Determination pays off for police in hunt for sex assault fugitive

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This article was published 17/08/2013 (4732 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There he was, behind bars at last, sitting in a dank stone-walled cell in the basement of a Spanish airport.

Two Canadian police officers entered and introduced themselves as members of the Manitoba Integrated Warrant Apprehension Unit.

The prisoner, Iain Kenneth George Smy, knew why they were there — to take him home, to Canada, to face his crimes after two years of hiding.

“I was wondering when you guys were going to get me,” Smy said.

So ended an international manhunt brought to a successful conclusion by a brotherhood of police officers who refused to quit.

Among them, a Brandon police officer who wanted to bring closure for victims who had waited nearly three decades for Smy to answer for what he’d done to them.

Smy had sexually abused three boys during the 1980s while a scout leader and air cadets volunteer. He fled in May 2010, about seven months after being arrested for those crimes.

Smy fled to Europe and the trail seemed lost, but Brandon Police Service Const. Scott Bullee wouldn’t let go.

After decades of private suffering from the emotional toll left by the abuse, victims had the courage to tell Bullee their stories in the hope that Smy would answer for his crimes. Bullee said he wasn’t going to let them down.

“How do you just let it go? … No way, no way,” Bullee said during a recent interview.

Smy was finally captured in Spain in April 2012. On Thursday, the 51-year-old received a six-year prison sentence for the sexual assaults, failing to attend court and failing to surrender the British passport that had allowed him to travel overseas.

But there was a time when it looked like he might get away.

The initial investigation began in April 2007 when one of the victim’s wives phoned Brandon police.

She reported that her husband had disclosed that he was repeatedly sexually assaulted as a youth by his air cadet leader.

Bullee, who learned that Smy had also been a scout leader at CFB Shilo during that same time, put in hundreds of hours on the case.

He tracked down three victims — one still lives in the Brandon area, but another had moved to the United States and a third to Eastern Canada.

In each case, Bullee was struck by how open the victims were about the assaults against them.

They’d kept their secrets for decades, but once Bullee contacted them they opened up and told him what Smy had done.

Bullee was especially struck by the first victim, whose wife had made the initial report.

“He was absolutely truthful, and it had absolutely ruined his life,” Bullee said. “He felt an obligation to protect other youth too, and he was really beating himself up for not disclosing sooner.”

The trust placed in him by the victims would serve as extra motivation for Bullee as he worked on the case.

Smy had left the Brandon area in 1988, and, assisted by BPS Const. Chris James, Bullee tracked Smy to Sarnia, Ont., where he lived with his elderly mother.

In October 2009 — two-and-a-half years after the investigation began — Smy was arrested by Sarnia police on behalf of their Brandon colleagues.

Bullee and James travelled to Sarnia to bring Smy back to Brandon to appear in court.

But the case didn’t end there.

In November 2009, Smy was granted bail to live in Sarnia.

On July 15, 2010, he was to be in Brandon for an important court date — the Crown attorney and his lawyer had struck a deal that would see him serve three years in prison.

Bullee was in court that day — Smy wasn’t — and the officer immediately went about trying to find out why. He’d spent hundreds of hours on the case and built friendships with the victims who had the courage to co-operate in the investigation.

As required by his bail conditions, Smy had surrendered his Canadian passport.

Bullee checked with the Canada Border Services Agency to see if Smy had somehow been issued another passport and slipped across the U.S. border — but there was no indication he had left the country.

The persistent officer then contacted Sarnia police, and they sent someone to talk to Smy’s mom, who said she hadn’t seen him in months.

Smy had disappeared, but how?

“We were at a loss — where is this guy?” Bullee recalled. “Where do you start?”

It was then that Brandon police turned to the media for help.

In November 2010, they sent out a Canada-wide press release and it paid off. Immediately, they got a tip from Sarnia.

Smy had befriended students at a French immersion school and had been playing online computer games with them.

He’d also made friends with a woman who had a 12- or 13-year-old grandson.

Through other students at the school, their parents and the principal, Bullee learned that a yearbook had been sent to Malaga, Spain.

That happened to be where Smy’s brother had a home. Bullee was told that Smy, the woman and her grandson had gone to Spain.

Bullee had an address for where Smy might be in Spain, and he and then-Crown attorney Joanne Maynard secured a provisional arrest warrant.

Bullee had already taken the extraordinary step of contacting Interpol which, with the backing of Manitoba Justice, issued a Red Notice in June 2011. Member countries would be notified of Smy’s wanted status and arrest him if he tried to cross their borders.

A special unit in Spain, dedicated to tracking down fugitives, had also been alerted.

Bullee expected a quick arrest, but that didn’t happen.

To this day, he’s not sure why. He suspects it was because Smy was travelling and language barriers played a part in his ability to elude capture.

It was only later that it was learned Smy had also held a British passport, which allowed his travel overseas.

The trail had gone cold. Every day, at the start of his shift, Bullee would check his computer for good news from Interpol, without success.

His luck would finally change.

The Winnipeg-based Manitoba Integrated Warrant Apprehension Unit was formed in September 2011. Made up of members of the Winnipeg Police Service and RCMP, its task is to track down violent offenders and Manitoba fugitives.

In October 2011, members of the unit travelled to Brandon to meet with city police to find out if there were any outstanding arrest warrants they could help with.

Never expecting the unit to take him up on the offer, Bullee light-heartedly suggested they go over to Spain and get Smy.

