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In September 2021, Cody McConnell & his 24-year-old girlfriend, Mchale Busch, moved out of their trailer & into an apartment complex in Hinton, Alberta, Canada with their 16-month-old son, Noah. When they moved in, they were so thankful for the additional space to comfortably spread out.
Because Canada’s National Sex Offender Registry is not public, they had no way of knowing that their new home was situated right next door to a man who had a documented history of sexual violence against children & had been formally assessed as a high risk to reoffend. Tragically, after only ten days of living in their new home, their happy family unit of three was ripped apart by this very man.
Mchale Busch was born to parents Stuart & Karen Busch on February 13, 1997 in Alberta, Canada. She & her little sister were raised in Camrose, a city in central Alberta. She was a sweet girl who adored her family & was exceptionally protective of her sister. As she grew up, one of her favorite things in life was ice skating.
Mchale attended Our Lady Mount Pleasant Catholic School & during the summer of 2014, while she was at a high school party, she met her boyfriend, Cody McConnell. They had an immediate connection & within three dates, they each knew in their hearts that they were each other’s person.
Over the next 7 ½ years, they grew together, side-by-side, their relationship remaining steady & solid. Mchale worked with the Camrose Association for Community Living, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping those with disabilities. Since she was a true caregiver, it was the perfect job for her; she was patient, kind & empathetic.
She eventually left her position to attend NorQuest College in Edmonton in 2017, enrolling in the Practical Nursing program. She felt that nursing was the perfect next step in her career. After her graduation in 2019, she went back to work at the Association. Meanwhile, Cody was employed by Midwest Pipelines, working on pipelines across Western Canada, a physically demanding job.
Shortly after her graduation, Mchale realized that she was pregnant & she & Cody were both thrilled that their family was growing. Realizing they were going to be parents, Cody felt inspired to move their relationship forward. While they were out ice skating together, one of Mchale’s favorite activities, he got down on one knee & asked her to marry him.
Their son Noah was born on April 18, 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. They settled into their new phase of life as a family of three & Noah was an absolute joy to Cody & Mchale. He was a happy, bubbly baby who rarely cried & even when he did, it was only for a moment as his tears were quickly replaced with smiles & laughter.
They immediately fell into their role as first-time parents, however, their world was turned upside down shortly after Noah’s birth when Cody was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Because his job was so physically demanding, he had no choice but to take a leave of absence.
According to the Mayo Clinic, multiple sclerosis or MS is a disease that causes breakdown of the protective covering of nerves. It can cause numbness, weakness, issues walking, vision changes, dizziness, memory issues & mood changes. Symptoms depend on the person, the location of the damage in the nervous system & how badly the nerve fibers are damaged. Eventually, the damage to the nerve fibers can be permanent.
Some people with MS lose the ability to walk on their own or move at all while others will have periods of time without attacks or new symptoms, called remission. The course of the disease varies depending on the type of MS. Although there’s no cure, there are treatments that can help speed the recovery from attacks, modify the course of the disease & manage symptoms.
With Cody on a leave of absence from work, although they were in the middle of something scary & uncertain, the family of three enjoyed the extra time they had to spend together. Cody indicated that through it all, Mchale was his rock.
Since the medical bills were piling up on top of their usual expenses, when Cody began feeling better, he was able to return to work. He was back out on the road, taking jobs wherever they were available while they decided it would make the most sense for Mchale to stay home & care for their son.
Since Cody was moving around Canada for work, they decided to buy a small trailer so they could all move around the country together. Although their space was cramped, they were thankful to be together & made the best of the situation.
Moving forward to late August 2021, Cody learned that his employer was going to be settling in a more permanent location. This would allow them to settle in one particular area, rent an apartment & have more stability & room in their lives.
The family of three moved out of their trailer & into an apartment in a complex in Hinton, a town with population of 9,817 in the foothills of Alberta, Canada, about 284 miles west of Alberta’s capital city of Edmonton.
By early September, they were settling into their new apartment, thankful to have the additional space to spread out & feel comfortable. Sadly, only ten days later everything came crashing down in an unimaginable nightmare.
Thursday, September 16, 2021 began as a typical weekday for the family. Before Cody headed to work, they spent time together outside. Noah played around with a hockey puck for the very first time, something that made Cody very happy. They marveled at how quickly their son was growing up.
