When two Toronto police officers were dispatched near Nordheimer Ravine because of a reported knife-wielding man on Aug. 18, 2023, it appeared to be just another incident of social disorder in a summer full of them.

The ravine – a wooded stretch on the southern border of Forest Hill, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Canada – had become home to a smattering of makeshift shelters, one of many amid a housing affordability crisis.

But when the officers arrived and arrested the man, he offered them an unexpected explanation for his conduct: he said he wanted someone to call the police because he needed to show them a dead body in the ravine.

He escorted them past an encampment, through a dense thicket, until he declined to go any further, explaining he didn’t want to see the body again. One of the officers trudged on and, about 30 feet from a public walking trail, he saw for himself why the man was so reluctant. Behind a fallen tree, at the bottom of a steep hill, lay a body that had been neglected for so long that the skin was tight and darkened. In its decomposed state, it would be difficult for even a loved one to identify who the person was.

A pearl earring located at the scene, however, hinted this was someone who had been reported missing 21 days earlier: Jennifer Johnson, a 54-year-old former costume designer and wardrobe stylist. Police had a photograph on file in which she’s wearing a similar earring. On Aug. 23, five days after the discovery of the body, a fingerprint comparison confirmed it was indeed her.

Ms. Johnson, whose work in the past was featured in music videos, television and films, long struggled with addiction and mental health. These issues had intensified in recent years, during which she rarely worked and spent time drinking in a small park next to the ravine.

News of her death triggered an outpouring of responses from friends, both those who knew her in the heyday of her career, and more recent acquaintances who’d met her in the park. Hundreds joined a Facebook memorial page, posting photos and memories.

Those who knew her expected the police would begin a thorough investigation – one seeking to understand how Ms. Johnson died, and whether she was murdered. Instead, a Globe and Mail investigation found police waited for more than a year to take basic investigative steps – despite evidence that Ms. Johnson had been the victim of violent crimes at the hands of two men in the years prior.

The circumstances of how police found Ms. Johnson are contained in a six-page affidavit, filed in court, in support of a search warrant to examine her phone. The document shows investigators waited 14 months after her body was found to inspect the device – one of the most crucial pieces of evidence in any suspicious death investigation.

The police had possession of the phone since the day she was discovered. It was put into a Toronto police storage facility, but it wasn’t until Oct. 22, 2024, that they sought the court’s permission to review the text messages, videos and other potential evidence preserved on it.

The lag in examining Ms. Johnson’s phone is reminiscent of the delayed police action that was detailed in a 2021 report by Gloria Epstein, a retired judge. Justice Epstein’s review looked at the cases of eight gay and bisexual men who went missing over a seven-year period, and why Toronto police were unable to sooner link their disappearances to serial killer Bruce McArthur.

In her report, Justice Epstein concluded that police applied inconsistent approaches to missing persons cases, and that the specific cases she was reviewing – which involved marginalized and vulnerable victims – were often given less attention than they deserved.

“Some officers were diligent and thorough; others were not. In many instances, basic investigative steps were overlooked or delayed,” she wrote, and urged them to follow strict guidelines and checklists.

In the case of Ms. Johnson, The Globe’s investigation found a lapse in the police investigation occurred after they found the body – even though they had evidence of the violent crimes against her.

The affidavit obtained by The Globe details how, about a year before her body was discovered, Ms. Johnson was allegedly a victim of sexual assault with a weapon by a man. The investigation fizzled when she stopped co-operating with detectives.

In addition, The Globe’s investigation found that police laid at least five criminal charges against a second man, Ms. Johnson’s on-and-off-again boyfriend, for allegedly assaulting her, in 2019 and 2020. He was also charged with a death threat against her and breaking a no-contact order in that time.

Toronto police have not classified this case as a homicide, in part because they say the cause of death has not been determined. The remains were in such a state of decomposition, the affidavit states, that forensic investigators were unable to perform a toxicology test in the days after they were discovered.

The police declined to answer questions about why they waited as long as they did to examine Ms. Johnson’s phone, and while the investigation is ongoing, they won’t comment on their efforts to look into those in Ms. Johnson’s circle with a known history of violence.

