He fled war and built a life in Canada. They found his body in the St. Lawrence.

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Jordan Heath Rawlings Today’s story starts in a foreign country, a country that’s falling apart, racked with poverty headed for civil war. A place where anyone holding money was a potential victim of violent crime. But the story doesn’t end there. Instead, it ends in Canada. After years of hard work, helping others climbing out of poverty and making it into the good life, but it still ends, it ends with a body in the St. Lawrence River, sometime after a bitterly cold night. A disagreement outside of a bar and six months of fruitless searching. This is an immigrant story, a Canadian story, and it didn’t have to end like this, but it did. How? We might never know.

I am Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Christopher Curtis is a journalist and the co-founder of the Rover, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project that covers under-reported stories from across Quebec, like this one. Hey Chris.

Christopher Curtis Hey, how’s it going?

Jordan Heath Rawlings It’s going great. Thanks for joining us today.

Christopher Curtis Well, thanks so much for having me.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Yeah. Well, this is a sad but fascinating story and I’m hadn’t seen it anywhere else, so I’m, I’m so glad that you guys covered it. Why don’t you just begin by telling me about Eduardo Malpica and where he’s from and, and how he came to be in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. Who is he?

Christopher Curtis Yeah, so Eduardo and his family late, he, he grew up in, in Lima, Peru during the Civil War in the eighties and the nineties and, you know, things had gotten so bad. People were being disappeared at night people were being executed and put in mass graves. It was like an extremely violent time. So, Eduardo’s father left the family in Peru and you know, came to Canada and established himself as a refugee and started working so he could save up enough money and do all the right paperwork so that his family could come join him. And so for five years while Eduardo’s dad was, was in Quebec, establishing himself Eduardo was only like 12 when he left, when his dad left. So he was like selling pencils on the streets of, of Lima you know, doing odd jobs here and there, kind of helping support the family. It was his mom, him and his baby sister. And you know, they, they went through some really hard times, but they made it to Quebec. And you know, Eduardo went from being this teenager who could barely speak a word of French to really accomplished student. You know, he studied at a master’s program did a, like a brilliant thesis on political violence in Peru. Became a sociology professor along the way, you know, he met the love of his life. They had a kid, a little boy called Santiago, and he got a job offer teaching at a college in Trois-Rivières, which is like an hour and a half east of Montreal. And that’s why he moved to that city.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Before we get into the case, we’re going to discuss, tell me a little bit about the person that he was and what his friends and people who, who know him say about him?

Christopher Curtis Yeah, well, I mean, like we use this word in French called rassembler. There’s no real like equivalent to it in English. And, and people would always call him that. What it means is you bring people together. And a lot of expats, you know, from Latin America living in Canada it could be super alienating, right? It’s this new place new province, new culture, new climate. And so he would kind of begin collecting these other Latin American expats and he sort of became like the big brother of the group. Like he would text message them on Monday mornings, just like, hey guys, it’s Monday, let’s get pumped up for the week. And you know, he would, you would help them navigate this like, strange new place that they lived in and go over for beers or, you know, help them find a local soccer league that, where they could make new friends. Like he was, he was a really generous and kind person.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Before we rewind to the details of this case, it ended last week, or at least there was closure on it.

Christopher Curtis Yeah.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What happened?

Christopher Curtis So, yeah, I mean, Eduardo went missing six months ago. His body was found in the St. Lawrence River two weeks ago. And it’s been a terrible six months for his family and, and for a lot of people in Trois-Rivières for the larger Latin American community in Montreal.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What do we know about when he went missing? How we went missing? What do we know about the night?

