1936
Settled in 1936; the town began as the site of Gander International Airport.
about 0:07:42The story
Jennifer Hicks was the youngest of six children from Musgrave Harbour, a town of about a thousand people an hour from Gander. Her father, who worked on dragger boats, died when she was a teenager, and her mother, a home care worker, died as she became an adult. In the summer of 1997 she moved to Gander with her sister to finish school and take a business administration course, having left school in grade 10.
At nine months old a high fever brought on epileptic seizures that never went away. Teased at school, by 12 he was in his third year of fifth grade, and his mother Pearl kept him at home.
In October 1997 the province arranged live-in care for Hart, and the caregiver was Jennifer Hicks. They became a couple, which cost her the job because carers cannot date patients, and both went on social assistance. She became pregnant with twins. Once he had her he turned jealous and violent: smashing furniture, waiting in the car park of the Albatross Motel where she worked, once holding a knife to his own throat, gambling the family's assistance cheques, selling their furniture.
The girls were born on 9 March 1999 by caesarean: Karen, elder by two minutes, at five pounds eight ounces, and Krista at over six pounds. The parents married in March 2000 before a justice of the peace. Hart had broken his neck in a 1998 car crash, and after the births he received a $25,000 insurance claim, which social services made him sell off and repay. Social services then threatened to remove the children and told Jennifer to choose between the girls and her husband; his brother Melvin offered to take her and the babies, but not Hart.
Twenty minutes later he returned without them, saying one had fallen in the water, that he cannot swim, and that he had driven home for help, though he had a mobile phone and never called anyone. He had left both girls at the park.
At the wharf Krista was floating face down but alive. Hart said he had a massive seizure after lifting them from the car and remembered one girl running, but not which way. He said the twins were frightened of his seizures and would hide. Jennifer could not swim either, so she searched the woods while he went to a petrol station to call the authorities. A few days after the funeral he threw out the girls' clothes, stuffed animals and pictures, and the RCMP retrieved them from the dumpster.
Three years later, in February 2005, the couple were living in Grand Falls when a man calling himself Steph Swab approached Hart, saying he was a French Canadian looking for his missing sister, a blonde drug addict who gambled in the local bars, while their mother was dying of lung cancer in Montreal. He paid Hart $50, then a carton of cigarettes, then hired him for odd jobs for an all-powerful boss: a package from a hotel, a Ski-Doo hauled in a U-Haul, a Pontiac Grand Am driven somewhere, an envelope from a numbered locker at a YMCA in Halifax. Over a few months Hart earned more than $15,000 and bought a $4,000 headstone with two angels, a $6,500 used 2000 Pontiac Sunfire, a bed and a mattress.
In Montreal, Swab took him to meet the boss, who said a rival gang member was going to tell police that Hart had drowned his daughters. Told the informant would be dealt with, he built an alibi by taking Jennifer to Walmart on 12 June 2005 and having her smile at the security camera for twenty minutes.
It was all a Mr Big sting costing more than $400,000; Swab and the boss were police. His lawyer said he had been intimidated and made the story up. Jennifer kept visiting him.
Prosecutors had no case.
Jennifer Hicks says she is no longer with him and now fears him. She lives in St John's, visits the graves every day and blames herself.