The Canadian Family Massacre That Was Sentenced on a Lie

In April 1984, in a courtroom in British Columbia, a young man stood up and confessed to one of the worst crimes in Canadian history. He told the court how he had crept out of the tree line at a family campsite at dusk. How he had shot four adults as they sat around their campfire. How he had then gone to the tent and taken the lives of two sleeping little girls.

How he had loaded all six into the family’s own car, driven it up a mountainside, and burned it. Six people. Three generations of one family. Grandparents, parents, and two children. Gone in a single night of violence. For what he claimed was nothing more than robbery. The judge called it a cold-blooded and senseless execution of six innocent people for no apparent reason.

The confession closed the case. The killer went to prison. British Columbia tried to move on. But here is the thing about that confession. The thing almost nobody outside the investigation knew for years. It was a lie. Not a lie about whether he did it. A lie about what he actually did. Because the story David Shearing told that courtroom, six quick deaths in one terrible night, was a version he invented to hide the truth.

And the truth, when it finally surfaced, was so much worse that it has kept him behind bars for over 40 years and turned every one of his parole hearings into a battle fought by thousands of ordinary Canadians. The detective who broke him always suspected there was more. He was right. This is the story of the Johnson and Bentley families.

Of the two weeks in August 1982, when they vanished into one of the most beautiful places on Earth. And of the confession within the confession, the one that revealed what really happened in the woods near Wells Gray Park. Wells Gray Provincial Park is one of Canada’s great wildernesses. Over 5,000 square kilometers of mountains, alpine meadows, and 39 waterfalls tucked into east central British Columbia about 120 km north of Kamloops.

For generations of BC families, the Clearwater Valley at its doorstep has meant one thing, summer. And in August 1982, it meant summer for the Johnson’s and the Bentley’s. George Bentley was 66, a retired man from Port Coquitlam near Vancouver and a lifelong outdoorsman. He and his wife Edith, 59, had spent decades camping together and George had a particular preference that will matter enormously in this story.

 He liked the quiet spots. Not the busy campgrounds, the secluded clearings away from the crowds where a family could have the wilderness to themselves. Their daughter, Jackie Johnson, was 40. She’d married Bob Johnson, 44, a steady, well-liked man who had worked at the Gorman Brothers Lumber Mill in Westbank near Kelowna for 25 years.

A quarter of a century at the same job. That’s the kind of man Bob Johnson was. The kind whose absence gets noticed. And then there were the girls. Janet was 13, Karen was 11. Two sisters at that golden age where a summer camping trip with your grandparents is still one of the best things in the world. On August 2nd, 1982, the two households set off on a two-week holiday together.

The Bentley’s in their Ford pickup truck with its camper on the back, the Johnson’s in their car. Three generations, two vehicles, 14 days of fishing, campfires, and quiet. They made their way into the Clearwater Valley and true to George’s habit, they didn’t settle in a formal campground. They found a secluded clearing near Bear Creek just outside the boundary of Wells Gray Park. Private, peaceful, theirs.

On August 6th, Edith Bentley found a phone and called another of her daughters just to check in. The message was simple and happy. They were having a wonderful time. That phone call was the last time anyone in the outside world ever heard from them. What the family could not have known, what no one could have known, was that their secluded clearing near Bear Creek was not as private as it seemed.

Someone had noticed them. His name was David William Shearing. He was 23 years old and he was local, raised on a property in the Clearwater area, not far from where the family had made camp. On paper, his background was ordinary, even respectable. His late father had been a prison guard. His brother worked as a sheriff.

 David himself had finished high school and trained as a heavy-duty mechanic. But by 1982, his own life was drifting. Odd jobs, petty trouble, too much time alone in the bush he knew better than almost anyone. And underneath the drifting, there was something far darker. Decades later, Shearing himself would admit to a parole board that violent fantasies had lived in his head since his mid-teens.

When he spotted the family’s vehicles parked in the clearing that August, he did not simply pass by. He stopped. And he began to watch. For days, from the cover of the tree line, David Shearing observed the Johnson and Bentley families going about their holiday. He watched them fish and cook and sit around their fire.

He learned their rhythms, who did what, who slept where. And by his own eventual admission, his attention had fixed on one member of the family in particular, 13-year-old Janet. Everything that was about to happen, everything, flowed from that. On the evening of approximately August 10th, 1982, as dusk settled over the Clearwater Valley and the four adults gathered around the campfire, David Shearing took a .

22-caliber Remington pump-action rifle and stepped out of the trees. I’m going to tell you what happened as plainly and briefly as I can because this family deserves dignity and because the facts speak loudly enough on their own. Shearing approached the campsite in the fading light and opened fire on the adults around the campfire.

