A photo of murder victim Vivien Morzuch at age 12.
Image Credit: TWITTER/ Eve Lazarus
August 15, 2020 - 6:00 PM
Vivien Morzuch, a 15-year-old boy who had run away from his Montreal home to pick fruit in the Okanagan area, was found beaten to death near Kamloops in July, 2000.
A new podcast created by Vancouver writer Eve Lazarus has shed light on the unique case that many Kamloops residents may have forgotten.
She explains in the third episode of How To Catch A Killer: The Vivien Morzuch Story, that all police had to work with was a partial fingerprint on a piece of duct tape found hear the boy's body and some unidentified DNA.
Consequently, the case went cold for six years.
Morzuch's murder was ultimately solved, with the help of a complex, costly and at times controversial operation executed by the Vancouver RCMP.
Lazarus explains that this tactic, called Mr. Big, is an investigation procedure in which police officers go deep undercover to pose as criminals and position themselves in the life of the suspect in order to obtain a confession.
"An undercover police officer, acting as a crime boss, has a suspect perform what he believes to be a series of illegal activities designed to make the suspect think that he is an increasingly important part of an organization," she said.
She added that the cost of a Mr. Big operation can range from a few thousand to a couple hundred thousand dollars.
Police successfully deployed this tactic on the suspect of Morzuch's murder, and arrested Brian Townsend in 2006.
To find out how the rest of the story unfolds, listen to the podcast below.
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