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Speaker 4: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 4: written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK every
Speaker 4: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 4: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 4: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 5: Good Evening. Fifty years ago, a serial killer proud the
Speaker 5: quiet city of London, Ontario, marking it as his hunting grounds.
Speaker 5: As young women and boys were abducted, raped, murdered, residents
Speaker 5: of the area held their loved ones closer and closer,
Speaker 5: terrified of the monster or monsters stocking the streets. Homicide
Speaker 5: detective Denis Alcep began hunting the killer in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 5: and he didn't stop searching until his death forty years later.
Speaker 5: For decades, detective's actual and arm chair and the victims
Speaker 5: families and friends continued to ask questions who was the
Speaker 5: Forest City Killer. Was there more than one person? Or
Speaker 5: did a depraved individual commit all of these crimes on
Speaker 5: his own? Combing through the files, Detective Alcep left behind
Speaker 5: research of Vanessa Brown reopens the cases, revealing previously unpublished
Speaker 5: witness statements, details of evidence, and astonishing revelations. And through
Speaker 5: her investigation, Vanessa posits the unthinkable. Is it possible that
Speaker 5: the Forest City Killer is still alive and, like the
Speaker 5: notorious Golden State Killer, a simple DNA test could bring
Speaker 5: him to justice. The book that we're featuring this evening
Speaker 5: is The Forest City Killer, a serial murderer, a cold
Speaker 5: case sleuth, and a search for justice with my special guest,
Speaker 5: researcher and author Vanessa Brown. Welcome to the program, and
Speaker 5: thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Vanessa Brown.
Speaker 6: Hi, Van, it's great to be here.
Speaker 5: Thank you very much for joining me with this incredible book,
Speaker 5: The Forest City Killer. Tell our audience a little bit
Speaker 5: about before we start about your occupation and your background
Speaker 5: and your interest in all things London. Tell us a
Speaker 5: little bit about your background before we talk about your
Speaker 5: faithful meeting with Dennis Alcep Junior.
Speaker 3: Sure, my day job is at a bookstore. I own
Speaker 3: with my husband an antiquarian bookstore in downtown and so
Speaker 3: an antiquarian bookstore. In addition to having general used books
Speaker 3: for people to enjoy and read, we also specialized in
Speaker 3: rare books, so first editions, signed editions, hard to find,
Speaker 3: limited prints, paper matter, old letters, the semera, and all
Speaker 3: sorts of interesting things anything printed on paper.
Speaker 6: So that's my day job, and that.
Speaker 3: Means I work a lot in researching history and the
Speaker 3: importance of cultural artifacts that come under my nose. And
Speaker 3: I also work a lot with libraries and archives. We
Speaker 3: really help members of the public who might have something special,
Speaker 3: something unique or interesting that should be kept in an archive.
Speaker 3: We help them get in touch with those librarians and archivists.
Speaker 3: And we also find things ourselves sometimes when we're out
Speaker 3: hunting for material. So you know, I've developed an understanding,
Speaker 3: I think more than the average person about how libraries
Speaker 3: and archives work and the kind of resources that are
Speaker 3: available for members of the public to access when it
Speaker 3: comes to doing research. But I'm also a lifelong Londoner.
Speaker 3: I've lived here my entire life, and you know, it's
Speaker 3: a community that I love. So my previous two books
Speaker 3: are about London, Ontario and its history. I wrote a
Speaker 3: book about a historic hotel that's no longer here, and
Speaker 3: my husband and I wrote a book about one hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty cultural moments in London's history. So, in addition
Speaker 3: to being an antiquarian bookseller, I think I'm a.
Speaker 6: Bit of a local history buff.
Speaker 3: I like to know what's happened in my city, and
Speaker 3: I like the unusual aspects of my city's history.
Speaker 6: So, you know, we all can.
Speaker 3: You can look in any history book about London to
Speaker 3: find out about its founding and important businesses and schools
Speaker 3: and churches and all of those things. But to me,
Speaker 3: the really interesting stories are the odd balls that are
Speaker 3: harder to find, that really tell the story about how
Speaker 3: our city became the unique place that it is.
Speaker 5: You write about a book you discovered in twenty fifteen
Speaker 5: from Michael Arnfield, a book called Murder City. What does
Speaker 5: he suggest in that book? And you talk about the
Speaker 5: anomaly that was that he refers to he suggests about London.
Speaker 5: Tell us about the population of London, a little bit
Speaker 5: about its access to Toronto and Detroit, and tell us
Speaker 5: about Michael Arnfield's book and his suggestion.
Speaker 3: Sure, Mike Arnfield is a professor of at Western University,
Speaker 3: and in twenty fifteen he released a book called Murder
Speaker 3: City about London, Ontario and the anomalous number of serial
Speaker 3: killers that were here, mainly in the nineteen sixties and
Speaker 3: nineteen seventies. He purported that London is the serial killer
Speaker 3: capital of Canada, if not the world. Now, I can't
Speaker 3: speak to that thesis. I'm not a criminologist or a sociologist,
Speaker 3: but it immediately grabbed my attention and I met with Mike,
Speaker 3: I interviewed him, I reviewed his book for a local publication,
Speaker 3: and I was sort of hooked on the subject matter.
Speaker 3: In Mike's book, one of the things he talks about
Speaker 3: is London's unique makeup as a silo city. So you
Speaker 3: have these sort of independent silo communities where people are
Speaker 3: very self referential, but it creates these little pockets of independence,
Speaker 3: and it's very good for test markets.
Speaker 6: So London's been.
Speaker 3: Known as a test market city, and I like to
Speaker 3: say we were the test market for chicken McNuggets, for
Speaker 3: Tim Horton's Dark Roast coffee, and unfortunately, we were a
Speaker 3: test market for serial killers. London is located, of course
Speaker 3: equidescent between Detroit and Toronto along a super highway like
Speaker 3: an interstate.
Speaker 6: So it's a very easy.
Speaker 3: City to come in and get out of quickly if
Speaker 3: you need to.
Speaker 6: And it's sort of a waspy, conservative place. And in
Speaker 6: nineteen sixty eight, when the.
Speaker 3: Spate of murders, the main section of murders in my
Speaker 3: book starts, the city had a population of about one
Speaker 3: hundred and sixty thousand people, And of course that included
Speaker 3: some annexed rural territory around the city that had been
Speaker 3: annexed the year before, so that's actually an elevated number
Speaker 3: of the population was probably something more like one hundred
Speaker 3: and forty or one hundred and thirty thousand in the
Speaker 3: city proper. So it's not a big place. And in
Speaker 3: two years we have nine unsolved homicide sexual homicide related
Speaker 3: to women and children, and that's the focus of my book.
Speaker 5: Now, you write that when you were reading Michael Arn'tfield's
Speaker 5: book Murder City, that you read in particular about the
Speaker 5: Jackie English case, and you said that despite being you know,
Speaker 5: a local history buff, you didn't know about a lot
Speaker 5: of these unsolved cases. They really did. You weren't aware
Speaker 5: whatsoever and reading about Jackie English's case and your research
Speaker 5: you found Dennis Alsop Junior tell us about this faithful
Speaker 5: meeting between you both and how it came that you met.
Speaker 5: What were you looking at on them?
Speaker 3: I was looking at this incredible website called Unsolved Canada
Speaker 3: dot ca, which is unfortunately no longer working, and that's
Speaker 3: very disappointing because it was an incredible treasure traive of information,
Speaker 3: kind of like Canadian webslutes, but even more so, there
Speaker 3: were you know, family members, victims, family members and community
Speaker 3: members really working hard together and bringing all their skills
Speaker 3: to the table to try and solve these crimes on
Speaker 3: their own.
Speaker 6: People going into the archives.
