Dave Moore is the former RCMP officer who suspected that serial killer Michael McGray, and not Glen Assoun, murdered Brenda Way, even though Assoun was convicted of the murder in 1999.
Moore repeatedly tried to get his colleagues interested in his investigation, but they were not interested. In fact, without Moore’s consent, computer files he had uploaded were deleted and paper evidence he had collected was destroyed, and Moore was transferred out of his unit.
That was in 2004. Glen Assoun spent another 10 years in prison.
Glen Assoun was released from prison in 2014, but not fully exonerated for the murder of Brenda Way until March 2, 2019.
As a result of a successful court action taken by the Halifax Examiner, the CBC, and the Canadian Press, court files related to Assoun’s wrongful conviction were unsealed last month. That’s when we learned about the destruction of Moore’s evidence.
Yesterday, Moore sent the Examiner a video of himself discussing his views on a potential inquiry into Assoun’s wrongful conviction.
Moore says he would support an inquiry if it were held on “neutral ground” in Ottawa, but not one held in Nova Scotia. “Going back to the same people who were involved in the corruption in the first place is a mistake,” he says.
Moore says he would participate in an inquiry if it’s held in Ottawa, but not if it’s held in Nova Scotia.
Moore says that there have been seven previous inquiries into wrongful convictions in Canada, but none of the recommendations coming out of those inquiries have been implemented.
“However,” he says, “if you use the Assoun case as a catalyst to enforce or implement the recommendations of those seven … inquiries, then the name Assoun will go down in history as being responsible for trying to make things better so other people don’t have to go through the same thing.”
Moore goes on to say that the Assoun wrongful conviction was both an attack on Glen Assoun and a personal attack on Dave Moore.
“I believe that Mr. Assoun was collateral damage in an effort to come after me for getting too close to an investigation that might reveal something other than what the Halifax Regional Police had already come up with [i.e., that Assoun killed Way],” says Moore. “Every time I got close to an investigation for somebody they were trying to protect — in this case an amalgamation with Halifax Regional Police, they were trying to protect the reputation between the two departments — that I was disposable, that I was in fact removable and quarantined. And by focussing my efforts in a new direction, the entire Assoun matter would fall. No one would care.”
Moore says that after his transfer, he asked an officer in the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB) of the RCMP who would pursue the Assoun case.
“He said, ‘no one cares about Assoun, tsk, tsk, tsk.’”
Moore does not name the CIB officer in the video, but he tells the Examiner it was Dan Tanner.