On one side, carefully manoeuvring police desperate for the safe return of an abducted child. On the other side, a panicked kidnapper with a 9-year-old girl he may not know how to get off his hands.
An awkward, delicate stalemate.
This is one scenario, police sources have told the Star, complicating the search for and investigation into the disappearance of Cecilia Zhang.
The child vanished some time between Sunday night and Monday morning, when Cecilia’s mother found her daughter’s bed empty, her coat left behind, a rear window of the Whitehorn Cres. home forced open.
Investigators are loath to do anything now that might alarm the kidnapper or provoke a precipitous, irreversible response. The critical operating premise: Do no harm.
“Obviously, the abductor or abductors did not expect the family to contact the police within such a short time-frame,” said the police source, who spoke only on condition of anonymity. “They weren’t even ready to make a ransom call.
“That’s why both sides have been in a standstill and the suspects are not making any move at this point.”
Indeed, Cecilia’s mom, Sherry, did not immediately phone police after finding no trace of her only child in the house. Rather, and quite naturally for a frenzied mother, she raced straightaway to Cecilia’s school, Seneca Hill Public, hoping the little girl had for some reason, inexplicably, left the house without speaking to her parents, without breakfast.
And without waiting for her grandfather to walk her the three blocks, as has been the normal routine since the elderly, recently-widowed gentleman arrived from mainland China for an extended visit.
It was only after the school principal, Evelyn Chadband － upon hearing the peculiar circumstances surrounding Cecilia’s disappearance － phoned the residence, pressing Sherry Zhang to contact police, that the distraught mother placed a call to 911. It was precisely 8:27 a.m.
The police source, who has extensive professional experience in the Chinese community, said the abduction does not appear to have Asian gang fingerprints on it. Cecilia’s disappearance, he said, might more likely be linked to people who came in contact with the Zhangs through the couple’s after-school daycare/adult learning centre in Scarborough. He further suggested that the jimmied-open window might be just a “smokescreen” to divert the investigation.
A gangland, or organized crime connection, seems particularly unlikely given that the Gangs and Guns Task Force of the Toronto Police Service has not been called in to participate in the investigation, nor tapped for their expertise in this area. “We haven’t been contacted,” Det. Sgt. Gary Keys, task force head, told the Star yesterday.
While uncomfortable speaking about Asian gang activity in connection with Cecilia’s kidnapping, which might inadvertently give credence to that scenario, Keys did say that kidnapping-for-ransom, unlike other forms of extortion, “is not typical” gang behaviour.
Kidnap-for-ransom, within an Asian community that is culturally disinclined to turn to police for help, is not without precedent in Toronto, however.
In May of 2001, Thomas Ku, the wealthy owner of Great Lakes College, was abducted from the driveway of his Chesbro Crescent home in Mississauga and later killed by two of his former students, in Canada on college visas. It was ultimately concluded that Ku － his burned and badly decomposed body found in a field near Peterborough two weeks later － probably died on the same day of his abduction, while bound and gagged inside a trunk. At trial, court heard the kidnappers had pretended their victim was still alive as they tried to seek a $100,000 ransom. Police traced phone calls to a Finch Ave E. pay phone, followed to a man to a Scarborough home and arrested the students.
The students pleaded guilty to manslaughter and forcible confinement at their preliminary hearing and were sentenced to 15 years in prison.
In another case, just last December, the daughter of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman and her boyfriend were abducted from the 29-year-old woman’s Mississauga apartment. The couple was held for five days in a car parked inside the garage of a Markham St. home before managing to escape on Boxing Day, making their way immediately to a Toronto police division.
A source later told the Star that police were initially contacted by the woman’s father, after he’d received a ransom call in Hong Kong demanding $1.3 million. Four Asian men were arrested earlier this year, including the kidnapping mastermind, who was seized in China. A Canadian landed immigrant, Norman Chan had worked as a groundskeeper on the estate of the victim’s sportswear magnate father. Court later heard that the woman (her identity protected by a publication ban) had negotiated a $6,000 side-deal with one of her abductors, who allowed the victims to escape. Chan pleaded guilty to two counts of kidnapping, two counts of forcible confinement and extortion this month and will be sentenced in December.
Yet neither of these cases, arising from a lust for easy ransom money, would appear to have much in common with the Zhang circumstances. Sherry and Raymond Zhang are not wealthy people. Rather, they are hard-working immigrants, pursuing the common immigrant dream in Canada, augmenting their income by renting out rooms to students attending nearby Seneca College. Four visa students were living in the house when Cecilia was taken.
Somehow, the Zhangs managed to pay cash, $350,000, when they purchased their Don Mills area home in 1999. Some 30 months later, the Zhangs took out a mortgage worth 80 per cent of the house’s original sale price and, around the same time, Sherry Zhang opened a combination daycare/language school in an office not far from her home.
Raymond Zhang is a computer programmer with Sun Life Financial.
Family neighbour and confidant Jack Jia, who on Wednesday publicly presented himself as a conduit to Cecilia’s abductors, pleading for the child’s safe, told reporters the little girl’s parents have absolutely no idea who they’re dealing with. Police have echoed that statement, asserting that the family has not received any ransom demand.
Investigators have, however, looked into two mysterious phone calls made to the Zhang house － with no one speaking － on the morning of Cecilia’s disappearance.
The Star found yesterday that Sherry Zhang’s company, on its Web site address, offers immigration and consulting services for Chinese families and students wanting to come to Canada and the United States, either to live or just to study.
Police have been extremely precise in their language when addressing news conferences, at times － like Jia － appearing to address the abductor directly, through the media. Lead investigator Dave Perry, of the sex crimes unit, has been carefully crafting in his public comments, striking a tone of reasonableness, suggesting practical, non-threatening steps the abductor can take to bring this lovely little girl back to her parents. The message is clear: Don’t compound the original mistake of the abduction by causing any harm to this child. Send her home.
Everyone is operating on the clear, one hopes informed, assumption that Cecilia is still very much alive.
Supporting the view that police have a better understanding of who they’re dealing with, and the why behind Cecilia’s abduction, are palpable shifts in the nature of the public search, now into its fifth day.
Sgt. Jim Muscat told reporters yesterday the investigation is changing, raising the possibility that the broad-based grid search might soon be scaled back. “We may in fact be moving to a different phase of the investigation,” he said.
(ROSIE DIMANNO)
