Shirley and Ed Andronowicz were regulars in a neighborhood bar a few blocks from their home in Winnipeg, Canada. On one of their nights out, Ed decided to leave early. Shirley wanted to stay. There was a brief argument, and Ed went home alone. It was Shirley Andronowicz's last night alive. Ed and Shirley Andronowicz had been married for 20 years. Ed was a construction worker. Shirley was a housewife. They lived in the Fort Rouge section of Winnipeg, Canada, with their three teenage daughters. They went out that night together, and just as usual, they went out for a good time. and I guess a few hours later, my dad came home. He was tired. He didn't want to be there anymore. She just wanted to stay, and his friends were there, so she stayed with his friends. Shirley left the bar around midnight and walked home. I heard her come home that night. She was by herself. I don't know if she was drunk, but you could tell that she had been drinking. Ed and Shirley argued again when she came home. Ed said Shirley went for a walk to calm down, but never returned. The next morning, an employee at a nearby high school discovered a woman's body in the schoolyard. It was a very gruesome scene. there was some very senior homicide detectives that were there that were a little taken aback of uh of what was discovered there they came to the door and i went and got my father i went upstairs then i got called downstairs and uh the uh the police looked at my father and said do you want to tell him and he just kind of hung his head and kind of nodded. And they told me. They told me that, you know, we found your mother, and she's been killed. Shirley Adronowicz had been sexually assaulted, beaten, and mutilated, with bite wounds over much of her body. It appeared that she had been strangled, then hit with a large piece of concrete. There was the destruction of the facial features and there was an obvious sexual assault had taken place. So this was a definite gruesome scene. I've been a prosecutor for 23 years and I have never seen any case with as much brutality to a human body. In a written statement, Ed Andronowicz admitted that he argued with his wife that night, but said he had no idea what happened to her after she left their home. Homicide investigators Bob Marshall and Ron Oliver decided to question Ed Andronowicz again to learn more about what happened on the night Shirley Andronowicz was murdered. At one point, he was sort of asked in a sort of a helpful sort of a question to him if he had any idea who may have killed his wife. The answer Andronowicz gave was a bombshell. He said he was the murderer. He actually had some knowledge of some of the aspects of the crime. for example, he knew where the body was. He knew that it was in behind the Grant Park High School. I was angry with the police. I mean, they thought it was my dad. And I was angry with people who thought it could even be my father, because I knew it wasn't. And not only should they just, you know, knowing my father, know that he could not have done that, but trust my word, even though I was only 14. To make absolutely sure, police questioned Andronowicz again on the following day, and again, he confessed. Ed Andronowicz was charged with second-degree murder. Thank you Ed Andronowicz was held in a Winnipeg jail after confessing to the murder of his wife Although parts of his confession were inconsistent with the murder scene, Andronowicz said he had been drinking on the night of the murder and his memory wasn't entirely clear. police began their forensic investigation by turning to dick monroe a forensic geologist with the winnipeg police department the murder weapon was a 55 pound concrete block found near the body his trunk was full of concrete particles that was exciting at the outset because he saw this concrete but the trick was can you match the concrete to the block can you put that block in his trunk. The process was tedious since there were hundreds of particles recovered from Andronowich's trunk, all very small. Because the murder weapon was rough, because it was a broken piece of concrete, you're looking for like a jigsaw puzzle, a piece that would fit onto it. Could you get a physical match? But Monroe was unable to find a match. Next, police sent photographs of the victim's bite wounds to Dr. David Sweet, a forensic odontologist at the Bureau of Legal Dentistry in Vancouver. Ed Andronowicz wore dentures which were also sent for analysis. The question that came up obviously was, can artificial teeth in the form of a complete upper and lower denture actually bite hard enough to remove human tissue? Dr. Sweet performed a metric analysis measuring the width and arch of Adronowicz's dentures to see if they were similar to the bite wounds on Shirley Adronowicz's body. But Dr. Sweet could find few similarities. I think at that point we were all leery of whether we had the right person or not. I know I had a question in my own mind as to whether we had the right person. During Shirley Adronowicz's autopsy, the medical examiner had swabbed the areas around the bite wounds for possible forensic evidence. The swabs were rolled in a moistened filter paper, and the paper turned white, a positive presumptive test for the presence of saliva. The next step was to determine the blood type of the saliva. We had a new technique at our disposal called ELISA, which allowed us to type saliva in the ABO blood typing factors. The ELISA test revealed that the perpetrator had type B blood. This did not match Ed Adronovich's blood type. Therefore, Mr. Adronovich, being of blood type A, could not have left the B-type saliva found on the swabs from the breast. Thereby, meaning he did not, he could not have been, in my mind, the murderer. After two months in prison for a murder he confessed to, but apparently didn't commit, Andronowicz was released. Feel better today? See you, Andy. Are you happy to be outside? Why had he confessed? Andronowicz back at that time had a terrible problem with alcohol. And when the detectives interviewed him and they asked him such questions as, did you have a fight with your wife last night? He responded and said, well, I might have. And then when they went on and pressed him and said, well, did you hit her? He said, I might have. Memory lapses while drinking are called blackouts And happen because alcohol interferes with the neurotransmissions that form memory in the brain When they come out of the blackout, it's the realization, the recollection All of a sudden that something bad may well have happened And it's very common for alcoholics to feel remorse, express guilt even imagine that they have done terrible things during the blackout period. Now the police investigation had to start all over again. The murder weapon was a 55-pound piece of concrete. To forensic geologist Richard Monroe, it appeared to be about five years old and looked as if it had