To his surprise, the unit’s supervisor, Winnipeg Police Service Detective Sgt. John O’Donovan, contacted him a few weeks later to get more details.

O’Donovan reviewed the entire Smy file and felt the same way about the case as Bullee.

Smy had taken advantage of young victims who would struggle emotionally with what had happened for the rest of their lives.

“Why should this guy literally get away with the trouble he’s caused?” O’Donovan asked.

O’Donovan said Bullee and his BPS colleagues had done all they could.

In the end, the big break came in the form of a single word: Smy’s first name.

Being from Ireland, O’Donovan — who moved to Canada in 1989 and became a police officer — knew that “Iain” was the Gaelic form of that name which was used in northern England or Scotland.

Given that spelling, O’Donovan was curious whether Smy was a British citizen, but learned that he was born in Canada.

However, O’Donovan decided to check on the background of Smy’s parents and learned they were from England and had immigrated to Canada shortly after the Second World War.

Smy, therefore, qualified for a British passport. That’s how he managed to travel, even though he had surrendered his Canadian passport.

It was learned that Smy had a British passport earlier in life. It had expired, but Smy was issued another in May 2009.

With that information, police could now track Smy’s travels. It was learned that he had left Canada in May 2010 and flown from Toronto to Malaga, where his brother lived.

It also appeared that Smy had travelled between Spain, North Africa and England.

His close relationship with his mother also supplied a clue.

She turned 80 in February 2012 and continued to live in Sarnia.

She and Smy were close, so it was thought they might reach out to each other around her birthday.

Sure enough, O’Donovan learned that a call had been placed to Smy’s mom from Malaga around that time.

But investigators needed to know that it was Smy who placed the call because there was information that he was living with his brother at some point.

That prompted O’Donovan to pay a visit to Sarnia in April 2012, to the lakefront home of Smy’s mom.

Smy’s pleasant, elderly mother said she didn’t know where her son was, and didn’t give any hint whether she knew where he might be, but did mention that Smy’s brother had travelled from Spain to visit her for her 80th birthday.

That was the time the call had been placed from Spain to Sarnia. If Smy’s brother was in Canada at the time, it was likely Smy who placed the call. That seemed to confirm Bullee’s suspicions about where he might be.

“I was at the point where I was pretty much convinced that Iain Smy was in Malaga,” O’Donovan said.

“My next problem was how the hell am I going to find him there.”

There were no Canadian police officers in Spain to help out and the language barrier posed a problem because O’Donovan doesn’t speak Spanish.

So, he turned to his Irish roots instead. He contacted some officers he knew back in Ireland, and they put him in contact with an officer at the Irish embassy in Madrid.

That officer was familiar with Malaga and the local police and was able to use his connections.

Spanish national police officers narrowed down the address to one or two based on phone records, Internet use and banking information.

The search had become an international effort by “mid-level” officers. Spanish police were working on behalf of an Irish policeman acting for a Canadian colleague.

“Everybody wanted to catch the bad guy,” O’Donovan said.

On April 27, 2012, O’Donovan sent Smy’s photo and fingerprints to his contact at the Irish embassy in Spain. Three days later, Smy was in custody.

In the end, it was a peaceful arrest. On April 30, members of the Spanish national police knocked on the door of Smy’s Malaga home.

He answered and identified himself upon request.

Bullee heard of the arrest from O’Donovan, who reached him by cellphone, and was delighted.

“It was fantastic,” Bullee said.

“I was really pleased that he was finally in custody.”

Smy didn’t fight his extradition to Canada. Once the deportation order was signed, O’Donovan and his team were notified that they could travel to Spain to get him.

He and a fellow member of his unit took a flight and brought Smy home on June 19, 2012.

The first time O’Donovan met Smy was in the old cell, with its door of made of bars and stone walls, in the basement of the Madrid airport.

Smy told police he wasn’t really hiding — he hadn’t tried to change his appearance or his name.

There was some small talk on the flight back to Canada, O’Donovan said, but Smy slept for more than half the trip and otherwise watched the in-flight movie.

They landed in Toronto. Smy was then moved briefly to the Winnipeg Remand Centre, then sent on to the Brandon jail.

Smy declined an interview request by the Brandon Sun, but has since told authorities that: “I knew it was coming and I would be found because I didn’t change my name. My attitude was — when they come, they come.”

Both O’Donovan and Bullee won awards for their successful manhunt.

O’Donovan, 52, was awarded the Excellence in Law Enforcement medal by the Manitoba Attorney General.

With 20 years at the WPS, O’Donovan has since been promoted to sergeant and become supervisor for that force’s Major Crimes Unit.

Bullee, 53, was presented an Exemplary Service Award by his BPS chief, and a Certificate of Appreciation from the Manitoba Attorney General.

Bullee is set to retire soon after about 35 years as a cop, 25 of those with the BPS. Despite the award for his exemplary effort, Bullee was modest about the part he played.

“I was just doing my job,” Bullee said.

Bullee has joked that at one point in the investigation he spent as much time on the phone with O’Donovan as he did with his wife.

For his part, O’Donovan said he now considers Bullee a good friend.

While Bullee downplayed his role in the search, O’Donovan didn’t hesitate to praise his friend.

“I can’t say enough about that guy, the work he’s done in that community … he’s a hard-working cop.”

» ihitchen@brandonsun.comonsun.com