Deep Dive
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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. At closing time on a cold and snowy night in November 1992, a young waitress had just finished her second shift at Confetti's Restaurant and Bar in Northeast Calgary. She asked a doorman if he would walk her to her vehicle.
As they walked out the back door and through the parking lot, she explained that someone in the bar had given her a hard time that night. When they got to her car, the doorman checked to make sure no one was inside. He waited as she got in, closed the door, and started the vehicle. She waved at him as she drove away.
She was never seen alive again. You have that feeling that obviously this isn't going to end very well. I just remember just staring at her. And I could see her walk up the stairs. She was with her back to me. This was the last time I saw her.
I'm Nancy Hixt, a senior crime reporter for Global News. Today on Crime Beat, I share the story of a couple filled with hopes for the future until one of them vanished. This is The Second Shift. This story begins in the small rural community of Drumheller, where Delene Hempel was raised. She was the middle child with a younger brother and an older sister, Jalene Cosco.
My name's Jolene. I was born in March. My middle name's April. She was born, her middle name is May, and she was born in June. Jolene and Delene, my dad kind of had it all planned out. Jolene said the family affectionately called Delene Tinker. Because she flitted around like that, she was very effusive and exuberant and that kind of thing. My sister was into a lot of different things. She was a dirt biker. She liked...
sea cadets. She played clarinet and saxophone. Golfing was a new thing for her. In her early 20s, Delene met Troy Hempel. I met her when I was, I believe about 19 at the time. We were paired together in my brother's wedding party and hit it off right from the beginning.
We just had lots of fun together and we're kind of always together since then. Since that day it was kind of strange and interesting how it all worked out. She was just funny, that was the first thing was smile, laughter. She was always very outgoing, people pleaser, just
Just tried to have everybody always have a good time. And at the time, I was very quiet, shy. And she, of course, was-- she could get me out of my shell a bit. And that was just-- that was attractive to me. They had a whirlwind romance. To be honest, we were living together within like six months of meeting each other.
It definitely all happened real, real fast with us. From the dating to the asking her to marry me and being married. I mean, I was married when I was 21 years old, right? So yeah, it all happened quite fast and just seemed right and natural. Troy and Delene were married June 6, 1992, just under two years after they started dating.
They had their ceremony at a church in Beisiker, and a reception and dance followed in the local hall.
Biceker is Troy's hometown, about a 45-minute drive northeast of Calgary. It's one of the ways I'm connected to this story. Biceker is also my hometown. So I became aware of this story several years before I began covering it myself as a journalist. That was a great day, yeah. We actually went on a trip.
Had our honeymoon right away, left the wedding early, went to Calgary, went to the airport and then flew out the next day to Victoria just for a couple weeks getaway. As they settled into married life, they expanded their family with two Rottweiler puppies. Delene entered them in dog shows with plans of breeding them in the future.
Not long after, they bought some property in a small rural community about 25 minutes northeast of the Calgary city limits. They both grew up in rural Alberta, so Troy and Delene were excited to build their future in the country. It was in the hamlet of Delroy, which there was, at that time, there was probably 15,000
maybe 10 people living out there at the time. So it wasn't a real big community. They had a community hall and a horse riding area was right behind our house and stuff. So yeah, it was just a good little community. We actually moved out there and lived out there on the property in a little motor home, her dad's motor home for...
Probably three months, actually, prior to. So we had two dogs and her and I in a motorhome for a few months, just living beside the lawn, the property, while the house was getting built out there. Their dream was to one day open their own restaurant and bar in the city.
She wanted more restaurant experience to manage and do all that rather than just being a waitress. So she was looking into doing that and friends of hers were opening up a bar but they were delayed. So she hadn't started there yet and she just needed a job for just to hold her over until the other guys opened up their place where she could like manage that spot.
And then where she was working, it was just a stopgap to get her to the next job. Delene was hired as a waitress at Confetti's Restaurant and Bar in northeast Calgary. Troy also commuted to the northeast part of the city, though further north, as he worked as a baggage handler at the International Airport. I actually was working a night shift at the time as well, so...
her working nights and me working nights, it just left us together for the day, right? So it was, yeah, it just seemed perfect at the time. Delene began working at Confetti's on November 13th, 1992 and didn't get off to a good start. She did have an issue with a patron and was telling me about it. I remember that after her first shift, that was the Friday. And so we were talking about that on the Saturday and
Yeah, that was, yeah, she just had a guy just not, kind of harassing her a little bit. But from what I understood is that she had that taken care of with the doorman and stuff like that. Delene's very independent, very, I always thought she could take care of herself, right? I never worried about her in that sense.
