Rex Gill

Rex Edward Gill was a Penticton-area resident of British Columbia, remembered locally as a longtime tour guide with Coyote Cruises on Okanagan Lake and as a familiar, well-liked figure in the South Okanagan tourism scene. He died on 23 January 2019 in Kamloops at the age of 41, after being shot outside a hotel in what police later described as a case of mistaken identity linked to organized crime. He became more widely known across Canada not for a public career but for the long fight to bring his killers to court.

Shortly before 8:30 a.m. on 23 January 2019, Gill was outside the former Comfort Inn and Suites in the Aberdeen neighbourhood of Kamloops when a vehicle pulled up and opened fire. A friend who was with him later described watching Gill struck as the two stood together. Gill was rushed to Royal Inland Hospital, where he died of his injuries. About an hour and a half earlier, 31-year-old Cody Marcel Mathieu had been shot and killed outside a Super 8 motel elsewhere in the city. Kamloops RCMP linked the two shootings and said publicly that Gill had no known ties to criminal activity, raising the likelihood that he was killed by mistake.

Former Penticton city councillor Max Picton, a lifelong friend who said the two had worked together for about a decade, confirmed the death and spoke of Gill as someone who had given him his first job at age 13 and remained a positive presence in Okanagan tourism. In the years that followed, Gill's mother Marie organized an annual motorcycle memorial ride across the South Okanagan every September, raising thousands of dollars for the Kelowna Gospel Mission and the Penticton Alliance Church food bank.

For more than seven years the case sat among Kamloops RCMP's top unsolved homicide priorities. That changed on 19 September 2026, when police announced that Brandon Dale Fiddick, 34, and Hugh Alexander McIntosh, 58, had been charged with second-degree murder in Gill's death. Both men were arrested and detained that day. McIntosh was already known to the justice system for a separate February 2019 Kamloops shooting. Superintendent Jeff Pelley of the Kamloops RCMP called the charges a testament to years of investigative persistence and an opportunity for some resolution for those affected.

Gill's death remains remembered locally less as a crime statistic than as the loss of a friendly face from the Okanagan tourism industry, taken in violence that had nothing to do with him.