Speaker 3: And paying for reproductions of photos, maps, there were people
Speaker 3: doing you know, pseudo scientific testing on car paint in
Speaker 3: different lights, historic car paint colors, and you know, water testing.
Speaker 6: And all sorts of It's really very.
Speaker 3: Impressive what this community of people were doing. So when
Speaker 3: I read Murder City, I found that website of course,
Speaker 3: just googling the cases, and that was impressive. But of
Speaker 3: course Mike wrote about Dennis Junior in his book, and
Speaker 3: I guess I should tell you who Dennis is. Dennis
Speaker 3: Alsop Senior was the lead investigator on the Jackie English
Speaker 3: murderer and the other murders that took place that are
Speaker 3: unsolved and insults as well, but mainly the unsolved cases.
Speaker 3: And he died in twenty twelve and his son was
Speaker 3: going through his things. He found three banker's boxes filled
Speaker 3: with notes and files from his father's time as a
Speaker 3: homicide investigator for the Ontario Provincial Police, which is sort
Speaker 3: of like our state police, I guess for your American listeners.
Speaker 6: And Dennis has.
Speaker 3: Had looked through all of these and he realized that
Speaker 3: there were answers for the family members in those files,
Speaker 3: people who didn't know what had happened to their loved
Speaker 3: ones and didn't realize, you know, there was more information
Speaker 3: I think that they were given.
Speaker 6: So, you know, Dennis.
Speaker 3: Felt this responsibility to carry on his father's legacy, and
Speaker 3: the Jackie English case in particular was one that he
Speaker 3: had continued to work on until his death. So Dennis Junior, sorry,
Speaker 3: go ahead, no, go ahead. Dennis Junior had wanted to
Speaker 3: reach out to the families, but that's a very sort
Speaker 3: of not tedious, a challenging task. You want to make
Speaker 3: sure that you don't offend people, or bring up terrible
Speaker 3: memories for them, or hurt them in any way. Some
Speaker 3: people don't want to talk about those kinds of tragedies,
Speaker 3: you know. So Dennis had been reading the newspaper and
Speaker 3: he read about the Walk for Jackie. The Walk for
Speaker 3: Jackie takes place every year, and Jackie English is one
Speaker 3: of the murder victims the main focus of my book
Speaker 3: and her surviving sister, and English remembers her sister annually.
Speaker 3: She goes to the same place where her sister disappeared
Speaker 3: on the same date, at the same time, and she
Speaker 3: re walks what she calls her sister's last steps of
Speaker 3: freedom every year.
Speaker 6: And this was covered in the newspaper.
Speaker 3: And when Dennis Junior read the article, he thought this
Speaker 3: is a good opportunity to reach out because he could
Speaker 3: reach out through the newspaper reporter, so there was sort
Speaker 3: of a natural buffer there. And if Anne didn't want
Speaker 3: to talk to him, she didn't have to.
Speaker 6: But she did, of course. She wanted to know all the.
Speaker 3: Information Dennis had and connected them and that meeting really
Speaker 3: was a catalyst for all of the citizens, loops and
Speaker 3: community members who have been working to find resolution to
Speaker 3: these cases. Because it really opened up the door for
Speaker 3: any victims' families who wanted to find out more, to
Speaker 3: be able to talk to Dennis and see what his
Speaker 3: father had left behind.
Speaker 5: Right now, Dennis was an identification officer in special training
Speaker 5: and fingerprints, so he's especially valuable to the police. You
Speaker 5: talk about October nineteen sixty nine and Jackie English. You
Speaker 5: opened this book with this scene where detect Divalso becomes
Speaker 5: involved and he just gets a call. Of course he's
Speaker 5: doing something else, but he has to rush to this
Speaker 5: crime scene. Tell us about Jackie English a little bit
Speaker 5: about her background before we talk about her disappearance and
Speaker 5: then the investigation.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Jackie was a fifteen year old girl.
Speaker 3: She was born that April seventeenth was her birthday, and
Speaker 3: she she came from an interesting family. She had a
Speaker 3: single mom and she lived with her mom and her brother.
Speaker 3: Her older sister had moved away actually to live with
Speaker 3: her fiance in Hamilton, where her dad actually was in
Speaker 3: the hospital for cancer, so their family was.
Speaker 6: Sort of spread apart a little bit.
Speaker 3: But you know, Jackie had a home with her mom
Speaker 3: and her brother, and they were a working class family.
Speaker 3: They had jobs, they all worked and contributed to the household.
Speaker 6: So Jackie got a job.
Speaker 3: At the Latin Quarter restaurant, which was like a say
Speaker 3: and see restaurant in downtown London, and she got that
Speaker 3: job through her mom and they worked there together, and
Speaker 3: Jackie really enjoyed making money. So, you know, the summer
Speaker 3: when she was fifteen, she sort of made this decision
Speaker 3: that she was going to probably drop out of school
Speaker 3: and start working, which her mom did not approve of
Speaker 3: her dropping.
Speaker 6: Out of school. Actually she.
Speaker 3: Didn't tell her mom that she hadn't gone back to school.
Speaker 3: But she got a second job. And the second job
Speaker 3: was at this sort of discount mall in a plaza
Speaker 3: way out in the south end of the city. And
Speaker 3: of course, the posh restaurant she worked at with her
Speaker 3: mom was right downtown near their house, and this one
Speaker 3: was way out by the highway, so you actually had
Speaker 3: to cross over the overpass to get to the restaurant.
Speaker 3: And it was like a discount department store and it
Speaker 3: had a restaurant in it, like a diner, and she
Speaker 3: worked at the diner at the counter, serving customers as
Speaker 3: the waitress. So that was Jackie, And you know, she
Speaker 3: kept a diary and I was able to read that
Speaker 3: diary and sort of get to know her as a person,
Speaker 3: and she really was like a fun, loving, incredible fifteen
Speaker 3: year old girl. And you know, I think in a
Speaker 3: lot of true crimes, it's very easy to go back
Speaker 3: and sort of venerate the victims, you know, like she
Speaker 3: was a perfect angel and.
Speaker 6: All of that.
Speaker 3: I'm not gonna say that about Jackie. I don't think
Speaker 3: she was a perfect angel, but I think she was
Speaker 3: a very relatable, smart, fun young woman and she I
Speaker 3: think she would have been an awesome adult woman to know.
Speaker 3: She was no nonsense. She came from like a no
Speaker 3: nonsense family. She liked really colorful clothes. She wore taboo perfume, which,
Speaker 3: as anyone knows about perfumes, that's not it's no Chanelle
Speaker 3: number five.
Speaker 6: It's a distinctive sense. She was a.
Speaker 3: Strong personality, but also a very generous person. And she
Speaker 3: she was raised with the values of giving, you know,
Speaker 3: basically giving her paycheck to her family, so you know,
Speaker 3: they all worked together and there was this sort of
Speaker 3: a survival aspect to that which I really admire. So
Speaker 3: that was Jackie. She had I guess related to the case.
Speaker 3: You know, this was her first summer exploring, you know,
Speaker 3: being a little bit boy crazy, you know, noticing that
Speaker 3: older guys were looking at her.
Speaker 6: She was developing into, you know.
Speaker 3: A pretty attractive young lady, and she noticed that she
Speaker 3: got the attention she wanted. And she wasn't promiscuous, She
Speaker 3: wasn't living anything I would call a high risk lifestyle
Speaker 3: at all. She wasn't a party animal, but she was,
Speaker 3: you know, doing the normal fifteen year old things for
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty nine for sure.
Speaker 5: How is it that she goes missing and then immediately
Speaker 5: police look at people surrounding her and she has a boyfriend,
Speaker 5: then another interest at work, there's a search. Tell us
Speaker 5: about her disappearance, the search, What happens? What's everyone's reaction?