Responding to The Globe’s questions about the police service’s approach to Ms. Johnson’s case, spokesperson Stephanie Sayer said: “This investigation has been treated with the same seriousness, diligence, and commitment as all cases involving unexplained deaths.”

But a number of Ms. Johnson’s friends, eight of whom spoke to The Globe, disagree.

Two of the friends – Eloisa Slimmon, a Pilates studio director, and Viia Beaumanis, a travel and lifestyle writer – say that, in the absence of a more thorough police investigation, they have been forced to take on the role of amateur detectives.

Together, with the help of a more recent friend of Ms. Johnson’s, they have spent more than a year and a half compiling a chronology of events, and interviewing potential witnesses.

They have prepared a 16-page dossier – complete with maps and photographs, and possible locations of security cameras near the ravine – which details their efforts to get to the bottom of what happened. Their materials also chronicle what they say are frustrating interactions with police, and include the name of someone they think may be linked to Ms. Johnson’s death.

The Globe is not identifying the name of the friends’ main suspect as that person has not been charged.

Another of Ms. Johnson’s friends, Allison Grande, a former assistant Crown attorney and now a criminal lawyer, helped out along the way. After reviewing the Toronto police affidavit last month, Ms. Grande says she was dumbfounded that police waited so long to comb the phone for evidence.

“What would justify waiting 14 months? There’s really no justification for that.”

Ms. Slimmon and Ms. Beaumanis contend that the urgency with which Toronto police treated her case has a lot to do with how they suspect they perceived her: as a troubled addict who drank in the park.

‘The coolest girl on the scene’

Jennifer Johnson was born in Winnipeg on Oct. 29, 1968. Her mother was of Mennonite and Romanian Jewish descent, her father was Métis and German-Hungarian. Growing up, she was especially close with her Métis grandmother, Rita, whom she visited often as a child – and whose granduncle was Louis Riel.

When she was 10, Ms. Johnson moved with her mother to Toronto, and by her teens was frequenting the city’s dance bars.

It was at this time that Ms. Johnson met Eloisa Slimmon, and then Viia Beaumanis, their bond forged in Toronto’s 1990s-era nightclub and music scene. Ms. Johnson was working at the Boom Boom Room, the Empire Dancebar, and the Bovine Sex Club – a bar on Queen West that was at the forefront of punk and rock music in Toronto.

“She was a bit of a superstar in the bar scene,” says Wesley Thuro, the Bovine’s co-founder, who called her his muse, the inspiration for the bar. She designed the bar’s cow-faced logo. “She had a tremendous presence, a tremendous aura about her that drew people to her instantly. Very likable.”

In a 2015 book about the city’s bars and clubs, Then & Now: Toronto Nightlife History, a co-worker called her “the coolest girl on the scene.”

Ms. Johnson became a wardrobe stylist for music videos – she’s pictured with Snoop Dogg on her Instagram account – and later moved on to TV, commercial and film sets.

But around a decade ago, Ms. Johnson began unravelling and bonds with friends started to fray. She’d had a daughter and her relationship with the father ended in an acrimonious separation. Financial stresses and pressures as a single mother piled up. She drank more heavily, showed up late for work and gigs dried up, according to friends.

Her difficulties stemmed in part from unresolved trauma from her youth, including sexual abuse, Ms. Slimmon says. Ms. Johnson had a mental health episode, wound up at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and eventually lost custody of her child, which caused her to go further downhill.

She lived on disability cheques in a small, studio apartment near the ravine – and took up with a new crowd, many of them unhoused and grappling with addiction and mental health issues of their own.

Although Ms. Slimmon and Ms. Beaumanis fell out of regular contact with Ms. Johnson, Ms. Beaumanis still occasionally checked in on her. In 2022, the two women were increasingly concerned over her wellbeing, and Ms. Beaumanis called CAMH to ask how her friend could access a treatment program – but was told all the spots were full.

The following summer, they learned that Ms. Johnson had gone missing, and feared the worst. Then they heard that a dead body discovered in the Nordhemier Ravine was identified as their friend.

