This teen’s hit-and-run death consumed his small town for 14 years. The truth rocked it

On that Friday night, he walked along Wellington Road 17, the lights in the village of Alma shrinking behind him, northwest of Elora and his hometown of Fergus.

He walked past cornfields, up a long rise in the road, and over the crest.

A light breeze.

And it was over.

Crushed steel. Shattered glass.

A victim of fate, and a man.

All the light and laughter, imagination and the possible, gone.

Gone and forsaken, there on the county road where blood pooled.

The question had lingered in her mind, on the seemingly endless, hour-long drive south to the hospital in Hamilton: what if it is someone else’s son?

And at the same time, she thought, she could never wish this on another.

In the morgue, she stood outside a door and peered through a small window.

A sheet was drawn to reveal his face.

Her kid.

She cried.

The police came knocking, as he knew they would.

When they search for a damaged white Dodge Neon, they won’t find his.

How often did he think about that night?

Did it haunt him, or could he tuck away the images and sounds in a corner of his mind?

That night: had a few beers. Headed for home around midnight, his young son in the back seat. Drove up the rise in the road. Nearly home.

A terrible collision.

“What happened?” the boy asked.

The lie came quick. A plausible one, out there on the dark county road.

“We hit a deer.”

He took steps to hide the truth. He was not an educated man but knew things.

Perhaps he did not consider the big picture.

Could never imagine that what he had done would bring not just a couple of cops to his home, but ultimately involve more than 140 police officers, and trigger a 100-kilometre-wide hunt for his battered car.

Did he realize how beloved the victim was, and that a brazen coverup was not a private act, but sticking a knife in the heart of the family, and an entire small-town community?

That wound would not scar over, but fester with sorrow, anger, and recrimination.

Keeping his secret was not an end, just the beginning.

Earlier that same fall, in 2008, 18-year-old Lucas Shortreed walked late down a darkened street.

This was in Fergus, a town of fewer than 20,000 in Wellington County, about 20 kilometres northwest of Guelph, on the Grand River.

He walked with a girl named Nora Crete.

When she left a party, he offered to walk her home.

Said he was going home too, so no problem.

They walked a half-hour to her house, and then the six-foot-three, 230-pound teen said goodbye, and walked back to the party.

“He just wanted to make sure I got home safe,” she says.

He was born in January 1990 to Judie Moore and Pat Shortreed.

When Lucas was a toddler, his parents divorced. He lived with his mother, and older brothers, Christopher and Marcus, and older sister, Jenneen.

Shortreed is a name with Scottish roots and a long history in town. He grew up on McTavish Street, at Highland Road, near Shortreed Avenue.

Their little bungalow sat on the edge of a downslope that led through woods to a grassy hill, and a cemetery at the bottom.

Lucas tended to wander. At three and a half years old, he headed out to the yard to play. His mother panicked when she went looking for him and he was gone.

Later, she saw him dawdling back up their street.

At four, he took off again, following his brother to kindergarten. His mother retrieved him, and reminded her boy that he was too young to go to school.

The Shortreed name never fit because Lucas was always the biggest kid in his class.

Genial and gentle, he would inadvertently knock down friends playing soccer and basketball. Someone nicknamed him “Piglet,” and it stuck.

In Grade 7 he met Tarique Todd, who became a close friend. 

“He was really loud, you could hear him across the hallway in a different classroom,” says Todd. “I wouldn’t call him a class clown exactly, but there was a lot of energy … A big funny dude.”

And yet Lucas spent many hours on his own, walking, feeling a bond with nature.

Through his teens he spent quiet afternoons with his grandmother, Ilene Moore, who had helped raise him when Judie went back to school. He loved helping her bake muffins and cookies and making jars of peach preserves.

He worked as a cook at Dairy Queen, along with friend Ashley Mackenzie.

“He was just a big, genuine, comfortable guy,” says Mackenzie.

The weather was warm as Thanksgiving 2008 approached.

Students who had gone away to university returned home for the weekend.

Shortreed had been volunteering at a long-term care home, where he started a gardening club for residents.

His future was in a holding pattern, but there was plenty of time for that.

On Friday night, Oct. 10, he headed out with friends to a house party in nearby Alma.

Shortreed was drinking at the party, playing beer pong.

It was nearly 11:30 p.m. Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown” played.

“You guys don’t know Kanye,” Shortreed said, starting one of the playful rants about rap music for which he was known.

He showed signs of being drunk, but was talking and walking with no problem.

He seemed his usual jovial self.

He started wrestling with one of his friends. Shortly after that, one of the parents who was home that night asked him to leave.

Shortreed had a girlfriend, but she was not at the party. He spoke to her on his cellphone, and said he would see her the next day.

He told Todd he was going home.

“Goodnight, man, see you tomorrow,” Todd said. He figured Lucas had called a taxi.

Other friends had full cars.

Shortreed set out walking along a home-lined residential street, and came to a T-intersection at Wellington County Road 17, next to Alma Bible Church.

