Detective Sergeant Denis Hogg's French-speaking colleagues in the Montreal homicide unit scoffed when he turned to America's Most Wanted to crack a murder case that had gone cold.
"They told me I was wasting my time, that they're Americans, what would they care about a Canadian murder?" Det. Sgt. Hogg said in an interview. "When they looked at the whole story, I thought they might care."
Tonight, the popular crime-busting Fox TV program will air an episode on the Christmas, 2007, killing of Gurpreet Kaur. Det. Sgt. Hogg will work with a team of 30 telephone operators to take tips from across North America.
The long-running program took up the case after Det. Sgt. Hogg wrote a long letter to producers describing the horror of the young mother's end.
Twenty-one days after she gave birth to her second child, the 29-year-old woman was beaten, strangled and stabbed at her apartment. Her body was found on Christmas Day.
Police believe the children were in the apartment when their mother died.
The woman's husband, Harinder Singh Cheema, is the chief suspect. The 29-year-old man showed up unannounced on Christmas Eve at the babysitter's residence to drop off the couple's baby boy and 18-month-old girl. He claimed he needed to search for his missing wife.
Police have retraced some of his movements. Mr. Cheema withdrew $500 from an ATM moments after dropping off the children. Later that day, he showed up on the doorstep of a Toronto girlfriend, who police say knew nothing of his Montreal life. When Mr. Cheema claimed he needed to get to Vancouver for a wedding, the girlfriend purchased a one-way plane ticket for him on Christmas Day, police say.
"He was a pretty good con man," Det. Sgt. Hogg said. "She was an immigration security guard and he met her while he was being detained [upon his arrival in Canada.]She thought they were going to get married."
The trail has gone cold, but Mr. Cheema, a truck driver, has left behind scattered clues. He has several aliases, many playing on the name Singh, which is common in the Sikh community.
Homicide detectives traced several calls from Mr. Cheema's cellphone to locations in the United States, including Seattle, Las Vegas, Boston and New York.
Police believe Mr. Cheema may be working as a truck driver in the United States.
Mr. Cheema came to Canada in 2005 with a doctored Indian passport and a Russian driver's licence. He claimed he'd been persecuted in India because of suspected ties to Sikh separatists.
The America's Most Wanted website describes Mr. Cheema as "adept at disappearing, and then reappearing in other countries."
Mr. Cheema's own family members appear on the program to urge him to surrender to police. His two children are in India living with grandparents. "In a flash these kids went from living in Canada to being orphaned in another country," Det. Sgt. Hogg said. "You can't help but feel for those kids."
Les Perreaux