What police couldn't possibly say about the horrific crime that has rattled the entire country was why it happened.
An autopsy showed Joshua Lall, 34, his wife, Alison Lall, 35, their two daughters, three-year-old Rochelle and five-year-old Kristen, and their tenant, Amber Bowerman, 30, all died of multiple stab wounds from one knife.
Ms. Bowerman died first and appeared to have been taken by surprise, as there was no sign of a struggle in her basement suite, police said.
Insp. Guy Slater said it was clear from defensive wounds on Alison Lall that she died trying to protect her children.
“This tragic incident ... has touched the hearts of many people,” Calgary police said in a news release.
The body of Joshua Lall was found in the room of his one-year-old daughter, who was not harmed.
Insp. Slater said there were no initial signs that drugs or alcohol were involved.
Joshua Lall's parents, who live in Guelph, Ont., have said they received a frantic call from the 35-year-old days earlier, saying he'd had an emotional breakdown.
But his boss at a Calgary architectural firm said there were no outward signs that anything was wrong.
“I saw [him] on Friday afternoon last week before the weekend and ... we had a very enjoyable end-of-the-week conversation about what we each were going to be doing on the weekend with our families, and about dinner reservations at restaurants that he was hopeful to make,” Rob Adamson of the architectural firm Cohos Evamy said Friday.
Mr. Adamson said “it was a total surprise to me that there's allegations or suggestions that Joshua had some significant mental health issues.”
He said there were no indications from any of the other 175 employees that anything was wrong.
“He was extremely popular. Joshua was a friendly, outgoing guy. He was helpful to everybody and probably touched everybody in some way in our office.”
Police have said the crime was gruesome and that the officers who made the discovery had to get counselling after what they saw.
A candlelight vigil was planned at a community church Friday night.
Commentary in the Globe and Mail
A tragic example of ignored mental illness in Canada.
Tragic but preventable, no doubt that comment will annoy a lot of people but
Canada has an ongoing problem with the taboo subject of mental illness. Before
you jump on the feminist bandwagon, just remember that spousal murders affect
men and women. Women may kill less often but mentally ill women receive
favourable bias in court and use that hysteria to destroy the father of their
children.
In most cases, the signs and symptoms of mental illness were obvious, obvious to
a skilled observer, and tragically, many relatives don't wish to see a problem
in the children, their son or daughter.
Mental illness is insidious, there are many many triggers, its a subject that
requires the utmost compassion and understanding.
Once a victim suffers a problem, they may seek help in various forms, once an
illness crosses a certain threshold, they no longer are able to seek help but
rather their illness prevents them from admitting they have a problem based on
paranoid fears that may or may not have justification.
The tragedy is that mental illness is used as a vehicle to promote hatred
towards men while women suffer mental health problems at a far greater rate than
women.
So, lets do a run down on the factors to be aware of, in men or women, its a
dysfunctional family background, often genetically inherited but not always. In
women, its can remain hidden till mid 30's or older to explode around the birth
of a child and accompanied by a discovery of a new sexual inclination, they come
out of the closet, they say. More to the point, many women who suffer mental
health problems were the victims of chronic childhood sexual abuse and after the
birth of child, simply cannot bring themselves to have a relationship with a
man.
Their paranoid ideas are obvious to a skilled observer, but don't expect society
to take any notice, society treats mental illness as a horrible social taboo.
Thats tragic. Ottawa Mens Centre dot com
Expect the feminists to be outraged, and quite rightly, its another woman
murdered by her husband and society needs to ask the question as to how and why
it happened and what can be done to prevent it in future.
Firstly, a campaign to enrage hatred towards men will backfire.
In Kingston Ontario, a police officer killed his wife, why? He like many other
men who killed their spouses were in a depression that got deeper to the point
that they crossed the line from being able to recognize they had a problem to
committing murder to solve the problem with suicide often following.
The fact is, Canada has an official policy of "Male Gender Apartheid", while men
know that there is no justice in Family Court with a majority of judges willing
to grant any crazy woman any crazy order, such an environment only breeds deep
depression and a sense of powerlessness that can turn into a graveyard spiral
that tragically takes a father into the grave and often he decides to kill his
entire family as to somehow obtain justice.
Feminists need to get understand that equality means children deserve a
relationship with both parents, and its Canada's failure to have a legal
presumption of equal parenting after divorce that convinces men that there is no
hope for their children to have a relationship with their father.
The first step in reducing spousal homicides is to address the pathological
hatred towards fathers in Canadian society, its a hatred that good deserving
loving fathers don't deserve.