Home was 14 kilometres to the southeast.

If you were driving to Fergus, you would turn right, head east along 17 to Hwy. 6, and then south.

If you turned left, to the west, you would come to the crossroads in Alma, marked by a convenience store, antiques shop and restaurant.

Did he plan to hitch a ride?

Call someone on his phone?

Or just walk, and walk, and figure it out later?

He turned right.

He walked east, into darkness.

No one would ever forget where they had been when they heard the news.

On Saturday afternoon, Oct. 11, Ashley Mackenzie was working at Dairy Queen.

“My boyfriend called,” she says. “I can still hear his voice. He said: ‘Lucas has been in an accident … Actually he is dead.’ We all started bawling. The boss said to keep working. My mom came in, trying to be supportive to broken-hearted teenagers.”

He had been killed by a hit-and-run driver east of Alma on Road 17.

Friends drove to the crash site that day. They saw blood on the road.

“Huge puddles of blood,” says Todd. “It was imprinted in my mind.”

Judie had a sense something was wrong in the early morning hours, when she saw $20 for cab fare she had left for Lucas on the kitchen counter.

They had done this routine before: upon arrival in a taxi, he would enter the house, grab the money and take it out to pay the cabbie.

But she had noticed the money still on the counter. It was her first clue he had not come home.

Shortreed’s friends gathered at Todd’s house and cried.

Police cruisers pulled up.

Officers said they had to come to the police station.

The friends were questioned in separate rooms. It made some of them angry, feeling like they were being treated as suspects.

Police said it was standard procedure. Anyone who is a potential witness is interviewed.

“We were young and (police) were saying crazy things trying to make you say you did it,” says Todd. “No one knew what was going on. My mom came down and told (police) to get lost, that we just lost our best friend.”

Rumours spread.

Who had done this to Luc?

Did someone kill him on purpose?

Where was the driver?

The forensic scientist trained her eye through a microscope at a minuscule fragment of white paint that she had dissected from a larger sample using a scalpel.

It was Oct. 22, 2008, 11 days after Shortreed’s death.

The paint sample had come from the car involved in the hit-and-run.

The car was missing. The task for the scientist, Gerri Lynn Vardy, was determining the make, model, and year of the vehicle.

The first paint sample police had sent her was taken from the autopsy on the victim.

That sample was less than one millimetre thick. It was from a laceration on Lucas Shortreed’s left hand.

A second, larger sample, measuring 2.5 centimetres, was from the crash scene.

Working at the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto (CFS), she deduced that the samples matched.

Vardy had worked many “paint” cases: studying samples of paint found at the scenes of break and enters, car accidents, and hit-and-runs.

CFS scientists can work with paint samples as small as a period on the printed page.

For this new case, she sliced a layer from the larger sample.

She determined it was OEM: Original equipment manufacturer vehicle paint.

To find a match for her white paint sample, she tapped into an RCMP database that stored more than 15,000 paint samples.

She determined the paint had come from the frame of the hit-and-run car, near where the windshield meets the front door, and found 578 samples in the database that matched.

The next day, Oct. 23, she received a call from OPP Sgt. Mike Ashley, who was heading the Shortreed investigation for the traffic department.

In the early moments after the hit-and-run, Ashley had been called at home near Fergus. He had called in his serious traffic collision team to the scene.

He had investigated many hit-and-runs but they hardly ever involved a pedestrian fatality. 

His team collected samples of car debris that littered the scene.

One of the officers had bagged a shard that had broken off a signal light housing on the car. The officer conducted research. He determined it had come from a Dodge Neon, mid-1990s.

Vardy was pleased.

“That took my 578 hits down to 59,” she says.

She narrowed it down further to 40 in the database.

And then 12.

“That gave me the year range.”

The scientist reported back to police: the car from the hit-and-run was a white Dodge Neon, made between 1995 and 1997.

She even pinpointed where it had been manufactured: an automotive plant in Belvedere, Ill.

Shortly after the collision, a motorist passing by had called 911.

An OPP officer arrived first, and then two paramedics, who wrapped Shortreed’s body in a blanket.

He had died instantly.

It was not clear how fast the car had been going on the dry, two-lane paved county road. The speed limit was 80 km/h. His body had been thrown approximately nine metres.

His spinal cord had been torn. He had multiple rib fractures, broken leg bones and lacerations to his lung and liver.

He had been walking on the downside of a rise, two kilometres from Alma, in the eastbound, right-hand side lane.

No one knew what he had been doing out on that stretch of road.

When a police officer first contacted Judie that morning, he said they were investigating a hit-and-run, but said the identification found on the victim belonged to Lucas’s older brother, Christopher.

She knew it could not be Christopher. He attended university in northern Ontario and had not come home for Thanksgiving.

She had a feeling it was Lucas but wondered if he had shared the I.D. with a friend.

Police drove Judie to Hamilton General Hospital, where she learned the truth in the morgue. Her youngest son’s face looked unharmed, but for a small scrape on his forehead.

