It started as an ordinary August morning, the kind that promised nothing but warmth and family time. Ardit Wood was 27, a philosophy PhD student with a runner’s build and a head full of plans. She was home in Ottawa for two weeks, visiting the parents and brothers she rarely got to see, since her university sat nearly 300 miles away. On that morning, she made a strawberry dessert, went for a run, and then borrowed her brother’s bike for a quick ride before the rain hit.
She promised her mom she’d be back within an hour and a half. An hour and a half later, the storm rolled in, but Ardit didn’t. Her mom waited, then worried, then called her husband. By evening, her father and brothers were driving up and down the city’s park trails, calling her name into the dark.
But there was no trace of her. Six hours later, they called police. Because she was 27, investigators didn’t treat it as urgent at first. Her family did.
Neighbors and friends poured in, searching through the night, but Ottawa’s bike paths stretched over 100 miles, and no one knew which one she’d taken. The next morning, police set up a command post at the Aviation Museum, where several major trails met. They brought helicopters, mounted officers, even the military. Hundreds of volunteers showed up, making it one of the largest searches in Ottawa’s history.
But they found nothing. Not a trace. Not a clue. Then the tips started.
Several women came forward with eerily similar stories. A fit, good-looking man on a bike had approached them on the trails by the river, seemed friendly at first, then suddenly tried to drag them into the trees. One woman broke free and sped away. Police made a composite sketch but kept it secret, hoping to avoid a flood of useless calls.
Then a 16-year-old girl came forward with something even more specific. She’d been riding in the park on the day Ardit vanished. She passed a woman who looked like Ardit, then heard a scream. She saw a woman standing with a man, arguing, then saw them both walk into the woods.
Something felt wrong, so she circled back. She saw a hat hanging from a branch, two bikes lying on the ground. But no people. She heard another scream, turned around, and convinced herself she was overthinking.
Later, when police showed her the composite sketch, she confirmed it looked like the man she’d seen that day. Detectives now believed Ardit had been abducted, and they turned their attention to the riverbanks. Divers searched the water. Four days after she vanished, a bike came up from the bottom of the river.
The serial number matched Ardit’s brother’s bike. That same day, police got a call unlike any other. A panicked man on the line said he’d accidentally killed Ardit near a bike path. He said he’d partially buried her body near the riverbank and covered it with branches.
Investigators traced the call to a payphone in a nearby town but found no fingerprints, no DNA, nothing. The next day, search dogs led police to a body lying just feet from the water, partially hidden under branches. It was so decomposed they couldn’t identify her by sight, and she was stripped of all clothing. But they knew.
Medical examiners confirmed: the victim was Ardit. She had drowned, most likely held underwater until she died. Then her killer dragged her onto the bank and covered her with branches. He’d taken her clothes with him.
Investigators believed she’d been sexually assaulted but couldn’t prove it. After her body was found, police released the composite sketch. It triggered hundreds of tips but no name. Witnesses kept mentioning one detail: a man with an eagle tattoo on his shoulder.
Detectives held that back for weeks, hoping it would crack the case, but when they released it, it only brought more dead ends. A year passed. Detectives worked through thousands of tips, checked hundreds of suspects, but nothing stuck. They even looked into a serial predator from a nearby town, a man who had attacked multiple women just a year earlier.
But no link could be proven. The case went cold. The $50,000 reward attracted no one who knew anything. By two years, even the most dedicated detectives were starting to doubt they’d ever see justice for Ardit.
Then, in May 2006, everything shifted. In North Bay, nearly200 miles away, a woman walking home late at night was approached by a man who claimed he’d just moved from Ottawa and needed directions. When she stopped to help him, he grabbed her and dragged her into the bushes. She screamed.
A neighbor ran out with a shovel and scared him off. The attacker bolted, dropping his phone. Police traced it to 25-year-old Christopher Myers, a recent transplant from Ottawa. While preparing the case, the lead detective remembered hearing about the Ardit Wood case at a conference.
He dug out the handout with the composite sketch. Christopher’s face matched it almost exactly. He passed the tip to Ottawa investigators, who realized they’d already interviewed Myers twice before. An anonymous tipster had named him in the early weeks after Ardit vanished, but his landlady gave him an alibi, saying she’d seen him at home until around3 p.
m. , when he left for work. Since the attack was believed to have happened around1:30, he seemed cleared. A year later, his name came up again, but when questioned, he showed police his bare shoulders, proving he had no tattoos.
The witnesses all described an eagle tattoo. So he was ruled out again. But now, with this fresh assault in North Bay, they took another look. The first thing they did was revisit that alibi.
His landlady clarified, when pressed, that she had actually seen him in the morning, not the afternoon. That detail cracked everything open. Police retraced his route by bike themselves: from his house, to the park, to his afternoon shift. It was absolutely possible.
Detectives traveled to North Bay to question him. He denied everything at first, then changed his story. He admitted he’d been riding in the park that day. He claimed he’d met Ardit, talked, that she willingly walked into the woods with him.
Then, he said, another girl appeared, startled Ardit, causing her to fall into the river. He said he left, then came back later, found her drowned, pulled her body onto the shore, covered it with branches, and left. Detectives knew it was nonsense, a twisted version of the teen witness’s account he’d likely seen on the news. He backtracked again, saying he’d never been in the park at all.
Then a polygraph came back: he failed. But without physical evidence, they couldn’t charge him. Still, they kept digging. They learned Christopher had a traumatic childhood, born to a mother who drank and used drugs, physically abused him until he was adopted at age four.
That family gave up on him by the time he was 12. One psychologist called him the most frightening child he’d ever worked with. As an adult, he held jobs and had girlfriends. One ex told detectives he would fly into rages and sometimes hit her.
And then she mentioned something that broke everything open: Christopher had a habit of giving himself temporary tattoos, and more than once, she’d seen an eagle tattoo inked onto his shoulder. It wasn’t permanent. That’s why his shoulders looked bare when police checked him. But the witnesses weren’t mistaken.
He had worn that eagle. Still, they needed more than suspicion. Five months after his arrest, they brought him in again, this time with an experienced interrogator from the UK. Christopher went back and forth, telling the same bizarre story, then retracting it, then drawing police a map of where he said he met Ardit.
He agreed to take them to the spot, then once there, claimed he didn’t recognize anything. He wouldn’t confess to murder, but he did confess to something else. Police had connected him to a string of unsolved sexual assaults around Ottawa. Several victims, shown his photo, identified him without hesitation.
Under hours of pressure, Christopher finally broke and admitted to five separate assaults. That gave police enough to charge him amp add to build a murder case. . In January 2008, prosecutors offered him a deal: plead guilty to second-degree murder, and they’d drop the first-degree charge.
Christopher took it. He admitted he approached Ardit on the bike path, dragged her into the woods intending to assault her, and then drowned her in the river. He also pled guilty to several other attacks. He received a life sentence with parole eligibility after just 10 years.
His first parole hearing came in 2015. Denied. His second, in 2020. Denied again.
Experts said he was still highly likely to reoffend, even after 15 years behind bars. As of now, Christopher remains in prison, and it’s unlikely he’ll ever walk free. Ardit’s murder became one of the most infamous cases in Ottawa’s history. For years, women were afraid to walk in parks or ride alone.
Volunteers organized patrols along the bike paths, groups riding together to watch over one another, trying to make sure no one else vanished the way she did. Detectives believed Christopher committed many more assaults than he admitted, but victims who never saw his face meant they couldn’t tie him to every case. The case closed with him behind bars, but with the chilling knowledge that some of his crimes likely never even got counted.
