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An undated photograph of murder victim Mindy Tran. (Photo: www.realworldimage.com)
By Joe Fries
David Ambrose is the man behind mindytran.com, a website that outlines his theory about who murdered the eight-year-old girl back in 1994. Ambrose remains convinced Shannon Murrin is to blame and alleges police helped get him acquitted of the charge in 1999 because Murrin was working as an RCMP informant.
Kelowna residents are all too familiar with the more bizarre aspects of the saga, which Ambrose outlines in detail on his site, a venture that’s cost him about $1,000 to date.
“This is pretty wild what went on and pretty unusual,” the 51-year-old said in an interview Wednesday.
“It’s not a real good thing to have going on that your kids can just be abducted and murdered and (the police) can just blow the case and the guy walks.”
Ambrose said he’s maintained the site, or a version of it, since 2003 in hopes it may allow new information to come forward that could lead to the capture of Tran’s killer, or that it might at least generate enough public outrage to see fresh police resources assigned to the case.
“I thought that… somebody out there would have some kind of pull, some kind of a backdoor route of dealing with this that may be able to pull authority over whoever was responsible down here.”
While Ambrose says he just wants to help get justice for a little girl, although her family apparently wants nothing to do with him. Ambrose said he sent a letter to the girl’s family and “right after that I got a fax from the RCMP telling me not to bother them.”
Since the site went up, Ambrose says he’s gotten hundreds of thousands of hits, including regular visits from police computers, which he says he can be identified by his server software.
“Cops look at the website all the time. They’re on there constantly. I don’t know what they’re up to, but they look,” he said.
But Ambrose said that Murrin’s next court battle could signal the end of his venture. On January 4, a B.C. Supreme Court judge in New Westminster is slated to hear a lawsuit Murrin has brought against against former RCMP Sgt. Gary Tidsbury and the three men who beat him so badly he spent 11 days in hospital. The suit alleges Tidsbury conspired in the 1995 incident that Murrin claims was designed to elicit a confession from him.
Given the confused nature of the initial murder investigation and subsequent murder trial, the pending lawsuit, Ambrose said, is “in some ways the last chance for things to be known.”
He fears, however, that an out-of-court settlement may be in the offing “under the pretext of avoiding embarrassment.”
If Murrin is successful in his suit, one way or the other, “then there’s not much more anyone can do after that.”
Ambrose, who declined to be photographed, said he met Murrin in the early 80s and was a witness to strange events on the night of Tran’s disappearance, although his – and other witnesses’ – statements have been discounted by police.
“Everybody’s interested at first,” he said, “then it just goes quiet.”
Photo: www.realworldimage.com
Tags: Mindy Tran, murder, Police, RCMP
