The next parole hearing for David Ennis, once known as David Shearing, is set for August 2026.It will determine whether a man who committed one of Canada’s most haunting crimes could one day walk free.More than forty years have passed since the summer of 1982, when six members of the Johnson-Bentley family vanished while camping near Wells Gray Provincial Park in British Columbia. .They were three generations together on holiday. Bob and Jackie Johnson, their daughters Janet, thirteen, and Karen, eleven, and Jackie’s parents, George and Edith Bentley. On August 6, Edith phoned another daughter. It was the last anyone heard from them.When Bob failed to return to work at Gorman Brothers Lumber, his absence was immediately noticed. He was steady, dependable. Relatives contacted the police, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police began a search that would grow into one of the largest in provincial history.For more than a month there was no sign of the family or their two vehicles. Then, on September 13, 1982, a mushroom picker found a burned-out car near Battle Mountain Road. Inside were the remains of the six missing campers. Four adults had been shot in the head with a .22 calibre rifle. The two girls were found in the trunk..The story spread quickly across Canada, a tragedy that was both intimate and unfathomable. The wilderness where the family had camped was vast and quiet. Investigators chased hundreds of leads, even re-enacting the crime on national television in hopes of stirring new information. The case came to symbolize the limits of reason against the kind of violence that has no logic at all.A year later, the second of the family’s vehicles was found burned on a remote logging road near Trophy Mountain, not far from where the first car had been discovered. The breakthrough led investigators to a 24-year-old mechanic named David Shearing from the nearby community of Clearwater. He had once asked how to re-register a Ford truck with a bullet hole in its door. The police had never made that detail public.Shearing was arrested in November 1983. Five months later, he stood in a Kamloops courtroom and pleaded guilty to six counts of second-degree murder. Only afterward did the full story emerge. He had watched the family at their campsite. He waited until night, then shot the four adults. He kept the two girls alive for several days, sexually assaulted them, and killed them one at a time. He burned the vehicles to erase what he had done..Justice Harry McKay called it “a cold-blooded and senseless execution of six defenceless and innocent people.” The sentence was life in prison with no possibility of parole for twenty-five years, the maximum allowed under Canadian law.In the decades since, Shearing changed his name to David Ennis. He has applied for parole several times and been denied each time. The Parole Board of Canada has cited his ongoing violent sexual fantasies, a lack of progress in treatment, and an absence of remorse. In 2021, when Ennis last appeared before the board, more than 101,000 people signed petitions urging that he remain behind bars. The board agreed. It found that he still posed a risk to the public.Ennis has now served more than forty years in custody. When the board meets again in 2026, it will weigh whether time, age, and confinement have changed him enough to warrant any measure of freedom. If granted day parole, he would live under supervision in a halfway house. Full parole would allow him to live independently while remaining under lifetime monitoring..The prospect of his release unsettles many who remember the Johnson-Bentley family and the generations of grief left behind. To some, the question of his freedom is not a matter of policy or parole eligibility but of moral weight. To others, it is a test of the Canadian belief that even the worst among us might someday be redeemed.Forty years on, the memory of the Wells Gray murders still clings to the forests of the Clearwater Valley. It will hang there, quiet and enduring, until the day the board decides whether David Ennis, now 66, will leave prison or remain where he has been since 1984.