George, Edith, Bob, Jackie. Four people who never had a chance to understand what was happening. Taken in moments by a man they had never met, had never wronged, had never even seen. For years, the official story, the story Shearing himself told in court, was that he then went to the tent and killed the sleeping girls, too.

Six lives one night. That is what the judge heard. That is what the newspapers printed. That is what Canada believed. It was not the truth, and we’ll come to the truth where it belongs in this story when it finally came out. What is certain is this. In the days that followed, Shearing worked methodically to erase the family from the landscape.

He gathered the bodies and placed them in the Johnsons’ car, the four adults across the back seat, and eventually the two girls in the trunk. He drove the car away from Bear Creek, up a rough logging road on a mountainside near Clearwater, roughly 20 km from the campsite. He doused it in gasoline and he set it alight. Then he went back for the rest.

The campsite was cleared, and the Bentleys’ pride and joy, the Ford truck with its camper, Shearing kept for himself, hidden away on back roads he’d known since childhood. By the time the ashes cooled on that mountainside, it was as if the Johnson and Bentley families had simply ceased to exist. And the terrible genius of it was this.

Nobody was even looking yet. The family was on a 2-week holiday. Nobody expected to hear from them. For days and days, the silence sounded completely normal. On Monday, August 16th, 1982, at the Gorman Brothers Lumber Mill in Westbank, Bob Johnson’s shift began without him. In 25 years, Bob had been the definition of dependable.

 His co-workers knew something was off immediately. But a missed day after a camping trip could be a breakdown, a delay, a misunderstanding about dates. They waited. The days passed. No Bob, no call. On August 23rd, a full week later, his colleagues contacted the RCMP and reported the entire family missing. Think about what investigators were facing.

Six people and two vehicles had vanished somewhere in one of the largest wilderness areas in British Columbia. And the trail was already 3 weeks cold. The search that followed became one of the biggest in the province’s history. Aircraft swept the valleys, ground teams worked the forest roads, relatives clung to hopeful theories, a breakdown in the back country, a wrong turn, an accident somewhere off a remote road.

 The RCMP chased tips across the province and beyond. Reported sightings, theories, dead ends. Weeks went by. Nothing. Not a campsite, not a vehicle, not a trace. Six human beings and two vehicles had been swallowed whole. Then, on September 13th, 1982, 6 weeks after the family was last heard from, the wilderness finally gave something back.

 A tip came in from a local out in the bush. By some accounts, a hiker who’d been picking mushrooms on a remote mountainside up a logging road near Clearwater. He’d found a car, burned out, sitting where no car had any business being. Police made their way up the mountain. The vehicle was the Johnson sedan, incinerated so completely that it took time to establish what and who was inside. The answer was everyone.

The remains of the four adults were in the passenger compartment, together in the back, and in the trunk were Janet and Karen. Sergeant Mike Eastam of the RCMP was there. And when they opened that car, decades later, retired, he would say the site had never left him. That he still had nightmares about it. He wasn’t alone.

 For the investigators on that mountainside, this stopped being a missing person’s file and became something else entirely. The hunt for a person capable of doing this to an entire family. And to two little girls. The search was over. The investigation had barely begun. The crime scene, six weeks old and put to the torch, gave investigators precious little, but it gave them something.

 Locals remembered where the family had camped, and at the Bear Creek clearing, police recovered spent .22 caliber shell casings. From the remains themselves, examiners recovered 22 bullet fragments. Small caliber, common rifle, the single most ordinary firearm in rural Canada. On its own, almost useless. But if they ever found the specific rifle, it would talk.

 And one enormous thing was missing. The Bentley’s Ford truck and camper. It hadn’t burned with the car. It wasn’t at the campsite. It was simply gone. And that made it the center of the entire national investigation. Find the camper, the thinking went, and you find the killer. Its description went out across Canada and into the United States.

What followed was one of the longest, most frustrating stretches in RCMP history. The task force ultimately worked through more than 13,000 tip files. Reported sightings of the camper came in from everywhere, and every single one dissolved on contact. Months passed. The first winter came and went, then a spring, a summer.

 The case that had horrified the country slid slowly toward the unsolved column. What nobody knew was that the answer had never gone anywhere. The camper hadn’t crossed a border or been chopped for parts. It was sitting hidden in the bush outside Clearwater on ground the killer had known his whole life. Shearing had wanted to keep it.

Only when the news coverage made the truck the most wanted vehicle in Canada did he decide it had to go. On October 18th, 1983, 14 months after the murders, searchers finally found it, burned like the car and concealed so effectively on the side of a different mountain that it had defeated one of the largest searches in provincial history.

