Original subtitles

St. Joseph Island is a very isolated area.

Anything could happen down there and you wouldn't see it

or hear it.

They told him that you don't want to go down there.

If you go, you probably won't come back.

There was a cabin.

And inside that cabin were miserable living conditions.

The first thing that we found was a human finger bone.

The second thing

was an elbow joint.

That was the worst thing to hear.

No one deserves what happened to her, no one does.

I'm so sorry.

At the time of this investigation, I was the area

crime supervisor.

David Lopez was a man with a mission, and he was here

looking for his daughter who went missing on

St. Joseph Island.

Their last known location was at a cabin

on a remote piece of property in Canada.

I knew

that I had to send a detective over there.

It's very, very remote. You can't drive there.

There's bog and marsh and water and trees and stumps.

And you have to walk up this road to get to the cabin out in

the middle of the bush.

That officer

had to walk in there in the dark.

It was mire, mud.

There's so many pitfalls and dangers out there.

But he got there.

The property, it almost looked like what you would see in

a horror movie.

That officer is in there in the dark.

But when he was at the cabin,

he wasn't alone.

The first time I ever saw Melody Lopez, it was 1993

when she had just moved and she had just gotten to

school for the day.

Melody came in and was stunning.

Absolutely gorgeous.

Black hair, dark lipstick, and I was just like,

that's gonna be my friend.

Me and Melody were both 15 so we went to the mall.

We went to the arcade.

Every day, she introduced me to new music, to new ideas.

Melody always wanted everybody just to be themselves.

Me and Mel were together every day for that whole summer.

Melody was

actively present in my life for six months,

but then she moved.

When Melody was a teenager, her parents split up.

So Robin moved to Eugene, Oregon.

And they decided that Melody would live with David in

Columbus, Ohio.

Melody was his only child. David was crazy about her.

I mean, he just thought she hung the moon.

And they had a really special relationship.

When she moved to Columbus,

we kept in touch for so long, for years.

We would write letters back and forth,

send each other pictures.

She found a lot of really great friends when she moved to

Columbus, and they were all very punk.

Melody always took and accepted everybody for who they were,

and I think that's one of the other reasons why she was

so drawn to the punk community, because they were themselves

for themselves, and didn't care about what

other people thought.

I talked to her one day, and she said she had planned to

go down to Mardi Gras.

And I was like, that sounds so cool.

And I was like, "Melody, have fun.

Be safe. Let me know when you get back."

So I remember when she got back, Melody didn't talk about

the boys she met. She met boys all the time.

But Melody met Shawn, and she didn't talk about

anything else that trip.

I didn't hear much about the trip.

I heard about Shawn and how great he was and how cute

he was, and she was excited.

She really was dead set on him from pretty much

the very beginning.

Like, she knew that he was her one.

She had found her one person.

She said, "We're gonna settle down in Oregon, get married,

buy a house, all the fun stuff on the beach."

And then I learned that she was pregnant.

I was so excited when she said that, because I'm like,

we're gonna get to be grownups together.

We're not gonna be kids.

Our parents aren't gonna have to drive us around to visit

each other.

They don't have to pay our phone bills.

We're gonna be grownups, and we can see each other

again, and we can visit.

I wanted me and her to have our babies together and grow

up, and it made me very happy. But Shawn and Melody had a plan.

Her dad was a free spirit.

He had a history of hitchhiking all over the country.

David used to hop trains, and that's something I never

would have done.

But he told us stories about that.

And Melody wanted to experiment with that, like David had done.

Shawn and Melody were planning to go see Shawn's parents

who lived in Ottawa.

They would hitchhike through Canada,

maybe hopping some trains to save money, and then go to

Eugene, where my sister Robin was living.

That was the plan. That's what she told her dad.

That's what she told Robin. That's what they planned to do.

I don't know a lot about Shawn.

I only spoke to Shawn once for a moment,

but, uh, he made me feel worried.

That trip was going to be their last big adventure before

they settled down.

And then time starts passing, and Robin and David are not

hearing anything from Melody.

They're not getting any more phone calls, none.

She would call David every three or four days and always

let him know where she was and who she was with.

When she fell silent, that sparked something

in David. You just get that intuition.

So David's wheels were turning.

David started his own investigation to

track her down.

David was talking to Shawn's parents, trying to figure out

what to do.

David went all over Columbus looking for

Melody's friends to talk to them and see if anybody had

heard anything, and nobody had heard.

It's just silence.

They were in communication with Shawn's parents, too.