Christopher Curtis What we know is on the night, Eduardo Malpica disappeared. He was organizing a lecture series at a museum in Trois-Rivières. It was about workers’ rights in, in textile workers in Bangladesh. You know, it’s the sort of thing he cared about deeply. And so after the lecture, it, you know, it went off great. The semester was about to end late November, right? So him and his colleagues went out for some drinks at this bar called Zenob. They’re having a good time. Somebody walks up to him at the beginning of the night. You know a white guy, doesn’t know him. Eduardo is visibly Latin American. He’s, he’s a bit darker-skinned and speaks French perfectly, but with an accent. And this person said, went up to Eduardo and said how do you say he’s a very hateful word to describe homosexuals? it starts with an F. How do you say that in Spanish? And it was weird and confrontational and it set off kind of a an uncomfortable vibe for him throughout the night, but they brushed it off, kept drinking. His friends leave the bar around 11:30, he decides to stay back for a few more drinks, and then out of nowhere he begins behaving really erratically the way people who were there describe it to me one moment. He’s fine. He’s carrying out a lucid conversation, the next he can barely stand up. It’s like he’s theatrically drunk. It doesn’t really make sense. And in the process of kind of stumbling around the bar, a group of white men claim that he made unwanted advances on one of their friends, a young woman. And instead of resolving it or, you know, getting the bar involved or whatever, they just start to beat him. You know, he’s barely able to stand at this point. They rough him up. They bring him outside. Someone threatens him out there, with an ax. He wasn’t associated with the, the original group or whatever. It’s, it’s a really scary scene. He doesn’t have his wallet, he doesn’t have his coat. It’s zero degrees outside. This is late November in, in a port city in Quebec. Like it gets real cold, and he’s essentially kicked out of the bar. They try to mitigate this by sending someone with him or someone volunteers to walk him home. But Eduardo is so messed up that he thinks he’s still being attacked or whatever, so he kind of pushes the person away. He can only speak Spanish at this point. That’s how messed up he is. And that’s the last confirmed sighting, is him walking away. He can barely walk. The next day he doesn’t show up. Like he has a wife and kids who kid who live like maybe a kilometre and a half from that bar, not even. And he never goes back. They never see him. He’s never seen again.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So he doesn’t show up the next morning. He doesn’t, doesn’t go home that night. Yeah. Once he disappeared, what did the police do?

Christopher Curtis So he was, yeah. He was not the kind of guy to stay out all night. He never did. Right. In all of the five years he’d been, or six years he’s been with his partner, Chloe. He never didn’t come home. He was an incredibly dotting father. Like, you know how when you have kids, some dads or some parents will like stand over the crib when they’re a baby and just kind of make sure they’re still breathing. It’s this weird thing parents do. He did that even when his kid was like four years old. He would like get into bed with a, he was very, very, very protective of his kid, probably because of what he’d went through, you know, growing up in, in Lima, his dad had to leave him behind and he had this really big nurturing instinct. So this guy who is notoriously nurturing doesn’t call, doesn’t text message, you know, so his, his partner starts to panic. She thinks, ma, you know, oh, maybe he did something stupid. Maybe he feels ashamed of himself. She calls around, no one knows where he is. She hears this thing about a fight in the bar, and they start looking for him frantically. And they, they go to the police, and the police say, look, we can only start searching after 24 hours. 24 hours pass. The police weren’t going to start searching, but and I think this is kind of an exclusive you’re getting here from what I understand, a member of the legislature had to call the police and say like, you need to start looking for this guy. So under a little bit of political dress, the police set up a command center and, you know, dozens of people from Trois-Rivières start looking around for Eduardo, like in alleys looking by the river. Now as this is happening, a theory begins to emerge, not one advanced by the police, but two other people at the bar with Eduardo last night, that, that night they didn’t know him. They saw him, they knew he was there. It’s a pretty small bar. Two other people in that bar claimed they were drugged that night. One person in particular I’d spoken to describes the event in detail. She says she’d had four beers or five beers over a period of maybe six hours, and then out of nowhere, around 1:30 AM which is right around the time that Malpica also started behaving erratically. She stumbles away from the bar and tries to drive home like this is not something she would normally do. But she was so messed up that her friends found her in her car passed out. So they they brought her home. She was extremely sick. And when she heard that Eduardo Malpica had gone missing, she contacted the police and she said, look, maybe this is connected, maybe it’s not. But I was at that bar the night he went missing, and I suspect I was drugged. A cop takes down her information cuz she called the station and says, the detectives will call you back. They never did. And another person confirmed to me that they also believe they’d been, they’d been drugged that night. So people begin wondering, well, is it possible that the sudden change in Eduardo’s behaviour could be attributed to a drugging? This, you know, again, this might seem like a little much, but Trois-Rivières is a city that like four months before Eduardo Malpica disappeared. The police had to have a discussion with bar owners about drugging. Or like local politicians basically saying, look, you need to start giving people plastic covers for their drink. You need to start alerting your staff about, you know, potential predators, drugging people’s drinks. So there was already like a culture of these kinds of druggings, and it’s possible that like somehow his drink was spiked, but that it’s not a theory the police ever took seriously.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Tell me about the confrontation. You’ve already described it to me. What I’m wondering is how certain we are police are, et cetera, that that was all that happened, that that was exactly what happened. Yeah. Do you know what I’m saying?

