onto the police force. It just set the whole world upside down for us."
Boudreau agreed.
"You're more aware of your surroundings. You took note of your surroundings," he said. "And you never took anything for granted."
While Bergeron and Hutchison were originally both sentenced to hang, their sentences were later commuted to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years, after Canada abolished capital punishment in 1976.
A few days after the search ended, Hebert went by another officer's house to pick him up for work and noticed two Christmas trees in the driveway.
"He said one was Aurèle Bourgeois's. He had cut it for Aurele and he was going to give it to him," Hebert said.
"And we were sitting in the car and we both started crying. We stayed there half an hour, crying, with the police car running."
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With files from Information Morning Moncton