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Ratte case draws international attention

The national and international interest in the Wendy Ratte case is clearly evident from the visitors we've had in The Citizen's newsroom over the past three weeks.

The national and international interest in the Wendy Ratte case is clearly evident from the visitors we've had in The Citizen's newsroom over the past three weeks.

Earlier this month, a film crew from CBC's The Fifth Estate came by and this week, we've hosted producer Izhar Harpaz and cameraman Simon Doolittle from Dateline NBC. They conducted extensive interviews with reporters Frank Peebles and Mark Nielsen about the Ratte case.

To say the Ratte case is unusually intriguing is an understatement.

On Aug. 18, 1997, Wendy Ratte, 44 at the time, disappeared without a trace and the family's van was found parked at what is now Value Village.

There were no breaks and few developments over the years but in 2008, Denis, her husband, now living in the Lower Mainland, became the subject of an elaborate undercover operation, known as a "Mr. Big" sting, in which police officers posed as high-level criminals to gain his trust.

During Denis Ratte's trial, the jury watched a video recorded with a concealed camera, where he took the officers to the scene of the shooting, in the backyard of the family's home, and then to a wooded area east of the city where he told them he dumped her body, which has never been found.

But the case might never have been sold without the efforts of Anna Sieppert, Denis and Wendy's daughter, who campaigned tirelessly for the police to find her mother's killer.

"Being his child I didn't want to believe it, when your parents tell you something, you believe everything they say," she said after her father was sentenced to 15 years in jail before being eligible for parole, a sentence that stood up this year at the B.C. Court of Appeal. "I can't say I completely believed it until they arrested him, but the pieces really started to fit together at that point."

"Of course it was the husband, how could I not have seen it?" Sieppert told the court in her victim impact statement. "I didn't see it because I was under the impression that he was still the father that had raised me."

Sieppert's younger brother, Gabriel Pelletier, 28, said after the 2010 trial that he wasn't convinced his father murdered his mother, although he accepted the jury's verdict. However, he said he was maintaining a relationship with his sister despite their differences in opinion.

"All we have left is each other," he said.

The Fifth Estate's interest in the case seemed to be less about the emotional family drama and more about the legal implications of the "Mr. Big" sting, since it dances right around the edges of entrapment and involves a level of coercion by undercover police officers to get the suspect to explain in detail how bad they've been by confessing to past crimes. Ratte's confession is further complicated by the fact that his wife's body was not found where he said she would be. A murder conviction without a body or at least some incriminating DNA evidence is extremely rare.

The Dateline NBC crew is pursuing a broader story, looking at both the legal issues and the family tragedy. Harpaz first came to Prince George in September 2011 to scout out locations and interview subjects.

"It's a tragic story but it's really interesting to explore both the mystery of how her mother disappeared and then looking at the emotional and human drama of the daughter's quest to find justice for her mother and then discovering the ultimate betrayal," he said at the time.

Both the Fifth Estate piece and the Dateline NBC report are scheduled to air sometime in the new year.