They had silence from Shawn, no phone calls.

None.

It was extremely frustrating, because what were they to do?

What was Robin to do?

She's in Eugene, Oregon, waiting for

her daughter to

you know, suddenly appear there.

One day, I talked to Robin, her mother, where she told me

about someone who showed up at her house.

His name was Chris, Chris Rogers.

Chris had told Robin that he had been traveling with

Mel and Shawn.

Robin asked where Melody was, and he got cagey.

That's when Robin knew something was definitely wrong.

Chris had said he left them

in a cabin.

Not a nice place, nothing nice. Scary shack.

He had said that you don't want to go down there.

If you go, you probably won't come back.

The last we heard, Shawn was taking Melody to meet

his parents, and this guy, Chris Rogers,

turned up at my sister Robin's house

in Eugene, Oregon.

Chris was an interesting character.

He was pretty rough around the edges.

And he basically said that Melody and Shawn were traveling

together with him.

And so they were hitchhiking outside of Ottawa,

near where Shawn's parents lived.

Chris Rogers was a drifter, a skateboarder.

Chris Rogers described himself as a friend of Shawn's.

Melody mentioned several of her friends,

but she never talked about Chris.

Robin had a really hard time because she didn't know if

Chris was being honest.

Chris said they had hitchhiked to Ottawa, and started

hitchhiking west to Sault Ste Marie.

There's an international rail line there that

crosses the border.

And they were going to pick up a train there and then head out

to the US West Coast.

According to Chris, it was around August the 4th,

1999, when they'd been picked up by a man in a truck whose

name was Robert.

They rode with him into the night.

He was financially flush enough that he looked after them.

He stopped and got 'em snacks and something to drink.

You know, everything seemed fine.

He seemed really sweet.

During this time, the driver of the vehicle, Robert,

he said, "Well, we live in St. Joseph Island and that's

really close to Sault Ste Marie, Ontario.

Why don't you come up?

He talked them into coming to his cabin.

They were gonna celebrate his younger brother's birthday.

They were gonna have a party and these are all young people.

And he invited them to come and stay with him,

come and take a break, relax, come for the party.

And they decided to do that.

I don't think they for one minute believed or knew how

remote it really was.

St. Joseph Island is a very isolated area.

The forest is so dense and it goes for miles and miles.

Lots of trees, lots of old camp roads that wind in and out

of the bush.

Anything could happen down there and you wouldn't see it

or hear it.

To get to the man's cabin...

...you can't drive there. You go up and the road ends.

And they had to walk a mile up this trail.

It would be the very early hours of the morning of

August the 5th.

They get to the cabin.

The driver of the vehicle, Robert, his cousin and brother

were there.

The property was 100% isolated.

They had a generator, but there was no hydro,

there was no water.

Chris said they had a big bonfire going, everybody was

having a good time.

The next day, they had a lovely day.

From what Chris said, they hung out,

they had some beers.

They were a hunting family, so they played some

target practice.

And the decision was made to stay one more day,

continue the party.

There was a lot of alcohol flowing one evening

and Melody was tired and had gone into the cabin.

Chris had said Melody went to bed then.

I can imagine Melody thought one more day of rest and then

they were leaving to head home.

It would have been around 8 o'clock at night

when they ran out of alcohol.

And about 9 o'clock that night, the guys decided that

they needed more beer.

And it was cheaper and easier, apparently, to go across

the border to get it.

The United States is

minimum 45 minutes away.

Melody was left at the cabin,

and Robert went with Chris Rogers and Shawn Barrett.

When they get to the border, Shawn didn't have

his passport with him.

He got left on the Canadian side and Chris Rogers

and Robert crossed over into Michigan,

made alcohol purchases.

Chris Rogers was an American and had a minor record from

the United States.

And because of that, Chris Rogers was not allowed

back into Canada.

So he was turned back, sent back on the American side.

Chris was left to make his way across the United States to

Oregon, and Shawn and Melody were gonna follow.

But apparently Shawn and Melody had never made it there.

Melody's parents did not have the full story.

And they had

absolutely no idea anything more other than the story that

they get from Chris Rogers.

It was heartbreaking that they didn't know where she was.

Was she still

at that cabin, or had they moved on?

Were they still hitchhiking? What had happened?

Nobody knew.

If it was true, Shawn and Melody were left here

in Canada

at a cabin in the middle of the bush.

And they had no idea who these people are

or what they were capable of doing.

David wanted to file a missing persons report.

