The 911 call came in just after two in the afternoon. Two sisters out horseback riding in a pasture southeast of Calgary had spotted what they thought was a person sleeping in the snow. They rode to a neighbor’s farmhouse, and he went back with them to check. The man was not sleeping.
He was dead. The RCMP officer from Strathmore took one look and knew this was no accident. Homicide detectives were called, along with forensic identification specialist Dean Ham. When Ham walked into the field, he saw a large pile of snow and, just beyond it, the body.
The man was on his back, arms stretched out at his sides, blood dried from his nose and mouth. He had been stabbed multiple times in the chest and back. There was no attempt to bury him. The killer had simply dragged him by the feet and left him in the snow.
Whoever he was, he was frozen solid. He had been there for three or four days. He had no wallet, no ID, no criminal record. His fingerprints were useless.
The only clues were footprints in the snow, a set of tire tracks that didn’t belong to the ambulance, and a vague description: an Asian man in his forties, wearing a jacket. The story hit the local news that week. A body dumped in a field, no name, no killer, no reason. It was the kind of crime Calgary wasn’t used to.
The city was baffled. Then, just before midnight on January 11th, a 15-year-old boy walked into a Calgary police station with his father. He said he knew who the dead man was. His name was Evan Chew.
He was 42 years old, a DJ, a security guard, a man who spent his free time helping younger kids in the Asian community steer away from trouble. The boy told the detective a story. He said he and his three friends had met Evan months earlier at an internet café. They had started hanging out with him, going out to eat, taking rides in his car.
Then they stole some of his blank checks and forged his signature. Evan had confronted them, said six thousand dollars was missing from his account, and told them he’d take action if they didn’t give it back. The last time the boy saw Evan was on January 6th, riding away in his own car with those same three friends—Mike, Paul, and Kevin. The boy believed the body in the field was Evan.
The detective was cautious. He knew the oldest trick in the book was a witness pointing fingers to hide his own guilt. But a driver’s license photo and medical records confirmed the boy’s claim. The body was Evan Chew.
When the news was broken to Evan’s family, they were shattered. He was the kind of man who did everything for the people he loved. The idea that someone had stabbed him and left him in a field made no sense. Police went back to the three boys.
They were all 15, all in grade 10, all part of the same community. Paul was quiet, studious-looking. Mike was smaller, spiky hair, a rough edge. Kevin was the third, also in school.
On the surface, they were average kids. But when police dug deeper, they found the boys were loosely connected to some troubled groups in the city, and rumors were already swirling through their high school that the three of them had killed someone. The crack in the case came without them knowing it. Under a judge’s order, police began recording phone calls from all three boys.
It took days of work, mostly because the boys spoke in their native Southeast Asian languages and every conversation had to be translated. At first, the calls were trivial. Then the news reported that police had found Evan’s missing car in an alley near one of the boy’s homes, and the calls went dark. Kevin called his girlfriend, panicked, wondering if Paul had cleaned the car well enough.
Paul called a friend, terrified that a girl might tell police what they had done. Over a hundred phone calls later, the picture was clear. The boys talked openly about how they had killed Evan. They said the police would never catch them.
They said there was no evidence. They accused each other of spreading rumors and threatening each other to keep their mouths shut. One of the boys even bragged about destroying the evidence and throwing the knives into the Bow River. In one call, they told their friends they had driven all their girlfriends out to the field to show off the body, trying to prove how tough they were.
It was enough. On January 20th, police moved in. Paul was arrested at home. His parents were in shock, unable to believe their son was involved in a murder.
Mike was picked up at his girlfriend’s house. Kevin was taken from his high school classroom, where the principal had asked a teacher to hold him behind after class. At the station, Paul and Mike kept quiet. Their lawyers told them to say nothing.
Kevin tried at first, but the interrogators kept at him. When they switched tactics, he broke down and finally told them everything. He said the plan had come together that afternoon. Evan had confronted them about the missing six thousand dollars, saying he was going to lose his house and his mortgage over what they had done.
Instead of admitting it, the boys told him a lie. They said someone else had forged the checks, and they offered to take him to the guilty party. Evan believed them. He got in the car.
As Kevin drove, Mike and Paul spoke to each other in Thai, laying out a plan. They would take Evan out of town and kick his ass. Kevin said he thought they were joking. He thought they would just beat him up or maybe leave him stranded in the middle of winter.
They reached a dark rural road. Paul snatched Evan’s cell phone and threw it out the window. When Evan got out to retrieve it, Paul and Mike followed him. As Evan bent over to pick up his phone, Paul stabbed him in the back.
Evan fell. He cried and pleaded for his life, but Paul kept stabbing him. Then Mike took the knife and stabbed him several times more. They dragged the body toward a tree line but weren’t strong enough to move it further, so they left it lying in the open snow.
Afterward, they drove around for days in Evan’s car. They used his credit card to buy video games, perfume, an expensive phone. They threw the knives into the river. Kevin went back to the scene with police and walked them through exactly what happened, showing them where the knives went into the water.
All three were charged with first-degree murder under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. The trial began in July 2004. Paul and Mike appeared cocky, laughing and talking in court. Kevin was the only one who showed any remorse.
Evan’s family sat in the gallery and watched, searching for any sign of regret on the faces of the boys who had killed their brother. They saw nothing. The prosecution hit a wall early. Kevin’s confession and video reenactment were thrown out.
The judge ruled that the good-cop, bad-cop tactic used in his interrogation was coercive, and that Kevin had cognitive difficulties that made it hard to understand his rights. But the other evidence stood. Surveillance video from stores showed the boys using Evan’s credit card. Tire tracks matched.
Footprints in the snow matched shoes belonging to the boys. Fingerprints were found on a garbage bag that held Evan’s missing license plate, hidden behind the school. And the wiretap calls were played for the court—the sound of three young men describing the murder in their own words. Friends of the boys were called to testify.
They described confessions the boys made, how they had been taken to see Evan’s body, how they were driven around in Evan’s car. The witnesses had been loyal to their friends, but the weight of what they knew was too heavy, and they told the truth. The defense argued there was no premeditation. Kevin’s lawyer said his client was just driving the car, that watching a crime wasn’t the same as committing it.
None of the three boys testified. On September 30th, 2004, the verdicts came down. Paul and Mike were found guilty of first-degree murder. Based on a psychiatric assessment, Mike was sentenced as an adult: life in prison with no chance of parole for five years.
Paul was sentenced as a youth: ten years in prison and two years of probation. Kevin was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to two years of open custody. For the public, justice felt done. But Evan’s family couldn’t square the punishment with the crime.
They called a murderer a child and gave him a few years. They didn’t see it that way. What they saw was a life taken, a brother lost, a kind man who was always ready to help anyone, lying dead in a field on a beautiful winter day for no reason at all.