It had been near the crime scene the end. Tire time. And that discovery quietly transformed the case. Because a stolen camper driven to Alberta or Montana points to a drifter, a stranger, anyone. A camper hidden and destroyed within kilometers of Bear Creek pointed to something much more specific. It pointed to a local.

Around the same time, a tip arrived that would prove to be the thread that unraveled everything. Someone told police about a young Clearwater area man who, sometime back, had been asking an unusual question. How do you re-register a truck that has a bullet hole in it? The young man’s name was David Shearing.

By late 1983, David Shearing had left Clearwater, moving north to the coal town of Tumbler Ridge, where, as it happened, he was already due in court on an unrelated charge involving a large quantity of stolen tools. Petty crime. The kind of file that would never normally cross paths with a mass murder investigation.

On November 19th, 1983, RCMP officers picked him up in Tumbler Ridge for questioning. And two Two sat down across from him. Sergeant Mike Easton and Constable Ken Leibel. What happened in that room has become a case study in Canadian policing. Easton and Leibel had no forensic match yet. No witness, no confession.

 Just suspicion and a bullet hole story. So, they didn’t hammer him. They talked calmly, patiently, hour after hour. They built something with David Shearing that he seemed to have very little of in his life. Rapport. They kept him comfortable. They kept him talking. And gradually, the man across the table began to slip.

 In conversation, Shearing referred to details of the case, including knowledge tied to the murder site that had never been made public. The detectives let the rope play out. And then David Shearing broke and confessed to killing all six of them. What he gave police over the hours and days that followed closed every gap in the file.

He walked them through it. He reenacted the crime for investigators at the scene. He turned over property belonging to the family. And he handed them a .22 caliber Remington Model 572 pump action rifle, which forensic examiners matched to the casings from Bear Creek. The murder weapon, surrendered by the murderer’s own hands.

His account went like this. He’d been in the bush. He’d wanted the family’s money and possessions. He shot the four adults around their campfire at dusk, then went to the tent and shot the two girls as they slept. Robbery escalated into massacre. Senseless, but so uh simple. There was just one problem, and it gnawed at the men who’d heard it.

Parts of the story didn’t sit right. The girls found in the trunk, separate from the adults, little inconsistencies in the timeline, and an instinct, particularly in Mike Easton, that the tidy one-night version was hiding something. He pushed. Shearing held his line. And with a full confession, a reenactment, the rifle, and the family’s property in hand, there was no evidence to prove any different version of events.

The Crown had enough to put David Shearing away. What it didn’t have, not yet, was the truth. David Shearing never faced a jury. On April 16th, 1984, with his trial set to begin, he stood in the Supreme Court of British Columbia and pleaded guilty to six counts of second-degree murder on the strength of the story he had told.

 Six deaths, one night, robbery. The next day, Justice Harry MacKay sentenced him. His words cut through the courtroom. What had happened at Bear Creek, he said, was very simply a cold-blooded and senseless execution of six defenseless and innocent victims for no apparent reason. The sentence, six concurrent life terms with no eligibility for parole for 25 years.

At the time, the harshest penalty ever imposed for second-degree murder in Canadian history. It was the absolute maximum available, and the judge reached for all of it. For the extended family, the relatives who had waited through the search, the discovery, the arrest, it was something like an ending. The man who did it was caged for a quarter of a century at minimum.

The story Canada filed away was horrific but contained. A drifter’s robbery that became a massacre. Shearing went into the federal prison system. In the years that followed, he quietly shed his own name, taking his mother’s maiden name and becoming David Ennis. In 1995, from behind bars, he married a woman from Saskatchewan who had begun visiting him.

And the truth about the girls in the trunk stayed buried, known with certainty only to him, and suspected by a detective who had never been able to prove it. It stayed buried for years, and then it came out. The truth surfaced the way buried truths often do, in pieces over years, through the persistence of people who refused to let the tidy version stand.

Mike Estem had never believed the one-night story. After his retirement from the RCMP, he wrote a book about the investigation, The Seventh Shadow, laying out the case in full, including what the evidence and Shearing’s own eventual admissions revealed about those days in August 1982. And as Shearing, now Ennis, entered the parole system, where honesty about one’s crimes is the price of any hope of release, the account he gave of what he’d done finally began to match the evidence.

This is what actually happened after the four adults died at that campfire. Janet and Karen did not die that night. Their killer had never intended them to, because the girls were never collateral damage in a robbery. They were the reason. Shearing had watched this family for days, and by his own admission at a parole hearing decades later, the fantasies driving him had fixed on Janet from the start.

The robbery story was an invention, a screen to hide what the crime had actually been about. After the adults were gone, Shearing took the two sisters captive. He held them for nearly a week. What he subjected them to during those days I am not going to detail. It is on the public record through his parole hearings.

