Shownotes Transcript
Hey, it's Nancy. Before we begin today, I just wanted to let you know that you can listen to Crime Beat early and ad-free on Amazon Music, included with Prime. On the evening of May 31st, 1992, a single mother hired a 13-year-old babysitter to watch over her son. After the boy went to bed, the teen fell asleep on the couch.
At 2 in the morning, she woke up gasping for breath, feeling suffocated. There was some sort of fabric over her head. She was being grabbed and they had their hands wrapped around her neck. Moments later, her hands were pinned behind her back and she was bound with wire.
The attacker then dragged the terrified young girl outside of the apartment to a secluded area surrounded by brush, where he violently assaulted her. When you're attacked like that and your home is invaded like that and you are raped, that stays with you for life.
I'm Nancy Hixt, a senior crime reporter for Global News. Today on Crime Beat, I share a case that left an entire city on edge and ravaged victims, leaving them with physical and emotional scars that will never heal. And a warning, this story includes graphic details of sexual assaults and violence. This is Hunted on Hemlock Crescent.
To better share this story, I sought out the help of a highly respected member of the Canadian legal community, Les Grieve. I became a Crown prosecutor in 1980. And over the years, the cases that came my way became increasingly more serious and more complex. My workday was rapes, robberies, murders and muggings.
Grieve was a prosecutor for 28 years until 2008. That's when he was appointed as a judge in the Provincial Court of Alberta, where he sat for 13 years.
I covered several of the high-profile cases he prosecuted, and we've built a mutual respect for each other. And then over the years, I would see you, Nancy, in the courtroom or on the sidewalk outside of the courthouse with your microphone in hand and the TV camera pointed at you. And then later at home, I'd watch you on the evening television news. Grief recalls the area where this particular case unfolded.
And in the 1960s, Canada Mortgage and Housing built a series of apartment buildings. Typically, they'd be three-story units or 20 apartments to a building. And, you know, it was affordable housing. But unfortunately, from a security point of view, those residents over the years became more and more insecure. Located directly south of the Bow River is the inner-city neighborhood of Spruce Cliff and Hemlock Crescent,
In the spring of 1988, a 21-year-old woman was ripped from her sleep at 2:30 in the morning. A hand covered her mouth, preventing her cries for help. She felt a knee drive into her back. Then she was struck with a bottle behind her left ear. Her hands were forced behind her back. And while dazed from the blows to the head, he put the pillowcase over her face, tied her hands,
And this is all in her dark bedroom. So she could see nothing but by his touching. He knew that she was wearing gloves. He then raped her on her back and then a second time from behind and then ran off. In 1989, just under a year later, another attack on Hemlock Crescent. The second attack, this woman's apartment was only doors away from the first attack. On May 6, 1989, he gained entry in the middle of the night.
She awoke as he was covering her mouth and the pillow slip went over her head. He hit her head with a bottle and tied her hands behind his back. She said, "I think I'm bleeding." To which he said, "No, you're not. But you will be if you don't shut up." He then used one of her nearby t-shirts to tie it over the pillowcase and around her head, thus keeping the pillowcase in place and muffling any sound that she may have made. This was in the dark. He got onto her back, took off her underwear,
She was protesting saying, "I can't breathe." And he was saying words to the effect of, "Be quiet or I'll knock you into unconsciousness." All the while tapping her head with this solid glass bottle to remind her how he could easily damage her face and head. And he raped her and fled. Then, just a few weeks later, a third attack. It was a similar home invasion. This happened on July 21st, 1989, only two months after the previous attack.
This was a 27-year-old female occupant who had only had the apartment for one month. Again, he got a bottle from inside the suite. This is in the middle of the night. And she woke with his hand over her mouth and his body pinning her to the bed. He said, don't move. All I want is your radio. It's assumed he says this to allay her fear of being raped, that she might cooperate and not scream and merely be a robbery victim and not a rape victim. It's a play, a ploy by him.
