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A household name she is not, but for many in Vancouver, especially its North Shore region and surrounding islands, Jodi Henrickson will certainly ring a bell.
Henrickson was a 17-year-old girl from Squamish who went missing after a house party on Bowen Island, during the then unusually warm summer of 2009.
She was last seen with her ex-boyfriend, a man two years older who had a court order prohibiting him from being in her company. While a person of interest at the time, there was no conclusive evidence to link him to her disappearance. Her body has never been found. Two missing person posters, depicting a teenage Jodi with side-swept brunette hair, are still tacked to the walls of the island’s RCMP detachment.
Jodi Henrickson was also, says filmmaker Jenni Baynham, a family-oriented social butterfly who was popular in school. She was bubbly, and funny, with a “colourful personality.” She loved to draw.
Contrary to reports, she was neither a troubled girl nor a runaway. Jodi had flaws, like all people do, but she didn’t, says Baynham, “deserve this.”
For four years Baynham has been investigating the teenager’s disappearance as part of an upcoming documentary Finding Jodi.
The filmmaker and former journalist says she is on the precipice of discovering what happened to Jodi in the early hours of that June morning. She has uncovered a new person of interest and has “credible information” that points to where the missing teenager might be.
“I cannot tell you how close we are,” she says.
Documentary Finding Jodi has new information regarding the disappearance of 17-year-old Jodi Henrickson.
First foray into true crime
Baynham had begun looking into Jodi’s story after hearing about her disappearance from a friend of a friend. Perplexed by how a popular teenage girl could vanish on such a tiny island without a trace, she had barrelled down an internet rabbit hole of Jodi-related research.
“When reading up on this there were all these interviews with police saying she never left the island. I’m thinking, ‘It’s 50 square kilometres, how hard could it be to find her?’”
Scottish, and in her mid-thirties, Baynham was in a different country and around the same age as Jodi when her disappearance occurred in 2009. She’ll be the first to admit that, in a professional capacity at least, she’s not particularly au fait with the world of true crime. The documentarian’s Vancouver-based production agency, Studio BRB, specialises in festive Hallmark flicks and feel-good Lifetime movies.
Jodi’s story had presented itself to Baynham as nothing more than perfect documentary fodder. It is a view “almost laughable” now, she says, considering the four years that would follow. After interviewing the missing teenager’s friends and family, all still stuck in a state of limbo, she describes how her raison d’etre shifted to become less about making a successful film, and more about finding peace for Jodi’s legion of loved ones.
It’s why, despite the numerous, generous offers from large streaming services, the filmmaker refuses to sell.
“I could release [the film] tomorrow, based on the information we have, but there’s a very specific ending that I want to this story, and I don’t want to stop until we get that ending.”
Baynham is quick to assure she’s not here to poke holes in the police’s initial investigation. Cracking open a case that could have forever stayed cold is easier to do when armed with the tool of time, she says.
“Things have happened in 15 years that hadn’t happened then, so they couldn’t have uncovered what we’ve uncovered now.”
Picking up the investigation over a decade later means there are “15 years of more slip ups” to probe, 15 years of “more people saying strange things, more people observing weird things” and more time for those who were around that night to reflect on moments they weren’t then comfortable with, she says.
The bulk of the teenagers interviewed at the time of Jodi’s disappearance are now in their mid-thirties. What would have felt like fateful confessions at the time – Bowen Island parties were rife with underage drinking and the selling and taking of drugs – have become trivial teenage misdemeanours with hindsight. Those who were wary of police then, she says, are more forthcoming now.
‘Genuinely brand-new’ pieces of information
Pete Cross is a retired RCMP officer whose final assignment before leaving the force had been Jodi’s missing persons’ case. Drawn back into the game by the very real possibility that he could solve an assignment much sleep was lost over, Cross says he has spoken with “30 or 40 people” who were on Bowen the evening of the party. Countless others who were linked in other ways have also been interviewed.
“There’s a couple of genuinely brand-new pieces of information,” he says, describing how “astounding” the difference in testimonies have been between then and now.
“The witnesses of people that were involved at the time have become 15 years older, they have evolved to now be parents, and they’re spread out all over the place,” he explains.
“What they recall now is different from what they recall then, they look at it from a different set of eyes, which I find interesting,”
With neither Baynham nor Cross able to access the official police file, Cross has been rifling through old notepads and forwarding new leads to the RCMP’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT), tasked with investigating Henrickson’s case.
They are both conscious that the public might have already made up their mind about what happened to Jodi in 2009. The relationship between Jodi and her ex-boyfriend Gavin Arnott was known to be tumultuous – a CTV News article from 2009 details an assault charge laid against Arnott following a complaint she had made. In the months that followed Jodi’s disappearance, Arnott explained how he and Jodi had been arguing before they both went their separate ways. He’s never been charged in connection to the case.
“People speculate all the time on this stuff, but the bottom line is, you’ve got to follow the evidence,” says Cross. He explains how he and Baynham have spent years investigating every possibility.
“Is it probable that she went to somebody else’s house? Seems unlikely, considering the number of people that we’ve talked to in and around where she last was,” he says. “Did she walk to the ferry? Well, we’re pretty convinced she didn’t walk to the ferry.”
Suicide, drug overdose, drunk driving, while unlikely, he says, can’t be ruled out until a body has been found.
There are two suspects in the documentarian’s investigation. One has since passed away, whom Baynham continues to “follow down the path” of. The other she has requested an open conversation with, offering them the opportunity to tell their own side of the story.
Laying blame, she says, is not her approach to this investigation. Her goal as a filmmaker is to simply tell the story, “and let the audience draw their own conclusion.”
There is a common joke among Bowen Island residents that you must have lived there for at least 20 years to be considered a local. A small, rural Xanadu, with a population of just over 4,000, it is a bubble with a tight-knit community whose trust, especially when it comes to speaking with journalists, isn’t always the easiest to earn.
Despite its reputation, however, Baynham says the Bowen community has been more than willing to co-operate. Many of the people she has spoken with, are “just as horrified about this” as the rest of the public. “They don’t want their island to have this reputation, or this dark cloud hanging over it,” she says.
The only white whale interviewees make up a small group, “two or three men” that still refuse to cooperate. Baynham believes they are sitting on information vital to the case, and for the investigation to progress, and the documentary to come to fruition, they need to come forward.
“I really, really need those people to respond to my voicemails, my emails, my phone calls,” she says.
To the people who “are adults now,” who were on Bowen at the time but have since moved away to other regions, who have “circles around them of people who have heard second hand information,” Baynham urges them to pick up the phone.
“It will be anonymous,” she says, “but we need these people to get us across the finish line.”
Anyone wanting to contact Jenni Baynham can do so via email at findingjodi@gmail.com, Instagram at @findingjodih, or via anonymous tipline 1 236 712 3349.
