Seven Deaths Lead To Canadian Manhunt

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32395, 7 September 1970, Page 13

Seven Deaths Lead To Canadian Manhunt

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) CRESTON (British Columbia), Sept. 6.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police who today found seven persons shot dead in their homes have begun a hunt in rugged timber country for a man believed to be holding a girl aged eight as a hostage.

The suspect, Dale Merle Nelson, aged 30, is believed by the police to have returned to one scene of the killings and removed a child’s body when the police left briefly to warn neighbours. The child was Tracy Wasyk, aged seven, whose body was seen by police in the house, but found 12 hours later and four miles away near Nelson’s car abandoned on a dirt road. String Of Killings Superintendent T. A. Stewart said that the string of ! killings began soon after mid night with the shooting of Mrs A. Wasyk, aged 30, and

her daughter Tracy. A second Wasyk child ran into the bushes and escaped. Mrs Wasyk’s husband, a timber worker, was absent. i The gunman then visited [the small clapboard home of Ray Phipps, two miles away. ! Phipps, his wife, and three ■ children—Paul, aged 10, Brian, aged six, and Kenneth, aged one—have all been found dead in the house.

But eight-year-old Cathy Phipps was missing. The police believe she may have been taken as hostage. Residents describe the terrain as “good for hunting deer but miserable for hunting people ” Nelson has lived the last few months in a small, dilapidated cabin between the Wasyk’s and Phipps’s houses. He knows the country well.

Police have sealed off the West Creston area with roadblocks. They believe that Nelson will attempt an eighthour climb—if unencumbered by a hostage—over a ridge to the main east-west Canadian highway. The search was hampered today by the lack of a track-

ing dog until the arrival late of a German shepherd. In West Creston, a few miles north of the United StatesCanadian border, everybody is carrying a gun. The popu lation of 150 is heavily reinforced by 50 police. Superintendant Stewart said that roadblocks would be maintained until Nelson is captured. Ten Mounties were posted as guards outside the Wasyk’s white three-room house and the Phipps’ unpainted two-room home and would not allow reporters to look inside.

The bodies of Mrs Wasyk and her daughter Tracy were found lying in beds. Tracy was “cut up like she’d been butchered,” Superintendent Stewart said. Phipps’s body was discovered in the door way of his home with his wife’s body lying on the floor nearby. The bodies of the three Phipps children were in their beds.

Nelson was reported by a Creston taxi-driver to have been seen just before midnight last night drinking and playing the guitar at a hotel in Creston,