Monday, 2 November 2009

Cal Millar's cases

Cal Millar, a former Toronto Sun cop desk master who moved to the Star and is now retired, has a new book about old cases that never got solved.

It is something more former police desk vets should do for The Forgotten, as the new American television series calls them.

The Sun caught up to Millar for a story in today's paper.

Ian Robertson's story says the book is called Find My Killer, published in September and already getting results.

Millar's book includes profiles of 38 Canadian homicides among the 264 unsolved North American cases.

The Sun story doesn't say if one of Millar's Canadian profiles is for the 1975 abduction of four-year-old Cameron March.

The unsolved vanishing in Burlington in the summer of 1975 was the front page story for the first Sun edition printed on the new presses at 333 and it still haunts this former colleague of Millar's today.

Cameron's parents welcomed this reporter into their home, provided the most recent studio photo of their curly-haired son for publication and they posed for a photo on the back steps of their rural home.

If Millar, who now lives in Burlington, didn't research Cameron's unsolved abduction for this book, hopefully he will find time to do it for the sequel he is planning to write.

This blogger suggested the case to John Walsh of America's Most Wanted years ago, but it didn't make the program. It has been 34 years, but some cases are never too old to solve.

A lot has changed since 1975, in police labs and on the Internet.

It is just so wrong that someone out there knows what happened to Cameron and isn't talking.

How do you live with that knowledge?

In a perfect world, there would be no cold cases.

Kudos to Millar, who retired from the Star in 2004, for not forgetting. We are looking forward to reading Find My Killer.

As we've said, a weekly cold case column in the Sun would have been a popular read. Maybe Millar can be talked into a column with excerpts from his book.

Robertson's story says the 326-page print-to-order book, published by Createspace.com, is available through Amazon.com for $21.95 U.S.

1 comment:

  1. The idea of an unsolved-murder column is a terrific idea, in part, because there's no shortage of good material.

    I recently blogged over at cancrime.com about the fact that there are more than 3,400 unsolved homicides on the books in Canada from the past 50 years. At one case/column per week, it would take 65 years just to get through that inventory.

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