As mysterious Halifax murder case turns 70, victim’s family asks police for more information
CBC
The family at the heart of one of the oldest cold cases in Canada is looking for more information from Halifax police, 70 years after grocer Michael Resk was killed in Halifax.
“We are getting older and we would like some definitive answers and we haven't been able to get any,” said Carole Curtis, the eldest of Michael Resk’s children.
“We've heard a lot of hearsay, but nothing concrete. It's like we're spinning our wheels all the time.”
Wanting to separate rumours from truth, the family made a formal request to the police to see the case file, but their request was denied.
Michael Leo Resk owned a grocery store on Gottingen Street when he was found shot in the back of his own delivery van in the early hours of Dec. 9, 1955.
As a small business owner, Resk kept his store open for long hours but he reserved two evenings a week to spend at home with his wife and five children.
He spent the evening watching television at his house in the city’s west end before leaving to lock up the store. He never arrived, and his body was found in the van parked at Acadia and Roome streets around 2 a.m.
Resk served for a time in the navy and was a businessman who was well known among the merchants in the area and within the Lebanese community. Resk’s store was located on land which later became the Halifax North Memorial Public Library.
In the summer of 2023, the Resk family had a meeting with police, and made a freedom of information application to the Halifax Regional Police to see the police file on their father.
They were denied on the grounds that it would harm investigative techniques currently in use or likely to be used, and that it was an invasion of personal privacy. The family found this frustrating and disheartening.
“I always felt ever since I was younger that this was my destiny, to help find out justice [for] the family,” said Janet Mackay, who was roughly six months old when her father died.
Mackay went to police when she was 20 and asked to see her father’s case file, which was denied. She feels strongly that she must keep trying to find out more about what happened.
“That way I'd never regret that at least I did my best,” she said.
The sisters feel saddest for their mother Annie Resk, who was left a widow with five young children at 36. She died in 1992.
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