Corinne Nicole Sellhorn, 34, was found dead on October 24th, 2010.
Jones was the Edmonton metro area's seventh homicide victim of the year.
Corinne's husband, Ronald Stuart Jones, 64, was also found dead.
RCMP said weapons were involved in a matter they were treating as a murder-suicide.
At about 9:40 a.m. October 24th, Wetaskiwin RCMP responded to a complaint of suspicious activity at a rural residence located near Township Rd. 474 and Range Road 243, three kilometres southeast of the Town of Millet.
While police said they received a request to check on the general welfare of residents, neighbours tipping off media said they were told officers were investigating a weapons call.
Cory Becker said police told him to stay in his home for most of day.
Upon arriving, police felt they were unable to enter the property safely and set up a perimeter and a command post.
Additional resources, including the Red Deer RCMP Emergency Response Team and the Edmonton Police Service Grizzly, an armoured tactical vehicle, were called in – read more »
At one point, over 20 police vehicles had converged at the scene.
"From time to time, given the nature of the complaint we're responding to, we may need additional members or firepower before we go onto a property," Const. Scott Mercer explained to media.
"There are certain situational factors, which deem it unsafe to enter the property at the time.
"In this situation the decision was made and we required the Emergency Response Team to come out.
"One of the resources that the Emergency Response Team uses is the Grizzly," Mercer continued.
"It's basically an armoured vehicle that allows the safe transport of personnel onto a property."
Mercer did not indicate if RCMP had prior dealings with the residents.
Later in the day, RCMP confirmed that two people had died on the property but said they were unable to release further details.
Forensic staff worked the scene overnight – see images »
The matter was investigated by the RCMP Serious Crimes branch and the Wetaskiwin General Investigation Section. Members from the Calgary RCMP detachment were later added.
Early October 25th, an Edmonton radio station revealed that a murder-suicide had taken place at the residence.
The station reported that when police first arrived they found the body of a woman on the ground near the front of the home.
Officers then heard a single rifle shot. The gunfire prompted the call for back up.
Using the Grizzly armoured vehicle as cover, RCMP along with a paramedic assessed the condition of the woman and determined she was deceased.
A further search of the property yielded the discovery of the body of a man behind a building, dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
RCMP didn't confirm the radio station's report, terming the deaths only as suspicious. Police said they expected to release further details once the identities of the deceased were confirmed.
Later reports indicated that next of kin had already been notified, with one of the deceased having relatives overseas.
Post mortem examinations on the bodies began October 25th in Edmonton and continued into the morning of the next day.
While the autopsies had been completed, police later advised that results wouldn't be made public until October 27th.
Wetaskiwin RCMP said in a release that they were not looking for any suspects and were currently focusing their investigation on the property itself.
The area's first snowfall of the season likely hampered their efforts – see images »
"We want to dispel any rumours," Const. Scott Mercer said, calling the investigation "complex."
Police were observed seizing three rifles from a trailer parked on the land – see images »
Quizzed by media, residents in the area didn't seem to know much about the property and the people who were seen there – read more »
One man said the property, located between two subdivisions, was heavily wooded and that what appeared to be a home was actually a shack. At the front of the property, a horse ring with a five-pointed iron star at its centre was set up.
Inside the yard sat two sea containers, an old semi-trailer with its rear door wide open, a wood-panelled single car garage with a barn-style roof, and an older-model tractor sporting faded paint.
Twenty-year resident Kevin Stone said he often saw a couple there taking care of horses.
John Shanks said he'd seen people run the horses around the ring during the summer.
"We've got good neighbours, that's why this kind of shocks me," Shanks said. "They've been to themselves as far as I know."
The Town of Millet last dealt with a similar tragedy on February 1st, 2010 when the bodies of Jayden and Connor McConnell were found drowned in the bathtub of their home.