 It is the reason his name carries a particular weight of hatred in British Columbia. And it is the reason every parole board that has ever reviewed his file has reached the same conclusion. At the end of that week, he took the girls into the woods one at a time, a day apart, and ended their lives with the same rifle that had taken their family.

Only then did he place them in the trunk of the car alongside their parents and grandparents and light the fire on the mountainside. When this became public, it did more than de-pen a tragedy. It rewrote the meaning of the sentence Shiro was serving. He had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on a false narrative.

 A narrative in which nothing was planned, nothing was prolonged, nothing was hidden. The reality, the stalking, the days of captivity, everything those days contained, described a different order of crime altogether. But the plea had been entered, the sentence passed, the case closed. The law had already spoken based on the story he chose to tell.

Canada could not retry him. What it could do, what thousands of its citizens have now done for decades, was make absolutely certain the parole system heard the truth every single time his name came up. In October 2008, 25 years after his arrest, David Ennis became eligible for parole. And the families of his victims discovered what a life sentence in Canada actually means.

Not an ending, but a recurring appointment with the worst day of their lives. At that first hearing at the Bowden Institution in Alberta, the board heard enough to refuse him both day and full parole, noting, among other things, concerns about violent fantasies he still harbored and rehabilitation work he had not completed.

The relief lasted 3 weeks. In November 2008, relatives were stunned to learn Ennis had been granted a 4-hour escorted absence from the prison. No public explanation given. For families who had just fought to keep him inside, even 4 hours felt like a betrayal. And so began a pattern that has defined this case ever since.

In 2012, he applied again. And this time the families came armed. A petition against his release carrying more than 13,000 signatures landed in front of the National Parole Board, denied. He applied again in 2014 and withdrew a month before the hearing as the signature count climbed past 15,000. Other eligibility windows came and went, waved or abandoned.

 Then in September 2021, came the hearing that told the country everything it needed to know. Now in his early 60s, Enns sat before the Parole Board of Canada seeking day parole and in the course of that hearing spoke openly about the fantasies he’d carried since his mid-teens, about spotting the families’ vehicles, about watching them, and about the fact that of the six people at that campsite, the only one he had been interested in was a 13-year-old girl.

The board denied him. Behind that denial stood tens of thousands of ordinary people. A petition drive that by then had swelled far beyond the earlier campaigns, driven by the victims’ relatives, by relatives by the girl’s childhood friends, by residents of Clearwater and Kelowna and Port Coquitlam who have made keep him in a multi-generational promise.

But here is the sentence that should stay with you. Under Canadian law, none of this ever truly ends. Every few years, David Enns can apply again. And every few years, a family that lost three generations in a single August must gather its grief, write its letters, collect its signatures, and stand in front of a board to argue again that the man who told a false story in 1984 should serve the sentence the true story always deserved.

He remains to this day behind bars. The families intend to keep it that way for as as as he draws breath. Wells Gray Park is still one of the most beautiful places in Canada. The waterfalls still draw visitors from around the world. Families still camp in the Clearwater Valley every summer. The wilderness holds no memory of what happened at its doorstep.

But, the people do. In Clearwater, the case never became history. It stayed personal. This was a local crime committed by a local man, solved by detectives who had to outthink him on his own ground. And the community that once unknowingly lived alongside David Shearing is the same community that now signs the petitions to keep David Ennis where he is.

And for those who study Canadian crime, this case left permanent marks. One of the largest searches and tipline investigations in BC history. A masterclass interrogation that solved an unsolvable file. The harshest second-degree sentence the country had ever imposed. And a haunting legal lesson that a justice system can only ever be as accurate as the story it’s told.

 And that the man who told it made sure the worst of it stayed hidden until his sentence was already sealed. Bob Johnson gave 25 years to the same mill. George Bentley just wanted the quiet camping spots. Edith called her daughter on August 6th to say they were having a wonderful time. Jackie was raising two girls who adored their grandparents.

And Janet and Karen were 13 and 11 on summer holiday with their whole lives ahead of them. Three generations went into the Clearwater Valley in August 1982. And the reason their story still matters is not the man who took them. It’s what was taken. A retirement full of quiet campsites. A marriage of decades.

 Two parents in the middle of raising their daughters. And two little girls who deserved to grow up. The man responsible told Canada a lie, and the lie was terrible. The truth was worse. Both are on the record now, and so is the promise renewed by thousands of signatures every time he asked for the door to open. Not while they can help it. Not ever.

Their family asked that they be remembered. So, remember their names. If this story stayed with you, consider subscribing because cases like this one deserve to be remembered properly, not forgotten. And if you believe some sentences should mean forever, the comment section is yours. Until next time, stay safe and hold your people close.