Troy recalls the conversation he had with his wife before she left for her second shift. I was, again, working nights. I left the house first. And it's still pretty...
vivid in my memory, right? It's crazy how there's things you are like yesterday and there are things that are a distant memory and some things you can't even remember anymore, right? But this is, I've always remembered this. I do remember leaving and just saying goodbye, we'll see you later. And
I walked out the door, I got in my truck and I sat in my truck and I remember looking out my vehicle and she was standing with her back to me in our bay window and she had a pair of my shorts and a shirt of mine on and I just remember, I don't know why, I just remember staring at her and, sorry, I just remember just staring at her
The couple planned to meet back at the house in Dalroy after work. Troy ended up working a bit of overtime.
Just to let her know I was on my way home and that was, I think, at about 3 in the morning or so or 2.30. And she hadn't been home yet. About an hour and a half later, Troy called their house a second time to let Delene know he was on his way home. Last call at the bar was around 2.30. He figured she should have left work around 3 and arrived home a half hour later at about 3.30.
But when he called again at 4 a.m., there was still no answer. I got home, right, and she wasn't there, still wasn't there, her car wasn't there. Of course, she got nowhere to call. I just ended up calling the bar where she worked, and somebody answered and said, there's just nobody left here. And so I knew she hadn't been home because our dogs hadn't been let out yet. So I waited for a little bit,
And then just instantly just got worried and I thought, oh, I'm just going to have to backtrack how she would come home, right? Troy knew the commute well, so he retraced the route his wife would have taken. About 10 minutes from their home, he found her car. Right in the ditch. Like it was all the way in the ditch. Just like someone drove it and parked it there. Not spun out or anything like that. It was just after the intersection, probably about
100 feet from the intersection, just parked, just driven neatly into the ditch. It was a disturbing discovery. Her car was left at the corner of Highway 1 and Highway 9. Highway 1 is busy. It's the main thoroughfare that takes you east from Calgary. It's more commonly referred to as the Trans-Canada Highway, which connects the country coast to coast. So I went...
and looked and the door was open. Nobody was there, didn't seem like their keys were in it, didn't seem like there was any signs of distress or struggling or anything. Her purse was still in there. So it was really strange to me, right? Snow was falling and any footprints that may have been there were soon covered. I wanted to look for her, but so where do you look? What do you do? Where do you start? There's no tracks, there's no leads, there's nothing, right?
Troy said he drove around some nearby farms looking for lights. Maybe Delene walked for help. He wondered if she might have run out of gas or had car trouble. But there was no sign of his wife. My sister lived close by. I drove to her place and knocked on my sister's door. And of course it was late and she answered and her and I went back to the car.
At that point, it was about 5 in the morning on November 17th, 1992. The bar Delene worked at closed two hours earlier, and it had now been an hour since Troy started looking for her. He started to panic and called the police. While I was sitting there with the police officer and he was phoning his stuff in, he said, this seems pretty legit. So...
That's when it hit me like, holy cow, like what is going on here? What has happened? Delene Hempel seemed to have vanished into the night. Troy said that as the hours ticked, he grew more and more concerned. I mean, every scenario goes through your mind, right? But it all comes back to why, how, how? Like if...
You know, you play many scenarios out in your brain and you think if that's, if it was this situation, why is the car parked like that? If it was that situation, why is the car parked like it is, right? So to me, it always reverted back to this is not good. Next was just waiting. Maybe she'll call. Maybe she's, is she kidnapped? Is she, you know, did she, you know, is she just...
Taking a break. She got somewhere. You know what I mean? Like everything runs through your brain. I mean, you hear of it in movies and stuff, right? Now you're about to live a reality of this. RCMP Corporal Doug Morrison became the primary investigator assigned to the case.
I went out with other members of our Major Crimes Unit and we had a look at the vehicle. The vehicle was still parked on the eastern shoulder of Highway 9, facing north. We were able to observe that her purse and money were still in the back seat of the car, or actually back floorboards, and there were no keys in the ignition.
Corporal Morrison is retired now, but in 1992, he already had 20 years' experience with the RCMP. He told me there were no signs of a struggle, nothing that stood out. One of our main things is to have the victim's vehicle pulled in, and we do then, you know, put it in a warm area in a garage, and so that we can do proper fingerprinting.