After Cody left for work, Mchale took Noah to a nearby park to play & burn off energy. At about noon, they were back at their apartment & Mchale briefly spoke with the building manager in the hallway just outside their unit. The manager mentioned seeing some dirt & mud in the hallway as well as on the stairway near their unit & made the assumption that it had come from Cody’s work boots.
Their conversation was brief & not at all combative or argumentative as Mchale assured him she would take care of the mess. After they finished talking, she began cooking some lunch for herself & Noah while she chatted on the phone with a friend. While she was still on the phone, there was a knock at the door & her friend could overhear a male’s voice.
The knock had come from Cody & Mchale’s next door neighbor, Robert Keith Major, who shared a wall with their unit. Since he’d been able to hear Mchale’s conversation with the building manager, he offered to vacuum up the mud in the hallway. Being a busy mom to a 16-month-old toddler, Mchale took him up on his offer & after thanking him, she went back inside her apartment to continue on with what she had been doing.
According to cell phone records, the final activity on Mchale’s phone was at 2:21 pm that day.
When Cody came home later that evening, he was very surprised to find their apartment empty & quiet since Mchale & Noah were usually there to greet him. Although she normally texted or called to let him know what they were up to, Cody just figured they may have quickly gone out.
However, this thought quickly vanished when he noticed raw food sitting out on the counter. It looked as if Mchale had been in the middle of cooking when she just suddenly stopped what she was doing & walked away. When he looked outside, he saw her car in the parking lot & Noah’s stroller was folded in their apartment so they clearly hadn’t gone anywhere. Regardless, he went to the two nearby parks to look for them as well as all around the apartment complex, but they weren’t there.
All of Cody’s text messages & phone calls to Mchale went unanswered & he couldn’t wrap his head around where they could be. He called their family & friends, but no one had heard from her. As time continued to go on & they still hadn’t come home, he decided to call the RCMP to report them missing.
When Cody’s friend Jared came over for support, they knocked on the doors of neighbors who lived on the same floor while they waited for police to arrive, asking if anyone had heard from or seen Mchale that day.
When the RCMP showed up, they instructed Jared & Cody to stay in the apartment while they began their own search. They searched the immediate area in & around the apartment complex, knocking on neighbors’ doors to determine if anyone had seen or heard anything concerning. One of these doors belonged to 53-year-old Robert Keith Major, the man who offered to clean up the mud for Mchale in the hallway that afternoon.
Major claimed that he’d seen Mchale run out of the apartment crying a few hours earlier, but he made no mention of seeing Noah with her. When officers spoke to other neighbors, no one else corroborated this story.
Officers met with the building manager to check surveillance footage from the complex to see if they could find evidence to confirm this story. The footage would also allow them to see if Mchale had Noah with her as well as to check timelines from that day & monitor people who may have been coming & going.
When they checked the footage, rather than seeing Mchale run from the apartment, they saw Robert Major leaving the building carrying what looked to be two large, heavy garbage bags. He walked directly to the dumpster & threw the bags inside. Surveillance proved that he had been the only person to take the garbage out that day.
By this point, it was about 2 am & Cody & Jared had been joined by Jared’s girlfriend, Baileigh. When officers told them they would need to search their apartment, they took them to a local hotel to get some rest & await news.
It was now Friday morning, September 17 at about 10 am, when investigators walked over to the dumpsters to see what Major had thrown away. Since they knew he lied about Mchale running from the building crying, they strongly suspected that the man had something to do with whatever happened to Mchale & Noah. However, they could have never prepared themselves for what they did find.
Inside one of the bags, they found the little body of 16-month-old Noah. He was wearing the clothing he wore on Thursday. Mchale’s cell phone was found discarded in a bag of cat litter, but there was no sign of her.
When the RCMP went in to search Major’s apartment, they found 24-year-old Mchale Busch’s naked & mutilated body, lying face-down in his bathtub. He was arrested that morning while he was at a neighbor’s apartment. He was initially charged with two counts of second-degree murder as well as one count of indignity to human remains.
Other than being neighbors, Cody & Mchale had no connection to Robert Major; they had never even met him before he came knocking on his door that afternoon.
This man had been the subject of a public warning four years earlier in 2017 when he was released to the Edmonton community. The Edmonton Police Service said that he would be living in the area & they had reasonable grounds to believe he would commit another sexual offense against a female, including children, while living in the community.
