(Posted 8:30 a.m., Feb. 23)
Orléans woman's body recovered from Ottawa River
By Fred Sherwin
Orléans Online

Police divers recovered the body of 37-year-old Rachel Taylor from the frozen depths of the Ottawa River on Monday less than 24 hours after a truck she was riding in fell through the ice near Aylmer Island off Shirley's Bay.

Taylor drove to the island wirh her boyfirend Lee Bourdon to take his dog Dusty for a run. They were returning to the shore at around 3 p.m. when the ice started to give way beneath Bourdon's GMC Blazer.

Bourdon escaped out of the driver's door and yelled at Taylor to do the same, but for whatever reason she was unable to open the passenger door and extricate herself from the truck.

Bourdon dove through the hole in the ice and tried three times to pull Taylor from the truck, but to no avail.

“I yanked at her and I tried to pull her out, but it wasn’t working,” Bourdon told a reporter from the Ottawa Citizen on Sunday. “I couldn’t pull her anymore, and the truck was going under, so I had to come back up.”

Bourdon was pacing along the shore of the Ottawa River with family and friends of the Orléans woman, while divers from the Sûreté du Québec took nearly an hour to recover her body.

Taylor grew up in Aylmer and then moved to Orléans 20 years ago with her two younger brothers after their mother died of cancer.

(This story was made possible thanks to the generous support of our local business partners.)

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