Lost & Unfound (Season 3, Episode 9)
Premise: Detectives investigate a handyman beaten to death on a Rosedale trail and uncover a string of missing men from Toronto’s Gay Village.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 3, Episode 9
- Starring
- DS Henry Graff (Aden Young), DS Frankie Bateman (Kathleen Munroe), Insp. Vivienne Holness (Karen Robinson), DCA Theo Forrester (K.C. Collins), Dr. Lucy Da Silva (Nicola Correia-Damude)
- Guest stars
- Tattiawna Jones as Hazel Bennett, Robin Wilcock as Len Marsden, Jude Wilson as Edwin Okelo
- Director
- Winnifred Jong
- Writers
- Carina Samuels
Summary
The Case
“Lost & Unfound” opens at a church gathering for newcomers, where handyman Len Marsden is a welcome regular. That evening Len takes Edwin, a young gay man from Kenya, to a drag show at Crews & Tangos in the Gay Village until Edwin’s father, Jeremiah, storms in and drags him home. The next morning Len is found beaten to death on a Rosedale ravine trail beside an unfinished grave, with alcohol and ketamine taken shortly before his death in his system.
Minister Cade of New Haven United Church says Jeremiah has asked to leave the church’s mailing list. Edwin and his father say they were home well before Len was drugged. Bar manager Hazel Bennett says she cut Len off around 10:30 and that the two had been searching the village for three missing men, Omar Haddad, Yusuf Nassar and Arjun Patel. Hazel says police are ignoring a pattern. Len fits it: middle-aged, bearded and heavyset, like the missing men.
Officer Webb, head of the village police detail, waves off the theory, but bathhouse owner Tevin says Webb told him to erase Len’s membership and that the missing men had all been customers. A news story passed on by Forrester leads to Webb’s past: he quietly resigned from the London police after a trans woman, Ash Perkins, was left in a coma following his raid. Webb reveals that Len had reported an assault during a hook-up, and his bodycam clears him. A coffee order identifies the other man as Adam Harris, a married Rosedale father, who says Len choked him in Len’s van behind a church.
The Interrogation
Behind a loose panel in the church shed, the detectives find trophies, and six bodies, including Omar, Yusuf and Arjun, are recovered from the grounds: Len was the village’s serial killer. With pressure mounting to find Len’s killer, the detectives look to the victims’ loved ones. At a vigil they see Omar’s dog, Ziggy Stardust, and trace it to Hazel, whom Omar called his sister; a Bowie lightning-bolt lighter in her bar links her to the missing trophy.
Hazel admits she saw Len pull out the lighter she had made for Omar’s 40th birthday, slipped ketamine she took from a bar patron into his last drink and confronted him, and he told her nobody would believe her. After months of being ignored, she says, she staged his death on the Rosedale trail so that senior detectives would have to link the cases, and she would do it again. She is arrested for Len’s murder.
The ending
Spoiler: As she is led out, one detective says it does not feel like justice, and the other suggests that is because it is not.
Suspects’ fates: Len Marsden, killed by someone else; Hazel Bennett, arrested.
Why it stands out
- Much of the story is set in Toronto’s Gay Village near Church and Wellesley and turns on how police handled men who went missing there.
- Hazel’s lighter carries the lightning bolt of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona, which also gave Omar’s dog its name.