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The RCMP made six missions to search for Jennifer Hillier-Penney’s body in the waters near the Hare Bay Islands off St. Anthony, N.L., and searched over 130 points of interest.
In his testimony in Corner Brook Supreme Court on Thursday, RCMP Cpl. Steven Hatch said the searches came up with nothing.
“We located several points, all of them were checked,” Hatch said. “We didn’t find, locate anything.”
Hatch, a police officer of nearly 15 years and member of the Major Crime Unit West in Newfoundland and Labrador, was among the latest witnesses called in the murder trial of Dean Penney.
Penney is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Hillier-Penney, his estranged wife. He has pleaded not guilty.
Hillier-Penney went missing on Nov. 30, 2016. Over the course of the trial, the court has heard that Penney confessed to an undercover officer — who he believed to be a crime boss — that he pushed his wife down a set of stairs and beat her with a hammer to ensure she wouldn’t come to.
He said he then sent Hillier-Penney’s body overboard in his boat off the Hare Bay Islands and watched it sink.
On Nov. 30, 2023, in the first of two secretly recorded interviews, Penney showed the undercover officer in the Mr. Big operation an exact location of where he dropped Hillier-Penney’s body.
“I can give you a latitude and longitude position where she’s at,” Penney said during the interview. “I knows the charts, I knows exactly where I put her.”
Hatch told the court that confession put the wheels in motion for the first of six diving missions that took place over a year-and-a-half.
The first occurred on Dec. 4, 2023, when police moved into St. Anthony in unmarked cars and boats to not stir suspicion.
“They dove on a GPS point given by Mr. Penney [in] his first recorded [interview],” Hatch said, noting nothing was found.
A second dive happened the same day Penney gave a second recorded confession to the crime boss, when Penney again showed the location to the undercover officer via Google Maps.
Hatch said that diving mission lasted eight days, but brought the same result.
Subsequent dives also included technology that scanned the ocean floor, remote operated vehicles (ROV), additional support from the RCMP and the Royal Canadian Navy. The final dive occurred on June 13, 2025, Hatch said, with no sign of Hillier-Penney’s remains or evidence Penney spoke of in his confession.
Hatch showed where police searched through two large printed maps at the back of the courtroom.
The maps showed the location of Penney’s home, Penney’s cabin, the gas station he visited after the incident, the main search area, the road he would take to access the cabin and more.
In his cross-examination, defence lawyer Jeff Brace said multiple times that if Penney had been honest in his confessions, the body would have been found where the divers searched.
Brace and fellow lawyer Mark Gruchy have argued Penney was pressured into his confession, and that it wasn’t true. In his recorded confession, Penney said he was being honest.
Brace pulled details from Hatch’s notes on the dates of specific dives, citing favourable conditions for divers.
“I would suggest that [in] ideal conditions, we find the body,” Brace said.
“[But there were] no rubber boots full of rocks, no Seadoo covers, no decoy bags. And certainly no sign that Ms. Hillier-Penney was ever there.”
Hatch said a large area of multiple square kilometres was covered, but some areas were left.
“The scale of the area is important,” he said. “We didn’t get eyes on every square foot.”
Every single one of them turned out to be a rock– Sgt. Jay White
The second witness called on Thursday, RCMP national underwater training co-ordinator Sgt. Jay White, was one of three people who operated ROVs during the searches.
White, based in British Columbia, told the court he’s worked in the role for 26 years and has taken 1,641 dives across Canada as part of his work.
He and other RCMP staff in B.C. were approached about using an ROV for the search in December 2024, he testified. That work began in the spring of 2025.
Thursday at Dean Penney’s murder trial focused on police’s extensive search for the body of Jennifer Hillier-Penney in Hare Bay, on the Northern Peninsula. As the CBC’s Colleen Connors reports, RCMP officers described six searches and over 100 points of interest in the search for her remains seven years after her disappearance, and how they ultimately ended with nothing.
White told the court he wanted to test if what Hillier-Penney was allegedly wrapped in — a canvas Seadoo cover, according to Penney — could be seen by sonar underwater. The RCMP proved it was possible during a test run in Terra Nova National Park, he told the court.
On June 2, 2025, an ROV began searching the area around Hare Bay.
White said the work brought 133 total anomalies that needed to be investigated. There were around 70 that the RCMP had given him at the start of his work, he said, and around 60 more he found through his own team’s work.
“Looking at sonar images is sort of like interpreting ink blots. It’s, you know, it’s an interpretation of the signal that the sonar is receiving. And sometimes somebody will miss something and somebody else will see it,” White said.
White was deeply thorough in his explanation of how the imaging was gathered, but said it too didn’t bring a sign of Hillier-Penney or evidence that Penney had spoken of.
“We searched 133, I’m going to call them possible anomalies … Every single one of them turned out to be a rock or something natural. What is naturally on the bottom.”
White said there were factors that could have played into the ability to search. Like Hatch, he also noted that not every square foot of the area was scoured.
Searching in Hare Bay also presented a challenge. Technology and salt water don’t mix, he said, and the seaweed and rocks at the bottom of the water can present problems for sonar.
The time between the events of Nov. 30, 2016, and the search could have also played a role, he said.
“The length of the time between, you know, when she went missing and now, it’s a significant time to try and identify something,” White said.
The Crown will continue with its next witness on Friday morning. Fridays are a half-day in the trial, meaning the jury usually sits until around 12:30 p.m. NT.
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