Murder of Tess Richey

Tess Richey was a 22-year-old Canadian woman, the youngest of five daughters from North Bay, Ontario. She had worked as an assistant manager at a Days Inn before moving to Toronto, where she completed a flight services program at Seneca College in April 2017 and applied for airline and hotel jobs while working part-time. She was a marathon runner whom her sister described as protective of the family.

On the evening of Friday, 24 November 2017, Richey left her sister's home in midtown Toronto around 11:30 pm for a night out with a high-school friend on Church Street, in Toronto's Church and Wellesley neighbourhood. The two went to the bar Crews & Tangos and had been drinking heavily by the time they left after 1:30 am. They walked to Dundonald Street and stopped to talk with a woman who lived there and a man who joined them. Richey's friend left for home after a text around 4 am, and Richey was not seen alive again; shared fitness-tracker and ride-share records showed activity after 3 am, including a ride request later cancelled.

Richey's sister texted her the next morning and, after receiving no reply, contacted hospitals and police that evening. Toronto police opened a missing-persons investigation and said by 28 November that they had few leads. Richey's mother and other family travelled from North Bay to join the search, distributing posters around Church and Wellesley. On 29 November, Richey's mother and a friend found her body at the bottom of a basement stairwell two doors from where Richey was last seen. It showed no visible signs of trauma; a post-mortem on 1 December found Richey had died of neck compression, and her death was ruled a homicide.

The case was handed to the homicide squad on 1 December, and investigators canvassed for surveillance video and witnesses. At a news conference on 8 December, Detective Sergeant Graham Gibson described the sequence of events: after leaving Crews & Tangos, Richey, her friend, and a man had talked with people on Dundonald Street before Richey and the man were recorded on video entering an alley and stairwell on Church Street, then leaving alone. Police released images of the man and asked for the public's help. In late January 2018, a Dundonald Street resident told CBC News that Richey had been upset about a breakup and that the man had comforted her.

On 4 February 2018, police arrested Kalen Schlatter, a 21-year-old man who did contract exterior-property work, near his home in Toronto's Earlscourt neighbourhood. Confirmed as the man from the surveillance images and with no prior police record, he was charged the next day with second-degree murder. On 21 March 2018, after new evidence was found, the charge was upgraded to first-degree murder. Schlatter was denied bail in August 2018 and ordered to stand trial after a December 2018 preliminary hearing. His trial opened in January 2020, and on 23 March 2020 he was found guilty of first-degree murder; his appeal was denied on 9 January 2024.

Toronto police were criticized for not finding Richey's body sooner, since it lay about 15 metres from where she was last seen. Chief Mark Saunders ordered an internal review, and on 12 June 2018 two patrol officers were charged at a police tribunal with misconduct and neglect of duty over their handling of the missing-persons report; their union said the officers had gone beyond their assigned task. Saunders also recommended an external review of missing-persons investigations, and a Toronto Police Services Board working group and a dedicated missing-persons unit followed in 2018.