Together, they grieved the loss, but also started to ask questions: How had she died? And why didn’t the police notify the public of her death, which could bring in crucial information?

Two worlds unite

The long-time friends’ search for answers would lead to them teaming up with a friend from Ms. Johnson’s hardscrabble years, two worlds colliding over a shared concern over what happened to her.

It started when Ms. Beaumanis saw a Facebook post from someone she had never met. The woman, Rebecca Green, described Ms. Johnson as a close friend, and suspected she’d been murdered. Through an e-mail exchange, they learned Ms. Green was a recovering alcoholic, three years clean, who’d spent a lot of time with Ms. Johnson in the years before she went missing.

At the Wells Hill park next to the ravine, Ms. Johnson and Ms. Green would chat about their past lives, joke around, do yoga.

But she also didn’t gloss over the dark side of their lives. Ms. Green was hospitalized twice because of altercations in the park, once needing 28 stitches after a beer bottle was smashed over her head. The women would take turns napping in the park after bouts of heavy drinking, watching over each other, keeping each other safe.

Ms. Green told the other two women she was worried the police would dismiss Ms. Johnson as “just an addict.” But her friend, she said, was more than that: she was a kind, dynamic, funny person. “I can’t help but think that something awful happened to her in that ravine.”

They decided then to team up to find out the truth.

Now clean, Ms. Green was trying to distance herself from her former lifestyle, but agreed to delve back into it as their guide in seeking witnesses. She went back to the ravine, and to soup kitchens, and when she found someone who knew something, she’d connect them with the team.

They heard from several people that Ms. Johnson was often hurt. Some said they saw her beaten up, with black eyes, bruises on arms and that she spoke of an abusive, on-and-off-again boyfriend.

The trio also prodded investigators. Ms. Beaumanis wrote an e-mail to Toronto police on Aug. 26, raising their concerns and included contact information for people to speak with. She told them that Ms. Johnson was loved by many people and her death deserved more attention. “Please do your best to find out what happened. And if someone did this to her, to bring them to justice.”

Ms. Slimmon followed up with a call a few weeks later. She says the detective told her he hadn’t seen Ms. Beaumanis’s note, and that he was behind on e-mails.

A key person the team talked to was a friend of Ms. Johnson’s known on the street as Tom Sweetwater, who says he was the one who reported her missing. Mr. Sweetwater, who describes himself on social media as “Philosopher in Residence” of Nordheimer Ravine, has lived in a shack he constructed of wood, tarp and reclaimed materials since 2020.

He and Ms. Johnson would often hang out, watch TV at her apartment or go to local church lunches. She was reconnecting with her Indigenous roots, he said, and trying to clean up her life, but “the environment kept bringing her back.”

He provided the women with an audio recording he made when the police interviewed him at the ravine. This took place on Sept. 10, weeks after Ms. Johnson’s body was discovered. In the recording, he is heard screaming at them, chastising them for not doing enough.

In a separate interview with The Globe, Mr. Sweetwater described the last day he saw Ms. Johnson, on July 25 at the Holy Rosary church lunch. The next day, he says, he went to her apartment to bring her food. She wasn’t there, nor on the next day nor the one after that, which he says was out of character. Concerned she may have had a medical issue, he says he walked into 13 Division and filed a missing persons report.

As to what the police did after his report, he said: “It was obvious there wasn’t a lot of effort.”

Asked about their attempts to seek out information about Ms. Johnson’s death, Toronto police spokesperson Ms. Sayer said officers “conducted multiple searches and engaged with members of the community.”

Ms. Sayer also said the police took many steps when Ms. Johnson was first reported missing, including issuing a press release, canvassing people in the neighbourhood and searching her apartment.

When the body was found, Toronto police did not notify the public of the death, Ms. Sayer said, because the case was not deemed a homicide.

'Zero out of 10'

On Oct. 19, two months after Ms. Johnson’s body was found, Ms. Slimmon and Ms. Beaumanis met with Det. David Wilson – the officer investigating the case. At the meeting, they say Det. Wilson told them he was aware of past allegations of violence toward Ms. Johnson, but cautioned them that it was difficult to extract information from a community that is suspicious of the police, and that a lot of cold cases go unsolved. Ms. Beaumanis left that meeting convinced that, in terms of priority, Ms. Johnson was “like a zero out of 10.”