A police officer told Judie: “We will find the guy who did this.”

“I don’t care if you do,” she replied.

“You will need closure.”

“My son has died.”

She selected a closed casket for the funeral later that week. She wanted people to remember how he had been and figured he would want that.

A baseball hat was placed on his head with the logo of the band Lost Boyz.

Elora Community Centre hosted the memorial to allow for more people. Had to be at least 800, many of them young, tearful faces. Lucas’s favourite music played. Judie read from a poem she wrote, that invoked her son’s love of nature, loud music and “surrounding yourself with good friends.”

Meanwhile, police searched the area for owners of 1995-97 white Dodge Neons.

One such owner lived five kilometres northwest of the crash site, on Sideroad 21, near Hwy. 6.

It was the country home of Dave and Anastasia Halliburton.

They had a young son and daughter. Dave drove a truck and Anastasia ran a cleaning service.

When police came calling, they saw that the couple’s 1995 white Neon was in good condition.

Police asked Dave if they could use the car for a Crime Stoppers re-enactment video, to help encourage public tips on the hit-and-run.

Dave said he would be glad to assist.

Just make sure you return the car when you’re done with it to the same spot next to the house, he said.

Police ultimately widened their vehicle search to a 100-kilometre radius.

On Nov. 4, 2008, three weeks after the crash, an OPP officer returned to the Halliburtons and checked their car a second time.

No damage.

He noted that the car was registered to Anastasia Halliburton, and the Vehicle Information Number (VIN) stamped on the inside of a door, and on the dashboard, matched with Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation records for the vehicle’s plate.

The officer spoke with Anastasia. He asked if this was the car she had been driving at the time of the crash down the road in October. She said that it was.

The car was cleared.

Police followed up on tips.

One name that appeared on their radar about two months after Shortreed’s death was that of Carl Leblanc.

The 20-year-old from Fergus had counted Shortreed a friend, as well as Lucas’s older brother, Marcus. 

Leblanc’s mother had died two years earlier in a small craft plane crash in Brantford. He lived with his sister, Sharelle, and their stepfather. 

Leblanc served time in youth jails. Had anger issues. Eventually was selling drugs.

About one week prior to the hit-and-run, Leblanc had fought one of Shortreed’s friends at a party near Elora.

Leblanc says that after the fight, the guy had left and returned with others for revenge, and one of them had a crossbow. Leblanc ran from the party through cornfields. Later, he went into hiding when he heard he had been charged with assault.

He believes that at least one of Shortreed’s friends interviewed by police after the hit-and-run pointed the finger at him, saying that he had been at the Alma party, even though he had not.

Sharelle says that when police were looking for her brother, they questioned her, leaning on her to give him up in the Shortreed investigation.

Sharelle had owned a Dodge Neon. She says police suggested it was the car that hit Shortreed, and that her brother had been driving.

She told them their Neon had been black, not white, and that she had taken it to a wrecking yard in August, prior to the hit-and-run, after the transmission had blown for the second time.

“They didn’t believe me,” she says. “It didn’t make any sense; my brother didn’t even have a driver’s licence, much less a car.”

Leblanc had left town, hiding from police on the assault charge. He stayed with a friend in Delhi, 40 kilometres southwest of Brantford, and worked at a tulip nursery.

One day, he thought he spotted a trespasser behind the house where he was staying.

He went out for a look. He says police officers emerged from a ravine, dressed in camouflage gear, and pointing weapons at him. He says they arrested him and interrogated him about the hit-and-run.

“They were like, ‘You killed him … We know you did it.’ I was bawling my eyes out. I was like, ‘Man, I did not do that.’”

Leblanc says he signed a form allowing police to check his cellphone records. He says they determined that his cell had “pinged” off towers in Guelph at the time of the crash in Alma.

He thought that would clear his name. Police had no evidence he had anything to do with Shortreed’s death.

But rumours that he was a suspect in the crash continued to plague him, as well as his sister, and police were not done with them yet.

Police would not comment about Leblanc, other than to say they are familiar with him.

Police continued searching for 1995-97 Dodge Neons.

Ultimately, they checked up on hundreds of them.

On March 9, 2009, five months after Shortreed’s death, a police officer returned to the Halliburtons’ home on Sideroad 21.

In criminal investigations, police officers often take actions intended to rattle the cage of a suspect: for example, tell them they are a “person of interest,” or ask if they will take a polygraph (lie detector) test.

It’s an investigative tool. Apply gentle pressure and note how the suspect reacts.

But police say this was not the case with an additional visit to the Halliburtons. It was a routine double-check of vehicles located near the crash site.

The couple’s Neon was cleared yet again.

Around town, at the grocery store, Judie could not escape the talk, and stigma.

Some people would point as if to say: that’s her, the woman who lost her son. Still haven’t caught the killer.

Some would greet her with a mix of condolences and theories about the mystery of what had happened.

“Someone would say, ‘I think (the driver) buried the car,’” she says. “Or: ‘I think it was somebody’s kid who did it.’”

