The Murderer Who Escaped in Montreal Is Still Missing

via CBC & Correctional Service Canada

Remember that prisoner who escaped while serving a life sentence for beating and killing a woman? Well, despite a national warrant for his arrest, 56 year-old Jean-Pierre Duclos is still on the loose and police don’t seem to be any closer to finding him. So, I thought I’d grab my magnifying class and try to find the murderer myself, but it turns out finding a murderer is much harder than I expected. Maybe if I paid $49.95 on a “how to become a bounty hunter or fugitive recovery agent” course, I’d be pro enough to find him, but I’m too cheap for that.

So, I asked a professional.

“The only way you’re gonna get somebody like this is through informants” said Remi Kalacyan a private investigator with spyvip.com.

Damn, thought I had him there.

If I were Jean-Pierre, where would I go?

According to Corporal Luc Thibault of the RCMP, many who flee Canada go to Central American countries where they don’t require passports, like the Dominican Republic. Maybe he went there?

Judging by his past, I wouldn’t put a tactical southern escape past this guy. Back when he was arrested in 1991 for killing 33 year-old Danielle André, Duclos found a way to slip out of Quebec and down to Columbia for 3 months before being captured. At the time, police were alerted by an informant the day after the murder, but refused to act. Why didn’t the police arrest him then and there?

“There are too many unanswered questions,” said the victim’s brother Paul André as quoted in the Montreal Gazette back in 2000. He and his sister Helene spent ten years and over $50,000 fighting with the courts to get the police officers charged for not arresting Duclos while he was in Canada and letting the hunt go on so long. After a $480,000 high profile case, all charges were dropped against the veteran officers from Laval when they insisted that they were protecting their informant.

If I were Paul André, I wouldn’t be too happy Duclos is out there, nor would I feel very safe.

Duclos wasn’t even handcuffed or wearing his prison uniform when he escaped from the Verdun Hospital, 56 km from the Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines federal minimum-security penitentiary at 2pm on May 27. According to Correctional Services Canada spokesperson Serge Abergel, he eluded not only his prison guard, but also several SPVM police officers who happened to be in the hospital at the time.

“This is not supposed to happen,” said Abergel, who said the investigation is ongoing and there is no news to report.

However, he did say that Duclos had been offered release on day-parole on March 13, 2013, but he declined. Day-parole would have given him the ability to spend his days outside of jail before returning to a halfway house every night.

After 20 years in jail, Duclos could have really been rehabilitated and simply saw a small window of opportunity (perhaps even a real window in the hospital) and jumped through it. Or, maybe he had this planned all along.

Without money or a car, Duclos probably didn’t do this alone. He has a recorded history of heavy drug-use, and usually heavy drug-users know dealers who have ways of smuggling things or people across unprotected regions of the US/Canada border—one local route being along the Saint Lawrence river past Cornwall, Ontario and into the US.

If he happens to take that route (fingers crossed he’s not reading this) and is not caught by night patrols from the RCMP, it is up to the US Protection Agency, local police or any other law enforcement agency in the world to look up his “pictures, contacts, details, and habits” through Interpol according to Abergel.

Interpol came in handy when the escaped psycho killer Luka Magnotta was picked up in Germany, or when corrupt businessman Arthur Porter was nabbed in Panama. But those cases were media circuses with an international manhunt angle to keep people interested. In the case of Duclos, the media has been silent since his escape, and at the time of this blog post’s publication, the RCMP hasn’t even put him on their most wanted list.

It’s unclear what, exactly, the police strategy for catching Duclos is. Perhaps they are hoping he will simply wander back to jail. Given the mainstream media’s blindspot for covering this escaped murderer and the lack of protection placed around Duclos during his hospital visit, it doesn’t seem like anyone is all that concerned about this man’s premature freedom. That is, of course, except the family of his victim, who are probably not very pleased about all this.

Follow Joel on Twitter: @JoelBalsam

More on Montreal Crime:

Hey Montreal, Your City has an Escaped Murderer in it.

The Beginning of the End for Dr. Arthur T. Porter IV

The Bloody Return of Vito Rizzuto: Canada’s Mob Boss