In the dark, he pushed a rag into her mouth, very, very roughly cutting her mouth. He taps her head with the bottle, threatening to bash her skull in as he put the pillowcase over her head. Now to add to her terror, she was claustrophobic and began to hyperventilate. The offender then turned on the bedroom light and he used her bed quilt to more securely cover the bedroom window. He then put a second pillowcase over her head, presumably to ensure that she could not see with the light on.
and to muffle her sounds of hyperventilation. And unlike the two previous attacks, this victim was raped with the light on. But similar to the very first attack, she was raped twice, once from front and once from behind. The attacker then took off. Again, investigators worked to figure out who was responsible for the violent sexual assaults, but they came up empty. And this caused a lot of fear, not only in the
the Hemlock Crescent area, but in the city itself, of course, humans need to sleep, but we're very vulnerable at night when we're sleeping to someone who is bold enough to sneak into our residence. Then, 10 months later, the rapist struck again. Now, attack number four was in the apartment of a 29-year-old mom who was sharing the apartment with her 9-year-old son.
She wanted to go out one evening and had a 13-year-old female babysitter who was in grade A to attend. This is the vicious attack I described at the top of the episode. I think it was May 31st, 1992, according to my notes. Now, since it was not her own home, the mom and the babysitter ensured that the apartment was locked once the mother went out for the evening. After the boy went to sleep, the babysitter was on the couch and she fell asleep shortly after midnight.
The offender gained entrance around 2:00 a.m. and because of the locked door, it's deduced that he entered through a ground floor window. He had flexible wire and a paint rag with him. He removed the pillow slip, placed it over her head, put the paint rag into her mouth, holding the pillowcase in place with his hand around her neck and told her, "If you squirm or scream, I'll choke you into unconsciousness." He then used the wire to tie her hands together behind her back.
And like his previous victim, he pretended that he was there just to rob, not rape. So, either worried about the sleeping child or that the parent would return, the attacker dragged her out of the apartment to a secluded area near the Chaganeti Golf Course. Keep in mind, this victim was barely a teenager at age 13. She's tied, blindfolded by the oppressive hood. She must have been so terrified.
He said, "I won't rape you if you're quiet," and then forced her to the ground on her back with her hands underneath her and behind her. And when he started to remove her shorts, she began to cry. He then hit her in the face twice, telling her to shut up. He fondled her, laid on top of her, and had non-consensual sexual intercourse with her. After ejaculation, he loosened the wire binding her hands and then ran away.
The community was fearful, never knowing when the serial rapist would attack next. With the entire community on high alert, police increased patrols in and around Hemlock Crescent in southwest Calgary. Investigators looked at the similarities in the attacks. The first and most obvious, each of the sexual assaults took place at a walk-up apartment complex located on Hemlock Crescent.
Each happened in the middle of the night between 1:00 a.m. and 2:30 a.m. and each of the women was jarred awake by the offender. In each case, the rapist covered his victim's heads with a pillowcase. In two of the cases, the women were gagged with a t-shirt. Another had a paint rag that was forcefully shoved in her mouth.
All of them were bound with twine, telephone wire, nylon cord or wire, their hands behind their backs. And in each case, the women not only suffered severe physical harm, but also psychological injuries that would never go away. That fear extended to other women in the city who worried they would be next.
And police weren't able to alleviate that concern, as investigators were no closer to identifying the serial rapist than when the first attack happened four years earlier in 1988. It was a challenging case for the police because the attacks are so random and also there is no description.
There are no fingerprints. Police developed a suspect list, but with no physical description of the offender, the list was long and extremely vague. My understanding is that the list of suspects numbered as high as 188 at one time. To get onto this list, the first qualification was that you had to be male.
So it's not a very specific list of viable suspects. The men had either worked or lived in or been seen in the area at some point. For example, anyone who ever got a parking ticket in the previous 15 or 20 years was looked at as to whether they could be a suspect or not. So if they'd gotten a parking ticket and had a criminal record for doing sexual assaults,
they would be on the suspect list. But as I say, a very generalized list. The one identifying factor the serial rapist left behind was his DNA. But you have to remember, this was the late 80s and early 90s. Back then, a sample of DNA needed to be a teaspoon in size. All the victims were cooperative, even after the trauma of the attack, to allow investigators to obtain swabs of their bodies.
DNA was a relatively new science back then. It wasn't even admissible in Canadian courts until 1988. And in this case, it didn't assist police in identifying a suspect. At that time, there wasn't a national DNA data bank, so there wasn't anything to compare it to.
But all of the evidence was saved. Months went by, and then years, and the Hemlock Crescent rapist was never caught. The case went cold. Yet for some unexplained reason, the attacks in the area stopped. In the years that followed the violent sexual assaults on Hemlock Crescent, there were major advancements in DNA identification technology.