Allyson Louise McConnell, the mother of the toddlers, was charged with two counts of second-degree murder – read more »
"Millet is being put on the map for bad things," resident Brunette Earle said.
"You want to be known for good things. I love Millet, but this is getting creepy."
Nikita Pawlick, who works at the Millet Skillet restaurant and lives just down the road from where two bodies were found, said news of the deaths was hard to fathom.
"It's hard to believe that two incidents of this magnitude could happen in the same year," she said.
"I don't know if you've ever been out here in the summertime, but the streets are filled with beautiful flowers.
"Everybody knows everybody, it's a very religious community, and you just don't think it would happen.
"(Millet) is like a little small family, right? It's definitely sad," Pawlick said. "It hits home, way too close."
Nikita said the property was owned by a man who kept horses on the land.
Former Millet mayor David Gursky said the town was still reeling from the McConnell matter.
"It's tough not knowing what the circumstances are surrounding these (recent) deaths," Gursky said.
With the McConnell case still working its way through the courts, Gursky said the community was still in mourning.
"In hearing the circumstances around their deaths, it really hit home for all of us," he said. "In terms of the circumstances around these two recent deaths, we still don't know what the details are.
"This is shocking."
"I think we are still grieving the loss of those two boys. I personally didn't know the families or the boys but I also have a daughter close to the age of the little one and it hits home. And now this," Nikita Pawlick said.
Media later reported that the property was owned by Ron Jones and his wife Corinne Sellhorn.
An avid outdoorsman and well-known activist, Ron was involved in court action against the Alberta government over Metis hunting rights.
A close friend of the couple recalled that Ron had met Corinne eight years earlier while he was preparing for an extended horseback trek through the mountains – read more »
Dale (Smoky) Mohan said that Ron asked the younger woman to join him. "After that, they were together day and night for years."
Others added that Corinne loved horses and competing in rodeos. With her husband she worked a trap line near Cochrane.
With only each other for company, the couple was known to spend months at a time in the Yukon.
In a September 2010 email to www.alexoutdoors.com, an online outfitter, Ron endorsed the company's product line:
We moved out of Alberta and bought a very remote trapline 120 air miles due east of Mayo, Yukon. Lots of fur in the country and we never see another human being for up to six months at a time. We usually fly in and out but this year we are going to skidoo in. It will be a 250 mile trip one way by land. You need good gear just to survive in the harsh Arctic environment. That’s why we come to you for our wool clothing.
Ron also wrote that the clothing kept him warm for a half-hour despite falling into water at -35C.
Alex Outdoors owner Ralph DiMeo told the Journal he recently spoke to the couple and thought they should already have been back in the Yukon.
DiMeo described them as "full of the joy of life."
"Really, really nice people," he said. "That's why I don't really believe it. It doesn't make sense."
Dale Mohan spoke extensively to media about his friends. At times he described a study in contrasts – read more »
Ron Jones was born and raised in Edmonton. He moved out of the city in his teens and began learning how to hunt and trap in the wild.
News of the deaths didn't surprise Mohan, who said Jones was a man "of extreme nature."
"I didn't have any trouble believing it," he said.
"I never did think it was out of the realm of possibility. They were fierce, fierce people. Very, very strong individual natures.
"They were almost like two alpha males ... they were both extremely, extremely high energy, I guess you could say.
"They went to great lengths to serve each other, and offer each other help in the environments that they lived if you know anything about their adventure lifestyle," Mohan said.
"They're on a snowshoe trip from the continental divide," he recalled.
"Out to the highway south of Jasper in the middle of winter. Ron falls through the ice. It's -20. She gets a fire, strips him down and starts warming him and drying him and caring for him. That takes skill, determination, commitment, all these things."
According to Mohan, Jones often spoke of "his plans around the annual trip to the Yukon to trap and be at one with the land.
"He believed it was a tough area, an unforgiving land, but there was potential for trapping there and for living the lifestyle that he had chosen – one of a hunter and a trapper," Mohan said.
