THE STORY SO FAR
In Canada, in the summer of 1997, Wendy Ratte vanished. She’d arranged to meet her hubby Denis, but never showed. Friends and family were convinced the mum-of-two wouldn’t desert her kids. So had she been killed or had she run away? It took 13 years for the truth to come out.
THE CASE
A cabin house in British Columbia, Canada, was home to Denis and Wendy Ratte.
When they met, Denis was a shy French-Canadian labourer, Wendy a free-spirited American art student. But the spark was immediate. They married and had kids – Anna and Gabriel.
Wendy became an art teacher, Denis worked at a lumber mill. Life was good.
‘I always thought of my family and my parents as being perfect,’ Gabriel recalled.
‘I always considered Dad a hero,’ Anna said.
But, in 1995, a work accident meant Denis had to quit. As they fell into debt, Denis gambled to earn money, but he kept losing. In February 1997, he lost over £16,000 in one game. Furious, Wendy told friends about Denis’ behaviour.
But Denis was a proud man, so tensions grew. And, in July 1997, they had a trial separation. But Wendy missed Denis. So she returned, vowed to make their marriage work.
On 18 August 1997, Wendy told Gabriel, then 15, and Anna, 16, she and Denis had some chores to run. But, at lunchtime, Denis phoned home, asking if Wendy had returned. She hadn’t met him for lunch as arranged.
Odd.
Frantic, the family drove around, searching for Wendy, 44. That night, they found her van outside a grocer’s. But she was gone. Anna and Gabriel were devastated. Yet when police questioned Denis…
‘He didn’t strike me as overly concerned, not distraught,’ recalled Detective Judy Thomas. Though he became the police’s chief suspect, there were other possibilities…
At least 15 women had vanished or been murdered along one local road, nicknamed ‘the Highway of Tears’. Was Wendy a victim of a serial killer? She’d also recently stood up to a notorious local family. Her complaints led to them being evicted. Had they taken revenge?
Then police discovered that Wendy had vanished before. At 17, she’d gone missing for months. She was finally found living in a tent, suffering from what doctors believed was drug-induced manic depression. Wendy was sectioned, but fled once more. It was years before she’d got in contact with her family again.
By then, she was with Denis, happy and settled.
But detectives discovered she still had wild mood swings and believed she had multiple personalities inside her – Wendy was the hard-working mum, Shanna the wild child, Oshanna an ancient spirit. Plus, Wendy’s passport was missing. She’d recently secretly applied for a teaching job in California. And, years earlier, she’d dabbled in a spiritual sect, the Emissaries of Divine Light.
So had she – or Shanna, or Oshanna – run away again?
Gradually, though, police ruled out each possibility. Denis remained the chief suspect. Police believed he’d snapped, furious at being outed for his gambling loss. Yet Denis passed a lie-detector test. And Wendy’s whereabouts remained unknown.
The kids were traumatised, and Denis fell apart – struggling for money and turning to crime. But was he tortured by grief – or guilt?
‘I thought he was hiding something,’ Anna admitted. So did police.
Four years later, they reanalysed Denis’ lie-detector test. And experts agreed. He’d been deceptive. But they had no evidence that he’d killed Wendy, had to look for more…
In 2008, police launched an elaborate sting operation. They created a fake smuggling ring.
When approached by an undercover officer posing as a gang member, Denis agreed to get involved, started working for the gang, helping to smuggle stolen goods. He even boasted of earning over £7,000 in three months.
Then the ‘real’ police came back on the scene. They told Denis he’d failed the lie-detector test – was chief murder suspect again.
Horrified, Denis begged his ‘gangland pals’ for help, insisting he was innocent. They agreed to make his problems go away. But only if he told them the truth…
‘The honest truth,’ he said. ‘I never told it in my life. I ain’t happy about it, but I did it. With a rifle, one shot.’
Denis claimed Wendy’s alter-ego ‘Shanna’ was planning to abuse Anna. ‘I had no choice. Save my little girl,’ he insisted. So he’d shot Wendy in the back of the head outside the family home. Then dumped her body, ID and the gun in a swamp. Finally, he’d left the van outside the grocer’s.
The gang ordered Denis to make sure there was no evidence left. But when he returned to the swamp, Denis was arrested. Anna was distraught, but Gabriel refused to believe his dad was a killer. And, after also confessing to the police, Denis backtracked, insisted he was innocent.
He claimed he’d lied in desperation, hoping the gang would ‘fix it so that these cops would get off my case’. In November 2010, Denis Ratte denied second-degree murder in court. The defence argued Wendy’s disappearance remained unsolved. After all, there was still no evidence of murder. No body, gun or ID.
Perhaps she really had run away. Or been killed by an enemy, or serial killer?
But the prosecution insisted Denis had killed Wendy…
Find out what the jury decided on page 2
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