Speaker 6: Oh, people were worried right away.
Speaker 3: I mean Jackie was very independent, but she was also
Speaker 3: very reliable, Like was she held down two jobs. Well,
Speaker 3: she was mature beyond her years because of the life
Speaker 3: that she had led, and mature in a good way.
Speaker 6: So when she didn't show up for her shift.
Speaker 3: And she wasn't at home, people knew something was wrong immediately.
Speaker 3: So her mother checked her out of the hospital and
Speaker 3: checked herself out of the hospital. That was something I
Speaker 3: need to rewind here. When Jackie went missing after work,
Speaker 3: she usually got a ride home with her mom from
Speaker 3: her job at the Metropolitan, which it was, as I say,
Speaker 3: way on the edge of town, like there was you
Speaker 3: could catch a bus, but it came like once an hour,
Speaker 3: and it was probably a twenty minute walk from the restaurant.
Speaker 3: So you know, that night on October fourth, nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 3: Jackie left her shift at ten pm. Usually she would
Speaker 3: walk over to an industrial building called Northern Electric where
Speaker 3: her mom worked, and her mom would get off an
Speaker 3: hour after her and they would get.
Speaker 6: She would get a ride downtown again with her mom.
Speaker 3: But her mom was in the hospital that week having
Speaker 3: a minor surgery, like a routine surgery. Of course, back
Speaker 3: in the sixties there weren't these in and out surgeries.
Speaker 3: You stayed for a week. So Jackie didn't have a
Speaker 3: ride home, and she didn't ask for a ride. She
Speaker 3: started to walk over the overpath towards the bus stop,
Speaker 3: so presumably she was going to catch the bus, but
Speaker 3: a car pulled up next to her, and there are
Speaker 3: several eyewitness accounts of her get into the car. There
Speaker 3: was no struggle, She didn't have her sum out, so
Speaker 3: she wasn't sort of generally hitching a ride. So the
Speaker 3: idea is that it's probably someone she recognized got into
Speaker 3: the car and then she disappeared. So you know, the
Speaker 3: next day, the restaurant staff at the Latin Quarter were
Speaker 3: expecting her to show up for work, and when she
Speaker 3: didn't show up, they actually used some of their connections
Speaker 3: with the police who were customers at the restaurant to
Speaker 3: start getting the investigation going. And the family got together
Speaker 3: and they all sort of congregated in the apartment building
Speaker 3: where they lived, and they there was no official police
Speaker 3: search for Jackie. They didn't comb fields, they didn't go
Speaker 3: out with a search dog. It was really just family
Speaker 3: and friends following up on any lead that they got
Speaker 3: to see if they could find her.
Speaker 5: There was a diary found and by her mother Doris,
Speaker 5: what clues, if any, are in that diary? And we
Speaker 5: talked talked about how police didn't conduct a search, and
Speaker 5: that is consistent in a lot of these cases in
Speaker 5: this book that Knew Chronicle, but also that the idea
Speaker 5: that this boyfriend was known to be boyfriend David Papple,
Speaker 5: that she had said that she had a love for David,
Speaker 5: She developed a love for David that he would be
Speaker 5: involved with the family in the search while there was
Speaker 5: no official police search. But tell us what if any
Speaker 5: clues were found in that diary.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they searched her room, sort of hoping to get
Speaker 3: some tidbits about where she might be, and they did
Speaker 3: find her diary.
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Speaker 3: Inside the diary, the first thing they noticed was that
Speaker 3: there were entries written in code, and they were hoping
Speaker 3: that those coded entries would help them. So sometimes, you know,
Speaker 3: if if you hear about this case, some people get
Speaker 3: very excited that there is a secret code in the diary,
Speaker 3: but unfortunately it's not that compelling. There are two other
Speaker 3: compelling clues in the diary. Code was really just about
Speaker 3: her kissing boys. It does tell us, though, a lot
Speaker 3: about her as a person.
Speaker 6: If you know she.
Speaker 3: Was doing anything more a lift or risky, you would
Speaker 3: expect her to have recorded that in her diary in
Speaker 3: that code, and she didn't. The most risky things Jazzie
Speaker 3: wrote about really were kissing boys, so you know, she
Speaker 3: was still a rather naive and an innocent young girl
Speaker 3: in many ways. But in the diary there are two
Speaker 3: clues that are still unresolved. The first is a picture
Speaker 3: of a young man that is unidentified. The picture has
Speaker 3: a dark haired young man sitting on steps of some
Speaker 3: sort of building, like an early twentieth century late nineteenth century,
Speaker 3: looking sort of Romanesque architecture building.
Speaker 6: Smiling. This snapshot had a name written on the back,
Speaker 6: and the name.
Speaker 3: Is Ricardo Fropo. Of course I can't find a record
Speaker 3: of any Ricardo Forropo ever existing, so I think that
Speaker 3: name is pretty made up. The other clue is a
Speaker 3: phone number in the back. There are actually two phone numbers.
Speaker 3: The first one was scratched out as if it was
Speaker 3: an error, and using reverse telephone search in the archives,
Speaker 3: I was able to find out that number doesn't exist
Speaker 3: from that time period in this area code, so it
Speaker 3: probably really was an error. The phone number it is there,
Speaker 3: I did find in the diary.
Speaker 6: There's no name with the phone number.
Speaker 3: Instead, there is again sort of a code, but if
Speaker 3: you run it through her diary code, it doesn't give
Speaker 3: any answers at all. The code is l L L
Speaker 3: four one K. The four oh one is interesting because
Speaker 3: of course that's the highway, but that went through town,
Speaker 3: but I can't figure out the rest. And there is
Speaker 3: this phone number. I contacted the people who had the
Speaker 3: phone number during that time. Significantly, Jackie had gotten this
Speaker 3: diary for her birthday to previous April, so she only
Speaker 3: had it for six months. That phone number then had
Speaker 3: to be concurrent with who had that number during that
Speaker 3: six month period. It's not like she wrote it in
Speaker 3: there five years earlier and the number changed hands. When
Speaker 3: I spoke to the woman whose number it was, she
Speaker 3: was just shot that a murder victim had her phone
Speaker 3: number in there. And she and her husband only lived
Speaker 3: in London, Ontario for a very short period of time,
Speaker 3: about eighteen months. But interestingly, she did tell me that
Speaker 3: she was doing her masters at the University of Toronto,
Speaker 3: which is two hours away, and she was only home
Speaker 3: on the weekends. So you know, I haven't been able
Speaker 3: to account for her husband's whereabouts during the week in
Speaker 3: that time period. So I think that's an interesting lead
Speaker 3: that I'd want law enforcement to take up.
Speaker 5: Very interesting. You also talk about a horrible scene in
Speaker 5: that Agnes Murray had to id the body and then
Speaker 5: the police, insensitive at the time, said listen, she wasn't
Speaker 5: a virgin. She couldn't even recognize she couldn't even recognize
Speaker 5: her without that police officer show or that person showing
Speaker 5: them her birthmark. And then you talk about Doris suicide
Speaker 5: attempt and where does she end up for a year after.
Speaker 6: This in the London psychiatric hospital. Yeah. So she's left her.
Speaker 3: Son who's fourteen, and her older daughter who's sixteen.
Speaker 6: They have their.
Speaker 3: Single mom is in the psych hospital and their father
Speaker 3: is in Hamilton in the hospital dying of cancer. So
Speaker 3: these two kids have no one. They're just on their own,
Speaker 3: and of course they have to work to pay the bills.
Speaker 3: There's no financial help from them at all from the government.
Speaker 3: And heartbreakingly, her little brother got a job at the
Speaker 3: same posh restaurant that she'd worked at, washing dishes to
Speaker 3: help raise money to pay.
