Ardeth Wood


Ardeth Mary Margaret Wood was a Canadian woman who was a graduate student at the University of Waterloo who was killed in a forcible drowning in the city of Ottawa. The initial search for Wood was one of the largest search efforts in the city's history, and the two-year search for her killer was one of the largest manhunts in Canada.

Biography

Ardeth Wood was the first daughter born to Brenden Wood and Catherine Ashley, on October 28, 1975 in Saint John, New Brunswick. Wood spent most of her life in Ottawa, and graduated from Lester B. Pearson Catholic High School in 1994. She proceeded to undergraduate studies at Carleton University before pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the University of Waterloo. Wood was recognized as an exceptional student, and, in Waterloo, was co-editor of Eidos: The Canadian Graduate Journal of Philosophy.

Disappearance

Wood was on leave from her doctoral studies and visiting her family in Ottawa in the summer of 2003. She was riding her bicycle along a path beside the Rockcliffe Parkway in the Green's Creek area when she was last seen on August 6, 2003.
News of her disappearance was reported widely in Canada, and the entire city of Ottawa rallied around a search effort that involved hundreds of volunteers, the police, and the military. Her body was found in the woods around Green's Creek on August 11, 2003.

Manhunt

Ottawa police received many tips that a man on a bicycle was seen luring women into the woods along the path where Wood had traveled. A composite sketch of the murder suspect was compiled soon thereafter, and was widely distributed across Canada.
Over two years after the murder, on October 20, 2005, police arrested Chris Myers, a 25-year-old man, who had been previously charged with assaults in North Bay, Ontario. Staff Sgt. Randy Wisker led the investigation into Wood's murder, and relied on a loose collection of tips prior to the arrest.

Conclusion

On January 8, 2008, Chris Myers pleaded guilty to Ardeth Wood's murder, and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for ten years.

Remembrance

Wood has been remembered with scholarships in her name at the educational institutions where she studied:
A spectacular Bebb's oak tree in the Dominion Arboretum of the Central Experimental Farm was dedicated to Wood in 2007. The tree was split in half by a violent windstorm 27 September 2017, and Wood's brother now wants to clone the tree for this reason.

Media

, Episode aired 25 September 2010.