A passenger, who has asked not to be identified (but whom we’ll call “Trevor”), allegedly identified Canadian Jesse Gilbert Wiseman during an encounter inside the dining car of VIA Rail Train 2 as it traveled from Vancouver to Winnipeg between February 19 and 21.
According to Trevor’s timeline, “The Canadian” left Vancouver on February 19 (3:00 PM Pacific Time) and arrived in Winnipeg on February 21 (8:30 PM Central Time). After more than two days crossing the prairies, passengers inevitably strike up conversations with each other. While Trevor recognized the faces of many of his traveling companions, just forty-five minutes before reaching the provincial capital of Manitoba, he sat down for dinner with a man he had spoken to during the journey and a stranger who, bizarrely enough, admitted that he had been inside his private cabin for most of the journey and had polished off a bottle of wine by himself before dinner.
The stranger, as Trevor recalls, “injected his opinions” on details regarding the witness’s final destination: Denver. “He didn’t establish credibility and accused me of being dismissive to his advice on altitude sickness and skiing,” said Trevor during an interview with The City Paper. “When I responded that ‘your opinions don’t resonate with me’,” the suspect excused himself from the table “as he needed to go to the bathroom”. Trevor quickly sensed that “something was off” as the expensive train journey “isn’t exactly the environment to pick fights.”
In an instant, the stranger punched Trevor in the face and “hid behind one of the VIA Rail staff members like a coward.” When the train pulled into Winnipeg, the man was removed from the train immediately. As you don’t need identification to travel by train in Canada, it was only when the Winnipeg Police questioned Trevor and asked if he would press charges for the assault, did he hear the name “Jesse Wiseman” mentioned.
Trevor then affirms that the same name was mentioned by the VIA Rail manager in Winnipeg as the unruly passenger was taken into custody. Even though Trevor wanted to press charges, he was advised by the cops to “let it go” as the best medicine for an inebriated passenger is to spend the night in a “drunk tank,” Trevor recalls.
Once Jesse Wiseman was hauled off “The Canadian,” Trevor texted his girlfriend in Vancouver to see if she could “find some information” on the passenger. As the couple do not speak Spanish – and have never been to Colombia – immediately the internet churned up news articles with the face of Jesse Wiseman and a young woman in Medellín, named Laura Lopera. One of the very few news articles in Canada by the Toronto Sun also featured the face of Jesse Wiseman, referring to him in a headline as “the suitcase killer.”
When Trevor saw Wiseman’s picture, he had no doubt that he had sat at the same table with the man who hid Lopera’s body inside a suitcase, next to the trash, in his rented Medellín apartment. “I have no doubt that the passenger was the wanted murderer Jesse Wiseman,” affirmed Trevor to The City Paper. “I am more than 150% sure,” he said emphatically.
Since taking the VIA Rail journey, Trevor has contacted the Winnipeg Police on several occasions to find out why Jesse Wiseman was not formally arrested given that Interpol issued a Blue Alert on February 10 for his capture. Wiseman was released from the Winnipeg Police Department’s “drunk tank” on February 22, based on the grounds that no charges were filed by Trevor, and that the alleged killer of Laura Lopera “has no criminal record in Canada,” he said.
“I cannot believe that a murderer is roaming the streets of Winnipeg, or Toronto, or any city in the country for that matter,” remarked Trevor to The City Paper. According to the eyewitness, the Winnipeg Police asked the assaulted passenger to “stop ‘Googling’ the name Jesse Wiseman,” despite the fact that the suspect had fled Colombia on February 9 on a flight from Bogotá to Guatemala City.
Around the time Jesse Wiseman arrived in Central America, Colombia’s Attorney General’s Office released gruesome findings relating to the femicide that involved a man in his ‘fifties’ and a Canadian citizen. Lopera’s body was found at an apartment in Villa Hermosa, Comuna 8 of Medellín, which Wiseman had rented.
The shocking violence of this crime has sparked outrage in Colombia, given that Lopera was a young single mother to a three-year-old daughter named Maria Camila. Laura’s brother Juan Manuel Lopera reported his sister missing on January 31.
