The Second Chance

Louise Ellis was a 46-year-old freelance journalist and illustrator in Ottawa. She met Brett Morgan in 1992 while reporting on the David Milgaard wrongful conviction case, was impressed that he had testified against a fellow inmate, and began writing to him. Morgan had served ten years for the 1978 manslaughter of twenty-one-year-old Gwen Telford, whom he strangled. When he was paroled in May 1994, Ellis took him into her home.

By early 1995 she had found more than $12,000 in forged cheques on her accounts, and friends knew she wanted him out. On April 22, 1995, Morgan killed her in the bathroom of her Old Ottawa South house, drove her body into the Gatineau Hills, and left her yellow-and-white Suzuki Sidekick on a road near Wakefield, Quebec. He then organized search parties and pleaded publicly for her return. Marie Parent, who was finishing a private-investigator course and offered to help him unpaid, went to Ottawa police with the gaps in his story.

Working with detectives, Parent kept Morgan searching the woods. On July 6, 1995, they found Louise’s remains in a wooded patch west of Wakefield, and Morgan was arrested that day. His trial opened in September 1997 and ran six months. In March 1998 a jury convicted him of first-degree murder, with no parole for 25 years. He died in prison of hepatitis C on April 24, 1998.