Christopher Curtis Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So here’s another kind of interesting point when this happened, You have two police forces that intervene. The local police, the police is like, it’s about 150,000 people live in Trois-Rivières. So they have a, a big police force. They have you know, they have a lot of funding for their cops…

Jordan Heath Rawlings But then there’s Sûreté as well?

Christopher Curtis Yeah, exactly. So, so you have this local police, but then there’s Quebec, like ROPP. They are brought in to oversee it because it’s potentially, you know, a violent crime. Both the Sûreté detectives and the Trois-Rivières police detectives review security footage from that night, and they reached two different conclusions. The local cops say, oh, he got into a fight and you know, just boys will be boys. That kind of thing. The Sûreté du Quebec see it and they talk to some witnesses and they say, it looks like he was violently attacked. And it might be racially motivated. So right off the bat there’s this big schism in like, well, what exactly happened that night? What we know is that he was allowed to leave the bar in a really deteriorated condition. The bar is not far from the river. There’s a park where you could basically walk into the water if you wanted. It’s possible that under the effects of drugs or, or a beating or whatever, that Malpica fell in, but something happened at the bar. And then the next thing we know, this guy never gets seen again. But the police don’t really look very hard at what happened in the bar. No one’s charged with assault. No one is really investigated. And the bar through sort of social media and the rumour mill, people associated with the bar. Start to kind of spread these rumours that, like Eduardo Malco is very sleazy. You know, he was doing these awful things. He should be ashamed of himself and kind of negating the fact that he’s missing and might be dead. They’re turning him into the problem and the police then kind of, instead of focusing on the bar. They believe then he voluntarily left Trois-Rivières with no coat, with no wallet. His bank account shows no record of transactions after the bar. Somehow he gets out of Trois-Rivières and goes to Montreal to start a new life and abandon his family. That was their initial theory.

Jordan Heath Rawlings That sounds implausible.

Christopher Curtis Yeah. Well, well, here’s another thing. I wasn’t, I wasn’t really authorized to speak about it until recently because it might, you know, it might affect how the police deal with Malpica’s partner. But, what we know is a lot of their theory is based on a witness, a witness who allegedly spoke to Malpica on Saturday after he was out at the bar and spent the night outside without a coach. She sees him at noon at a park no one else does, right? It’s a crowded park, and sees him on Sunday. Says that this guy who is like, has social anxiety and is like notoriously not open with his emotions with strangers confesses everything says I was a jerk last night. I was awful. I, I have to leave my family. I have to leave my family and start a new life. They’ll be better off without me. So this person says that she’s heard this on, on a Sunday. She knew he was missing then she’d seen that he was missing. She waits two days or three days, goes to the police on a Tuesday, and and gives them this story. And the police say it’s credible because she could say you know, how he was dressed. She knew elements of the investigation that hadn’t been published yet. But the thing is, it’s a small town and everyone at that point knew about the investigation. Everyone was talking about the investigation. There was a ton of information going around on social media, and it’s kind of impossible not to at least consider that some of her testimony is tainted by what she’d seen or heard, or we are, we’re basing an entire path of investigation on this one person’s testimony versus this whole body of evidence that shows you something violent happened to this person hours before he went missing. Other people in a bar were drugged hours before he went missing. We seem to ignore that element of it and focus an awful lot on this witness who came forward days after the fact, after having maybe consumed quite a bit of of social media gossip about what happened that night.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Take me back to, as the search continues, finds nothing, how does it wind up and what do police say at that point when I know it’s not closed… but there’s always a point in these cases where the resources stop being allocated, you know?