The Globe repeatedly asked to speak with Det. Wilson. The police’s communications department declined the requests.

By January, 2024, another old friend of Ms. Johnson’s got in touch with the team – Allison Grande, who was then an assistant Crown attorney. She was a former TV and film producer who hired Ms. Johnson multiple times earlier in the 2000s. She offered to call police to check on how the investigation was going.

Ms. Grande says that, based on what she heard from police, she was left with the impression that investigators suspected a homicide – and doesn’t understand why it wasn’t turned over to experts in the force: “Why wasn’t it handed over to the homicide unit?”

(Toronto Police Service says the homicide unit investigates cases where there is clear evidence that a homicide has occurred.)

As it is, the only reason the police gave in their affidavit for examining the phone at all was to look into a less serious crime.

It turns out that police had been informed of a body in the ravine one day before they found the remains. A man, who The Globe is not identifying as he hasn’t been charged, called on Aug. 17 to report that he’d seen a body a few days before. A police search on that day did not find anything; Ms. Johnson’s body was discovered the next day when the knife-wielding man led them to it.

Fourteen months after the Aug. 17 caller contacted police, they now allege in the affidavit that his neglect to alert them when he first saw the body constitutes a criminal offence: indignity to a body.

As well, the affidavit shows the delay in searching Ms. Johnson’s cellphone wasn’t the only lag in the investigation. The man who was accused of sexual assault a year before she died shared the same first name as the Aug. 17 caller they were considering charging with indignity to a body. Yet it wasn’t until thirteen months after she was found that police sought court permission to compel a men’s homeless shelter to provide client records about that man.

The country’s largest municipal police service, with an annual budget of more than $1-billion, plans to implement all 151 recommendations from the 2021 Epstein review on missing persons. To date, they have implemented 89 of them, with the rest still underway.

They have also pledged to do a better job in serving Indigenous peoples and those in marginalized groups, in response to calls from the 2019 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and the 2019 Missing and Missed report.

It’s clear from the affidavit that the police were aware of Ms. Johnson’s background, as she is described in it as “a marginalized Indigenous woman.”

The Globe sent the Toronto Police Service a list of more than 50 questions about the case. The TPS says it couldn’t answer many of them, as the investigation is ongoing. It did say that “the complexity or timeline of an investigation should not be mistaken for a lack of diligence or care.”

'Pushed aside'

More than a year and a half after Ms. Johnson’s death, the police investigation continues.

It’s been a harrowing time for Ms. Johnson’s mother, Leslie Frappier – starting with the way she learned of her daughter’s death.

Ms. Frappier knew her daughter had been missing in the summer of 2023, but figured maybe she was visiting a boyfriend, or away at a cottage. She never imagined she was dead.

Typically, police notify the next of kin of a sudden death by going to their home, and breaking the news in person. In this case, she says she only learned her daughter died from a routine coroner’s call, asking her to give a sample of her DNA to identify the body. “And I’m saying, ‘What? What?’ Because nobody had told me that her body had been found.”

Her daughter’s ashes now sit in a box in the top shelf of her closet, and nothing is resolved.

“The uncertainty is driving me insane,” Ms. Frappier says. “I feel like it’s all just been pushed aside, which is a sad thing.”

Ms. Johnson’s friends are still seeking justice and accountability. If there is a perpetrator, they want that person apprehended so they can’t hurt others.

The case is emblematic of all the missing and murdered Indigenous women in this country whose deaths or disappearances were ignored or improperly investigated by authorities, says Ms. Slimmon. She hopes bringing light to her friend’s death, and what she sees as a flawed investigation, will spur them to treat these cases with much more urgency.

“If we can effect change out of the most miserable, saddest scenario, then I guess it’s not for nothing,” she said. “As difficult as this has been, I am hoping for a positive outcome for other folks in the future.”

With files from Stephanie Chambers in Toronto.