Woman's murder unsolved but not forgotten

She springs out of bed. Red lights on her clock radio flash 4:20 a.m. "Where is Simone?"

That question has passed Linda Sandler's lips a thousand times in the past 15 years. Especially in the dead of night, when her subconscious transports her back to July 24, 1994, when she was startled awake and knew – with a mother's intuition – that she would never see her daughter again. "I woke up thinking `this is wrong,' " Sandler says now. "Something is wrong."

It would be another nine agonizing nights before her worst fears were confirmed, but chances are good 21-year-old Simone Penni Sandler was already dead by the time her mother fumbled for the phone to call York Regional Police.

To this day her murder is a cold case mystery. No motive, suspects or leads. And while police re-ignited their investigation 18 months ago at the family's request, they have once again hit only dead ends.

Back in 1994, officers arrived at the Sandlers' home within 20 minutes that humid summer morning. But when they learned Simone had just crossed the threshold into adulthood, they backed off. Maybe she had slept out with a boyfriend, they suggested, or had skipped curfew. When the Sandlers contacted Toronto police in the following days, officials said their hands were tied, the family alleges in a complaint filed to the York Regional Police Services Board. Even though Simone had been working near the Eaton Centre on the afternoon she went missing, York police would have had to enlist the services of Toronto police in order to get help from them.

But they didn't, the document shows. An investigation did not start for an entire week. An ocean of time, detectives say today, for invaluable strands of evidence to uncoil, witnesses to slip away and leads to vanish.

Their inaction may have lasted even longer if a couple driving along Lake Shore Blvd. E. the following Saturday had not spotted something bobbing in the Keating Channel.

Simone's body was bloated and battered. She was naked from the waist down. A green garbage bag was knotted around her neck as she floated in the Don River among the empty potato chip bags, Styrofoam cups and construction debris.

The consummate ingénue, Simone was sweet and pretty, shy and trusting. Petite and fair-skinned with flaxen-coloured curls, she loved to pose for pictures, bake carrot muffins and work out at the YMCA. But her parents admit she lacked savvy and street smarts.

Fresh off her first year in hospitality and tourism at Humber College, Simone took a summer job with a now-defunct casting company called Actors and Models Studio.

Her office was a sandwich board parked at gritty Yonge and Gerrard Sts., between the now-shuttered La Maison croissant shop and the Evergreen Youth Shelter. Her task was recruiting passersby to become extras on film and TV shoots.

Getting through those long summer days downtown was tough at first for Simone. But quickly, she struck up a partnership of sorts with the street rats and homeless kids who hung around the area.

Implausible as it seemed for this sheltered Thornhill girl to carve a niche among these social misfits, Simone was absorbed by the group, even falling for a new boyfriend. "Joe," tattooed but attractive, was a year older. He had a way about him, detectives said, and certainly "knew how to work it." Later on, "friends" would say that Simone was often seen holding Joe's hand. But others said the two broke up a week before her disappearance.

The group invited her to gatherings in the wooded areas off Cherry Beach to smoke marijuana around sandpit bonfires. Detectives would later place Simone at one of these "parties" the night she disappeared. But they will never really know how she spent her last hours.

Her case was fraught with challenges, says Mark Mendelson, one of the original investigators.

Detectives could never crawl out of the weeklong black hole in their investigation. The river's toxic waters removed any hint of a murderer's DNA. Other evidence was probably washed away in a thunderstorm four days after Simone's body was discovered, forcing police to call off their search for clues.

While there are always more tests in the works, and evidence can be found in the unlikeliest places, detectives say, even today's technology has failed to detect a flake of dead skin or a single strand of hair on the garbage bag tied around her neck. Biologists methodically separated each knot in the plastic weapon, recently dissecting it with fresh intent, but found nothing.

After Simone's body was discovered, an autopsy merely concluded she had died of strangulation. The body was so badly decomposed that dental records were used for final identification. There had been an unsuccessful attempt at rape.

"It was one of those nasty investigations," Mendelson says. "Every time we thought we turned a corner and answered a question, we didn't. We just picked up three more questions." Perhaps, the biggest impediment was the quality of witnesses – the homeless kids Simone had befriended, the wayward youth, the hot dog vendors. Sure, they recognized the girl who had become a local fixture. But could they shed light on what happened to her? Who did it? A resounding no.

There were many fruitless attempts to find people and confirm alibis. Even a $100,000 reward offered in 1998 for information yielded nothing.

The last time Stephen Sandler saw his daughter was the Saturday she disappeared. She smiled at him, mid-stride from across the street.

"Do you want a lift to the subway?" he called out. "No thanks, Dad," she said, a hand at her face shielding her eyes from the sun's glare. Today, the Sandlers are left with that vision, the hurt as fresh as the day their daughter went missing.

Over the years, the family has accumulated part of their pain in a bulging red folder. Documents burst out the sides – explanations, apologies and promises from top York police brass, government officials and politicians that something like this will never happen again.

The Sandlers toyed with legal action against York Regional police, believing that Toronto officers might have located their daughter sooner had they gotten the go-ahead to proceed with an investigation. But the Sandlers decided against a legal course of action.

It won't bring back Simone. Nothing will. Not even finding her killer.

"But someone should not be getting away with this," Linda and Stephen both said. "If they do find out, it will at least give us some sense of closure."