Tell me this isn’t the stuff of a modern noir:

Suicide yields no clues to death of Pittsburgh native

Saturday, May 19, 2007

By Ervin Dyer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Quebec police say they don’t have enough evidence to link the recent suicide of a Montreal taxi driver to the 2005 death of a Pittsburgh-area Iraq war veteran, and they are not planning to reopen the case.

Montreal police would not release the name of the cab driver, whom they said was found hanged in his duplex last weekend.

Initially, anonymous tips to police seemed to link the suicide to the August 2005 deaths of Mark Kraynak, 23, of Uniontown, and Steven Wright, 20, of Guerneville, Calif.

The men’s bodies were found in a rock quarry behind a disco bar in Laval, a city outside Montreal, on Sept. 1, 2005.

Mr. Kraynak, a Penn State University student who served in Iraq, and Mr. Wright were in Canada working as models for a pornography agency and were missing for 10 days before they were found.

The taxi driver was suspected of being the cabbie who dropped the pair at the bar before they ran off without paying their $40 fare and fell 50 feet onto a ledge in the quarry.

According to Natalie Lorrain, a constable at the Laval Police Department, investigators are not certain it was the same cab driver, and because there are no notes from the suicide victim confessing to the deaths, there is nothing confirmed, said Ms. Lorrain.

She said Laval police are not reopening the case.