Christopher Curtis Yeah. Well so here’s an example. So we, we published a story about the alleged drugging that then the detectives decide, okay, well we’re gonna, we’re gonna follow up with this person who spoke to the media just to make sure that they know we, we care, or whatever. Two months after the fact, they start to investigate the drugging theory, but they get nowhere because it’s two months after the fact and it’s, you know these are, there’s no, no physical evidence left. So they sort of abandoned that theory. Then they realized that, okay, well there has, there have been no, like this is now a highly publicized case. It’s been in newspapers. It’s been on the radio…

Jordan Heath Rawlings And this is a fairly prominent individual in the community. Right. You know, you mentioned he had a big network of expats and immigrants. He’s got a family, works at the university. He works at the college, I mean.

Christopher Curtis Yeah. And in Trois-Rivières like is a very white city and he’s one of the maybe handful, like he’s, there are not very many Latin American people there. So a guy without a coat on the streets, who doesn’t look like everyone else, who, who might be going through some court kind of traumatic episode would stand out. Surely. You know, surely by this point they have to at least consider that he might be dead. And they come around to that theory in maybe late February, early March. They think, all right, well maybe he did terrible things at the bar that night. The consensus is that maybe he groped a woman, which is terrible. But they think that he was so distraught that he groped a woman. And of course, none of this is proven, but he was so distraught, that he decided to take his own life and throw himself into the river. Hey they spoke to his therapist because he has anxiety and his therapist said, agreed to you know, to, to breach Doctor-Patient confidentiality because you know, the, it’s a life and death issue. So the doctor said no, he doesn’t show any sign. He never showed any signs of suicidal ideation. Malpica’s partner Chloe gave the police his diary. His diary doesn’t show any trace of suicidal ideation. If anything, this was someone who was in the prime of his life. He had just gotten what he called his dream job. He was out celebrating you know, a lecture series that, that had gone really well. He had just bought a house with his wife. Christmas was around the corner. He was someone who just loved celebrating, loved being with his friends. For someone like that to just, people say this all the time, when people take their lives, they say, oh, it doesn’t make sense. He was so, but he really did have a lot going for him, and he really did. He really was a dotting father and, and, and a super caring partner. And it just seemed so out of character that he would take his own life without leaving a note, without, you know, without kind of any sort of text message phone call, whatever, an apology. Someone who notoriously apologized all the time for everything. Like, it just seems like. It just seems hard to believe.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Tell me when and where his body was finally found and what, if anything, we’ve learned from that discovery.

Christopher Curtis About two weeks ago, there was a man fishing in Bupa Bay, which is near Quebec City. It’s about 140 kilometers downriver from from Trois-Rivières. And he saw a body in the water. He saw something in the water gets closer, realizes it’s a body. But after six months underwater, it’s in such an advanced state of decomposition that people can’t immediately tell if it’s male or female. So they retrieved the police, retrieve his body. They, they’ve given it to the medical examiner. They identify it as being Malpica because of dental records. And the first thing the police do is, as they’re advising Chloe, that her, her partner is dead, that his body was found, that they’re sure they’re 100% sure it’s him. They put out a press release that says there was no signs of violence on his body. There are no bruises. therefore, you know, were ruling out sort of any association. They were very quick to not let the coroner speak. They were very quick to not, you know, to just put it out there that like, they almost absolve themselves of the perception that they might not have explored every investigative avenue they could.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Is there anything we still could learn? Did the police have the final say here? Will the coroner step in? What are we waiting for and what might we learn still?

Christopher Curtis So it will take maybe three or four months, maybe even five months for the coroner to do a workup of the toxicology in Malpica’s blood. When that happens, they might be able to tell, if, you know…

Jordan Heath Rawlings How could they tell six months later they might be able to find remnants of the drug?

Christopher Curtis Yeah. Yeah. Because the blood stops moving through your body. Right. Still exists. And it degrades. It gets diluted. The water kind of, you know, like for instance, it’s almost impossible to tell if he drowned or not because well, now obviously there’s water in his lungs. You know, his lungs are full of water. Doesn’t mean he breathed it in. It means he’s been underwater for six months. So they’re assuming he drowned, they’re assuming that’s what killed him. There’s no blunt force or nothing like that. But they could still determine that, you know, maybe he was drugged. They could probably get a good idea of how much alcohol was in his system, you know, and that that could add more you know, more, more theories or that could, that could help flesh the case out. But the big thing that people around Eduardo are pushing for is a public coroner’s inquest. This could take a very long time. And what that would be is a public review of all the evidence, including having detectives testify under oath. It doesn’t mean anyone’s under criminal investigation or anything like that, it’s just the family would be able to have a lawyer asking these detectives questions like, you know, did you consider X, Y, Z? Did you say this? What, what, you know, what did the evidence show? So, So they’re hoping for more answers because right now it’s just such a confusing story.

