“Hi. I am a plumber and I am currently on a call on-site. We are cleaning a drain with the snake and in the process… we have pulled out about 10 to 15 pounds of something that looks like flesh or meat scraps, and we don’t know what it is.”
When these plumbers were called to a quiet neighborhood in Ontario in December 2017, they expected a routine job. A clogged drain is usually a simple matter. The plumbers had their drain cleaning snake with them, an indispensable tool consisting of a long wire with a corkscrew-like end. Had the blockage not been so massive, the work with this specialized tool shouldn’t have taken more than an hour. But they encountered a problem.
After the pipes had been clogged for several days, the neighbors grew impatient. They wanted a quick and easy solution to the problem, but what the plumbers discovered in the drains was anything but quick or easy. Their gruesome discovery led the police to cordon off the area and turn it into a crime scene. The plumbers had discovered evidence of a horrific murder with far-reaching consequences: body parts that had been callously flushed down the toilet. This is the harrowing story of Adam Strong.
Let’s start with Rori Hache. She was born in July 1999 in Oshawa, a quiet suburb of Ontario, Canada. She was a bright and spirited child with a love for animals and the elderly. Outside of school, she kept busy as an army cadet, and by the age of 13, she had already twice received the title of “Cadet of the Year.” But when she entered high school a year later, her life took a dark turn. As a 14-year-old freshman, she was offered crystal meth. She took it—the first mistake in a years-long battle with addiction.
Even as a teenager, Rori came from a difficult background. Her grandfather was Bernie Guindon, also known as “Bernie the Frog,” the founder of the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club, which at one time was the second-largest biker club in the world. As an outlaw biker with a criminal record for drugs and assault, he had spent 22 years in prison and had between 11 and 16 children. One of them was Rori’s uncle, Harley Davidson Guindon, who owned a clothing store in Oshawa.
Rori and her uncle were close. Harley himself was a Hells Angels biker with a past full of drug offenses and a tattoo on his back announcing his prison fight record: 41 wins and no losses. Nevertheless, he had a soft spot for his teenage niece. In 2016, when she was 17, she lived with Harley and his family while he was under house arrest for drug offenses. Rori’s mother, Shannon Dion, had reported herself to the Children’s Aid Society because she thought this was the only way to get Rori the help she needed for her addiction.
The authorities didn’t help, but Rori managed to change her life on her own. The last six months of her life were positive. Rori had a boyfriend named Tony and even her own apartment. Harley had recently given her and her mother $1,000 to help with living costs, but Rori had found a job herself and returned to school. Things were looking up. In August 2017, her aunt Michelle Guindon took her to a drugstore to buy a pregnancy test. It was positive. Rori was pregnant and wanted to keep the baby. She looked forward to motherhood. But at the end of that same month, things were to go terribly wrong.
On August 10, there was an unexplained fire at Rori’s mother’s house. Shannon was injured and her dog was killed. This might have been the triggering incident for Rori’s downward spiral. Rori was a regular at a youth center called “The Refuge.” The staff there noted that she had recently relapsed, although they said in August she was doing better. A few days before the end of August, Harley met Rori and noticed something different about her. She didn’t want to talk about what was going on with her and seemed cornered and secretive. He described her hug as heartbreaking—the tightest hug she had ever given him, a hug that felt like a final goodbye.
On August 29, 2017, Rori’s friend and her mother took her to the hospital. We don’t know exactly why, but it was described as her having some kind of mental episode. They were captured by the security camera in the waiting room. Rori’s friend and the mother were filmed leaving the hospital shortly thereafter, leaving Rori behind alone. She sat in the waiting room for 15 minutes but then left before she could be examined by a doctor. This footage shows her leaving the hospital alone. This was the last time Rori Hache was seen alive.
When she didn’t show up at “The Refuge” for several days, her friends and her guidance counselor grew worried. Together with her family, they raised the alarm. Some thought she had fled the city and fallen back into old habits, but her closest family was certain she wouldn’t do that now. Regardless of her recent problems, she was pregnant and in a stable relationship. They knew something was wrong. And then, on September 11, 2017, her story took a horrifying turn.
It was a pleasant evening at Oshawa Harbor, and a grandfather and his 11-year-old grandson were fishing. As they stood on the pier, they noticed something strange in the water. At first, it looked like a piece of trash, so the two cast their lines at it to hook it and make the lake cleaner. After about half an hour of effort, they managed to pull it close enough to catch it with a net and heave it onto the pier. One of them remembers thinking it was some kind of animal, maybe a chicken. But the fishermen soon realized the truth was far worse.
The grandfather remembers saying:
“I think this is a body.”
The object pulled from the lake was indeed a female torso. When the police arrived, they determined that it showed signs of trauma and had been intentionally severed from the rest of the body. Someone had killed a woman and disposed of her remains.