Speaker 6: For gravestone for her. So, I mean, the whole story
Speaker 6: is just agonizing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And then you have a scene where detective also
Speaker 5: involved in this first involved in this investigation, is at
Speaker 5: that funeral and as police understood at least at that time,
Speaker 5: it might be a good idea to observe the funeral
Speaker 5: in case to see who might come and people's behavior. Now,
Speaker 5: the next case that you talk about is Jacqueline Dunlevy,
Speaker 5: and first tell us who her father is, and then
Speaker 5: you open with three boys. This one deaf mute named
Speaker 5: Wayne Heblithwaite. He just first day got a car. He
Speaker 5: was able to drive, you know, fite this disability, and
Speaker 5: he was going cruising with his friends. Tell us who
Speaker 5: Jacqueline dun Levy is. How old? Does she tell us
Speaker 5: about her father and then tell us about Wayne and
Speaker 5: his buddies what they discover one night driving.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Jacqueline on Levy was sixteen, I believe, and forgive
Speaker 3: me if I'm getting that wrong. She made it in fifteen.
Speaker 3: I don't have it in front of me. Jackie Jacqueline
Speaker 3: was a high school student who had a part time
Speaker 3: job after school at a variety store in downtown London.
Speaker 3: Her father was a constable with the London Police. He
Speaker 3: was actually the head of the union, so you know,
Speaker 3: he was a well loved, well recognized member of the
Speaker 3: London Police Force.
Speaker 6: And they lived in the West End of the city.
Speaker 3: And Jacqueline went to high school in the West End.
Speaker 3: But she had this part time job a variety store
Speaker 3: sort of downtown, so she'd go there after school and
Speaker 3: work a three hour shift twice a week on Tuesdays
Speaker 3: and Thursdays. So it was on one of those Thursdays,
Speaker 3: on January ninth, nineteen sixty eight, she left work and
Speaker 3: I mean it was cold, it was January in Canada,
Speaker 3: and she was supposed to head to the bus stop
Speaker 3: to go home, but of course she never came home.
Speaker 3: And yeah, she had gotten into a vehicle. There was
Speaker 3: someone who reported that they saw her get into a vehicle.
Speaker 5: How was she found, what was the condition on when
Speaker 5: she was found? And we haven't mentioned Jackie English's condition,
Speaker 5: but we will just talk about how she was found,
Speaker 5: how dun Levy was found.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm really glad you asked me about that because
Speaker 3: to me, that's one of the more fascinating stories in
Speaker 3: the book.
Speaker 6: And this is exactly the type of.
Speaker 3: Local history that really captivates my imagination how people come
Speaker 3: together at these strange situations. There were these There was
Speaker 3: to start with Wayne Haltswaite, who was deaf, and he
Speaker 3: had been in the foster care system and he'd had
Speaker 3: a rough life, but he'd finally landed on his feet
Speaker 3: with this great foster family who had their own biological
Speaker 3: daughter was deaf as well. And you know, Wayne was
Speaker 3: nineteen and he'd just gotten this car. He hadn't even
Speaker 3: gotten the ownership papers yet, he'd gotten.
Speaker 6: This car that was outfitted so that a deaf.
Speaker 3: Person could drive. And he was really excited about it.
Speaker 3: So he got permission from his parents to go out
Speaker 3: on the school night and he went and picked up
Speaker 3: two of his friends that he'd known when he was
Speaker 3: in an earlier stage of sort of the child welfare system,
Speaker 3: living in a group home. So he picked up these
Speaker 3: two guys and they were going out cruising. I mean
Speaker 3: they were teenagers. The two younger boys were fourteen and
Speaker 3: Wayne was nineteen, so there's an age disparity there. But
Speaker 3: they because of the child welfare system that they were
Speaker 3: a part of, they would have gone for assessments or
Speaker 3: treatments out at the Children's Psychiatric Research Institute on the
Speaker 3: West end of London. So this was a location they
Speaker 3: knew of and it was a place.
Speaker 6: Where they could go to sort of. They knew this
Speaker 6: was a spot they could be alone, maybe smoke a joint.
Speaker 3: Maybe have a beer, or even just they smoke cigarettes
Speaker 3: and not getting shipp from their parents, so they were
Speaker 3: they drive. They drove out there in Wayne's new car
Speaker 3: for what was supposed to be a really fun night,
Speaker 3: and then they pulled in to the They they pulled
Speaker 3: into the driveway of one of the schools there. It
Speaker 3: was the Castine Harley school for unfortunately named the Retrainable
Speaker 3: Retarded Children, and they pulled into the school parking lot
Speaker 3: and that's where they found the body of Jacqueline Dunleavy.
Speaker 5: Now what was it again? What was the condition? What
Speaker 5: are the some of the things that they found Initially
Speaker 5: just with that discovery of her body, well, I.
Speaker 3: Mean, the three boys took off right away, and they
Speaker 3: fortunately found an officer in a cruiser who came to
Speaker 3: the scene, and that officer I interviewed, and he stayed
Speaker 3: at the scene. They had this It's an archaic system,
Speaker 3: I'll admit, but their system was for the officer who
Speaker 3: was first on the scene to stay with the body
Speaker 3: all the way through for chain of evidence, and he
Speaker 3: was to write his name on the victim's hand in
Speaker 3: ballpoint ten. So he was there through the entire thing.
Speaker 3: And he had known Jacqueline Dunleavy personally because she babedat
Speaker 3: for him, and her body was so badly battered in
Speaker 3: the face that he did not recognize her, did not
Speaker 3: realize it was her until they sound her wallet. She
Speaker 3: had been strangled with her own scarf. She'd been beaten
Speaker 3: badly around the left side of her face. So if
Speaker 3: she was the passenger in a vehicle, that would make sense.
Speaker 3: Her shirt was torn open, exposing her breast, her skirt
Speaker 3: was typed up exposing her vaginal area, and the contents
Speaker 3: of her backpack, like if her bag were sort of
Speaker 3: strewn about, and there was semen on her coat, and
Speaker 3: I believe there was some semen in her mouth. But
Speaker 3: what's very interesting is that in her mouth was stuffed
Speaker 3: a package on like a travel pat of pink facial tissue. Yeah,
Speaker 3: which of course means that I don't ever want to
Speaker 3: have a package of facial tissue around me ever again,
Speaker 3: Yeah sure, yeah.
Speaker 5: Interestingly too, the boys were taken to the police station
Speaker 5: and Wayne horrifyingly didn't know what was going on, was
Speaker 5: very confused, very scared, and his foster parents were not notified. Again,
Speaker 5: this just added to the dismay of everyone, but the
Speaker 5: parents were relieved when they saw him at five five
Speaker 5: in the morning. He came home. But in this investigation,
Speaker 5: which again a very heavy scene in your book, is
Speaker 5: that this police officer, John Dunlevy, has to go down
Speaker 5: in id his daughter's body.
Speaker 6: And you're right about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the officer who had stayed with her body throughout.
Speaker 3: Was also at the Morgue when John came in and
Speaker 3: he said that he just was completely broken, just completely broken.
Speaker 3: And you can imagine being a constable. Your job is
Speaker 3: to protect the public. Here is your own daughter. And
Speaker 3: I honestly, Jane, I can't think of anything worse than
Speaker 3: losing a child in a random serial homicide. I mean,
Speaker 3: these are predators and it's the most terrifying thing to me.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, And also with detective Also, interestingly, dun Levy's murder
Speaker 5: was not in his jurisdiction, but he wanted to read
Speaker 5: the files and you write it reminded him of a
Speaker 5: case he investigated two years earlier in Elmer. So we'll
Speaker 5: be talking about that soon. We'll be talking about that soon.