So more than a decade after the last attack, the Calgary Police Service reopened the case. In 2004, this was a cold case and ended up being assigned to Detective Lionel Bush. He had joined the Calgary Police Service in 1992, the year of the last attack. And by then he was a 15-year veteran.
But he was new to the sex crimes unit. The forensic evidence that had been in storage for more than a decade was finally sent for advanced DNA testing. The results confirmed what was suspected all along. The same DNA profile fit all four crimes. Meaning the same offender had committed all four sexual assaults.
But there were nearly 200 suspects on the original list. Detective Bush narrowed the list down by, of course, if someone had died, they were struck off the list. If they had an alibi, he double-checked, triple-checked the alibi to ensure it was rock solid. So he took them off. For example, if they were away from Calgary and had a plane ticket to prove it and receipts in another city at the same time, he would take them off the list.
And I think it was a matter of intuition and detective skill, and he narrowed it down to 10. And Detective Bush contacted all 10 of these men, told them what he was doing, and one by one they all voluntarily came to a Calgary police station to supply a swab from the inside of their mouth so that he could obtain their DNA. And each swab was sent to a lab at Edmonton, and that DNA on the swab was compared to the DNA taken from the bodies of the four victims.
One of those men lived about a 40-minute drive from Calgary, in Bragg Creek. On November 5, 2004, Emil Joseph Cromwell received a call from the Calgary Police Service. He was asked to provide a sample of his DNA. He was put on the suspect list many years earlier, as he had lived in an apartment on Hemlock Crescent with his first wife.
Cromwell voluntarily gave a blood sample for DNA analysis three days after getting the call. And though outwardly very cooperative, Joe Cromwell must have had inner turmoil worrying about this test because shortly after leaving the police station, he attempted suicide. He was taken to the Foothills Hospital, treated, and he did recover.
About one month later, police received the results. Well, the DNA analysis came back as a positive match to sample number four, which was Joe Cromwell, on all four rapes. The chance that it was someone else other than Cromwell was one in 3.9 trillion. The police went out to Bright Creek to look for him and pulled him over in the traffic stop. Apparently, Detective Bush's words were, quote, the jig is up, end quote.
and asked for the allegation of rape, Cromwell said, I've been living with this all these years. Emil Joseph Cromwell was better known as Joe to his friends and family. Originally from Halifax, Cromwell did a six-month peacekeeping tour in Cyprus, then moved to Alberta.
Cromwell only had a grade 5 education, so he worked many odd jobs including forklift operator, painter, and maintenance person. He married twice, but both relationships ended in divorce amid allegations of anger problems and abuse alleged against him. It was during his first marriage that he lived in an apartment in Calgary on Hemlock Crescent.
In 1985, Cromwell was in his 40s when he married for a third time and started his own contract painting business. Like his two prior relationships, his third marriage got off to a rocky start. Eight years into that relationship, he saw a news report about the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl.
That's when Cromwell sought out help to deal with his issues of what he referred to as self-loathing. He later told officials he didn't realize the victim was a 13-year-old girl, and that turned out to be the final attack. Cromwell decided to undergo a 14-week anger management course, and after that continued on with a weekly support group.
He and his wife participated in a marriage counseling workshop, and he said things turned around. The couple reported a marked improvement in their marriage. The couple became a beloved part of their rural community in the foothills, a hamlet named Bragg Creek, about 30 kilometers west of Calgary. He lived in the community in a modest house.
He painted a number of homes in the community and all were very happy, both again with his work and with his personality. More than a decade after the final attack on Hemlock Crescent, Cromwell was arrested and accused of sexually assaulting three women and one child.
I can remember the day I learned about his arrest. I covered the story for Global News. I interviewed several people who still lived on Hemlock Crescent. Each of them expressed relief that an arrest had been made. Many told me they had continued to live in fear, never knowing if the attacker would return. My photographer and I also went to Bragg Creek. Put the camera away and get off the property.
Cromwell's neighbors were less than welcoming. They're putting up no trespassing signs. If the press gets on the property, let me call the police. That's when Les Grieve was assigned to prosecute the case. I remember reading in the newspaper all the people that were quoted by journalists like you and others that he did not do this.
I also remember reading the letters that came to the prosecutor's office telling us that we didn't know what we were doing, we made a big mistake, it couldn't possibly be him. I remember reading letters to the editor in the newspaper that we were incompetent, so we didn't know what we were doing, we had the wrong guy. He was a fabulous fellow, according to all his friends and neighbors. Grief spoke to reporters in an interview outside of court on December 20, 2004.
