Michael Marvin Masson was a 27-year-old man whose disappearance from Medicine Hat, Alberta, in the summer of 1989 became a homicide investigation that has never been publicly solved. Although June 5, 1989, is sometimes listed as the date connected with his death, available reporting identifies that as the day he was last seen rather than a medically established date of death.
Masson had spent time moving between jobs in Medicine Hat, southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, working as a labourer and taking seasonal employment. Contemporary police reporting described him as someone who had drifted in and out of Medicine Hat for several years, while an archived RCMP cold-case summary stated that he was living with his girlfriend in the area.
On June 5, Masson checked into the Hat Motel in Medicine Hat. Within roughly two hours of arriving, he left the motel and apparently never returned to his room. He was not seen again by family or friends. Because his lifestyle involved moving around for work and staying in different places, his movements were difficult for investigators to reconstruct. Police later said that even people who knew him had trouble placing him at specific locations or remembering exactly when they had last been with him.
Nearly two months later, on July 31, 1989, two boys who were hunting outside Medicine Hat came upon badly decomposed human remains in a roadside thicket or shallow grave approximately 10 kilometres southeast of the city. Investigators eventually identified the remains as Masson. A wallet belonging to him was reportedly discovered by a grader operator near the recovery area on August 3, and comparisons with dental and medical records from Saskatchewan were used to confirm his identity.
Police treated the death as a murder. Contemporary reporting attributed to Sgt. Jim Hill stated that Masson had died from a serious head injury, although investigators deliberately withheld certain details about the killing so that they could distinguish legitimate information from false confessions or unreliable tips. Some later online case summaries have described Masson as having been shot, including descriptions of an execution-style shooting, but the contemporaneous public account available online specifically identifies fatal head trauma and does not disclose all of the forensic findings.
The investigation proved difficult almost immediately. Masson had little money and no obvious reason for someone to kill him, and police initially said they had been unable to establish a motive. Detectives interviewed people who had associated with him, but many could provide little useful information about where he had been or who he had been with shortly before he disappeared. Investigators from Medicine Hat police and RCMP units in Medicine Hat, Calgary and Edmonton planned to compare information and investigative strategies as they tried to reconstruct his final movements. Police even considered using hypnosis during witness questioning in an effort to recover additional details that might have been forgotten.
A later RCMP cold-case summary indicated that investigators came to believe the motive might have been connected to an argument Masson allegedly had with associates on the night he disappeared. Publicly available information does not identify who those associates were, what the disagreement involved, or whether any particular person involved in that argument was ever formally classified as a suspect. The theory therefore remained a possible investigative lead rather than a publicly proven explanation for the murder.
Despite interviews, interagency cooperation and efforts to develop new leads, no named suspect has been publicly identified in Masson's killing. No arrest, criminal charge, trial or conviction connected to his homicide has been reported in the available online record. More recent case summaries continue to classify the death as an unsolved homicide, leaving unanswered what happened after Masson walked away from the Hat Motel on June 5, who he encountered during his final hours, and who ultimately left his body concealed outside Medicine Hat.