Speaker 5: So now shortly after this, again I'm skipping over these
Speaker 5: leads that the police have to contend with. But you
Speaker 5: also have the issue that you talk about, and we
Speaker 5: might as well talk about it now that there was
Speaker 5: there was an issue. As people know that have watched
Speaker 5: any kind of police procedurals on TV fiction and non fiction,
Speaker 5: there's jurisdiction problems. Now there's London Police and then the
Speaker 5: Ontario Provincial Police explain the differences in the forces and
Speaker 5: any tension there might be in the jurisdictions as these
Speaker 5: cases escalate and the pressure from the community escalates as well.
Speaker 3: Sure, I think from a geographical standpoint, it's like there's
Speaker 3: a city and then you have your city police and
Speaker 3: then you have your sheriff's department. It's sort of similar
Speaker 3: to that relationship. So in London, Ontario, London proper, you
Speaker 3: have a London Police force and their job is to
Speaker 3: take care of anything that happens within the city, and
Speaker 3: then the opp the Ontario Provincial Police, they take care
Speaker 3: of the rural community is surrounding and any small towns
Speaker 3: or villages that don't have their own independent police force.
Speaker 3: But of course, what was happening with these murders consistently
Speaker 3: is that with the exception of the Dunleavy case, is
Speaker 3: that the individuals taken from the London area and then
Speaker 3: their body is disposed of in Ontario provincial jurisdiction.
Speaker 6: So wherever the.
Speaker 3: Body is found, that's the force that's in charge of
Speaker 3: the case. So you have these Ontario police who they're
Speaker 3: not just in charge of the rural area, they're also
Speaker 3: sort of called in for special special crimes, like major crimes,
Speaker 3: sort of like how you'd call in the SBI.
Speaker 6: The OPP does that too, So for.
Speaker 3: The Independent Police in London having the OPP come in,
Speaker 3: it's sort of like your big brother is showing up
Speaker 3: at your party and all your friends thank your big
Speaker 3: brother is really cool, and you're like, get out of
Speaker 3: my birthday party because you're ruining it. I want the attention.
Speaker 3: So there's that struggle between the two jurisdictions. I do
Speaker 3: know of instances where information was just straight up not
Speaker 3: passed between the two bodies. And you know it's not
Speaker 3: just because of you know, computer systems and databases.
Speaker 6: There are people who.
Speaker 3: Did investigations in London that should have shared that information.
Speaker 3: So you know, Detective Alsop is having to navigate those
Speaker 3: relationships while at the same time just trying to find
Speaker 3: out who's killing these children.
Speaker 5: Now you write about a serial killer expert, and I
Speaker 5: think it's important to talk about this now as we
Speaker 5: proceed into other victims and other ages. Well not saying
Speaker 5: necessarily other races, but there is biracial victim. Let's talk
Speaker 5: about doctor Mike Ahmad, who runs a serial killer database
Speaker 5: at Radford University. He talks about the common misperception about
Speaker 5: serial killers. What is that common misperception regarding.
Speaker 3: The mixed perception is that serial killers only kill the
Speaker 3: same type of victim every time. And I think a
Speaker 3: lot of that public perception comes from Ted Bundy, you know,
Speaker 3: or David Berkowitz, like women changing their haircuts so they
Speaker 3: don't match the profile, so the serial killer won't pick
Speaker 3: them up.
Speaker 6: So there's this perception that, you know, a serial killer
Speaker 6: will only.
Speaker 3: Kill teenage girls, or they'll only kill children, or they'll
Speaker 3: only kill old women, like the Boston Strangler or that
Speaker 3: sort of thing. Not that the Boston Strangler only kills
Speaker 3: old women. But you know what I'm saying, and what
Speaker 3: doctor Amu is saying is that that's not correct. The
Speaker 3: serial killers often cross lines of gender, cross lines of race,
Speaker 3: cross lines of age, that there are so many factors
Speaker 3: that come into play. So victimology can be deceptive. It
Speaker 3: can seem.
Speaker 6: Like pauh, this is a separate set of cases. But
Speaker 6: if you have those.
Speaker 3: Blinders on, you can miss other connections that might tell you, no,
Speaker 3: this is the same person. This individual is killing men
Speaker 3: and women, you know, children and teenagers, black people, white people,
Speaker 3: Indigenous people.
Speaker 6: It doesn't have to be so black and white. That's
Speaker 6: the misperception.
Speaker 5: Right now. That leads us to February ninth, nineteen sixty
Speaker 5: eight and a victim of nine years old, Frankie Jensen.
Speaker 5: And you write that since the Jacqueline Dunlevy's murdered parents
Speaker 5: asked their kids, obviously, you know, to stay together. But
Speaker 5: tell us what Frankie does on his way to school,
Speaker 5: and again, how do they find his body, what's the condition,
Speaker 5: and what is the similarity with the dun Levy case.
Speaker 3: Remarkably yes, yeah, So Frankie actually lived in the same
Speaker 3: neighborhood as Jackie and he was taken exactly a month
Speaker 3: later to the day. So Frankie was on his way
Speaker 3: to school and there was this group of school kids
Speaker 3: that were walking together to be safe. But Frankie had
Speaker 3: gone home sick from school the day before and he
Speaker 3: was late coming out of his house that morning, so
Speaker 3: when he didn't come out on time, the group of
Speaker 3: school kids sort of thought he wasn't coming, so they
Speaker 3: went on ahead of him. But in fact, Frankie had
Speaker 3: had a problem with his winter coat because again it's
Speaker 3: February in Canada, and by the time he figured out
Speaker 3: that situation, got out the door, the group of kids
Speaker 3: was far ahead of him, so he was isolated unpredictably.
Speaker 3: So so that does tell you something about the killer
Speaker 3: that they have to be regularly hunting looking for that opportunity.
Speaker 3: So Frankie walked to school and in fact he got
Speaker 3: pretty close to the school but the bell rang and
Speaker 3: some of his friends saw him on his way, but
Speaker 3: they all went inside the building and he never made
Speaker 3: it into the building.
Speaker 6: So they found his body.
Speaker 3: In early spring, shortly thereafter, I believe it's about six
Speaker 3: weeks afterwards, and he was again outside of London. Now
Speaker 3: in this situation, he's not he's like Jackie English in
Speaker 3: a body of water. So he's in the Thames.
Speaker 6: River and they recovered him.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because a week before they found his body
Speaker 3: in the water, there was actually a canoe race that
Speaker 3: went right by his body. And in fact, the farmer
Speaker 3: who found him had been at that part of the
Speaker 3: river watching the canoes go by, and he thought he
Speaker 3: saw something in the water, but he wasn't sure what
Speaker 3: it was.
Speaker 6: And it was about a week. Oh it was.
Speaker 3: The farmer didn't find his body. I'm sorry it was
Speaker 3: on his property, but A week later, another pair of
Speaker 3: canoers were going up that same route when they found
Speaker 3: Frankie in the water and he was partially closed horses,
Speaker 3: pants were removed, and in his mouth was a wad
Speaker 3: of pink facial tissue.
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Speaker 5: Eighteen plus right, you know? And despite this you in
Speaker 5: the press at that time the London Police Force said
Speaker 5: they didn't think the killings of Frankie Jensen and Jacqueline
Speaker 5: dun Levy were connected, and even though the bodies were
Speaker 5: found so close to each other. Now, despite that, you
Speaker 5: talk about Scott Leishman. Tell us a little bit about
Speaker 5: particulars of the Scott Leishman disappearance.
Speaker 3: Right, So actually just just before they found Frankie's body,
Speaker 3: but you know, on the same I mean the same concession.
Speaker 3: I mean, like hundreds of yards away from where they
Speaker 3: would find Frankie's body, another boy is picked up Scott Leishman.