“We are reporting live from Oshawa Harbor. Good evening. The busy spot on the shore is now a disturbing crime scene. The discovery was made by a fisherman and his grandson. They saw a torso in the water. Many questions tonight, very few answers. Who was this woman? Where did she come from? Who wanted her dead?”
The police took the torso for identification.
“We will likely reach out to other departments to see if there are any unsolved missing persons cases.”
But Lake Ontario was a vast area, and the police couldn’t rule out that the torso had been carried to Oshawa from elsewhere. The absence of the pelvis on the torso made identification difficult, and the condition of the torso made it hard to determine whether the victim had been pregnant or not. It took until November 10, nearly two months, before the police could compare the DNA from the torso with the DNA provided by Rori’s family and determine that they matched. The severed torso belonged to Rori Hache, and her missing person case had become a murder case.
But how had her torso ended up in the lake? Who had killed her? And, horrifyingly, where was the rest of her body? There were no tracks. The lake had washed away all evidence that could have pointed to the perpetrator, and Rori’s final movements were a mystery. It wasn’t known how long she had been in the lake or how long she had been alive after leaving the hospital waiting room. Who had she met? What had been done to her? For now, the police didn’t know, and the family remained in anxious waiting.
They waited until December 28, 2017, when the police were notified of a gruesome discovery by a plumber from Oshawa. The plumbers were called by a couple in an upstairs rental apartment because of a pipe blockage. The blockage had existed for several days, and the other resident of the building, the man who lived in the basement apartment, Adam Strong, had been unable to do anything about it. He had even asked the neighbors upstairs for a drain cleaning snake to clear it himself. He told them it was a bloated condom blocking the drain. The neighbors upstairs took matters into their own hands and called the plumbers. The source of the blockage lay in the lower apartment, which Strong had rented for over a decade.
So the plumbers knocked on Strong’s door. The basement apartment was filled with a sickening stench. Strong seemed nervous and remarked that the condition of the drains was repulsive. And as we know, while flushing the pipes, the plumbers found something terrible. Knives lay next to the bed. The police arrived shortly thereafter. They suspected that the material coming out of the pipes was human flesh. The plumbers were horrified by what they had stumbled upon and by the awareness that they had spent so many hours in contact with this man.
For when the police knocked on Strong’s door, he opened it and said almost immediately:
“The game is over. It’s a body.”
They arrested him on the spot. While he sat outside in the patrol car, he continued to be talkative. He said:
“If you want the rest of her, she’s in my freezer, and she’s pretty much defleshed.”
With a growing sense of horror, the officers opened the freezer. Inside, they found various severed body parts. This included a human head. On the neck, the word “Alive” was tattooed—the same tattoo Rori had had. These were the body parts of Rori Hache. Her autopsy revealed several facial injuries and two fractures. The exact cause of death was not certain. She had drugs in her system, but there was no way to determine the amount. It was also suspected that she might have been strangled or died from blunt force trauma. In any case, she had died in a horrific attack.
“You said to the officers: ‘If you’re looking for the rest of her, you’ll find her in the freezer.’ My question to you is: Is the person in that freezer Rori?”
“I plan to answer that question. I… these things can take hours, is that true?”
“That’s right.”
The police got nowhere during Strong’s interrogation, even though he had previously been talkative and almost boasted about the human remains on his property. So they turned back to his apartment to search for further evidence. It was extremely messy and cluttered. They found a range of restraint devices and sex toys, as well as weapons like a hammer. On this hammer, they found Rori’s DNA. They found Rori’s running shoes in a plastic bag with apparent blood splatters on them. They also found blood splatters on the wall and on the baseboards leading into Strong’s bedroom.
There was also evidence of other crimes. Strong’s online search history documented his obsession with extreme violence and death. This interest had crossed over into the real world in an alarming way. They found an unexploded pipe bomb, for which the bomb disposal squad had to be called to defuse it.
“3, 2, 1… a loud bang tonight in the heart of a neighborhood in Oshawa. The controlled explosion of a suspicious package at the site of an investigation into a suspicious death for the Durham Regional Police.”
Perhaps most damningly, they also found a specialized knife in the knife drawer. It was the kind of knife hunters use to butcher and skin animals—the kind of knife that could have been used for Rori’s dismemberment. They examined this knife for Rori’s DNA, but what they found on it was to completely blow this case open: it was the DNA of another victim. This second victim was 19-year-old Candace Fitzpatrick.
Candace was born in 1989. Not much is known about her except her similarities to Rori. She too was often out on the streets of Oshawa and had a drug problem. But she also had a loving family, just like Rori. And this family had searched for her for almost 10 years since she disappeared in March 2008.
“Another missing woman was identified at this point as Candace Fitzpatrick from the Oshawa area. The family had reported concerns to the DRPS in 2010 that she had not been seen since 2008. She was 18 years old at the time.”
“I had the feeling from the beginning that this was an experienced person who has done this before. Because my daughter was tough, she was very tough, and she wouldn’t have been an easy victim for anyone, you know what I mean? So I knew he knew what he was doing.”