She created her own narrative: it was probably a drunk driver, an alcoholic who didn’t even have a driver’s licence. The guy probably drank himself to death, unable to live with what he had done.

“That was a story I told myself to get me through the day. But when we found out what actually happened, nobody’s story had been as bad as the real one.”

In August 2009, 10 months into the investigation, a billboard went up on well-travelled Hwy. 6, about six kilometres from the crash site.

The giant poster featured a photo of Shortreed, and a white Dodge Neon, and read: “Do you know who hit and killed Lucas Shortreed?”

It also announced a $50,000 reward in the case.

The billboard remained there for several years.

Smaller versions of the poster were hung everywhere, including the foyer of Shortreed’s former high school, as well as university campuses from Waterloo to St. Catharines.

A mural that featured the poster was hung on a long-haul truck trailer; Lucas’s grandfather paid for the space.

When the reward was announced, Judie was encouraged by police to speak to the media to generate tips.

She was not anxious to assume the role of family spokesperson but agreed.

“I just wish this person would come forward,” she told reporters. “They are a danger to others on the road and our family just needs to put this to rest … He was a good kid.”

The following year, on Thanksgiving weekend 2010, police handed out information flyers about the case during RIDE checks in Wellington County.

In October 2011, Crime Stoppers announced the unsolved case was its “crime of the week.”

In 2012, the investigation was taken over by Wellington OPP detachment Det.-Const. Dave Telfer, who worked in the major crime unit. His supervisor had moved the case over to him from the traffic unit.

Telfer continued to be optimistic the car would be found.

True, the hit-and-run driver could have taken the Neon to a junkyard and had it chopped up.

“But there was so much scrutiny on that vehicle, getting rid of it would have been tough,” he says.

Telfer’s investigative approach was to gather pieces of the puzzle and see where they fit in the big picture. While he projected even-keeled calm, the case continued to fuel speculation, and emotion, in the community.

Police had no inkling who killed Shortreed — or why. It could well be a homicide.

In October 2013, on the fifth anniversary of the crime, police held a news conference to spark new tips.

Judie was again called upon to speak to media. An article in the Guelph Mercury urged the driver, or a tipster, to come clean: “You know who you are … There is your conscience … that part of you that knows turning yourself in or sharing what you know is the right thing to do. Because if you don’t, that feeling in the pit of your stomach won’t go away. Ever.”

One year later, in October 2014, Vardy, the forensic scientist, received a new sample to test in the case.

“The paint was totally different,” she says.

Another dead end.

Police said that over time, they received more than 100 tips from the public.

Telfer says one tip came from someone who said they overheard a family member confess to the crime.

The tip did not pan out.

Another called Telfer and confessed, but their information did not match evidence police were holding back.

The false confession may have been related to a mental health issue, and perhaps a symptom of the emotional ripple effect in the community: the desperation to provide closure for the family and find justice.

“Someone wrote a (social media) post saying that Lucas had become everyone’s child,” says Judie. “And it was true, people had internalized it.”

As the years went by, friends wrote messages on a Facebook page called “R.I.P. Lucas Shortreed!”

“Feelin’ you today brother,” wrote Ryan Sage in 2014.

“We think about you every day,” wrote Tina Gadoury.

“Miss you dude.”

“Happy New Year, Luc.”

“They will find out who did this to you Lucas.”

Tarique Todd, who had helped lower the casket at the burial, says their friend’s violent and unsolved death “messed up a lot of people for a long time.”

Shortreed’s closest male friends each got a tattoo in tribute to him.

At weddings, toasts were made to his memory. Some named their kids after him.

Todd moved to Calgary to try to start fresh. Each time he returned to Fergus, at Christmas or Thanksgiving, it would all come back.

He would be out for drinks at “The Goofy Newfy” downtown along the river, and people would get talking about the case.

“They would say, ‘I know who did it.’ It was like people wanted credit, everyone wanted to be part of it; it was weird. It pissed you off more than anything … Some people thought a police officer hit Luc. That was one rumour that went on forever. A lot of it was malarkey but it just evolves, like the telephone game.”

Carl Leblanc, investigated by police in the early months of the case, says he could never shake the rap others put on him as a suspect.

He received messages from people in Fergus urging him to confess.

“I heard it all the time, not to my face, but friends would tell me that someone is saying ‘You did it’ … People thought I killed him. It made me cry. It emotionally damaged me.”

In 2021, Leblanc was living out West, when a police officer phoned him and said he should return to Ontario to talk about the case.

“I told him I’m not coming back and I’ve got nothing to say to you guys.”

His sister, Sharelle, says she received a call about once a year from police who suggested she was withholding information about the hit-and-run.

As for Shortreed’s family, while they never stopped feeling pain from his loss, they did not fixate on the unsolved case.

“We never sat around at Christmas pounding the table and saying we have to get (the one) who did it,” says Judie’s brother, Jim Moore.

There was a part of Judie that never wanted police to catch the driver.