Jones was a wealthy and outspoken man who preferred to lead, Mohan noted.
"In tough survival situations, it's not a democracy, it's survival. I would submit to the role of subservient, as would Corrine. He was a leader of men.
"He like any other man has good and bad in him, but mostly good."
When speaking of Corinne, Mohan painted an incomplete picture. He said she was enchanted by Jones' rigorous outdoors lifestyle when they first met.
"Fiercely loyal," he said of her. "Willing to sacrifice her time and herself for the good of others. Troubled."
Yet when Mohan spoke with Shellhorn at the Millet ranch the evening before she was killed, she seemed optimistic.
"She was looking forward to training horses and hunting and spending time with my family. She was upbeat and full of energy, and all that. So no, there was no sign," he said.
Cecil Bellrose, president of Region 4 of the Metis Nation of Alberta, said he was shocked to hear of the deaths.
"They seemed a really happy couple," he said. "For the years I've known them, they seemed very, very happy."
The woman who sold the couple her trapline on the Hess River near Mayo, Yukon, said the pair seemed very content.
"They were really down to earth and, I don't know, very friendly and very interested in trapping. They'd been doing it for a long time," Janet Buchanan of Carcross, Yukon, said, adding that they seemed like nice people when they had dinner together.
Other friends who knew the couple said they were going through a rough patch, with financial problems cited as a possible cause.
On October 27th, Wetaskiwin RCMP announced that 34-year-old Corinne Nicole Sellhorn's death was being treated as a murder-suicide.
The identity of the second person found on the property was confirmed as 61-year-old Ronald Stuart Jones.
Police said they were unable to release the cause of death for either person but it was believed by investigators that weapons were involved. The investigation continues.
Wetaskiwin RCMP also seemed to take the media to task in their news release (excerpt reproduced here verbatim):
No other information to offer at this time, the RCMP are aware of information being carried by various media outlets - many of whom are eager for police to confirm investigational details. All investigations are subject to tried and proven investigational protocols and privacy legislation that limits what can be released into the public domain. The public's need for information in tragic cases such as this is recognized and acknowledged. RCMP investigators strive to provide the public with as much information, when possible to make public disclosures in a manner that will not result in; negative impacts on investigational processes or undue stress on family or loved ones.
That said, it was family who told media that Corinne had been stabbed and strangled – read more »
The revelation came from John Sellhorn, Corinne's father, who offered a more complete picture of his daughter.
John told the Edmonton Journal that Corinne and Ron were not married but had an "on and off relationship for many years."
It was Corinne who owned the property where she was later found dead. Over a 10 year period, she kept about a dozen horses there.
According to John, Corinne made a living operating several traplines in the Yukon ... and that Jones worked for her as an employee.
(However, a close friend of Jones said the man was "wealthy").
Growing up in Medicine Hat, Corinne took part in the usual activities: soccer, ringette and basketball.
She wanted to be a legal assistant, but after a stint at Red Deer College she decided office work wasn't for her.
Corinne took a 46-day horseback trip through Jasper National Park. She fell in love with the outdoor life and she soon found herself sharing that life with Ron James.
A love of horses led to trips across Alberta and the United States.
Her pride and joy, Wings of War, helped her win the American Paint Horse Association's Rookie Of The Year Award in 2003.
"She was my inspiration," Corinne's brother Jason said.
"You can imagine a city girl changing her life. In the last 10 years she was a country girl on the farmland in the middle of the wilderness."
"She was very bubbly, always high on life, and loved to laugh and play jokes on you," Corinne's mother Patty said. "And she loved her horses."
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Corinne's funeral was set for November 6th, in Medicine Hat.
All the information presented on this page has been compiled primarily from published media reports and should not be interpreted as having legal bearing or other prejudice against the individuals named on this web site.
The Last Link on the Left practices fair presentation and the disclosure of relevant interests.
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