Killing of Lindsay Buziak

Lindsay Elizabeth Buziak was a 24-year-old real estate agent working in the Victoria, British Columbia area when she was fatally stabbed on February 2, 2008, during what had been arranged as a routine property showing in the nearby municipality of Saanich. Born November 2, 1983, Buziak was described by family, friends, and colleagues as ambitious, popular, and caring, and had built a promising start to her real-estate career by the time of her death. She was survived by her parents and a sister.

In late January 2008, Buziak received a phone call from a woman who said that she and her husband urgently needed a home with a budget of about one million dollars. The caller spoke with a foreign accent and gave a name that was later determined to be false. Buziak, a relatively junior agent, was unsettled that the caller had obtained her personal cell-phone number and raised her concerns with her boyfriend and her father. She arranged to show a property at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, February 2, 2008, at a home on a small cul-de-sac in Saanich.

On the day of the showing, Buziak and her boyfriend had a late lunch and then left in separate vehicles. Rather than the single woman who had called her, witnesses saw a tall, dark-haired man and a blond-haired woman walk up to the property and go inside with Buziak; witnesses believed she did not know the pair. Buziak's boyfriend arrived at the cul-de-sac shortly afterward and waited nearby so as not to interrupt the showing. After receiving no response at the front door, he and a colleague found an open patio door at the rear of the house, entered, and discovered Buziak fatally stabbed in the upstairs master bedroom. She was pronounced dead at the scene. She had no defensive wounds, and neither her belongings nor her body showed signs consistent with robbery or sexual assault.

Buziak's boyfriend and his colleague were briefly held for questioning but were released without charge after surveillance footage from an earlier errand confirmed their whereabouts at the time of the killing. Police have said no one in the boyfriend's family is a suspect, though investigators reviewed the family's ties to the street where the killing occurred, including a business associate of the boyfriend's mother who had been supervising nearby construction about an hour before the killing. Investigators also found no DNA, fingerprints, or other physical evidence at the scene. The phone used to contact Buziak had been bought months earlier in Vancouver under a name authorities consider false, was used only once, and was never activated again. A 2010 television documentary reported that detectives had examined and ruled out a possible connection to organized drug trafficking, concluding that the killing appeared personal rather than a paid contract, and that it may have involved someone with access to information from Buziak's real-estate office.

In August 2017, an anonymous and unverified comment claiming responsibility for the killing was posted to a website devoted to the case. A 2020 freedom-of-information request by the news outlet Capital Daily produced previously unpublished investigative records, including that police had identified two phones connected to the suspects and had examined social-media contacts as an early line of inquiry. In February 2021, Saanich police said that advances in DNA analysis and other technology had opened new leads. As of the most recent reporting, the killing remains unsolved.