And he tried to file in Canada because that's where he last

heard from her.

And they said, "Well, but you live in Columbus

and she's from Columbus, so you have to file there."

And so he tried to file in Columbus, Ohio.

And then he was told, "Yeah, but she's headed to

Eugene, Oregon, so you have to file with Eugene, Oregon."

Even though Melody had never been there, she was just on

the way there.

It was sort of like they were getting the runaround a lot.

The police were saying, "She's an adult.

She's not missing. She's just running around."

Shawn's parents had the same issue.

David was aware that she'd been on a remote piece of property

in Canada with a man, but they had

absolutely no idea anything more other than

his name was Robert.

I was working as a reporter, and I received a call in

the office that there was someone down on St. Joseph

Island who was looking for their daughter

and putting up posters.

He had contacted various police agencies.

But had been for months.

However, nobody was really listening.

Because David, I think, is from outside of Canada, I don't

think he knew all the places that he could go, what was

available to him.

So he was going to the wrong places.

And they weren't always able to give him information either.

It was December of 1999.

David was about to give up, and went

to the border crossing again.

David was lucky enough to meet the same border guard that was

working the night that Chris got turned back.

So he remembered Chris.

The border guard remembered that whole incident because it

wasn't a pleasant one.

So because David had the date and all the information from

Chris, the border patrol guy looked it up, and that's how

he was able to find the full name of the person they were

with, Robert Armstrong.

And he had a cabin on St. Joseph Island.

David wanted to go right now, wanted to go to the cabin.

But he was told that Robert Armstrong had some records of

sexual assault.

They were not people that you just happened to go by

and knock on their door.

David was told at the border to go to Ontario Provincial

Police, which covers outlying areas from municipalities.

The population is sparser,

and St. Joseph Island is their jurisdiction

and that they would be able to help.

The OPP is similar to a state police force.

He didn't even know that the OPP existed, didn't know

anything about it until then.

We knew the cabin. We knew the people.

David Lopez was a man with a mission.

At one point, I remember David saying, "I thought maybe she was

being held hostage somewhere."

So immediately, I assigned a detective to go to

the Armstrong property

and see if anybody's there.

That officer was Detective Jason Nickel.

Detective Nickel had to walk in there in the dark.

It was mire, mud.

There's so many pitfalls and dangers out there.

Amazing he got in there without getting hurt.

There were wrecked vehicles in the yard at the man's cabin,

and they got wrecked on the road

trying to get in there.

There was a wood stove inside the cabin, but there wasn't

much firewood around,

and it was cold.

When Detective Nickel got there, it looked like Robert

Armstrong was no longer there.

There's no one else at the camp.

The cabin had beds and mattresses and blankets,

but that wasn't all.

When Detective Nickel

was sent to the Armstrong property...

...inside that cabin was Robert Armstrong's younger brother,

Richard Armstrong.

Richard is there alone in December

under miserable living conditions.

Richard was 19 years old. He was vulnerable.

He was young.

He eventually told police that Robert and Dale McCrae,

the cousin, left him at the cabin for the winter.

Detective Nickel asked about Melody, Shawn, and Chris

being there, and response was, can't help you,

never saw them, don't know who they are.

From being a police officer, Jason learned to take

their story, listen to them, write it down,

and then when you're done,

you can confront them with their lies.

And then Jason said, "I think those people are still here."

And then as Jason pressed him,

Richard actually turned around, and he said, "If my brother knew

"I was talking to you,

he'll kill me too."

And that was suspicious.

He wouldn't say what happened to those two kids because

he was concerned about his life.

We, at that point, ensured him of his safety.

And we took Richard Armstrong into protective custody.

We put him up in a motel, and we left an officer with him

at all times throughout the initial stages of

this investigation.

We knew we needed extensive work and further interviews.

We needed scene examination. We needed scene security.

We didn't know where Shawn and Melody were, but we had

information that they had been there, that there was

a disruption at the border, that Chris Rogers, who was part

of the traveling companionship, had said Melody was left

at the cabin.

We had enough information to conduct a more exhaustive

investigation at the Armstrong property.

We undertook a search in the area.

It's a good-sized island, but it's a prime hunting area.

And the Armstrong cabin was nowhere near any cleared fields

nor farm fields. It's dense, thick, heavy,

bush. We couldn't find them.

And then we literally moved old, rotten, dead trees

and threw them to the side until we got to what looked

like was a makeshift grave. and we just peeled back the top,

and then we found the first bone.

My name is

Scott Fairgreave.