Now they finally had a clue as to what had happened to her, and it was nothing good. They had Candace’s DNA on the knife, but they found no trace of her body. So they went back to Strong. Initially, he wanted to talk about Rori. He revealed a callous, cruel attitude toward her death and the way he had dismembered her, which he said he began doing on Christmas Eve 2017 because the neighbors were away at that time.
“So the 24th is the day you start, as you said? Christmas Eve?”
“Yes.”
“Are you doing this while it’s frozen or…”
“It’s partially thawed. Completely thawed. Okay.”
The police had already charged Strong with indignity to a dead body. He believed as long as they stuck to the practical details of what he had done after Rori was dead during this questioning, he was safe from other charges. But the more he told the investigators, the more they could push him to reveal more damning details, and the more a judge could infer what he had done to Rori while she was still alive.
Strong did not make an actual confession for either of the murders—neither for Rori nor for Candace. He admitted to knowing Rori and eating with her, and that she had come to his apartment more than once. He continued to confess to dismembering her body after her death and expressed surprise that her torso had been found in the lake. He didn’t think she should have floated. He also described the months he took to dispose of her body parts as a result of “procrastination.” He also blamed the possession of the knife with Candace’s DNA on procrastination and admitted he should have disposed of it, then he might not have been caught. And he admitted to having known Candace at all.
This and the physical DNA evidence were enough for the police to charge Adam Strong with both murders in November 2018, one year after the identification of Rori’s torso. Without a confession, prosecutors had to focus on Strong as a person. Strong, born in 1972, was 45 years old when the plumbers found Rori’s remains. He was a gas station attendant and occasional security guard on film sets. Not much is known about his early life, although he claimed to have had a terrible childhood and blamed it for his behavior.
“They are my actions, but I don’t believe I would have committed these actions if I had been nurtured,”
he said.
“It was a really bad childhood.”
He also had a problematic past with women. The prosecution called two women to the stand who both had past relationships with Strong—at least 20 years prior, when Strong himself was in his twenties. They said he enjoyed bondage and choking, which was consensual for one of the women, but not for the other. She said she feared for her safety when it happened. This disturbing behavior painted the picture of an aggressive and cruel person.
The defense tried to suggest that the girls might have suffered an overdose and Strong had panicked and disposed of their bodies out of fear of being blamed. Rori’s head injuries, however, told a different story. Strong did his best to delay the court proceedings. It took place during the pandemic, which meant much of it was conducted via video link. But even then, there were occasions when he refused to appear.
“I was up all night,”
he complained, refusing to meet his lawyer to discuss the case. He said:
“I’m tired, I want to go to bed.”
His arrogance did not make him popular with the court, and on March 16, 2021, after many delays, Strong was convicted of first-degree murder in the case of Rori Hache and manslaughter in the case of Candace Fitzpatrick. This was all the more remarkable since Candace’s body was missing and there was no confession for either of the two murders. But the confession to the dismemberment was obviously enough. The conviction for murder carried an automatic life sentence.
Perhaps he reconciled himself to his fate in July 2021 when Strong revealed the location of Candace’s remains to a prison guard. The police took him to the site, an intersection in Oshawa, and he pointed to the spot where he believed he had buried her body. They recovered Candace’s remains and were finally able to offer her family closure.
“We barely survived a year, a year and a half, while going through this. I couldn’t imagine 10 years. And I have met this family personally. There is no way they didn’t report this child as missing. No way. They are kind-hearted people. They are hurting, they are devastated. It’s very hard to accept that this happened so close to the police station, so close to the city center. I have lived in Oshawa for 43 years, I was born and raised here. I never thought we would have to worry about such problems here. We’ve had some bad people, but not… not someone sent straight from the mouth of hell, you know what I mean? So, I don’t know how to feel except that I feel blessed right now by the work of the investigators. I don’t understand his attitude. In his head, he’s not to blame for anything. He has already judged himself and found himself innocent. I have no words for this guy. I have no names I could give him. I have no words for him except: maybe think about doing the right thing for this city and my family and all my friends who will never be the same again, because this has slaughtered us all.”
Strong’s sentence will be particularly dangerous for him. Rori’s family connection to biker gangs, including the notorious outlaw biker Bernie Guindon, founder of the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club, means that people in prison will hunt Strong as the man who killed the granddaughter of their leader. One inmate said:
“You can’t kill the granddaughter of someone connected to the Hells Angels. That’s what it comes down to. You can’t kill the granddaughter of a biker and get away with it.”
But we still don’t know exactly how Strong met these women or why he murdered them. The prosecution suspected they were crimes of opportunity—that Strong met Candace and Rori on the street and kidnapped them. He has still not revealed the truth. What is most unsettling is the ten-year gap between his first and his second murder and the question of what he might have done in the meantime.
