The family at the heart of one of the oldest cold cases in Canada is looking for more information from Halifax police, 70 years after grocer Michael Resk was killed in Halifax.
“We are getting older and we would like some definitive answers and we haven’t been able to get any,” said Carole Curtis, the eldest of Michael Resk’s children.
“We’ve heard a lot of hearsay, but nothing concrete. It’s like we’re spinning our wheels all the time.”
Wanting to separate rumours from truth, the family made a formal request to the police to see the case file, but their request was denied.
The 1955 crime
Michael Leo Resk owned a grocery store on Gottingen Street when he was found shot in the back of his own delivery van in the early hours of Dec. 9, 1955.
As a small business owner, Resk kept his store open for long hours but he reserved two evenings a week to spend at home with his wife and five children.
He spent the evening watching television at his house in the city’s west end before leaving to lock up the store. He never arrived, and his body was found in the van parked at Acadia and Roome streets around 2 a.m.
Resk served for a time in the navy and was a businessman who was well known among the merchants in the area and within the Lebanese community. Resk’s store was located on land which later became the Halifax North Memorial Public Library.
Family seeks more information
In the summer of 2023, the Resk family had a meeting with police, and made a freedom of information application to the Halifax Regional Police to see the police file on their father.
They were denied on the grounds that it would harm investigative techniques currently in use or likely to be used, and that it was an invasion of personal privacy. The family found this frustrating and disheartening.
“I always felt ever since I was younger that this was my destiny, to help find out justice [for] the family,” said Janet Mackay, who was roughly six months old when her father died.
Mackay went to police when she was 20 and asked to see her father’s case file, which was denied. She feels strongly that she must keep trying to find out more about what happened.
“That way I’d never regret that at least I did my best,” she said.
The sisters feel saddest for their mother Annie Resk, who was left a widow with five young children at 36. She died in 1992.
“Mum was very brave and she was very stoic and she was very strong,” Curtis said, adding that their mother told her children it was important to move forward to find peace.
“We left it in the hands of the police to find out. But it never happened,” Curtis said.
Genetic analysis for solving cold cases
Brian Curtis is the stepson of Carole Curtis, and conducted research on the case on behalf of his stepmother and her sisters.
He says he was encouraged by a member of the Halifax Regional Police to file a freedom of information request for his stepmother.
“It was a gift I thought I could give to her,” he said in a recent interview.
Curtis says while he’s heard about cold cases being solved with genetic analysis, an HRP member told him that hasn’t been done for the clothing and shoes of Michael Resk.
“We’ve been told that the chances were bad and ultimately that there would be no DNA testing,” he said.
Mike Arntfield, a former police detective who now is a professor at Western University, says some cases are solved this way even if the person who committed the crime is dead.
“Ultimately, that’s the goal of a law enforcement agency is to get that ‘clearance’ regardless if it ends up in court or not,” he said.
Arntfield says it’s not uncommon for family requests to see a police file to be denied.
“[Police] are not going to be getting into the business of redacting and vetting 70 years worth of investigative chronology to determine what should go out and what shouldn’t,” he said.
However, Arntfield says after so many years there is value in releasing new information.
“If the police have been routinely conducting anniversary stories for this case and it’s gotten nowhere — we’re now seven decades and there’s no new leads, at least that they’re prepared to publicly discuss — OK, that hasn’t been working,” he said.
“At this point they need to seriously consider releasing some additional information that will jog someone’s memory, provide context for the information that they’re looking for.”
Halifax Regional Police declined to do an interview about the Resk case. Const. Martin Cromwell sent a statement that said the investigation is still considered “open,” so information is not shared through requests in accordance with privacy laws.
However, investigators shared “what information they could” with the family in a meeting.
In response to followup questions, Cromwell wrote there have been “several” investigators on the file over the years, and the most recent investigator was assigned in 2024.
“The issue in this case is that most information that continues to come forward are rumours or theories,” Cromwell wrote. He added that although investigators follow up on each tip, “no new first-hand physical evidence has come forward and there have been no new first-hand witness accounts.”
Cromwell said before the introduction of DNA analysis in the late 1980s, investigators didn’t handle evidence with the same contamination and handling protocols they do today.
“This makes it very challenging to use forensic DNA analysis on historical cases,” he wrote.
He said investigators spoke to the forensic identification section at HRP and the RCMP, and the RCMP’s National Forensic Laboratory in Ottawa, but they didn’t recommend analysis.
Painful memories
Every year around Christmas time, Michael and Annie Resk’s three daughters go together to visit their parents’ graves in Lower Sackville. The inscription on the single headstone says “Ever Loved.”
It’s hard for them to see every year that the case is still under investigation.
The sisters recall after about a decade their mother called the offices of the Mail-Star and asked the editors of the local newspaper not to run the story anymore.
Now, they’re speaking out for what Linda Resk, the second-eldest sibling, feels could be one last time.
It’s a request to the police to tell them more, and a plea to the public for information that can lead them to solid answers. This year the family set up a website where the public can contact them with tips.
“I’ve been talking about it all my life and I’m now 77 years old. It is painful because it’s always there in my head,” Resk said.
The sisters say they’re looking for closure but aren’t sure if it will ever happen.
“It’s been so long: 70 years,” says Resk. “I don’t know how long I’m going to live, and I probably will not know the truth.”
The case remains in the province’s major unsolved crimes program.
Tuesday marked 70 years since grocer Michael Resk was killed in Halifax. As the CBC’s Shaina Luck reports, the passing of time hasn’t quelled his family’s quest for answers.
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