Police have made two arrests in a 2010 double-homicide outside of Cranbrook that took the lives of two innocent bystanders.
Colin Raymond Correia, 41, and Sheldon Joseph Hunter, 30, were arrested and charged with two counts of first degree murder, who are both former residents of Cranbrook and known to authorities, according to RCMP.
Correia was arrested on June 9th in Edmonton and Hunter was arrested a day later in Drumheller.
Police were called to a shooting at a rural residence outside Cranbrook on May 29, 2010, where officers found a dead woman and a man in critical condition who later died of his injuries. RCMP say there were early indications that it was a targeted incident, but the victims — Leanne Laura MacFarlane and Jeffrey Todd Taylor — were not the intended targets.
READ: Marking the sixth anniversary of the MacFarlane-Taylor murders
“The murders of Jeff and Leanne were tragic and their deaths deeply impacted the lives of their family members,” says Sgt. Jason Smart, Southeast District Major Crime Unit. “The core group of investigators dedicated to this file would like to thank those family members for their persistence, understanding, patience and courage throughout the last eight years.”
The RCMP’s Southeast District Major Crime Unit has been actively investigating the murders since 2010, providing full-time resources to the investigation, which was dubbed Project E-Navid.
Over the years, as investigators tracked down leads, developments occured which allowed for the identification of suspects and the accumulation of an evidence package that led to the approval of charges from the BC Prosecution Service.
Numerous law enforcement agencies within and outside the RCMP also contributed to the investigation, say RCMP.
Both Correia and Hunter will be taken to Vancouver to appear in BC Supreme Court on Wednesday, June 13, 2018.