According to Parole Board of Canada documents, Major was sentenced to almost four years for an offense in 2012 when he took a toddler from a babysitter’s care for an unsupervised walk & sexually assaulted the child. He was also convicted of sexual assault in 2006 as well as sexual interference in 2013. While the first charge was stayed, the second was withdrawn.
The board cited a 2013 psychological report indicating that he posed a high risk for impulsive behavior & a high risk for sexually harming someone he deemed weaker than himself. During this time, he admitted to being sexually aroused by the assault & that he committed the offense for the thrill of it.
In 2015, while he was serving his four-year sentence, Major was accused of inappropriately touching another inmate. He completed a national moderate intensity sex offender program in 2015 & worked closely with mental health nurses, attended church & connected with pastors. He was released in February 2016.
At the time of the public warning in 2017, media outlets announced that he was under a number of court-ordered rules that included a curfew, restriction of his access to children as well as a ban from leaving the area without permission from his supervisor.
However, as of July 2020, he no longer had to follow any conditions. When Cody, Mchale & Noah moved into their new apartment, they had absolutely no way of knowing that they were living next to a dangerous criminal. Major had been living in that complex since October 2020, for about one year.
Canada’s National Sex Offender Registry is a confidential database monitored by the RCMP, used exclusively by law enforcement agencies to monitor & investigate convicted sex offenders. It isn’t accessible to the public since courts have upheld that public access could lead to harassment, discrimination & violate the constitutional rights of those convicted of serious crimes.
When investigators spoke with Major, he claimed that Mchale had voluntarily come into his apartment to have coffee with him after he cleaned up the mud for her. He said that he pushed her to the floor of his bedroom & began choking & sexually assaulting her. After trying to manually strangle her for ten minutes, he used a cable that officers later found at the foot of his bed. He then placed her in his bathtub & removed several of her organs using various knives.
It’s unclear if Noah had been in Major’s apartment or if he had been left at home while his mother was attacked & murdered. In order to stop the baby from crying, Major stuffed a sock in his mouth & placed a plastic grocery bag over his head, tying it tightly around his chest, suffocating him to death.
When Noah was deceased, he put the baby’s body into a black garbage bag along with Mchale’s blood-stained clothing before throwing the bags into the apartment’s dumpster. It’s likely that Mchale had been Major’s target & little Noah had just been collateral damage. Knowing neighbors would be eventually alerted by the baby’s cries at the lack of his mother’s care & presence, he murdered him.
As investigators learned additional details of the murders & it was clear that this was not a spontaneous act of violence, Major’s charges were upgraded to two counts of first-degree murder & two counts of interfering with human remains.
As the details of his criminal history came to light as a result of the investigation, Mchale & Noah’s family, like the rest of the community, were enraged that a predator had been allowed to live quietly among the community. He had over 24 criminal convictions, two of which were violent sexual assaults, yet his neighbors would have no way of knowing since the general public has no access to the sex offender registry.
After he moved from Edmonton to Hinton, he came to live in the apartment complex among women & children, near parks & schools, without anyone realizing it. Nothing had been done to protect those at risk for his sexual attacks. This is despite the fact that he had been deemed a high risk to reoffend based on his 2013 psychological report.
As Cody & the Busch family grappled with the loss of Mchale & Noah, they were angry that they had ended up in harm’s way for no reason, that their deaths had been preventable. The fact that Major was a known predator who, by 2020, had been able to freely live among those he preyed on, was impossible for them to wrap their heads around. He was no longer being actively watched & there were no safeguards in place to protect the community.
Although some might argue that he’d served his sentence & had been released in February 2016, it didn’t change the risk. He was a documented danger to society, yet no one knew; not the landlord of the apartment building or the families sharing the hallways, stairwells & parking lot with this man.
It was Cody & the Busch’s goal to make changes in laws that would better protect the community so that another family didn’t need to suffer the way they were. They wanted the sex offender database to be accessible to the public, especially in the case of when an offender has been deemed likely to reoffend.
Cody also wanted changes to rental laws to ensure that tenants are aware that there is a registered sex offender living in their building & he wanted legislative changes in his son’s name.
In May 2022, Major pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder & in November 2022, he received an automatic life sentence without the chance of parole for 25 years. He will be almost 80 when he’s eligible for parole.
