| Notes |
- What In The Hell Was Up With Jason Gamache?
Patricia Platt
Patricia Platt
Updated November 16, 2017
13 items
The Jason Gamache case was shocking to the small community of Courtenay, British Columbia. What did Jason Gamache do, you ask? On an otherwise normal October afternoon in 1992, the 15-year-old kidnapped and then brutally raped and murdered his six-year-old neighbor Dawn Shaw. News soon surfaced that Gamache had been previously convicted of sexually assaulting children. The Jason Gamache crimes left the community baffled.
Residents began asking themselves, "Who was Jason Gamache?" He had been well liked in his community and no on knew of his dark history before he arrived in Courtenay. Shaw's family trusted Gamache and believed he deeply cared for their daughter. Sadly, the lack of knowledge about Gamache's history led to a brutal, unforgettable crime.
There is not a lot of public information on the crimes Gamache committed or the details of Shaw's brutal murder, and some of this may be conjecture. Still, there is no denying what an awful crime Gamache committed - a teenager killing a child - and the scar it left on this small British Columbia town.
Jason Gamache was friendly with children and appeared to genuinely enjoy their company. He ended up kidnapping Dawn by tricking her into playing hide and seek with him and a group of neighborhood children. Gamache carried Dawn into the woods during the game, perhaps under the guise they would find a hiding spot together. He went on to rape and murder her in the secluded woods.
When Dawn?s body was discovered, it had been absolutely brutalized by Gamache. Several of her ribs were broken, she had severe blows to her thorax and abdomen, and her liver was perforated. It was concluded that she bled out as a result of her wounds, which ultimately caused her death.
Gamache lived in the same townhouse complex as Dawn Shaw. He was, by all accounts, well liked and trusted by other residents. In fact, the man who discovered Dawn?s body trusted Gamache to babysit his two sons the night of Dawn's murder. The man was later shocked and stated it never even occurred to him Gamache could be the murderer.
Gamache had previously been convicted of sexually assaulting two four-year-old children in the city where he previously lived with his mother. To escape the public stigma, the family moved the family from Namaimo to Courteny, British Columbia. Gamache was attending court ordered sexual assault therapy at the time of the murder.
In Canada, there were no laws at the time requiring that those convicted of sexual assault be documented. When Gamache and his mother moved to town, no one had any idea of his history. To neighbors and classmates, Gamache was an average 15-year-old boy. They had no reason to suspect he may harbor violent tendencies.
Gamache left his mark on the crime scene in the form of a footprint. When stomping Dawn to death, he left the imprint of his shoe on her face and the ground. This was part of the evidence police used to eventually convict Gamache.
In 1997, Jason Gamache died via asphyxiation when he hung himself in his jail cell. His body was found around 10:30 at night by guards during routine inmate counts. He was 20 years old at the time of his death.
Carol Shaw wanted closure after the death of her daughter. She sent Gamache a video in prison in which she explained how his actions affected her, her husband, and her surviving children. Gamache eventually sent a video of his own back, but the contents were never made public. We can only hope Dawn's mother gleaned even a small amount of closure from what was surely a deeply upsetting video response.
A highly disturbing videotape of Gamache confessing was shown as evidence in court. Gamache gave police a walk through of his crime, in which he led them across the school grounds and explained how he raped and murdered Dawn. In a particularly disturbing detail, Gamache admitted he stomped Dawn to death because he heard her 10-year-old brother calling for her. He killed her to keep her quiet after she called out, ?Mommy.?
Even more unsettling was the fact Dawn?s family viewed the tape in court. They walked out before the video was finished and tried to warn other family members about what happened. They knew the clip would be shown on the news, as the case was highly publicized. Unfortunately, the news had already aired pieces of the tape before the Shaws could warn relatives.