Speaker 3: He gets into a car willingly taking a ride on
Speaker 3: March Break after a fishing trip with some friends, and
Speaker 3: then his body is found later that's spring, closer to summer,
Speaker 3: in a body of water. For the same body of
Speaker 3: water by the way that Jackie English was found in
Speaker 3: just in a different section of that body of water
Speaker 3: in the harbor of Port Burwell in southwestern Ontario. So
Speaker 3: you have Jackie Dunleavy whose body is found close to
Speaker 3: where she lived and close to where Frankie Jensen lived.
Speaker 3: Frankie's taken from that same spot and then found out
Speaker 3: is actually in the country in Thorndale, about twenty minutes
Speaker 3: outside of London.
Speaker 6: He's found in the river. And then right where Frankie
Speaker 6: was found, another boy.
Speaker 3: Is taken and he's found in the water that connects
Speaker 3: to Jackie English's murder. So you know these from the
Speaker 3: geographical standpoint, it's bizarre. And the pink tissue in the
Speaker 3: mouth is also an important point. Mike Arnsfield talks about
Speaker 3: how the press had revealed that Jackie Dunmedy had this
Speaker 3: pink tissue in her mouth, and so that whoever killed
Speaker 3: Frankie Jensen was probably a copycat.
Speaker 6: That's possible.
Speaker 3: However, I do think we can't ignore that he's coming
Speaker 3: from the same neighborhood and it's a month to the day,
Speaker 3: and you know, if you're talking about an opportunistic sexual
Speaker 3: predator who sees that in the newspaper and says, oh,
Speaker 3: if I commit a murder now and I put pink
Speaker 3: tissue in their mouth, they'll think it's this guy and
Speaker 3: they'll throw them off the scent. Okay, but what are
Speaker 3: the chances of that person also says I'm going to
Speaker 3: take a kid from the same neighborhood. I'm going to
Speaker 3: do it a month to the day. You know, it's
Speaker 3: a little too much of a coincidence for me. And
Speaker 3: the two cases are related, regardless whether one influenced the
Speaker 3: other and it's two different killers, or if it is
Speaker 3: the same killer, I think there's definitely a relationship there
Speaker 3: that can't be ignored. And of course Scott Leishman is
Speaker 3: to me clearly picked up when a killer is revisiting
Speaker 3: the scene and revisiting Frankie's body, I that's just two
Speaker 3: bizarre coincidence. And he lived across the street from the
Speaker 3: river where Frankie was found, So it's just implausible to
Speaker 3: me that it's not the same killer.
Speaker 5: And you write too that police were not aware of
Speaker 5: connections and ideas that killers would till they had Bundy,
Speaker 5: and that they had spoke to him and others like him.
Speaker 5: They had no idea that people would go back to
Speaker 5: a disposal site and then revisit the corpses or anything
Speaker 5: like that. They didn't assume those things when they looked
Speaker 5: at a crime scene or the connection between crime scenes,
Speaker 5: did they.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 3: I mean they have the idea that criminals returned to
Speaker 3: the scene scene of the crime that old maxim. That's
Speaker 3: why they're checking all the license plates at the funeral, right,
Speaker 3: because I figure the killer is going to be curious
Speaker 3: and want to see what's going on. But I think
Speaker 3: the idea with the killer is keeping track to make
Speaker 3: sure they don't get caught, not that the killer has
Speaker 3: some sort of erotic sexual arousal from looking at the
Speaker 3: corpse or some sort of other excitement that comes from
Speaker 3: looking at the corpse, which, yeah, that comes into play
Speaker 3: much later. Keeping in mind that this is nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 3: so that you're just starting to have the zodiac is
Speaker 3: the next year the Manson family murders of the next
Speaker 3: year public awareness and understanding. We want to think that
Speaker 3: the cops are ten years ahead of us in our
Speaker 3: understanding of criminal behavior, but that's not always the case,
Speaker 3: And just to.
Speaker 6: Quickly speak to it.
Speaker 3: In nineteen sixty eight, in London, Ontario, police were required
Speaker 3: to have a grade ten education. There was no one
Speaker 3: trade trained and homicide, there was no forensic pathologists, so
Speaker 3: you're talking about essentially glorified bouncers. And if you do
Speaker 3: have someone with a higher skill level who's going to
Speaker 3: be looking at serial bank robbers or fraudsters, they're going
Speaker 3: to be at the opp level. And they are also
Speaker 3: a very small handful of identification officers like Dennis Alsop,
Speaker 3: who fortunately was local and was working on these cases,
Speaker 3: but he was maybe you know, five or six other
Speaker 3: officers in the entire province who had that skill set.
Speaker 3: So there's there's no awareness of serial well the word
Speaker 3: serial killer doesn't exist, but there's no awareness of this
Speaker 3: sort of pathological behavior, and if there is very limited
Speaker 3: to a select group of individuals and certainly not to
Speaker 3: anyone on the London Police Force.
Speaker 5: Now you include shortly after this another attack, again completely
Speaker 5: different victimology. August fifth, nineteen sixty eight, Helga Beer. She's
Speaker 5: thirty one years old and she's a whig stylist and
Speaker 5: she's last seen exiting her friend's place with a tall
Speaker 5: guy about five foot ten, dark hair, thick eyebrows, and
Speaker 5: that matches a lot of descriptions of this person the
Speaker 5: thick or bushy eyebrows and late twenties to mid thirties,
Speaker 5: and somebody discovers her in her VW Beetle, which seems
Speaker 5: to be pretty popular according to this book of a
Speaker 5: vehicle at that time. What is her condition? How is
Speaker 5: she found?
Speaker 3: She is found in the vehicle, on her back, her
Speaker 3: partially clothed, her bottoms removed, and strangled to death.
Speaker 6: In the back of her car.
Speaker 3: And of course her car was in this parking lot
Speaker 3: she has found by the aged parking attendant in the morning.
Speaker 3: But her car had been parked in reverse under a tree,
Speaker 3: which is interesting because she never reversed her car to park.
Speaker 3: In fact, she hated doing it. She would always go
Speaker 3: out of her way to find a parking spot you
Speaker 3: could pull into because she was any good at reverse parking.
Speaker 3: So the killer must have been driving her car at
Speaker 3: some point and her underwear there was of course semen internally,
Speaker 3: but also semen on her underwear, so police at the
Speaker 3: time thought that she'd had consensual sex, then been murdered
Speaker 3: and then had her clothing removed, But I don't know
Speaker 3: about that, Jackie English. Also when they found her underwear,
Speaker 3: they found a semen sample on her underwear as well
Speaker 3: as the internal samples, So.
Speaker 6: That's a consistency there that I held as older.
Speaker 3: She's found in a car, and she's found in an
Speaker 3: urban area, so I understand why people would want to
Speaker 3: exclude her based.
Speaker 6: On those factors.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, the partially closed sexual homicide
Speaker 3: strangulation on her back, it's very similar, and I do
Speaker 3: have to admit, as you mentioned, the suspect description is
Speaker 3: very similar to one of the top suspects in the book,
Speaker 3: and I wouldn't discount this at all from the list
Speaker 3: of victims involved.
Speaker 5: You talk about. In October, the reward was offered for
Speaker 5: information about Jackie English, Jacqueline Dunlevy, and Fred Jensen, which
Speaker 5: for fifty thousand dollars, so it was a very impressive
Speaker 5: amount at that time. Then we talked you talk about
Speaker 5: Linda White and Bruce Stapleoton. Linda White's story's very hard breaking.
Speaker 5: Tell us about she decides to move from Burlington to London, Ontario.
Speaker 5: Tell us a little bit about Linda White and her family.
Speaker 3: You know, Linda came from a very successful family from Burlington.