She did not want a name attached to her son’s death. Did not want to feel the anger that might flow from knowing who had forsaken Lucas like that.

And she didn’t want to experience a trial. She wondered if she could survive it.

Better to leave it that faceless drunk driver in her mind’s eye who did it, who has since gone off to die.

In 2022, as the 14-year anniversary of his death neared, Judie heard a knock at her door.

She saw that it was two police officers dressed in suits.

Why were they here?

It had been a stressful time at the law office where she worked and she had taken the day off.

Seeing the police, she worried something had happened to her middle son, Marcus, who had been living in Guelph.

The officers introduced themselves.

It was Telfer, and OPP Det.-Insp. Jennifer Spurrell, visiting from OPP headquarters in Orillia.

Spurrell said it wasn’t about Marcus.

It was about Lucas.

“We have someone,” Spurrell said.

Judie broke down.

In the end, 142 police officers would play a role in the Shortreed investigation, interviewing nearly 100 people formally and informally.

But 14 years in, police had nothing: no leads or solid suspects.

And then it moved quickly, following a phone call in June 2022.

The call had been patched through to Telfer at the station.

It was another tip. But this one sounded promising.

“It corroborated other evidence we had,” he says. “I felt pretty good about it.”

He arranged for the person to come in for an interview.

The tipster said the car that killed Lucas Shortreed is on Dave Halliburton’s property on Sideroad 21, hidden inside a semi trailer.

Halliburton: the one who lived near the crash scene and owned the undamaged, white ’95 Dodge Neon police had cleared many times.

On June 13, Telfer drove past the Halliburtons’ place near where Sideroad 21 meets Hwy. 6.

It is a rural area, the homes spread out along the paved sideroad with well-treed properties and long driveways.

The Halliburtons’ neighbours were few and far between. 

Their property was 1.5 acres. Unpaved driveway. Two-level, brick-and-siding 3,100-square-foot house more than 30 years old; large garage and a yard that backed onto farmers’ fields.

Telfer saw the white trailer out back of the house.

To Telfer, it appeared it had been sitting there a long time.

And it was big enough to hold a car.

He spoke to his supervisor. OPP officials in Orillia were contacted. The Shortreed investigation was elevated to the Criminal Investigations Branch (CIB). That meant more resources on the way.

On July 14, Spurrell was named to oversee the CIB operation, with Telfer lead investigator.

The information from the tip was big, but Spurrell was circumspect.

If there was a car hidden inside the trailer — and there was no guarantee of that — was it the one from the hit-and-run? And could they prove who had been driving the car?

She met with a Crown prosecutor to review the case.

“If we have the vehicle, that’s great we have the means of Lucas’s death,” says Spurrell. “But we don’t know who is behind the wheel, and that is critical evidence for us. We needed more robust techniques to get the best evidence about those responsible. There was urgency.”

The OPP has a branch called the Technical Support Unit, that specializes in techniques including entering buildings and vehicles by stealth. The unit conducts searches and installs hidden cameras, as well as listening and tracking devices.

Police applied to a Superior Court judge for a warrant to covertly search the Halliburtons’ semi trailer.

The evening of Aug. 10, 2022, under cover of darkness, police officers entered the trailer.

A second team of officers observed in the wings in case they were detected.

Inside the trailer: no sign of a car.

They continued searching the trailer.

Near the rear they found a false wall.

Behind the false wall, a white Dodge Neon. A badly damaged one.

Spurrell and Telfer received phone calls.

They had the car.

“I was extremely relieved it was there,” says Spurrell.

And still, the police wanted more evidence. In theory, the Halliburtons could claim they were hiding the car for someone else.

Police applied for a warrant to record conversations involving Dave and Anastasia Halliburton.

Six weeks later, police arrested them, and the damaged Neon was loaded from the trailer onto a truck.

But the couple refused to talk.

The Halliburtons appeared in a Guelph court Sept. 22 and were released that day.

Police continued recording their conversations.

Perhaps they would be motivated to talk to others about what had just happened.

Meanwhile, in Toronto, at the Centre of Forensic Sciences, Vardy received a much larger sample to examine: the Neon, delivered to her doorstep.

She had often examined vehicles involved in hit-and-runs. Most involved glancing blows to pedestrians, and minor damage to the vehicle.

This was not the case with this car.

The hood was dented. The roof had partially collapsed. The windshield on the passenger side had shattered.

“It’s unusual to get a car that damaged, where it had not remained at the scene,” she says. 

She compared paint samples from the beat-up car to paint samples found at the crash scene, that had also been found on Shortreed’s body.

It was the same car.

She examined the damaged car’s VINs.

Someone had removed them from the door and dash.

Vardy knew where to look for additional VINs.

She found them. The numbers matched those police had found on the door and dash of the undamaged white Neon.

Police had never checked for additional VINs in the Halliburtons’ undamaged car to see if they matched.

Most vehicles have about a half dozen VIN locations.

