Restaurant cashier spots fugitive wanted for murder in Canada

Jace Radke

Friday, Sept. 17, 1999 | 10:48 a.m.

An article in the October issue of Reader's Digest helped lead Las Vegas authorities to a fugitive wanted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in connection with a 1994 murder.

Grant Warren Beaucage, 46, was spotted Thursday by a restaurant cashier in the Stardust hotel-casino who had just finished reading a Reader's Digest story entitled "Worlds Most Wanted."

The article featured a profile and picture of Beaucage that the cashier thought looked like a man who had just paid for a meal at the casino.

Beaucage fled Canada in 1997, just days before he was to stand trial for the stabbing death of his wife, according to the FBI.

The cashier alerted security officers about her hunch, and they detained Beaucage, who told them his name was Philip Hansen. After FBI investigators interviewed him Beaucage admitted his real identity, authorities said.

Beaucage has been living in Las Vegas for the past two years and was arrested in Laughlin in May of 1998 on a misdemeanor charge using the Hansen alias, investigators said.

Beaucage's wife, Aileen O'Brien-Beaucage, 31, was found dead in a car in the parking lot of an Ottawa mall on Feb. 22, 1994, according to the Reader's Digest story.

She had been stabbed at least 20 times in the back, and Grant Beaucage was charged with her murder in June 1995. He pleaded innocent, but got on a bus bound for Niagara Falls on Jan. 22, 1997, a few days before he was to go to trial, according to the article.

That was the last sighting of Beaucage until the cashier noticed him Thursday at the Stardust.