Gamache did not seem all there during his confession. He expressed a lot of affection towards Dawn and seemed devastated about her murder. At the same time, when explaining the details of his murder to the police, he seemed strangely detached. This led forensic psychiatrists to diagnose Gamache with multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identify disorder. He blamed his actions on a personality he called "Karl." The diagnosis, however, did not prevent him from being charged with the crime.
In 1990, Gamache found one of his father?s porn tapes and watched it. The tape featured oral sex, which Gamache had never encountered before. Perhaps inspired by the tape, he later attempted to force two children to perform fellatio on him.
Jason Gamache did not have an easy time growing up. When he was two, his parents went through a bitter divorce. At six, his father managed to temporarily gain custody of Gamache. Apparently, Gamache?s father was highly disciplinary and living with him may have been traumatizing for Gamache. There are hundreds of thousands of children who are caught in the middle of awful divorces and manage not to rape or murder a child, but it does give us some insight as to what events may have shaped his dark personality.
Part of what made the murder so shocking was the fact Gamache was such a well-liked young man. Neighbors reported Gamache was kind and well-mannered. He also did well in school and was captain of the rugby team. This made his horrific crime all the more shocking. No one would have suspected the seemingly well-adjusted teen could have such violent impulses.
- Summer sunlight fell in green-filtered shafts through the heavy branches, dappling the wet, brown teenage bodies. Laughing at their own horseplay, the clutch of tanned boys and girls fought good-naturedly for a place aboard a bobbing inner tube as it spun and drifted slowly on the river's current. Among them was the tube's owner, Jason Gamache, a handsome, rather lanky youth, his thick brown hair plastered against his head. Apart from his height, a strapping 6 feet, 1 inch, there was nothing--nothing visible, at least--on this August, 1992, day on Vancouver Island, to set the easygoing 15-year-old apart from his playmates. There most certainly was nothing to suggest that within weeks this same laughing boy would lure an unsuspecting younger child into darkened woods, rape and casually murder her.
The strangling of six-year-old Dawn Shaw on October 24, 1992, in Courtenay, B.C., a community of 12,000 people 180 km northwest of Victoria, sent shock waves through British Columbia. Horror at the killing redoubled eight weeks later, when police arrested Gamache, Shaw's next-door neighbor in a townhouse complex, and charged him with the girl's murder. No one apart from investigators had suspected the personable youth of harboring a hidden impulse to lethal violence. Lloyd Doucet, another resident of the complex and the one who discovered Dawn's bruised and naked body, trusted Jason so completely that later that night he left the teen to babysit his own two young sons. ``It never dawned on me at all that it could be him,'' Doucet says now.
But there was a side to young Jason that his neighbors knew nothing about--one that was, and may still be, a mystery to Jason Gamache himself. What the neighbors did not know was that the youth was already on probation for two previous minor sex offences. What no one knew, although police quickly began to suspect it, was that the polite young man, the captain of his high-school rugby team, was also brutally capable of murder. Physical evidence collected from the crime scene, however, pointed directly to Gamache. Confronted with that evidence eight weeks after the crime, the youth confessed. After nearly a year of assessment by court- appointed experts, Jason's case was raised to adult court last fall, and his name made public. On April 6, a B.C. Supreme Court jury in Victoria convicted him of Dawn's murder. He is now serving a life sentence.
That sentence, however, hardly closes the case on Jason Gamache. Now, still only 17, he
Maclean's | August 15, 1994
Died:
- Asphyxiation from hanging
Autopsy results show Jason Karl Gamache died of asphyxiation from hanging. His body was found at about 10:30 p.m. during a routine inmate count. A coroner's inquest will be held and a police investigation is continuing.
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A sex killer who fatally choked and kicked a 6-year-old girl was found hanged this week at a Fraser Valley prison.
The girl's grandmother, Margaret Hunter, said yesterday she's glad Jason Gamache is dead, but the child's mother said she feels sorry for his mother.
``This is something we've prayed for, that he can't cause any more harm,'' Hunter said.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer | February 5, 1997
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1976 - 1997 (20 years)