And our forensic unit then did their examination of the vehicle from the inside out. And we didn't really determine much more physical evidence at that stage. Given the lack of forensic evidence, police said they had no clear direction to pursue. Forensic evidence really doesn't do that in the beginning anyway, unless you have, you come across a crime scene where you have the victim
and you have blood samples and you have footprints and all of that stuff. This particular crime, we had nothing of that extent. Officers searched the rural area where the car was found, including the surrounding properties and the nearby hamlet of Cheadle. To have all of these ranchers and farmers, which are the heart and soul of Alberta, to have them search their property,
In the event that her car ran out of gas or whatever the case might be and she was walking somewhere, stumbled and fell and hurt herself. So, you know, those are all things that as an investigator you're trying to cover off. At the same time, in Northeast Calgary, a parallel investigation into Delene's disappearance began at Confetti's restaurant and bar.
Now we have a major scene there as well because that's basically the last area where she was seen alive. That's when police learned about Delene's request to have a doorman escort her to her car following her second shift. She had come to him and she says, I'm really nervous. Can you walk me out to my car? So he, in fact, walked her out. And, you know, when we interviewed him, he told us that she was very nervous and jittery.
and wanted security to take her to her car, to get her into her car. And subsequently he did that and watched her drive off to the south and then get on to Memorial Drive and then head east on Memorial Drive. So she was obviously nervous about something that happened in Confetti's Bar and Grill. The question was, who made Delene Hempel feel so uncomfortable that night?
We had our forensic people go over and take photographs of Confetti's Bar and Grill at that time. We then took a planned drawing of the inside of Confetti's Bar and Grill. And then our next task was to interview everybody that was in Confetti's from noon on the 18th of November 1992 up until closing. The endeavor there was
If you were sitting at a table, tell us which table you were at. Did you move from one table to another table? Who did you know in that bar? And so subsequently, over the course of the next, well, I have to say probably almost three weeks, we were able to put in, I think, at the last count was about 310 people back into that bar.
on that night. So those people were all interviewed and in particular who was seated on the area where Delene Hempel actually served customers. As the investigation continued, family and friends gathered at Troy and Delene's home in Dalroy. After a while,
My house was Grand Central Station because everybody wanted to give their support, which is great, you know, awesome. I had, I needed to find places for me to escape because at the time I was very, I was quiet. I was a pretty quiet guy. I needed to escape and get away, so I had my spots and I had two dogs at the time too, so lots of walks. Yeah, just waiting.
Both Troy and Delene's mother did interviews with journalists and appealed for her safe return. Lots of pain. I just want her back. I just want her back. I just want someone to let her go and let her come back. I just want her back. So many speculations right now. So many things run through your mind. I just want her to come back.
With each passing day, the search for Delene grew. Police had a lot of ground to cover, acres and acres of farmland. Both police helicopters and private planes flew over the area with hopes of finding a clue. At first, Delene's sister joined the search efforts herself.
But I had such a bad anxiety attack looking in culverts, looking behind haystacks, looking in abandoned buildings. I was just becoming really ineffective. I could not keep it together. After that, Jalene Cosco focused on helping organize the searches. I was very open with the public and I invited anybody and everybody
If you have a dream or a feeling or you're psychic, call me. Leave the tip line alone unless you have something that they can really track down. Because they did like 900 tips. And I got, I have 30,000 phone numbers of people who either had a dream about my sister, looked for my sister. Corporal Morrison said Jolene's daily media updates led to countless tips for police to sift through. Jolene...
The sister was very instrumental in getting people out and people involved in searching, you know, people on horseback and, you know, we kind of left that part of the investigation out of the Strathmore members because that's really their detachment area. So they kind of know their farmers and their ranchers a lot better than us city folk, so to speak.
We were getting flooded with calls. We were getting flooded with calls that people that were claiming that, "No, she ran away because her and her husband weren't getting along." We were getting flooded with calls of people, "Well, I saw this. I drove by the car. I saw somebody standing there. I saw somebody in the car with her." We had psychics going by and saying, you know, "This is what he was wearing."
Even, you know, while he was sitting in the car, they were able to say that he was wearing blue jeans and so on and so forth. Given the volume of tips pouring in, police had a number of theories to explore. It looks like she just got out of her vehicle, took the keys, and then just maybe walked away or got picked up by someone else.
she maybe went away with a newfound man. So, you know, that also raises the tension there that she went away on her own behalf. But if she was going to do that, she was certainly taking her purse and her tips, which was in a bag laying on the floorboards by her purse. Delene's husband told investigators she wouldn't just take off. If you knew us, like there's...
There's no reason she would not be able to not call me if it wasn't because she was in trouble, right? Like, she wouldn't just leave. She wouldn't just get cold feet and then leave all of a sudden, right? We have that relationship to be able to talk if there's issues between us, right? You recall this was 1992, so communication didn't happen on cell phones.
