On August 12, 1989, at 4:20pm, 19-year-old Dalhousie University student, Kimberly Ann McAndrew left her shift at the Canadian Tire at 6203 Quinpool Road, Halifax, where she worked as a cashier. This was the last confirmed sighting of her.
“I don’t think Kim got out of the Canadian Tire parking lot,” retired police detective, Tom Martin said. Martin spent countless hours working on the case, which is still officially listed as a missing persons case. Unofficially, it is considered a homicide. McAndrew has had no contact with her family since that day and her bank account has not been touched. Sex offender, Andrew Paul Johnson has long been suspected in her disappearance. Active in the area at the time of her disappearance was serial killer Michael Wayne McGray. Another person of interest, who creeped Kimberly and her coworkers out by taking pictures of her and following her home on many occasions because "he wanted to feel close to her", was seen speaking to her inside the Canadian Tire store hours before she left to go home.
At the time of her disappearance Kimberly, or Kim as she was called by those who knew her, was wearing pleated, ankle-length navy cotton slacks with slash pockets in front and one pocket in the back, a white, short-sleeved "Esprit" t-shirt with red and green squares, a navy cotton oversize cardigan, and jade green flat-heeled slip-on loafers. She had braces on her teeth and was very much looking forward to her appointment to have them removed in a few days.
According to her younger sister Megan, Kim was not the type that would just go off on her own. Megan says she didn't even like walking downtown Parrsboro (her hometown) by herself. There have been reports of an unconfirmed sighting of Kimberly McAndrew in a flower shop in Penhorn Mall in Dartmouth where she was said to have bought flowers and a balloon, however, this doesn't seem likely given that there is a flower shop in Halifax, minutes away from the Canadian Tire where she worked and to have gotten on a bus to travel to a city she wasn't familiar is something she would not have done. Plus, Kim had plans to go to the Halifax Busker Festival with her boyfriend and her sister and her partner on the evening she disappeared.
At the time of her disappearance Kimberly McAndrew was living in an apartment on Maxwell Avenue at the north end of Windsor Street with two of her four sisters. According to Megan, who was living at home in August of 1989, Kim had her whole life planned. She was going to be a cool mom who would drive her future children, Nicholas and Cassandra, around in a convertible.
Kimberly's father, Cyril McAndrew, retired from the police force after serving as an RCMP officer for thirty-three years, the month she disappeared. He passed away in September of 2004, hoping and searching for answers until the end. Megan says, "The pain for him was just all-encompassing and it just never left him."
The strongest suspect in the case, Andrew Johnson, is currently serving a prison sentence in British Columbia and has been declared a dangerous offender after being convicted of the kidnapping and confinement of a 20-year-old mentally disabled woman and attempting to pick up 12-year-old girls while posing as a police officer. Johnson is a suspect in other unsolved cases involving young women in Halifax, like the murder of Andrea King, who was killed 2 years after Kimberly went missing. At the time of Kimberly's disappearance, Johnson lived in an apartment located directly across from the Canadian Tire where she worked. While he was in therapy for sex offenders, he was asked to write an essay of a sexual assault from the victim's point of view and the account he told sounded eerily like the abduction and rape of Kimberly McAndrew.
Kimberly's family think of her everyday and pleads of anyone who has any information to contact the police. This August she will have been missing for 31 years. She turned 50 years old this past January 17th.
If you have any information at all regarding her whereabouts please contact the Rewards for Major Unsolved Crimes Program at 1-888-710-9090. There is a $150,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest or conviction.
RESOURCES:
Missing - Please Find Us (January 22, 2018 post is Kimberly McAndrew)