Speaker 3: She was a sweet girl and they had everything they needed.
Speaker 3: She had a happy home life, and they had enough
Speaker 3: money to make themselves happy.
Speaker 6: She was shy, you.
Speaker 3: Know, in high school, but in her senior year she
Speaker 3: sort of changed. She bleached her dark brown hair into
Speaker 3: this blonde and she started dating the star quarterback. She
Speaker 3: was an athlete on the track and field team, and
Speaker 3: she found herself as one of the popular kids. And
Speaker 3: she was a great student. She was doing really well.
Speaker 3: She had a very promising feature. So a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of her friends in Burlington graduated high school and all
Speaker 3: decided to go to Western University. So they moved here,
Speaker 3: and two of her high school friends were actually her roommates,
Speaker 3: and they got a little cottage off campus to live together,
Speaker 3: and you know, they were having a good time. She'd
Speaker 3: only been at Western for a couple months. It was November.
Speaker 3: She was taking a French exam, and she finished her
Speaker 3: exam and she wanted to go out and have a
Speaker 3: drink after class, but she couldn't find anyone to go
Speaker 3: along with her.
Speaker 6: So she got a lift.
Speaker 3: Not to her house, but to a neighborhood adjacent to
Speaker 3: her neighborhood, like a ten minute walk, and presumably she
Speaker 3: was going to stop by someone else's house and see
Speaker 3: if they would go for a drink with her, you know,
Speaker 3: not wanting to give up on celebrating her successful French exams.
Speaker 3: But she never made at home, so the last person
Speaker 3: to see her was the individual who dropped her off,
Speaker 3: and then she she was gone. So her family came
Speaker 3: from Oh go ahead, no.
Speaker 5: Go ahead, sorry.
Speaker 3: Her family came immediately from Burlington, and in fact, they
Speaker 3: knew her roommates had called the family, and her brother
Speaker 3: came right away, John's, shortly followed by her father. They
Speaker 3: knew the police wouldn't pay attention, and in fact, when
Speaker 3: they did finally call the police, the police just said, oh,
Speaker 3: she's run away. She's just another hippie, you know. But
Speaker 3: what's interesting is what prompted them to.
Speaker 6: Call the police. They were really worried.
Speaker 3: I mean, they started their own civilian search for her
Speaker 3: right away, and they went just like Jackie's family went
Speaker 3: into her room to search for clothes, and they didn't
Speaker 3: see anything out of the ordinary. But you know, two
Speaker 3: days into the search, they go into her room and
Speaker 3: they see her clothes that she'd been wearing on the
Speaker 3: night she disappeared, bundled up under her bed. And this
Speaker 3: is new, and you know they're asking themselves, did you
Speaker 3: see that before? And this isn't like Linda. Linda's someone
Speaker 3: who folds stuff up. She's a neat and tidy girl.
Speaker 3: So this scared them so much that that's when they
Speaker 3: called the police.
Speaker 5: Now you right that they were asked. The friends were asked,
Speaker 5: were those clothes under that bed in the first search?
Speaker 5: And they said no, we're certain they weren't. What did
Speaker 5: the police conclude, again, not so surprising. What do they
Speaker 5: say and conclude from that same information?
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, she just came home before she went to
Speaker 3: the bar, she got changed, she threw her stuff into
Speaker 3: the bed, and she went out drinking.
Speaker 5: Yeah, incredible. Now you include June seventh, nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 5: Bruce Stapleoton. He's eleven years old and his remains aren't
Speaker 5: found in September twenty third. There's not so much information
Speaker 5: about him, but you say there's a possible connection. What
Speaker 5: is the condition he's found in and is that part
Speaker 5: of the possible connection in your mind?
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, Bruce was yeah, as you said, eleven years old,
Speaker 3: and he regularly went off on his own to go
Speaker 3: camping in the woods. So it took a little longer
Speaker 3: for his family to clue and that he was missing.
Speaker 3: But he was living with a single father who had
Speaker 3: been widowed and had his own children and his step children.
Speaker 3: He had a large brood of kids to take care of,
Speaker 3: so these children were very self sufficient and being raised
Speaker 3: by a dad. So there's kind of rough and tumble boys.
Speaker 3: He kind of pictured it as a sitcom, you know,
Speaker 3: And Bruce goes off to go camping and his body
Speaker 3: was found, as you say that September, farther than an
Speaker 3: eleven year old would walk. He's found out on the
Speaker 3: sort of rural outskirts of northern London at Sunningdale and Adelaide,
Speaker 3: which doesn't mean anything to anyone who's not from Lunton.
Speaker 6: I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: He was in the woods and his body was skeletalized
Speaker 3: and torn apart by animals.
Speaker 6: So the scene of his.
Speaker 3: You know, his body's disposal scene is much more difficult
Speaker 3: to interpret than that of the other victims. I don't
Speaker 3: know how much clothing he had on. I don't know
Speaker 3: if there was any semen found at the scene. I
Speaker 3: do have one tidbit of information that they suspected he
Speaker 3: was killed by blunt force trauma.
Speaker 6: With a brick.
Speaker 3: There was also a lead that there was a shed
Speaker 3: not far from where his body was found that had
Speaker 3: actually been torn down in between the time he went
Speaker 3: missing and when his body was found, and the property
Speaker 3: owners said that when they tore the shed down, part
Speaker 3: of their motivation for that was that they could tell
Speaker 3: people had been living in it. So that's an interesting
Speaker 3: note as well for that case. But I think in general,
Speaker 3: when you have an anomalous state of child murders going
Speaker 3: on in a place, you include all of them. And
Speaker 3: you know, Bruce was clearly taken by.
Speaker 6: Someone who was in a vehicle. He's a young boy.
Speaker 6: You know he's murdered. It's probably by bunt force traumas.
Speaker 3: There are enough commonalities that you know, I wouldn't exclude him.
Speaker 3: I'd keep them in there because what are the chances
Speaker 3: that this is a one off murder? When you have
Speaker 3: the context of a serial killer, right, you have to
Speaker 3: include it until you can exclude.
Speaker 6: My opinion, we have.
Speaker 5: In your book, you have a particular it's not a detour,
Speaker 5: but it's as great true crime and fantastic nonfiction stories.
Speaker 5: You can't even come up with stuff like this in fiction.
Speaker 5: There is a Betty Harrison, and there's a Glenn Friar,
Speaker 5: but we won't have enough time to go down this.
Speaker 5: It's not a rabbit hole, but it's a very very complex,
Speaker 5: interesting case. Betty Harrison. Let's just go and describe this
Speaker 5: in general, because it ends up in a trial and
Speaker 5: it ends up in a discharge with the judge making
Speaker 5: a statement to him. But we don't want to skip
Speaker 5: over David Bodemer and the Jehovah witnesses and that incredible
Speaker 5: story and investigation and trial, So let's summarize somewhat Betty
Speaker 5: Harrison and Glenn Fryer and their connection and this incredible
Speaker 5: trial that's part of just a small part of your book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I thank you for bringing it up because
Speaker 3: I think for those readers who do you want to
Speaker 3: engage with the material on that level, I think the
Speaker 3: Glenn Friar trial and investigation is incredibly revealing in regards
Speaker 3: to the Jackie English murder, and it can't be discounted
Speaker 3: at all. But it is that sort of complex puzzle
Speaker 3: solving detective work that has to go into it and
Speaker 3: putting these sort of intricate pieces together. So it is bizarre,
Speaker 3: but essentially Betty Harrison was this woman who came forward
Speaker 3: as an eyewitness, not an eyewitness, but as a witness
Speaker 3: for the Jackie English murder. And she said that the
Speaker 3: night before Jackie disappeared, she saw these two men at
Speaker 3: the Metropolitan restaurant talking to Jackie and that Jackie was upset,
Speaker 3: and these men, of course became persons of interest for
Speaker 3: the police. They made a composite sketch and it was
Speaker 3: published widely in.
