Mayors conference heads to Hawaii
HONOLULU — The United States Conference of Mayors will return to Hawaii next year, the first time the annual gathering has been hosted in Honolulu in five decades.
Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell has been trying to get the mayors conference to have its annual meeting in Hawaii since being elected in 2012.
The 2019 meeting will be hosted at Hilton Hawaiian Village — the same location as gatherings in 1963 and 1967.
The conference is composed of the 1,400 mayors or other top elected executives of U.S. cities and municipalities with populations of 30,000 or more residents.
About 300 mayors, and between 1,000 and 1,500 people including staff, family, resource people and speakers, are expected to come to Honolulu to attend.
The group meets each January in Washington, D.C., and again each June in a city hosted by one of its members. This year’s conference is in Boston.
Police search for more victims of Canada serial killer
TORONTO — Judi Riley’s 47-year-old brother vanished while on a trip to Toronto nearly five years ago. Her family filed a police report and repeatedly prodded authorities for updates.
But there were no leads, until now.
Riley, who lives in Hawaii, started getting emails from friends in Canada, where she grew up, about the arrest of an alleged serial killer. Potential pieces to a disturbing puzzle began to fall into place.
The suspect, Bruce McArthur, is accused of preying on adult men in a gay neighborhood of Toronto where Jon Riley spent time. The alleged killer owned a landscaping company, the kind of work Judi Riley said her brother was likely seeking at the time he disappeared.
Then Riley got a call from police, who thought it made sense as well. Authorities say McArthur killed at least seven men, but investigators think more victims will be found as they comb through crime scenes and re-examine long-stale missing person-cases such as that of Jon Riley.
McArthur has so far been charged with six deaths and not yet entered a plea. His lawyer has not responded to repeated requests for comment. Police won’t say how many potential victims there could be, but they are reviewing hundreds of missing person reports in Toronto as well as elsewhere in Canada and places where he traveled, including Italy and Mexico.
Judi Riley, a children’s book author who now lives on Maui, said her older brother worked as landscaper in the past, though he didn’t have a steady job at the time of his disappearance. He left a note for their mother saying he was headed for a few days to Toronto, and in the past had stayed in hostels and shelters in Gay Village.
She said authorities asked her for photos of her brother and asked about identifying details such as scars. They asked to look at his computer, something she wishes they did much earlier.
Friends have told Judi Riley not to read about the McArthur case but she can’t help it.
“It’s been a devastating time for us. It’s really hard for me to talk about Jon without falling apart,” she said.
“I don’t want it to be true.”