Troy said that back then, the couple kept in touch by calling each other from their work landlines. We called each other all the time. We had a community bullpen phone. We called it at the airport. And mostly everybody called it Troy's phone because even joking guys would pick up the phone saying, Troy's phone, and it'd be Delene on the other end laughing saying, can I speak to Troy, please? So we were always on the phone with each other.
Troy said the fact he didn't hear from Delene the night she disappeared made him worry. I'd always feared that she was in trouble, right? Not just somebody who did this on her own. Just days into the search, Corporal Morrison said investigators looked at another theory: the husband. You know, I guess in any, you know, any crime of this nature,
You know, he was the first one to arrive on the scene, so to speak, to find his wife's vehicle. Could a dispute happen there at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning when he reported finding her vehicle? You know, an argument happened there, and subsequently the bad thing happened. So obviously he's...
He has to be eliminated from the overall picture. It was an incredibly traumatic time for Troy, given his wife was missing and now he was considered a suspect in her disappearance. But I always knew that this is part of it. They don't know. They don't know. It's part of the investigation. I know, obviously, but they don't, so they have to prove that. And I understood that.
I'm not saying it was easy, it was very hard. I will, like taking the polygraph test, if anybody's ever done it in their lives, they'll know how stressful a polygraph test is. I mean, I won't get into the details of a polygraph test, but it's not a quick process. Yeah, it's stressful, it's very stressful. Even though you're innocent, it's very stressful.
It's an experience that I don't wish upon anybody. My heart goes out to the family, certainly to Troy. You know, we put him through the Dickens, you know, to try to get him to, you know, because I mean, let's face it, he's number one suspect. You have to say that. You know, all the heartbreak that he's going through at the time and then having the police
hound and question him, and then subsequently polygraph him, you know, to ensure that he's not responsible. You know, he was very cooperative. You know, we put him through his ropes, and, you know, he came out very truthful in all his answers, and so he was eliminated as a suspect very early on in the investigation of her being a missing person.
By early December 1992, two weeks had passed and there was still no sign of Delene Hempel. Her sister, Jalene Cosco, focused on keeping the case in the public eye. We had 300,000 posters up in three and a half weeks. And I did everything.
television, newspaper, radio, every day. Every day I tried to think of some other little tidbit that I could share with somebody just to keep that attention going. Delene Hempel's face was on bus stops and billboards, and there were missing persons flyers scattered throughout Calgary. Troy Hempel said he was grateful for his sister-in-law's tireless efforts. She was the reason, too, that...
that it was as high profile as it was because she did a lot to get it out in the public, which I was always so grateful for. And it took that burden off me. I didn't have to do that, right? I didn't have to make posters, call trucking companies to have her face plastered on the back of trucks and news agencies to show up with a camera at a search, right? So she did a lot of work in that now. Yeah, I was pretty grateful for that.
Without answers, it was difficult for Delene's loved ones to move forward. I went back to work while she was missing for one day and just to kind of, I don't know, change it up maybe. This was a few months after, I don't actually recall how long after. I just remember going to work one day and I mean, it was overwhelming.
the support from people at work. And I mean, I worked around airplanes and I mean, as baggage handler, but still dangerous work environment. And my mind just wasn't suited for that. To make matters worse, while police cleared Troy of any wrongdoing, public opinion was a different story. Yeah, that was really hard on me.
Yeah, it was hard for me to go out in public because it was very, obviously very high profile. I remember standing in line in like Safeway or something and paper was there and I had sunglasses on and a hat because I didn't want people to recognize me. But it was on the front page and this was a little bit into it. I had no idea why it was on the front page again, but it was on the front page, probably just to keep it up there.
But I remember these two guys in front of me just saying, do you think the husband did it? And the other guy saying, of course the husband did it, right? And me standing right behind them just thinking, like, what do you do in that situation, right? So that really put me even more into a shell. Troy was eliminated as a suspect. But investigators had another lead.
And the case was about to take a tragic turn. We didn't have any evidence to prove that it was homicide. But as time drags on, unfortunately, in our line of business, you know, you have that feeling that obviously this isn't going to end very well. That's next time on part two of The Second Shift.
Thank you for joining me this week. 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.
I would love to have you tell a friend about this podcast, and you can help me share these important stories by rating and reviewing Crime Beat on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can find me on Twitter at Nancy Hixt, on Facebook at Nancy Hixt Crime Beat, and on Instagram at Nancy.Hixt. That's N-A-N-C-Y dot H-I-X-T. Thanks again for listening. Please join me next time.