After using technology to reconstruct facial images of two slain cold-case murder victims, and publishing them on a website, two completely independent tips, one from a friend and one from a family member, helped identify one of the victims as Richard “Dickie” Hovey.
Hovey disappeared in 1967 when he was in his late teens. He was a native of Fredericton, New Brunswick who moved to Toronto to follow his interests in being a musician. A one-time friend of Hovey's told the Toronto Sun, “We thought he just left town, because in 1967 we were always getting on the road, hitchhiking, going away. We were all in our late teens and it was quite normal for somebody to go to Toronto and try to get work up there, and the circle I ran around with, there were a lot of musicians … and we figured Dickie had just hit the road. It's a bit of a shock because I always figured he had gone on and lived a life of some sort.”
Hovey's remains, and those of the unidentified male found with him, were found naked with their hands bound. They were killed, investigators think, by someone they met in Toronto's gay village. CTV reports that “police say a sexual predator was working in downtown Toronto, particularly in the Church and Wellesley Streets area at the time.”
Said Hovey's family in a statement: “We are very relieved to be able to bring our brother home after years of anguish. We loved him dearly.”
