The RCMP has confimed a second murder charge has been laid against Eric Fish, the convicted killer who was unlawfully at large from a federal halfway house in Vernon, B.C., when he was charged with killing an elderly man in August 2004.

Fish will appear in court Thursday to face a murder charge in the death of another Vernon man who was killed during the same period in 2004, the force said.

Bill Abramenko, 75, a retired carpenter, was beaten to death with a crowbar in Vernon on Aug. 4, 2004. Fish was arrested and charged with his murder three days later.

On the following day, Jeffrey Drake, 60, who had been missing for a month, was found dead on the shores of Okanagan Lake.

On Tuesday night, police told his son, Jerry Drake, of Kelowna, that the case may finally have been solved.

"I've just received a phone call [from a] Vernon RCMP [officer] and he informed me that charges would be laid against Eric Fish for my father's murder," Drake told CBC News.

Fish, 45, had been paroled to the halfway house after serving time for a murder in Ontario in 1984.

Debate ignited

The arrest of Fish in 2004 ignited a national debate on the role of the National Parole Board.
 
Fish was supposed to be serving out his parole at the Howard House in Vernon, but disappeared from the halfway house and had been at large for six weeks at the time of Abramenko's death.

Documents showed that before releasing Fish to the halfway house, the National Parole Board ruled he was "high-risk to violently re-offend." Corrections Canada later agreed to shut down the halfway house.

Abramenko's wife, Gladys, said at the time she was not satisfied that closing down Howard House would solve the problems in Vernon.

"The problem doesn't start with the Howard House. It starts with the National Parole Board. I think there should be a grand public inquiry — nothing hushed up," she said.

During the six weeks, Fish was at large, no alert was issued by police or the parole board, the RCMP admitted in a news conference in 2004.

Abramenko's daughter, Tracy Barth, said that may have been a fatal error.

"When everything happened to my dad back in August that year, we kinda knew [Fish] might have been involved in other criminal activities, just from what the RCMP said to us," she said.

Drake's death is one of seven deaths that police earlier said may be linked to a drug trafficking gang known as The Greeks.

Fish's trial in the Abramenko death is scheduled for Jan. 7, 2008.