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I wondered why – roughly within the same time-frame – the remains of a large deer was devoured by wildlife along 142nd Street ... but Liana White's body was relatively untouched by scavengers.

How does that happen?

The mystery prompted me to get several pounds of frozen hamburger and T-bone steak and wrap it in an old shirt. Using a long screwdriver, I spiked the meat in the ditch about fifty feet south of where Liana's body was found.

It was early 2007. There was no snow on the ground but it was still cold.

Next day, I returned to find the meat still frozen and secured in the ditch. I pulled back the cloth. Birds had been picking at it. The meat, still frozen, was dimpled like a golf ball.

Within two days, the meat was completely gone, bone and all. I located the stained shirt in the bush, about twenty feet to the west.

The screwdriver may still be out there.

Perhaps the birds and predatory animals went on a diet during the time Liana White's nude body lay in the ditch in the summer of 2005, allegedly for a week. I don't know.

It raised questions about how long Liana's body was in the ditch. Was it nearly a week, just a day – or only hours?

If Liana's dead body lay in the ditch for nearly a week, another mystery was why the grass under the corpse looked no different than the grass around it.

A pastor on his way to a counselling session at Poundmaker Lodge (a nearby drug and alcohol addiction treatment facility) said he dropped by the crime scene the day after Liana White's body was removed.

Gerald Budzinski of the Freedom Church of God said there was yellow police tape but no patch of ground where human body fluids, dissolved fat and blood should have seeped, destroying the vegetation.

Budzinski – who said he took forensic studies while in university – said Liana White's body was definitely not there for nearly a week.

I took measurements of the area.

The dirt road was twenty-five feet wide; the ditch eighteen feet wide. The depth of the ditch where Liana's body was found was two-feet ten-inches.

Sorry if the imperial measurements throw you off.

Taken in winter to provide contrast,
this photo indicates the position of Liana White's body when it was found.

If the body of Liana White was visible, how long had it been lying near the top of the ditch?

The answer was crucial.

If it had been there for only a day or hours, who put her there? Michael White? According to police, White was under surveillance twenty-four hours a day.

Carol Forbes, who first saw Liana's body, points out that her long hair had been "butched," with her ponytail resting on the branch of a bush.

Could animals have pulled out Liana's hair? Or, was her ponytail cut by whoever dropped her off, allowing her face to slam into the dirt?

If that's what happened, whoever dumped Liana White's body in the ditch after she was murdered was still angry with her.

For Liana White to have been treated with such post-mortem indignity may say something about Liana's fiestiness and her will to live.

The large neck wound, infested with maggots, also suggested Liana was not killed the same day her body was found.

On a Sunday morning in January 2007, I returned to the ditch to recover more of Liana's hair.

The early-morning sun clearly showed the hair shining in the short grass. It was all over the place.

I put on my glasses and held up strands to the bright light to see if any of her hair had roots (which might indicate if it had been pulled out).

None of the hair had roots attached.

It was safe to say the pretty woman's ponytail had been sliced off.

A number of vehicles drove by while I was sitting there. I wore a fur hat, a dark-coloured jacket, blue jeans and brown boots.

I have no idea how many people spotted me in the ditch, but at least two did.

A pick-up truck heading north stopped a ways down the road and backed up. A middle-aged man rolled down his window and asked if I'd lost anything.

I told him I was looking for a ring.

The guy took off and I never saw him again.

The second person to notice me was a jogger, also heading north. He raised a hand to signal "Hi."

I yelled out for the jogger to stop but he couldn't hear me. He was listening to music.

I caught up to him. I asked the guy if he'd been running on Poundmaker Road last July. He said he had only recently started jogging in the area.

I later caught up with the man again at the Law Courts Building. This time he was wearing a suit – and no headphones. The jogger who zipped by me on Poundmaker Road that day, zoned out to music, was a criminal defence lawyer.

I was blown away by what had just happened on Poundmaker Road.

For ninety minutes, on a quiet Sunday morning, I was nearly camoflauged and sat where Liana's body was dropped off. At a time of the day when there was light traffic on the road, two people spotted me.

Something doesn't add up.

For a nearly a week – with hundreds and hundreds of vehicles travelling the narrow road – no one noticed a stretched-out dead woman, nude, white and – according to searchers – in full view?

To again paraphrase the detective, that's bullshit.

It gets worse: a member of Liana White's search team said just days before Liana's body was discovered, he searched that part of Poundmaker Road and didn't notice anything.

In my search of the area where Liana's body was found, I was hoping to come across her wedding ring, but no luck. The ring remains missing.

Mrs. Forbes revealed something that would turn out to be a contentious point and question the integrity of the EPS investigation. She said Liana's body was not covered in branches when they found her.

What Forbes said she saw that day flies in the face of police photographs, taken after her group left. The photos show Liana's body covered by green, leafy branches.

"How the hell does that happen?" she asked.

I challenged Forbes if she would take a lie-detector test (known in police circles as a truth verifier). She snapped, "You're God-damn right I would."

Forbes then challenged me.

She said I should ask the police about how those branches magically appeared on Liana's body, and then ask police if they're willing to take a lie-detector.

Forbes recalled, at her son's preliminary hearing, that she did a double-take when shown police photographs that showed Liana's body covered by leafy branches.

"I said to Larry (Anderson), show me those photos again." Anderson flipped through the pages of his binder in the courtroom.

Forbes said she told the defence lawyer, "That's not how she (Liana) was when we left her. That is not right."

She said she thought Anderson would get excited about that, but she said he didn't seem to want to pursue it.

She said Anderson tried to "hush" her.

Carol Forbes is not the only searcher who claims Liana's body was not covered in leafy branches.

Forbes conceded that police have cause to suspect a person when their spouse is killed, adding that can't be "terribly unusual."

She compared the EPS investigation of Liana White's death to a jig-saw puzzle, saying "If the pieces didn't fit, Edmonton police made them fit."

Two others who saw Liana White's body in the ditch that day also say it was in plain view and not covered by branches.

In spite of being the one who found Liana White's body, Forbes was not called as a witness at her son's murder trial.

Whoever dumped Liana's body did not have time to dilly-dally. That's likely why that juncture of the road was chosen ... it gave them an excellent view of vehicles coming and going, nearly a mile each way. They could also keep an eye on west-bound traffic coming off 195th Avenue onto Poundmaker Road.

It begs the question of why anyone would take the time and trouble to cut branches when they could have hidden Liana's body a lot faster by carrying Liana a few feet more and putting her in the woods.

Mrs. Forbes speculated: was Liana dumped at that spot that same day so she could be found ... by their search team?

More could be known about roughly when those branches were cut – if the branches were taken to the University of Alberta for forensic testing.

That never happened.

A soil test would also help determine how long Liana's body had been lying in the ditch.

That never happened either.

At Michael White's murder trial, the EPS officer in charge of soil tests testified he was ordered not to do one.

A local reporter later spent his lunch break parked on Poundmaker Road, keeping track of vehicles that passed Liana White's cross. In one hour, he counted 21 vehicles.

A private detective working for Michael White's law firm later called me looking for that reporter's phone number. I don't know if he ever contacted him.

It's fair to say that in the time police claim Liana's body lay in the ditch, several hundred vehicles passed by.

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deadmonton - michael white - the untold story - 13