The first thing Cody noticed when he walked through the door was the silence. Then the empty rooms. His son’s stroller was still sitting in the corner of the living room, which made no sense, because Maelie never went far without it. He checked the kitchen.
Plates on the table, food half-prepared. It looked like his wife had started making lunch and just walked away, leaving everything behind. He called her phone. It rang and rang.
No answer. He called her friends, her family. No one had seen her. Cody searched the nearby parks and playgrounds, hoping she’d taken Noah for a walk on a whim.
Nothing. The calm, peaceful apartment complex they’d moved into just fifteen days ago felt wrong now. He called the police. Officers arrived and searched the grounds, the wooded area behind the building, the streets.
They knocked on doors, asking questions. One neighbor said something that stuck with the detectives. The neighbor claimed she saw a woman who looked like Maelie running from the complex toward the road earlier that day. No screaming, no calling for help.
And the son wasn’t with her. The police asked the building manager for the security footage. They checked the recordings, looking for Maelie’s face, looking for any sign of where she’d gone. What they found instead was the neighbor herself.
Around noon, caught on camera, the same neighbor who claimed to have seen Maelie running off was seen carrying two large garbage bags out of the building. When officers opened those bags at the dumpster, they found the body of sixteen-month-old Noah. Inside one of the other bags was Maelie’s phone and some of her clothes. The search for Maelie took an immediate turn.
The police didn’t tell Cody anything yet, not while his son’s body was lying in a dumpster just a short distance away. They told Cody and his family they needed to temporarily leave the apartment so investigators could examine the building more closely. Cody agreed. He had no idea they were about to search the apartment right next door to his own.
When the officers knocked at the neighbor’s door, the man, fifty-three-year-old Robert Major, willingly agreed to let them search his home. They found Maelie in the bathroom. She was lying in the tub, completely unclothed. Robert Major was arrested on the spot.
As police dug into his background, the horror only grew. Robert had a long criminal record stretching back decades. More than twenty-four charges, almost all of them sexual offenses. He had been evaluated by multiple psychiatrists during his prison stays and he had openly admitted to them that he enjoyed what he did.
He told them he took real pleasure in causing harm, especially to those weaker than him. Every expert concluded that Robert was highly likely to reoffend. And he was released anyway in 2016. The only protections put in place were a public warning and a requirement to register in a special offender database.
He was banned from living near women, children, schools, or playgrounds, forbidden from leaving his home city, which was about 190 miles from Hinton, and ordered to check in with police on a regular basis. But under Canadian law, an offender who went a year without committing another crime was automatically removed from the registry and had all restrictions lifted. So Robert fell off the radar years before the tragedy. When he moved to Hinton and settled into a family complex, none of the local police knew his history.
The apartment management had no way to access such records. The residents had no idea they were living next to a man who had spent his life hurting others. Robert gave a partial confession after his arrest. Medical examiners later confirmed the details of what happened.
That morning, Maelie had taken Noah for a walk in the park. When she got back, the building manager stopped her to complain about another issue. Cody worked on pipeline construction and often came home with his boots and clothes covered in dirt. The manager said the hallway was being left with muddy tracks and asked Maelie to fix it.
She promised she would and went back inside. She put Noah down for a nap and started preparing lunch. Around that time, she called a friend. During the conversation, the friend heard a knock at Maelie’s door.
A man’s voice offered to help clean the hallway. The friend didn’t catch the rest of the conversation. Maelie ended the call, sent a message to a family member, and that was the last time anyone heard from her peacefully. Investigators couldn’t determine exactly how Robert got her into his apartment.
He refused to explain that part. Maybe he continued the conversation about the hallway. Maybe he asked for her help with something. Either way, Maelie walked through his door.
Once she was inside, he attacked her almost immediately. He tried to strangle her. It took him nearly ten minutes to finish the job. He then sexually assaulted her lifeless body before dragging her into the bathroom and leaving her there.
Then he went next door, into Maelie’s own apartment, where the toddler Noah was still sleeping. Robert took the sixteen-month-old boy and ended his life as well. Investigators suggested he may have killed the child out of fear that Noah could identify him, or that Noah woke up and started crying, and Robert panicked, worried the noise would draw attention. His motive for killing Maelie was simpler: he took pleasure in harming others, and he sexually assaulted her after killing her.
After the murders, Robert wrapped Noah’s body in garbage bags along with Maelie’s clothes and phone and carried them out to the dumpster. He left Maelie’s body in his own bathtub and made up a story about seeing her run away from the complex, perhaps hoping no one would bother checking his apartment. When the case broke, the country was horrified. Outrage grew as the public learned how a man with more than two dozen charges and a known history of violence against women had been set free and left unmonitored.
In Canada, the sex offender registry is only accessible to law enforcement, not the public, so residents had no way to know who was living beside them. Cody and Maelie’s family became vocal advocates for justice, working with lawmakers to draft a new piece of legislation named in Noah’s memory. The bill would require repeat offenders to be monitored for the rest of their lives and would create a publicly accessible registry so people could check whether a known offender lived nearby. At trial, Robert didn’t deny his guilt.
His final statement stunned the courtroom. He admitted he should remain in prison for the rest of his life, because even he feared what he might do if he were free again. Still, he claimed he saw himself as a good person despite everything. Robert was sentenced to life in prison.
But under Canadian law, he remains eligible for parole after twenty-five years. If he lives that long, he’ll be seventy-eight years old, and there’s no guarantee he won’t be a threat to others even then. The victim’s family continues to fight for the bill that bears Noah’s name. Progress has been slow.
As of now, the legislation still hasn’t been passed, and it’s unclear if it ever will be.