The Crown's position in this matter is that Mr. Cromwell should remain in custody until the charges are resolved for several reasons. One, to maintain the public confidence in the administration of justice. Two, considering the gravity of the offenses.
I should note that while I've shared details of four attacks, at the time Cromwell was arrested in 2004, police submitted DNA from six similar sexual assaults. They all happened in the Hemlock Crescent area from the late 80s to early 90s. Police alleged four of the samples came back as a definitive match to Cromwell.
Unfortunately, this case went cold and by the time the police had DNA technology to use, there were only four victims that had provided DNA samples to the police that could be analyzed. There are reasons for this, of course. It may be that sometimes victims in their panic to wash away the memories literally wash themselves and then there's no DNA available or DNA degrades over time.
Cromwell was held in protective custody for his own safety. Just months later, Grieve received some unexpected news from Cromwell's defense lawyer. When he told me his client had instructed him to plead guilty to all four attacks, and we picked a day in April of 2005. He was in the remand center then and appeared by CCTV, entered those guilty pleas, and we set over the sentencing date for June 20, 2005.
Grieve said the evidence in the case was overwhelming, given the DNA findings. I doubt that Mr. Cromwell knew anything about DNA or gave it any thought at that time. He obviously gave thoughts to committing his crimes at night and using the pillow slip to cover their eyes immediately so they couldn't make an identification. And of course, tying their hands so they couldn't resist him. I doubt that he gave the thought of DNA a moment's thought.
There was another unexpected twist that really stands out to me as someone who has covered dozens of sexual assault cases. As you might remember from other stories I've shared, the identities of sexual assault victims are protected by court-imposed publication bans.
Most want to keep that anonymity. But there are exceptions. It started with the victim of the second attack wanting her name published. She was very adamant about that. She wanted her name out there. She didn't feel any embarrassment about being a rape victim. She wanted to stand up to him. And so she consented on attack number two. Then victim on attack number one seeing this
She wanted her name protected, but her image was okay to have her photograph taken. But then she changed her mind on that and consented to having her name published in the newspaper or on the television reports. The third victim and the fourth victim, the 13-year-old girl who, by the time the case got to court, was in her late 20s, had a young baby.
Victim number three and victim number four did not want their identity known and it was never published.
This woman was the second to be attacked. This was a criminal. This was a vicious man who preyed on us. And it was not our doing. And so I'm not going to hide and say I'm embarrassed or I'm afraid to show my face. She was assaulted on May 6th, 1989. She spoke outside of court after reading her victim impact statement at Cromwell's sentencing hearing. It's a new impact now because...
When it happened, I was a single female. And now I'm a married mother of four children, and they've had to live this, and they never should have. Right? So it's not just me that's reliving it, it's my children and my husband living it. The prosecution read statements in court for the victims that chose to keep their identities protected.
If you look at the victim impact statements, that 13-year-old babysitter, she wrote to the judge about how she was worried about getting pregnant and getting AIDS. She hated to be alone at night. She thought of suicide. She had no self-esteem.
Victim number three, who was 27 then on July the 21st, 1989. Within the first six months of this attack, she had thoughts of suicide and feelings of hopelessness.
And victim number four, she found the medical examination very humiliating. She wrote to the judge that she couldn't trust anybody, especially men. It took her a long time to have trust. She was always doubtful and always hated to be alone at night. She was just so scared it might happen again.
and of course had thoughts of suicide. So the trauma of these attacks on these women, and as I say, then the fear that was instilled in the community itself, not only in the neighborhood, but across the neighborhood, across the whole city, was really remarkable. The prosecution suggested Cromwell should serve 20 years in prison. This was not just rape, but it was break enter and rape.
So for the Crown's position on sentencing, what I did was obtain precedent cases noting the home invasion aspect of these crimes, the confinement, the trauma, the terror to the victims, that it was full-on non-consensual sexual intercourse, multiple victims, and also the impact on Calgary itself. I mean, these women lost their sense of security, but so did many other people in Calgary.
And I argued that Mr. Cromwell showed no remorse until he was caught. Larry Ross was Cromwell's defense lawyer at the time. He argued 20 years was too harsh. There's a spectrum between, in all criminal cases, from the crimes that are committed on the lowest level to the crimes that are committed with the most horrendous facts.