Police said that generally when officers check a vehicle’s VINs, the door and dash locations are the only two readily visible, and a more vigorous examination of additional locations requires further authorization.

Vardy’s role in the hit-and-run case was nearly finished.

If there was a trial, she could be called to testify, although that did not happen often.

She was taken aback by the damage to the car but did not allow herself to think of the victim, or if the driver would be convicted, or what kind of person leaves another for dead.

For one thing, she says, dwelling on the human element in her work, over time, can lead to vicarious trauma.

For another, the forensic scientist must remain neutral.

“We are not trying to prove police cases or prove the Crown or defence case; we work in an unbiased way,” she says. “I am trying to eliminate things. I am trying to find differences (between samples). Someone else decides what it means.”

One year later, on Sept. 26, 2023, Crown prosecutor Paul Erskine stood in a Guelph courtroom before a packed gallery.

“Mr. Erskine, when you’re ready,” said Justice Matthew Stanley.

“Thank you, your honour.”

Erskine began reading from a document outlining details of the police investigation into the Halliburtons.

Among the most damning evidence of a hit-and-run coverup, was a recorded conversation between Dave Halliburton and his daughter, inside his car.

Police had placed a listening device inside the vehicle.

It was recorded Sept. 23, 2022, two days after Halliburton’s arrest, and one day after he had been released from custody.

In that conversation, said Erskine, “Dave Halliburton confessed that he was responsible for the death of Lucas Shortreed.”

Halliburton told his daughter that the night of the crash, “he had a few beers at a friend’s house and decided to drive home,” and that he “did not believe he would have blown over the legal limit.”

Halliburton’s 11-year-old son had been riding in the back seat of the car at the time, said Erskine.

Halliburton “admitted he struck Lucas Shortreed … and that he saw Mr. Shortreed at the last second, but it was too late to avoid him.”

While Halliburton “indicated he knew he struck a person immediately,” he told his son they had hit a deer, said Erskine. And then he had “stopped the car briefly and looked back” before continuing to drive five kilometres to their home.

That night, Anastasia Halliburton treated their son for cuts to his face from the broken windshield.

The Halliburtons sat listening in court.

Dave, 56, “is short and balding, with thin grey-white hair and a beard,” the Wellington Advertiser newspaper reported.

Anastasia, 54, “has short, shoulder-length wavy brown and blond hair, wearing a black shawl and red shirt.”

Shortreed’s mother, siblings, and aunts and uncles were there, and his father, Pat Shortreed, had flown in from out West.

Ashley Mackenzie got a neighbour to mind her daughter and walked to the courthouse from her home up the street. Tarique Todd didn’t attend. He thought of Lucas every day but had a bad feeling about how the court case would end, and feared he might yell something at the Halliburtons.

Erskine continued reading from the document.

“His plan was to get rid of the car by cutting it up but he was unable to. He also dumped bleach on it to attempt to get rid of any DNA.”

Halliburton bought a second white Dodge Neon, said Erskine, and “switched the door and dash VINs from the Neon involved in the collision to the replacement Neon. (They) continued to portray a façade that the Dodge Neon registered to Anastasia Halliburton was not involved in the collision.”

He concluded: “Those are the facts the Crown is seeking to rely upon, your honour.”

Erskine had been reading from an agreed statement of facts between the Crown and defence lawyers for the Halliburtons.

There was no trial.

The Crown and defence had agreed upon a plea deal.

Dave Halliburton pleaded guilty to failure to remain at the scene, and obstruction of justice. Anastasia Halliburton pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, and for unlawful possession of a shotgun police had found in their home. (The couple did not have a licence for it, and stored it illegally, without a trigger locking device, in an unlocked closet in their bedroom.)

The judge had listened to the list of facts, but before he announced the sentences, family members read victim impact statements.

Pat Shortreed stood in court and said the Halliburtons had “prioritized their own lives at the expense of the closure and compassion for the family of the child they left for dead … A child, barely a young man, my son Lucas, is gone and all that he might have been.”

Judie’s brothers, Jim and John, spoke of how loving Lucas had been, and how much he enjoyed spending time with his cousins.

John described him as a “spirited young man who had a roaring jolly chuckle … A big teenager, a gentle giant of sorts with a kind presence.”

Jim said: “Lucas shouldn’t have been out on that road, especially at that time of night. That is on him. Accidents can be forgiven. But everything after this accident was planned. It was heartless. It was selfish … This is what can’t be forgiven.”

He felt an urge to let loose on the Halliburtons in court but wanted to take the high road in his statement.

“This is the part where I had written some not so nice things to say to you,” he continued. “But I won’t — my family isn’t like that. Judie isn’t like that. And I can feel Luc saying, ‘Just let it go, man, they aren’t worth it.’ At 18 he was more of a humane adult than I see in front of me today.”

When Judie spoke, her voice broke at times.

