The day before she was killed, Doreta Mary Andrews told her adult daughter Susan to be careful.

A normally vivacious divorcee, Doreta was acting strangely after an evening out with some friends.

“They’re going to get me.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Just be careful.”

It was enough to make Susan wonder whether someone had slipped something into her mother’s drink.

But the next day an apparently calm Doreta told Susan everything was fine and asked if she could have granddaughter Tiffany for a sleep-over that evening.

“Never mind,” she said when Susan tried to ask about her previous remarks.

“It’s okay.”

When Tiffany awoke the next morning, Doreta wasn’t there beside her in bed the way she usually was.

Maybe Nana got up early to make breakfast, thought the seven-year-old, smiling as she padded down the hallway in her pyjamas, bare feet sinking into the freshly cleaned carpet.

But nothing was cooking in the kitchen of the tidy townhouse at 7837 120A St.

“Nana?”

There was no response.

So Tiffany tried the sewing room, where she found her Nana draped over a chair.

Doreta’s hands were purple and she wasn’t breathing.

Tiffany tried to call 911 but the phone in the sewing room had been unplugged. She had to go back to the kitchen to make the call.

It was around 9 a.m. on March 22, 1993.

A few minutes later, in her townhouse just one block away, Susan picked up her phone and dialled her mother’s number.

Doreta was late bringing Tiffany back and she hadn’t picked up Susan’s earlier calls.

This time, a man’s voice answered.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Susan explained Doreta Andrews was her mother.

“The lady is deceased,” said the man, likely one of the police officers at the scene.

Susan went into shock.

Her mother was only 49 – a tiny, 5’3” force of nature. How could she be dead?

Tiffany tried to be reassuring about her Nana when she was reunited with her mother.

“They’ll put the breathing mask on her,” Tiffany said. “She’ll be okay.”

Then police officers came and told Susan it wasn’t a heart attack.

One officer would later call it a case of “face-to-face strangulation,” meaning the killer was looking into Doreta’s eyes as she died.

Some rings had been removed from Doreta’s hands and a few of her “sparklies” were missing from her jewellery box.

“Strangled for rings” read the headline in The Leader newspaper, above an artist’s sketch of the missing jewelry, including a gold wedding band with three diamond chips, and a family ring with five stones.

There were no signs of forced entry.

At the funeral, Susan slipped a bag lunch in her mother’s coffin with a cheese sandwich, a tea bag, and pack of Player’s filter cigarettes with a lighter.

“I don’t know where I’m going”, Doreta would say when she talked about her funeral plans, “but I may be hungry when I get there and I know I’m going to want a smoke.”

The police investigation ground on.

Days became weeks, then months, and years. Susan longed for her mom. She missed Doreta calling her “my blond-haired, blue-eyed baby.”

She even missed the cleaning binges, when her fastidious parent would clean Susan’s home to hospital standards.

And the wild rides in her mother’s gigantic gold Lincoln Continental, Doreta lead-footing it over the Alex Fraser Bridge.

Susan waited for a break in the case that never came.

After a few years, she left Surrey, moving from town to town, always finding a job and a place to live, but never putting down roots.

Tiffany’s life was never the same after that morning, either. She suffered through a troubled adolescence and moved away not long after her mother did.

Susan tried to forget, but she couldn’t. She kept thinking about going back – doing something to help find her mother’s killer.

The feeling kept getting stronger until one day, Susan thought, “today’s the day.”

Six months later, Tiffany moved back to Surrey, too.

The death of Doreta Andrews is one of 72 murders under investigation by the Surrey RCMP detachment’s Unsolved Homicide Project Team.

There are five officers working full-time on homicides going back as far as 1967.

Since the unit was created in 2006, the Surrey team has been responsible for reopening two cases that produced convictions.

The first was the 1991 death of six-year-old Candice Walters.

When Candice died, her mother’s common-law husband Robert O’Sullivan was arrested and charged with her murder.

But there were problems with the evidence and the Crown prosecutor’s office entered a stay of proceedings.

One of the original investigators brought the case with him when he joined the newly created unsolved homicide unit.

As a result of evidence obtained by the team, O’Sullivan pleaded guilty in January of this year to one count of criminal negligence causing death and was sentenced to eight years.

“They never gave up,” Crown prosecutor Don Wilson says of the team. “Their persistence paid off.”

The other case involved the drowning of a four-month-old boy in a swimming pool in May of 2002.

Mother Jasvinder Kang claimed a panhandler had stolen her child from her basement suite and dumped him in the pool.

In August of this year, after the team conducted nearly 250 interviews, Kang was charged. She eventually pleaded guilty to infanticide and received the maximum sentence possible – a conditional term of two years less a day under house arrest plus three years probation.

There are dozens of mysteries remaining to be solved, all stacked in cardboard boxes and accordion files arranged in floor-to-ceiling metal shelves in the Surrey RCMP records section.

The unsolved homicide files occupy most of a wall.

Among the stacks of labelled and numbered boxes is the material concerning the slaying of Doreta Mary Andrews, including notes of interviews, police reports and any forensic evidence that was gathered at the time.

The team does not disclose which unsolved cases are currently under review, but Susan and Tiffany are hoping that the Andrews case is one of them.

“Whoever did it is out there enjoying their life,” Susan says.

“I will never, ever, let this rest.”

It was about nine years ago, when Sgt. Roger Morrow was based in Alberta, that he came across a man who had a small but crucial bit of information about an old, unsolved murder.

The man had never bothered to contact police because he didn’t think what he knew was significant.

But it turned out to be an important part of the puzzle that led to a break in the case.

You never know, says the Surrey RCMP detachment spokesman.

“It could be one small piece of information that can turn the tide in favour of a successful prosecution.”

Which is why anyone who knows anything about an unsolved murder should contact police or Crime Stoppers.

Here are three other Surrey cases in need of solving:

• The 1998 murder of outspoken newspaperman Tara Singh Hayer, shot to death in his home garage.

Surrey-Tynehead MLA Dave Hayer, son of the slain publisher of the Indo-Canadian Times, says he’s been told the case is “very active.”

“We are looking forward to the day when all the people involved in my dad’s assassination, the people who hired the hit men, who paid the money, will be charged.”

• The 2001 disappearance of Surrey businessman Narinder “Ned” Mander.

Mander went missing the night his friend, Surrey teacher Rakinder “Rick” Bhatti, was gunned down outside the Dasmesh Darbar Sikh temple.

Mander’s family raised $50,000 as reward money for anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest and conviction of the people responsible.

No one has come forward.

• The 2003 slaying of Riasat Ali Khan, gunned down in the driveway of his Surrey home.

It’s not clear why someone would want to kill Khan, founder of the Pakistan Canada Association, chair of the Surrey’s mosque reconstruction committee, and a lifetime member of the B.C. Muslim Association.

The family has set up a website at www.riasatalikhan.com and a $100,000 reward has been posted.

Anyone with information about these or any other unsolved cases should contact Crime Stoppers on the web or by calling 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).

dferguson@surreyleader.com