It's my position that ours is towards the lower end. And I'm hoping, what my submission was, that I think that what would be a fair sentence in this case would be a sentence in the area of 10 to 12 years. Any man who stands up and says that a rape is a lower end crime needs to be slapped. He has no idea what a rape is.
During the sentencing hearing, Cromwell stood and addressed the court. He said for the previous 13 years, he lived with remorse and shame of what he'd done. He then went through and named each of the four victims and apologized to each of them individually. He did make eye contact, and I respect that. He didn't put a lot of thought into his words. It was as simple, I apologize.
A month later, in December of 2005, Emile Cromwell was sentenced. In each of the first three attacks, the judge gave Cromwell eight years in prison.
For the fourth attack against the child, she sentenced him to 10 years, to bring the total sentence to 34 years. But the judge made further adjustments to allow for several mitigating factors. For his guilty plea, the judge reduced his sentence by a quarter, taking it down to 25 and a half years.
For his post-offense rehabilitation, she reduced the sentence by a further three and a half years, taking it down to 22 years. And finally, she gave credit at two for one for his time in remand. In the end, Cromwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Two of the women he sexually assaulted spoke to journalists outside of court. In the 17 years since it's happened, I never dreamed that he would be caught and put away for this long. It's over. It's done. I can try and carry on in life and go on as best I can.
When you're attacked like that and your home is invaded like that and you are raped, that stays with you for life. No amount of counseling, no amount of sentencings. There's no closure. It's now become a fact of our lives. Cromwell appealed his sentence. His defense cited a number of grounds that included the trial judge erred in not considering Cromwell's age as a mitigating factor. At the time of sentencing, he was 62 years old.
Alberta's top court dismissed all grounds of appeal and upheld the sentence. I attended his parole hearing 11 and a half years later in July of 2017, a little over the halfway mark of his sentence.
Cromwell was seeking release. I was escorted into Bowdoin Institution and taken to the minimum security annex where Cromwell had served the last five years of his time. At that point, he had already been going on unescorted temporary absences from the prison for two years. During those absences, Cromwell stayed with his wife at their Bragg Creek home for 72 hours.
I was in the room with Cromwell when he explained to the board what led to his crimes. And I need to warn you, what Cromwell described is disturbing. He said at the time he suffered from depression, anger, and self-loathing, and that a divorce from his first wife, along with custody issues during that separation, really triggered his anger.
He said to clear his head, he would wander the neighborhood of Spruce Cliff, where he used to live with them. Then, one night, everything changed. I saw a light on in an apartment, Cromwell told the board. I wondered who was in there, and I started to get excited.
He said in his fantasies, victims didn't resist. And from that moment on, he would fantasize about breaking in and attacking women. "I tried the doors. If they were unlocked, I went in," Cromwell said. "To me, it was like a power trip." He described going into the apartments, tying up the victims, and putting pillowcases over their heads.
He detailed hitting some of the victims, sometimes with bottles. Cromwell told the board he always felt guilt after the attacks, but said when police didn't show up at his door, he would get those excited thoughts again. It was only when he learned he attacked a 13-year-old girl that he took steps to get help.
He said he sought psychiatric help to manage his anger and has been on Prozac since 1994. Cromwell told the board it was a relief when sex crimes detectives arrested him. His only request at the time was that he be allowed to tell his wife. He described that conversation and said to his wife, "Remember a while back a guy was attacking women in Spruce Cliff? Well, that was me.
I watched him wipe tears from his eyes as he spoke about his wife. She has supported him through every step of the court proceedings and his time in prison. On July 27, 2017, the parole board granted Cromwell day parole. Nearly a year later, in June of 2018, he was granted full parole.
Emile Joseph Cromwell declined my request for an interview for this episode. I tried to contact the two women who had the publication ban lifted during the court process, but I wasn't able to reach them. Given that he's out of prison and out of an abundance of caution, I felt I should not use their names without checking if they're still comfortable with that decision.
A special thank you to Les Grieve for helping me share this story.
Crime Beat is written and produced by me, Nancy Hixt, with producer Dila Velasquez. Audio editing and sound design is by Rob Johnston. Special thanks to photographer-editor Danny Lantella for his work on this episode. And thanks to Chris Bassett, the VP of Network Content Production and Distribution and Editorial Standards for Global News.
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