“I believed that I never wanted you to be found,” she said. “I did not know if my family and I would have the strength to survive these court proceedings. I almost didn’t survive as I was hospitalized in December with heart attack symptoms and received open heart surgery in April … You lack the compassion and empathy required to understand the impact of your decision to live your lie for 14 years. But I believe I have survived the burden of your deceit. And it is almost behind me … We remember Lucas as the caring young man we lost, and his light will shine.”

Judge Stanley spoke. He said that Halliburtons’ coverup was “not fleeting, momentary, or impulsive, it was calculated, by design and intentional.”

He added that Halliburton’s driving, however, “was not at issue. It’s not about the driving, it’s the actions since then.”

The Crown prosecutor had suggested Shortreed was standing in the middle of the eastbound lane when he was hit. 

That is what Halliburton had been recorded telling his daughter.

Shortreed’s blood had stained the thin white line marking the soft shoulder, indicating it was likely that after he had been hit and thrown into the air, his body landed and rolled to the edge of the shoulder.

No one could ever say why he had been walking there.

“The accident may have occurred, as tragedies do, regardless of what else Mr. Halliburton did that night,” the judge said.

He said the coverup was an “aggravating” factor when considering the severity of their sentences, and suggested it was beyond the pale that Halliburton had offered up his undamaged Neon for police to use in the video re-enactment.

“I’m guessing someone probably said thank you, as though you were at that moment attempting to help out the community,” he said.

It was an additional “aggravating factor” that Halliburton had been driving his young son at the time, the judge noted, adding that the boy had been injured in the crash.

The son would have grown up seeing the “Do you know who hit and killed Lucas Shortreed?” billboard on Hwy. 6, and heard of the police media campaigns to encourage public tips.

“He was old enough that I imagine he has memories,” said the judge. “The damage your actions have caused rippled through the community.”

At the same time, Stanley said, mitigating factors included that the couple had no prior criminal record, and in pleading out, “it saves everybody the time and anguish of a trial, especially in a case like this.”

The judge added: “I can only deal with what is before me.”

The Crown and defence had jointly recommended the sentences: two and a half years in jail for Dave Halliburton, and a six-month conditional sentence with four months house arrest for Anastasia.

The judge agreed.

“I find that it is within the range of appropriate sentences for both and would not bring the administration of justice into disrepute,” he said.

The judge asked both Halliburtons if they wished to say anything.

Both declined.

Dave Halliburton was handcuffed and led from court. He was ultimately transported to Beaver Creek Institution, a medium- and minimum-security prison two hours northeast of Fergus, in Gravenhurst, near Muskoka.

His wife was free to leave the courthouse.

The Halliburtons had sold their house on Sideroad 21. A real estate advertisement said it listed for $949,999.

People in town believe Anastasia moved within an hour’s drive.

Outrage followed the one-day court proceeding, including posts on social media charging that the sentences should have been much tougher.

But Judie, for one, had not been surprised by the sentences. She had read up on precedent hit-and-run cases the Crown and defence would rely upon.

A prosecutor had told her that even if the case had gone to trial, and the Halliburtons received the maximum punishment, it would not have been a significantly higher sentence.

“People were saying that (Halliburton) killed him. Which he did, but that was not the crime,” she says. “The roads were fine, but there was a dip in the road, and even if he was going the speed limit, wouldn’t have had time to stop by the time Lucas was caught in the headlights. (The crime) was that he left. They told me from the start that if (Halliburton) had stayed at the scene, and he didn’t blow over, he wouldn’t have been charged with anything.”

Pat Shortreed was angry. He had thought reading their victim impact statements in court would influence the sentences, but it felt like baring their pain had no effect at all.

“It’s all just a deal they made in the hallway,” he says. “It’s a slap in the face. It sends no message to the public about (the severity) of doing a crime and concealing it, and showing the gall (the Halliburtons) did, allowing their car to be used for the re-enactment. It is beyond belief.”

After seeing bitter posts about the case, Judie asked for calm.

She posted on Facebook: “We would all love to punish the Haliburtons … but we need to move on … We have to accept we cannot change the past.”

And she urged those who unfairly accused others of the crime to apologize. She referenced Carl Leblanc by name.

Carl’s sister, Sharelle, had attended court the day of the sentencing. For years, she had felt the burden of accusations against her brother. But through all that, she had not wanted to contact Judie or the family to assert their innocence, had not wanted to burden them.

When court had ended, she approached Judie outside and told her how she felt.

Judie gave her a hug and said: “I always knew it wasn’t Carl.”

For Leblanc, the trauma of the experience remained. He wished police at some point had publicly acknowledged he was innocent.

But he has also moved on. He lives a good life out West, where he owns a house, raises four daughters, and works as a concrete finisher.

He is still working through anger issues from his youth and attends counselling. He says it’s going well.

As for Judie’s Facebook post about him, he read it.

“It was nice. Man, it made me cry.”

The person who provided the critical tip to police in the investigation received the $50,000 reward from the OPP in January 2024.

Police would not reveal any details about the tipster, or how the person had known about the hidden car. It appears unlikely the person had known about it for long, but rather heard it second or third hand, and called police immediately.