I am a PhD forensic anthropologist.

I interpret skeletal remains by essentially building up

a biography of the person in life from the bones--

a bone biography.

I came out to the scene because police had never seen anything

like this before.

It was at that point we could say the bone was a finger bone.

But then I focused directly on the fire pit that,

shall we say, got my full attention.

It's had so much debris in it. There wasn't just ash and logs.

There's a cardboard box sitting in it, full of ash.

What is all the metal debris that is inside?

Nothing about this looked typical, looked right.

It's wintertime.

We had tents set up over top of the fire pit with propane

heaters running inside the tents trying to

thaw the ground

so we could excavate just even the fire pit.

Then myself and another officer, we started with

shovels and we dug until we found another bone.

The second thing eventually uncovered in the fire pit

was an elbow joint

that had been crushed in place.

We have to dig deeper.

Once we had melted the ground,

uh, it was producing a lot of bone, but it was fragmented.

I could say that we had remains that represented

a young male

and a young female, young adults.

But as far as a positive identification was concerned,

it wasn't possible.

So the big question in my mind was, as we were doing that,

who died, where did they die,

when did they die,

and what was the manner of death?

Robert Armstrong's younger brother, Richard, was brought

back to the scene.

And seeing what the remains were on the property,

and we pressed him again.

Richard immediately broke.

And a statement subsequently followed with what we believe

to be the truth.

It was the very early hours of the morning of the 6th

of August, 1999,

when Robert and Shawn got back from the trip

across the border,

Richard Armstrong, his cousin Dale McCrae,

and Melody had been asleep in the cabin.

Robert had developed an interest in Melody.

Robert Armstrong had made a comment to Shawn about wanting

to have sex with Melody, and she's pregnant and it won't

matter now anyway.

Shawn took offense to that, and a fight ensued.

Robert Armstrong took a shovel

and hit Shawn with the shovel.

Robert then went,

retrieved the gun that had been out during target practice

earlier in the day,

and shot Shawn dead.

Robert Armstrong tells Dale McCrae,

"Grab his feet, help me throw him on the fire."

Dale McCrae and Robert throw Shawn Barrett on the campfire

and throw a whole bunch of firewood on too.

Robert still had the gun.

He wakes Melody up, tells Melody, "Shawn's outside,

he wants to talk to you."

Melody walks outside and says to Robert Armstrong,

"Where's Shawn?"

And Robert Armstrong tells her, "Look in the fire."

Melody turns around saying, "Don't kill me, don't kill me,

please don't kill me, I'm pregnant."

Robert Armstrong pulls a gun out and shoots Melody.

Richard Armstrong said that they put her body

into the fire pit as well, and then they proceeded to burn

all of Shawn's and Melody's possessions in that fire pit.

We found in the pit itself, all sorts of artifacts,

but we found a bracelet,

uh, that had some sort of a Hindi script on it.

It was badly charred and bent by the heat.

And as it turns out, Melody's mother

has the mate to that bracelet.

They bought them together, apparently,

at some carnival.

The bracelet was key, as it was the most profound piece of

physical evidence supporting an identification of Melody.

That was the worst thing to hear.

She didn't get a chance to hold her baby.

And that her and Shawn didn't get a chance to be

the good parents I know they would have been.

Please excuse me again. I'm so sorry.

Really tried not to let the tears go.

And it doesn't matter how long it's been.

It doesn't get any easier.

I don't think there's any amount of time that I'll be

able to not be upset when I talk about this.

Because she didn't--

No one deserves what happened to her.

No one does.

Robert and Dale were arrested near their home in Windsor,

Ontario in December.

Robert received a life sentence for the first degree murder of

Melody Lopez and second degree murder for the shooting death

of Shawn Barrett.

Dale McCrae, the cousin of the Armstrongs, received six

years for accessory after the fact.

His sentence was reversed on appeal, his defense being that

if he didn't listen, he was next.

If it wasn't for David Lopez

and what he did, Shawn and Melody

would still be missing.

The Armstrongs would still be living their lives,

and no one would know what happened.

That man would never give up.

He'd be looking for her today.

He was going to find his daughter,

no question.

And I don't think David and Robin ever got over it.

Robin passed away

in 2018.

David was ill, and passed away in 2020.

But maybe they are with Melody now.

It was a requirement for Cindy to live in

the middle of nowhere.

Cindy liked to be off in a cabin.

You might not hear somebody scream.

Is anybody going to find me? Are they gonna know how I died?