Randy Rankin

Randy Rankin was a man of contrasts, a larger-than-life figure in every sense. At six-foot-four and 400 pounds, the 47-year-old male was known to children in his community of Morewood, Ontario, as the gentle and funny entertainer "Lunchbox Louie" or "Koo Koo the Clown." To his family—his wife Dorothy, their teenage daughter Amanda, his mother, and grandmother—he was a much-loved and exceptionally close presence. But in the world of harness horse racing, Rankin was a passionate and outspoken force. He owned and trained horses, but he was also a fierce online critic of the industry, alleging corruption and horse doping, which earned him a full share of enemies.

The two sides of his life collided in the pre-dawn darkness of February 12, 2007. At around 5:00 a.m., Rankin was in the basement of his secluded bungalow on Thompson Road, sitting at his computer desk. Outside, an assailant crept up to the basement window, took aim through the glass, and fired a single shot. The bullet struck Rankin in the back of the head, killing him instantly. Awakened by the noise, his wife and daughter rushed downstairs to a horrific scene, finding him slumped over in his chair. The gunman had vanished into the falling snow.

The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) launched a homicide investigation, describing Rankin as an avid harness racing enthusiast. Investigators acknowledged there were "lots of persons of interest" in the case, but no arrests were ever made. Rankin's vocal criticism had previously made him one of four defendants in a $6.25 million defamation lawsuit filed by the Ontario Harness Horse Association over comments he had made on a public discussion board. The suit was settled before his death, but his brother, Gary Rankin, later revealed that Randy had been receiving threatening phone calls the night before he was killed and had vowed to publicize more information about the industry in the coming days.

The investigation into Rankin's murder took on a new dimension years later. His home was located on a rural stretch of road that locals had grimly nicknamed "death row" due to a startling number of unsolved crimes. The area had been plagued by a series of suspicious arsons, including a barn fire on his father-in-law's property that killed two horses. In 2014, the discovery of the remains of Raymond Collison, a man who had been missing since 2009, in a ditch less than two kilometers from Rankin's home, prompted the OPP to conduct a detailed re-examination of its cold case files. Detectives created a map that revealed a cluster of five unsolved homicides and more than 50 arsons around Morewood.

While the review led to a first-degree murder charge against a man named Jimmy Wise in the Collison case in 2018, it brought no such resolution for Rankin's family. The other homicides in the area shared some similar trademarks, including victims being shot in their isolated homes. These cases included Harold Davidson in 1983, Wallace Johnston in 1987, and John King in 1987, whose body was found after a house fire, with tests showing he had been shot in the head. Despite the renewed focus on the region's violent past, the identity of the person who stood outside Rankin's window on that cold February morning remains a mystery.

More than a decade after his death, Randy Rankin's family continues to wait for justice. "I’d like to see the guy who did it get nailed," his brother Gary said in a 2018 interview. "We think about Randy a lot." His other brother, Jim, added, "Whoever killed him should burn in hell." Dorothy Rankin defiantly continued to live in the home where her husband was murdered, stating, "No one is going to scare me out of my own home."

As of June 2018, Randy Rankin's murder was still an active and unsolved cold case. A $50,000 reward, offered by the Province of Ontario in 2009 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible, remains in place. The family hopes that after so many years, someone with knowledge of the crime will finally come forward.