Mchale’s mother, Karen Busch, wrote her victim impact statement in April when they should have been celebrating Noah’s birthday, writing, We should be celebrating our only grandson’s second birthday, instead it’s a day filled with tears & sadness. She went on to say that her daughter & her grandson were two of the most precious people in her world.
Each & every day since their deaths, Mchale & Noah’s family struggled to handle the grief & emptyness that consumed them. They couldn’t fathom that such evil could exist in the world, that someone this despicable could be living among us & be capable of intentionally taking two innocent people from this world with his bare hands with zero remorse & zero external motivation.
Mchale’s best friend, Mary Urzada, who had been on the phone with Mchale hours before their murders, had been able to hear Major’s voice that day. At the time, he presented himself as a kind stranger who was going out of his way to help a neighbor.
After Mchale & Noah went missing, but before their bodies were found, something in Mary’s gut told her that Major might be responsible for whatever happened to them. She told anyone who would listen to look into him, but Cody couldn’t imagine that the man who lived next door, someone he viewed as a little old man could have harmed his fiance & child.
Cody submitted his victim impact statement to the court, but he did not read it out loud as he felt unable to speak, overcome with too much raw emotion. He remains forever grateful for his family & friends who spoke for him.
Cody & his family have since pushed for Noah’s Law, which would make it a criminal offense for sexual offenders on the registry to fail to inform police when they change addresses. It would create a specific, more rigorous category on the sex offender registry for the most violent offenders & would extend the duration of sex offender registration to potentially up to 30 years for certain cases. It would also shift the focus of the National Sex Offender Registry from not only assisting police to actively ensuring public safety.
Cody’s work in making these changes has given him a sense of purpose as after Mchale & Noah’s deaths, he lived with regret, believing that he had failed them.
Noah’s Law (Bill C-336) was introduced in the Canadian Parliament in June 2023 to address gaps in the monitoring of high risk sexual offenders. While it was at the second reading stage in the Senate, it failed to make progress, stalled & did not receive a vote or proceed further.
The main reason it hasn’t passed is because it was a private member’s bill, meaning, it was introduced by an individual member of Parliament, rather than the government. These bills rarely become law because they compete for limited debate time & in the case of Noah’s Law, it never even got prioritized for debate. Because Canada’s 44th Parliament session ended in January 2025, the bill, being unfinished, would have to be reintroduced from scratch in a new session.
As of January 2026, a new publicly accessible child sex offender database went live, the first of its kind in Canada. The High Risk Child Sex Offender Database contains information from across the country about people who have been found guilty of sexual offenses against children & are deemed at high risk to re-offend.
Had Cody & Mchale known that there was a sexually violent man living in their building, they would have never moved into that apartment complex. Anyone that knew Mchale could see that she had been destined to be a mother after Noah’s birth. She & Cody had established a relationship based on love & respect & when Noah was born, their family felt complete.
They had been looking forward to watching every milestone in their son’s life from starting school, to graduating, potentially getting married & starting a family. That Thursday in September 2021 began as an entirely normal day. The family of three enjoyed their time together before Cody had to leave for work. When he said goodbye to his beloved fiance & son that morning, he could never have imagined that he wouldn’t ever get the chance to see them again.
They were robbed of all the dreams they once had because of a monster that lived next door, someone that authorities knew was at risk for harming more lives. Yet he was given the opportunity to live quietly among women & children, those who were vulnerable to his evil.
References:
- Mayo Clinic: Multiple sclerosis
- Wikipedia: Hinton, Alberta
- Times Colonist: Alberta man pleads guilty to killing woman & her 16-month-old son
- Noah’s Law: Justice for Mchale & Noah
- CTV News: Authorities warned sex offender was a risk years before he allegedly killed Alberta mother & son
- CTV News: RCMP launches new sex offender database available to the public
- CBC News: Alberta man who lost wife, toddler in double homicide calls for changes to sex-offender laws
- CBC News: Maximum sentence for man who admitted to murdering mother & toddler in Hinton, Alta.
- City News Everywhere: ‘Monster’: Alberta man who killed woman, toddler sentenced to life in prison
- Global News: ‘Noah’s Law’ to be introduced in House of Commons, Senate
- Camrose Association for Community Living
- Medium: Living next door to a monster
- YouTube: Danelle Hallan: Mother & baby killed by neighbor 10 days after moving in
- Weisberg Law: The National Sex Offender Registry: Existing rules & new developments
