RCMP homicide investigators are saying little publicly about the death of 35-year-old Karver Morford, in a remote Ryder Lake house, sometime during a rainy weekend last November.
But it’s clear from the pain etched in the faces of his father Jim, mother Judy and older brother Jade that it was a savage and senseless act that snuffed the life of this quiet and reclusive young man.
The family is pleading for anyone who knows anything about Karver’s death to call the tip line set up by the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team at 1-877-551-IHIT or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS.
“I cannot give any details of the case,” Karver’s father Jim said. “But I will say that the perpetrators were the ultimate cowards in their actions.”
“The only thing of value Karver had was his life - and that’s what they took,” his bewildered mother Judy said.
Why anyone would want to hurt their son, a gentle man who enjoyed his privacy but was well-regarded by all who met him is “unfathomable” to the family.
And for anyone to think that Karver was up to anything illegal in his secluded Ryder Lake home, or that he somehow deserved what happened to him, Judy said, grappling for words, “that’s so ...”
“Wrong,” said Jade, finishing his mother’s sentence.
While his brother “liked his privacy,” Jade said, he had formed “solid bonds” with the friends he did make.
“All the people he met, they were solid connections, solid bonds,” he said.
It was Jim who found his son’s body on Monday, Nov. 8, inside the rustic Ryder Lake house. Judy had seen Karver just two days earlier on Saturday, Nov. 6.
Sometime in between, someone made their way up the kilometre-long driveway, a rutted and overgrown pathway, to the house where Karver’s blue and grey Ford 250 pickup was parked outside.
What happened next only the perpetrators can say.
“Karver’s nightmare began and ended on that date, but ours goes on and on,” Judy said.
“We know we can’t bring him back,” she added, “but someone must know something, even if it’s just who could be capable of such an act.”
Jim said it would take a “particular kind of person” to commit such a brutal crime.
“It was a home invasion, and it was brutal, absolutely brutal,” he said.
“I think the community should be outraged,” Judy said, “that there’s a killer on the loose out there, who would go and take the life of an innocent man.”
She doesn’t want to spark unnecessary fears, but she believes this isn’t the first time the perpetrator has killed - and it could happen again.
“You don’t usually start out with murder ... this is probably not their first and quite possibly not their last,” she said.
Karver left school and shied away from socializing after he was diagnosed with epilepsy when he was fourteen years old.
Over the following years he kept busy “re-inventing” himself as a cowboy in Ashcroft and a logger in Kitimat, but he returned to live in the Chilliwack area where he enjoyed the outdoor life and keeping up with his friends.
“He was always keen on keeping up with what other people he had known were up to, and was fond of reminiscing about the adventures he’d had with everyone along the way,” his mother recalled in a memorial tribute.
“He had what he once called a ‘photogenic’ memory of the people and events in his life, and what he didn’t remember he was still quite handy at making up,” she said.
“No one has the right to take someone else’s life, and especially not to just get away with it,” she said. “As his family, friends, and community, we can only carry on by doing all we can to help, and by believing that justice will someday be served.”
rfreeman@theprogress.com