Jordan Heath Rawlings You’ve mentioned what a special person he was to those who knew him to his partner and son obviously, but to expats and immigrants. What does this case tell us a big picture about Quebec’s immigrant fabric? I know people like Eduardo are incredibly important to it. And, and look, I wanna phrase this delicately, but I also know that yeah, immigration is a very sensitive topic in some parts of the province, particularly outside of the big cities, and things can get nasty.

Christopher Curtis Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, Eduardo Malpica comes to Quebec and learns the language and the sort of the stereotype about immigrants in Quebec is that they come here and they’re so grateful that Canada kind of allowed them to come to the country or let them in, that they become immediately loyal to federalism and to the Canadian government and but actually what happened with Eduardo was like a lot of immigrants, he came and he identified with his, like the sovereignty movement, the Quebec sovereignty movement. But instead of kind of joining the mainstream, he joins this nascent political party called Quebec Solidaire and convinces a lot of other Latin Americans to join. And they advocate for, you know, Quebec sovereignty. But a Quebec sovereignty that’s a lot less kind of based around these identity politics of exclusion and hostility towards organized religion and, you know, sometimes hostility towards immigration. So he embraces a lot of Quebec values and he embraces the language and he embraces the culture, and and he participates in the politics, but it’s not the exact mainstream politics that I think a lot of people would want him to. So, in a sense, like, I don’t know, it’s, it’s, immigration in Quebec is hard for a number of reasons, you know, because it’s, it’s, I think unfortunately some bad actors in the province have done a really good job associating immigration with a decline of French. Even though the children of immigrants always go to school in French and always invariably learn French they, they hold onto a piece of home right? And I think a lot of people unfortunately a lot of older supporters of this government assume that there’s some sort of malign influence of immigrants. And when in, when, in fact, I mean, this guy’s life just shows you how much he enriched that community. You know, he was a teacher, he was someone who helped his neighbours. He was someone who volunteered at, at community organizations. He was someone who fought for workers’ rights. Like this is a net plus in this province. And, and in all of this debate about immigration, we forget that like at one point he was a 12 year old kid in the streets of Lima selling pencils so that his mom and his sister could eat. You know, why would you want to deprive your province of someone with that kind of fortitude, with someone with that, that kind of spirit. And so, you know, if anything, I just think it, it adds nuance to a debate. It’s like far way too polarizing in which immigrants are way too often used as canon fodder by both sides. One to say, well, we need immigration because they’re labor and we have a labor crisis. And the other side’s saying, no, immigration is dangerous because they’re a threat to our the fabric of our society. But like they’re neither, they’re just people, like you and me, and they just want to live in a better, safer world for their kids. And that’s what Eduardo had done. His son was growing up in a much safer environment than he was. And now his son will have to grow up without a dad. And I think, you know, that’s what’s lacking in our conversation about, about immigration in Quebec is that focus on who these people are and you know what they’ve been through and, and how they can make us all better.

Jordan Heath Rawlings I’m so glad you focused on Eduardo, and obviously I really hope we find out what exactly did happen to ’em. Christopher, thank you so much for this and we’ll get in touch hopefully when the coroner’s report comes out.

Christopher Curtis I really appreciate you giving a platform to this story and, and I know his family does as well. Thank you.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Christopher Curtis, co-founder of the Rover. Which you can find at TheRover.ca. That was The Big Story. You can find more big stories at TheBigStorypodcast ca. In fact, you can find all of them more than 1200 by now. You can send us ideas for stories anywhere. You can get in touch in. We love to hear from listeners. You can find us @TheBigStoryFPN on Twitter. By email at hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca, and by calling us up and leaving us a voicemail, 416-935-5935. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.

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