once been part of a bumper block used in parking lots Monroe decided to visit the murder scene to survey the area He went around midnight to evaluate the scene the way it appeared at the time of the murder Standing where the body was discovered, Monroe wondered what exactly took place. If the victim had been strangled and was unconscious, what happened next? Where did the concrete block come from? Then Monroe saw it, an illuminated area about 500 feet away. In the shadows, Monroe found a piece of concrete. About 12 feet away was another piece. Both were similar to the murder weapon. The killer had been drawn to the area by lighting, his only visual cue. To prove his theory, Monroe needed to find out whether the murder weapon and the pieces in the schoolyard had once been part of the same block. Monroe performed a petrographic examination. Petrography is the term for identification of minerals. Concrete is made of sand, cement, water, and pieces of stone, which is poured into molds to form the bumper blocks. As it dries, the mixed design settles into a distinctive pattern, which is visually different in each concrete block. When Monroe compared the murder weapon to the other concrete pieces found in the schoolyard, the mixed design and position of the stones were identical. The fit was almost like a glove. When you get broken aggregates in your sand and gravel inside your concrete, it'll break and it's usually a regular surface, and you'll have some what they call class small stones that will break out of the concrete mold, and what you're trying to do is fit that in. and it's not just one fit, it's a collection of fits. Monroe suspected that the murder weapon might contain a fingerprint, but lifting a print from a porous surface like concrete is extremely difficult. It's almost like a fingerprint is sitting on top of the bed of nails, so your latent material, which is very, very thin, is sitting on top of something that is very, very tenuous. As a last resort, Monroe decided to try a technique usually used to find prints on non-porous surfaces called superglue fuming. Superglue is made of cyanoacrylate ester. A drop of superglue is placed into a chamber along with the item containing the print, and the chamber is heated for up to six hours. By heating the superglue, fumes condense and adhere to biological material such as the oils of a fingerprint. Under a laser light, the biological material fluoresces, producing a clear image of the print. Monroe followed these steps with the concrete, placing both the superglue and the concrete in a vacuum chamber. But the color of the concrete is the same as the cyanoacrylate. In order to see a print, Monroe needed to find a chemical that would attach itself to the cyanoacrylate. after a number of tries Monroe finally found one that worked it was a biological stain known as Sudan Black Monroe found what he was looking for the killer's fingerprint but it was badly smudged unfortunately with the circumstances of the event with the end of it being used as a pile driver and repeated blows on the victim. There was a certain amount of slippage taking place with a 55-pound block on the hands. But the discovery of the related concrete pieces in the schoolyard was important. It revealed that it was a crime of opportunity and that the perpetrator may have been on foot. But a full year passed, and the trail was turning cold One year after the crime local television stations and newspapers carried stories about the unsolved murder hoping to jog someone memory or conscience The media campaign led to the break police were hoping for One year after the brutal murder of Shirley Andronowicz, an informant came forward saying that his roommate had returned home on the night of the murder with stains on his jeans and boots that looked like blood. They lived in an apartment building across the street from the murder scene. Mark Jarman was a 29-year-old unemployed construction worker. The informant also revealed that Jarman had burned his clothes the day after the murder. Samples of Jarman's blood and saliva were sent to the forensic lab. Tests revealed that Mark Jarman had type B blood, the same blood type as the saliva found on the victim. Photographs and impressions of Jarman's teeth were also sent for analysis. Jarman had a distinctive wear pattern that had ground the biting edge of the upper and lower teeth into a flattened surface. There were also some unusual spaces between the teeth, and several chipped areas had not been restored. As a result of some of the testing that I did and the comparison with the suspect's teeth, I was able to determine that his teeth were in fact consistent with causing these marks. Or another way to explain that is his teeth could not be excluded in this case as causing those marks. Finally, police had a shopping list they found in the schoolyard on the night of the murder. It was a big schoolyard and police weren't sure whether the shopping list had any connection to the murder. On the shopping list was a fingerprint. That print belonged to Mark Jarman, placing him in the schoolyard around the time of the murder. After initially denying he was involved, Mark Jarman eventually confessed. Jarman said he was at the same bar as Shirley and Ed Andronowicz on the night of the murder, but he didn't speak to them. He said he ran into Shirley Andronowicz later, near the high school, while she was out walking. Jarman said they talked and had consensual sex. Jarman said he killed Shirley Andronowicz when she threatened to tell her husband. Jarman said he emptied the contents of her purse to make the scene appear to be a robbery. but investigators didn't believe Jarman's entire story. Staff Sergeant Dan Rahn is a blood spatter expert who studied the crime scene photos and noticed an inconsistency in Jarman's story. The distance blood travels from a head wound struck by an object the size and weight of a cement block is 10 to 12 feet. creating medium-velocity impact spatter. On the papers found within 10 to 12 feet of Shirley Andronowicz's body, Ron discovered medium-velocity impact spatter. The pictures of the evidence actually showed that the contents of her purse had been strewn around at some location in a position where they were exposed to the bloodletting. which meant that Shirley Andronowicz's purse was ransacked before she was murdered, not afterwards. Mark Jarman was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. He took my mother. I was 14 years old. It's almost half my life. you know, I've been without her now. And you can't, I don't know how I'm ever supposed to forgive somebody for doing such a terrible thing to me. There isn't a punishment severe enough that we can give this guy for taking something like that from us. Not a day goes by when she doesn't come into my mind. I just think about what it would have been like if she was still here. I miss her.
