The Confession: Murder of Peter Schnellhardt
Peter Schnellhardt’s body was found by a colleague on the grounds of United Concrete in Williams Lake, B.C., just as the working day was beginning on July 4, 2006.
Schnellhardt had been badly beaten, his throat slit from side to side. He’d also been shot three times — twice in the head and once in the hand.
There were no arrests in the immediate aftermath of the killing. But three years later, a B.C. man told a woman in whom he was romantically interested that he and another man were responsible.
“Guy is a hitman. We did Peter,” the suspect wrote in an online chat.
Information that could reveal the suspect’s identity is protected by a publication ban, but we’re calling him John Doe for the purpose of this story. For the same reason, we’re calling the woman he was talking to Jane Roe.
“Guy” is a local man who would later be convicted in another B.C. homicide.
“At night me and Guy went to United Concrete and snuck up the back. [Peter] was in a truck and Guy shot him in the head three times, but he didn’t die and Peter came out of the truck. I kicked the shit out of him and when he was on the ground, Guy cut his neck,” Doe wrote.
Despite this recorded confession and with a man now known to be a killer implicated, 13 years after Schnellhardt’s death, his family is no closer to seeing justice.
Doe didn’t know it at the time, but Roe was actually co-operating with the RCMP. When Doe made that admission, Roe was sitting in a hotel room with an undercover officer, who was watching her computer screen.
Doe was arrested and charged with Schnellhardt’s murder, and a transcript of his conversation with Roe was presented as evidence in his trial.
Yet Doe would be acquitted of all charges. After Schnellhardt's death, Doe had suffered a brain injury, and was known to brag to impress women. As a result, a judge said he doubted the reliability of Doe’s confession.
Meanwhile, the man Doe named in his confession has not been charged in Schnellhardt’s death. He was, however, convicted last summer of killing and partially dismembering another man.
Schnellhardt’s unsolved slaying has consumed the life of his older sister Petra Bunn. It also makes Roe furious that her co-operation with police didn’t end with a conviction.
“It takes the joy out of life,” Bunn said. “It really affects me at night, because during the day I'm busy, I'm doing everything I need to do for my family … but at night — oh, it just comes flooding [back], and it goes 'round and 'round in my head.”
She said she’s spent a small fortune trying to discover the truth about what happened to her brother. She’s hired private investigators, offered up rewards and paid lawyers to represent her family in court.
She has also spent countless hours trying to get access to court transcripts and have publication bans lifted. She’s written pages and pages of letters to justice officials, trying to convince someone to investigate why the prosecution was not successful. The 62-year-old has even self-published a book, Unjust: A Memoir, in an attempt to draw more attention to the case.
Multiple publication bans mean there are many gaps in what the media is able to report on the Schnellhardt case. The victim’s family has had to fight in court for access to documents that might help them understand what happened during the investigation and trial.
“It has been a frustration all the way through. And no matter what I've done or tried to do, I can't really get anyone to listen, to look at it, to investigate it,” said Schnellhardt’s older sister, Petra Bunn. “It's just this void.”