The initial connection between Wiseman and Lopera was established on social media at the end of 2023. Despite language barriers arising from Wiseman’s limited proficiency in Spanish, the couple developed a romantic relationship over four months. The owner of the Medellín apartment discovered the abandoned suitcase after detecting a foul odor with the trash. When the apartment owner managed to contact Wiseman through WhatsApp, the response she got from the alleged murderer was that he (Wiseman) had left “unattended garbage” before departing Colombia “due to a family emergency.”
Preliminary analyses by Colombia’s Legal Forensics Institute, Medicina Legal, suggest that Lopera likely died on Sunday, February 4, less than a week before her body was discovered. A taxi driver, also an acquaintance of the victim, was the last person to see Lopera alive, having dropped her off at Wiseman’s seven-room apartment where the femicide took place.
Juan Manuel Lopera stated to the Medellín press that the relationship between Laura and Jesse appeared “normal”, but that he did suspect Wiseman’s calm demeanor concealed a “much darker reality.”
The investigation has uncovered WhatsApp messages between Wiseman and Lopera, in which the Canadian threatens the young woman and uses offensive language. When Wiseman was confirmed as the only suspect in the murder of the young woman, Medellín Mayor Federico Gutiérrez underscored ongoing efforts with international authorities to apprehend Jesse Wiseman. “He has been identified. He left the country yesterday, February 9. Thanks to the joint work between @FiscaliaCol and @PoliciaColombia @PoliciaMedellin, we hope that an arrest warrant will soon be issued and executed through Interpol,” stated Gutiérrez on his official “X” account.
Trevor first contacted The City Paper on February 26 with the incident on VIA Rail, and in an email in which he wrote the following: “Hi. I saw Jesse Wiseman (you have a blue alert out for him) on VIA Rail Train 2 from Vancouver to Winnipeg. He punched me in the head on the train and was taken in by Winnipeg Police but released yesterday. He was heading to Toronto.”
Jesse Wiseman: From Iowa to Nova Scotia
Trevor’s short video inside the dining carriage before the assault also raised the interest of the Canadian news outlet Saltwater that covers Eastern Canada. According to investigative journalist Ian Fairclough at Saltwater, Jesse Gilbert Wiseman, 50, used to reside in Terence Bay outside Halifax and is believed to have relocated to Guatemala late last year. Saltwater confirmed that Wiseman, as per his Facebook page, was born in Iowa and engaged in competitive football and wrestling during his schooling in Iowa and Louisiana. He claimed to have moved to Bathurst, New Brunswick, in 2001.
Wiseman spent several years coaching young female wrestlers in Nova Scotia at both the high school and Canada Games level in the 2010s.
Former wrestlers were interviewed by Saltwater’s parent company The Chronicle Herald and expressed initial shock at Wiseman being a suspect, but also recalled his angry demeanor. The wrestlers have preferred to remain anonymous, fearing Wiseman might return to Nova Scotia.
One woman coached by the murder suspect told the journalist that Wiseman “always gave me the absolute creeps. He was always aggressive, and he really didn’t treat us like people.” Another athlete mentioned the “jarring” age difference between Wiseman and the victim, reminiscent of the age gap between him and the teenaged girls he coached. Wiseman ceased coaching at the high school level around five years ago after a complaint about inappropriate conduct involving a female athlete. One wrestler suggested this wasn’t the first complaint, citing a previous incident, documented Saltwater.
Upon hearing the news of Wiseman being a suspect in a homicide, one former wrestler was initially shocked but noted, “As I got older and looked back, there were a lot of red flags.” Another expressed immediate concern, saying, “My stomach just flopped. Someone sent me the link, and I thought that maybe it was a joke story, and then I read it, and thought, ‘Oh my god, he finally cracked.”
Trevor’s deailed testimony, as well as the investigative report by Saltwater, reveal the profile of a dangerous person who returned to Canada from Colombia (via Central America) and whose whereabout now are unknown. The eyewitness’ short video which he took as a memento of his voyage across the Pairies, could prove to Colombian, and international law enforcement officials, important evidence to help track down a cold-blooded killer who had no qualms in disposing the body of Laura Lopera with the trash, and weeks later, was served a three-course meal inside the luxurious “The Canadian.”
