MURDER IN OLD BARNS

Why a Nova Scotia community is still looking for the killer of a beloved farmer, three decades on

- LINDSAY JONES

IT WAS STILL DARK on October 26, 1991, when Elmer Yuill slid from beneath the patchwork quilt as his wife, Hazel, slept. The seventy-seven-year-old dairy farmer went out to do the barn chores, as he did every morning. In rubber boots, he crunched across frost-laden grass, Becky the black Lab at his heel. At 4:30 a.m., Todd Carlton, the farmhand, found Yuill face down on the concrete. His body was still warm. “I tried to shake him and wake him up,” said Carlton. What he didn’t see, in that moment of shock before running into the house to call for help, was that Yuill had been shot, execution style, in the back.

Twenty minutes later, the ambulance arrived at Elm Knoll Farm, in the community of Old Barns, Nova Scotia. The paramedics were still pumping Yuill’s chest as they raced him to the hospital in the nearby town of Truro. In the waiting room, police delivered the grim news to Hazel. At first, she thought it had been an accident, that Yuill had been struck by a stray round. After all, hunting season had just begun. But, when doctors removed not one but two Tic Tac– size bullets, the truth became clear. Two bullets are no accident. Two bullets are murder.