“People assume (a tipster) harbours information, but you can’t make an assumption about when the person found out (about it),” says Spurrell.

Telfer says the person “came into some information.”

Spurrell adds that reward money was not the motivation, and that the tipster was unaware they would be paid.

“Sometimes (a reward) is the motivation, but not in this case,” she said. “This was truly an altruistic action by this person … We advocate for people to assist police when they have information that will help an investigation.”

Dave Halliburton never spoke to police and never testified in court, since there was no trial, or preliminary hearing.

Left unanswered was what he had been thinking, that had led him to drive from the scene in his battered car, with his son, peering through broken glass, and in the light of day plan and execute the coverup.

He lived with his secret for 14 years. He would have routinely driven past the billboard near his home, and socialized with people in the area who had been upset about the loss.

In court, his lawyer said Halliburton started working at 16, “has a Grade 8 education” and has been a truck driver all his life. “Except for this incident he has lived an unremarkable life” but had “made a terrible, fear-based decision; a decision that got away from him, and it was like a (boulder) rolling down a mountain, and he became crippled by that fear over the years.”

Jim Van Allen, a retired criminal profiler with the OPP, says “avoidance of consequences” is common with many crimes.

“But (Halliburton’s) actions were pretty elaborate,” he wrote in an email. “It demonstrates a high commitment to not getting caught or paying the price.”

Van Allen, the former manager of the OPP’s Criminal Profiling Unit, says that electing not to sell, scrap or burn the car, shows Halliburton taking steps to avoid creating records that would establish a link to him.

“It speaks of an operating criminal mind, calculating the risks and benefits, and rolling the dice on his decision, and having a tolerance of risk of keeping the car that close to him.”

The couple’s actions, he says, “are very self-focused. He’s probably the type of guy who would rationalize about the victim: ‘You’re gone, but I’m still here and I want to keep living comfortably rather than spend any time in jail.’”

The only available window into Halliburton’s mindset was the recorded conversation he had with his daughter.

He told her about the coverup.

And he said: “Even if I was stone cold sober, I would have done the exact same thing.”

Lucas Frederick Shortreed

1990-2008

Think of him as living in the hearts of those he touched

for nothing loved is ever lost and he was loved so much.

His mother stands in the cemetery next to the stone that has a natural, earthy look, with shades of grey and brown.

Family members all had a say in the design.

Belsyde Cemetery in Fergus had once been farmland owned by a Scottish immigrant, opening in 1863 when the dead had filled the Auld Kirk Yard at St. Andrew’s church in town.

Next to Lucas Shortreed’s stone is one with a toy train engraved on it; the boy died one month before Lucas, at one and a half years old.

On the other side lies a girl who died at 10 weeks old, the summer before Lucas was killed.

And further down the line, another young man who died too soon, just after his 20th birthday.

“I call it tragedy row,” says Judie.

This was last fall, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving and the 15th anniversary of her son’s death.

Judie has a routine each year, when she commemorates him on Friday of Thanksgiving weekend, his last day alive.

She takes the day off, picks up a coffee in town, and walks to her special spot along the Grand River. She pauses, and reflects, and picks a single flower to bring to his stone.

“And then I have a little visit with him.”

Everything hurts about losing Lucas, but especially that she had looked forward to getting to know him better in his adult life.

At 18, he had been spending most of his time with friends.

“I felt like it was his time to be with friends,” she says. “He would come and go, and if he was home, hung with friends in the basement, and mom wasn’t going down to hang with them … I just always figured there would be time later.”

On an overcast, damp day, she talked about her son.

We drove north together to Alma.

She turned onto the residential street where the party had been.

Exactly which house it was, she is not sure. She doesn’t want to know.

She headed east along Road 17, up the rise.

She never drives this road, not anymore.

“Over this knoll,” she says. “This is where he was hit.”

She turned quiet.

Raindrops dotted the windshield.

In the days following the crash, someone erected a cross off to the side. Flowers were added.

It’s gone now. When the roadside memorial faded, Judie did not refresh it. She doesn’t believe in them and doesn’t want reminders left that he was killed here.

She drove back to Fergus, and parked at the cemetery, a short walk from their former home on McTavish Street.

“Let’s go see if the peaches are still there,” she said.

Four days earlier, on Friday, her day of reflection, she had been surprised to discover that someone had placed a jar of preserved peaches on top of Lucas’s stone.

It recalled the days when he spent afternoons with his grandmother, Ilene, jarring peaches, writing up labels so family members could take a jar home at Thanksgiving.

Ilene had mentored him, helped cultivate his love for plants and trees.

She is buried here, too. She outlived her grandson by two and a half years, with a broken heart.

The jar of peaches still rested on his stone.

Judie had no idea who put it there.

She smiled.

“It’s heartwarming that someone took the time to do this.”

It was nearly sunset, and the sky bore a silver cast. The rain paused, there on tragedy row, south of the river and down the hill from the little house where the big happy boy had first wandered.