Speaker 6: The local media.
Speaker 3: So Betty had come forward as this witness, and she
Speaker 3: starts getting harassing phone calls, you know, knocks on the
Speaker 3: door in the middle of the night, threatening letters, and
Speaker 3: eventually she is attacked. Lucy's a whole bunch of cuts,
Speaker 3: twenty seven lacerations, hospitalized, and eventually she fingers her attacker
Speaker 3: as Glenn Fryer, who's actually the principle of Children's Psychiatric
Speaker 3: Research Institute where Jackie Dunleedy's body was found. So the
Speaker 3: London community assumed that whoever had attacked Betty Harrison was
Speaker 3: also responsible for Jackie English's murder.
Speaker 6: So the trial that.
Speaker 3: Came up about a year later in November of nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy really was for the community.
Speaker 6: Also a trial for all of these.
Speaker 3: Unsolved murders, and Londoners really wanted a resolution. It's a
Speaker 3: very exciting chapter in the story, actually the whole chunk
Speaker 3: of chapters of the story.
Speaker 6: But essentially what happens is.
Speaker 3: Glenn Fryar is given a Scottish verdict. So the judge
Speaker 3: is saying to him, there's not enough for me to
Speaker 3: find you guilty, but I can't equate you. You are
Speaker 3: neither guilty nor innocent, and he pleads with him. And actually,
Speaker 3: Dan I talked to one of the reporters who was there,
Speaker 3: whose articles I used, actually his research on him recently
Speaker 3: at a book event, and he said to.
Speaker 6: Me that the judge was prequent, just desperately.
Speaker 3: Saying to him, if you committed these crimes, giving the
Speaker 3: impression really that he thought he had, but that he
Speaker 3: didn't have enough evidence to put him behind bars. Just
Speaker 3: please get help, please stop, you know. And of course
Speaker 3: Glenn Fryer leaves with a huge smile in his face,
Speaker 3: a much bigger smile than most of us would have,
Speaker 3: I think, after a judge basically said you're guilty, but
Speaker 3: I can't lock you up, she goes out there like
Speaker 3: he's really exonerated with this huge smile on his face
Speaker 3: with the cameras and kissing his wife and showing off
Speaker 3: to the press and telling jokes. I mean, he is
Speaker 3: he is a character. So I know we're not going
Speaker 3: to get into him, but to me, he's a major
Speaker 3: suspect in these murders. I have interviewed him, I've spoken
Speaker 3: to him, and I would never take him off the table.
Speaker 3: He's definitely of vital interest. But yes, you're right, that
Speaker 3: trial and the investigation is very complicated and bizarre, and
Speaker 3: I think people who like that in true crime are
Speaker 3: really going to enjoy that section of the book. People
Speaker 3: who like a more straightforward bad guy caught by you know, cop,
Speaker 3: more straightforward thing aren't going.
Speaker 6: To be But if you like puzzles, that's that's the best.
Speaker 6: That's the best section I think of the book.
Speaker 5: Mm hmm. Now you include the case of again a
Speaker 5: very sad case of Sararah O'Connell. And this is his
Speaker 5: biracial she's Pakistani and her father is a Caucasian, I believe,
Speaker 5: and she goes to she is in school, she's shy.
Speaker 5: Her friends are telling her, listen, this is the kind
Speaker 5: of time where this at this community dance. You need
Speaker 5: to reach out and approach somebody. It's just a dance.
Speaker 5: And of course she does tell us what happens at
Speaker 5: this dance.
Speaker 6: Yeah, she was at this dance and they had you know,
Speaker 6: the switch with the girls asked the boys.
Speaker 3: And of course, as I say in the book, she
Speaker 3: thought she should ask the boys she wanted to dance with,
Speaker 3: not the boy she could dance with. So she goes
Speaker 3: to one of the most handsome, popular boys in school
Speaker 3: and asks him to dance, and he turns around in
Speaker 3: front of everyone and tells her he would never dance
Speaker 3: with you know, I think he said, like a fat,
Speaker 3: smelling immigrant. And she's embarrassed and horrified and she runs
Speaker 3: out of the dance. And of course this dance is
Speaker 3: on the edge of town. She doesn't have a ride.
Speaker 3: The dances on the northern end of the city, this
Speaker 3: time in actually an old country schoolhouse that had been
Speaker 3: shut down and essentially in a rural area. I grew
Speaker 3: up right near there, and there was nothing. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's built up now, but there was nothing. So she
Speaker 3: walked over towards what's really highway for it's Highbury abb.
Speaker 3: Once it gets into the city, but in this section
Speaker 3: at that time it was really a country road and
Speaker 3: presumably gotten a vehicle.
Speaker 6: There were some people who said they saw.
Speaker 3: Her hitching to get home and she was never seen alive.
Speaker 5: Again, let's talk about Georgia Jackson and tell us where
Speaker 5: Elmer is in relation to London, and tell us a
Speaker 5: little bit about her work at the dairy bar and
Speaker 5: who owned the dairy bar and this fascinating introduction of
Speaker 5: the Jehovah Witness members.
Speaker 3: Yeah, before I tell you about Georgia, I want to
Speaker 3: tell you that when I met Dennis Alsop junior and
Speaker 3: he knew I wanted to look at his dad's files,
Speaker 3: he brought two file folders with him and these file
Speaker 3: folders were next to each other when he went.
Speaker 6: Through his dad's boxes.
Speaker 3: They were the two fattest folders he had on these murders,
Speaker 3: and one was Jackie English and the other was Georgia Jackson.
Speaker 3: So he thought this murder was important, Okay. Georgia was
Speaker 3: a twenty year old girl, a member of the Jehovah's
Speaker 3: Witness community in Elma on Terra.
Speaker 6: Now. Elmer is like about.
Speaker 3: A half hour drive outside of London, heading southeast, a
Speaker 3: small community it's actually the home of the Ontario Police College,
Speaker 3: so there's a lot of you know, cops and cops
Speaker 3: and training around the area. It was a former World
Speaker 3: War Two our RCAF training like a well Canadian Air
Speaker 3: Force training grounds too, so there's always been men in
Speaker 3: uniform around there. And it's also a community that's surrounded
Speaker 3: by Mennonites and Amish, so it really comes across as
Speaker 3: like the safest place in the world because it's all
Speaker 3: Mennonites and Amish and cops. Right, there's nothing, there's nothing
Speaker 3: bad going on, and there was a really thriving Jehovah's
Speaker 3: Witness community, a community that really appreciated that sort of atmosphere,
Speaker 3: and Georgia was part of that group.
Speaker 6: She lives with her parents.
Speaker 3: She'd never had a boyfriend, she didn't drink, she didn't swear,
Speaker 3: and she was actually hoping to go into the ministry
Speaker 3: as far as women were allowed to within her faith community.
Speaker 3: She worked at the Dairy Bar, which is like the
Speaker 3: temperance response to bars. So the idea is that it's
Speaker 3: a bar, but it's milk, you know, so it's okay.
Speaker 6: I love that they call it a bar.
Speaker 3: So she works there and actually I believe. I believe
Speaker 3: the owner was Jehovah's witness as well, and her coworkers
Speaker 3: were Jehovah's witness. So she got off work at six
Speaker 3: pm on February eighteenth, nineteen sixty six. It was stormy
Speaker 3: like it was a gross winter night, and she actually
Speaker 3: had called home. She only lived three or four blocks away,
Speaker 3: but she called home to see if her mom wanted
Speaker 3: her to pick anything up. And at first her mom said,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, oh yeah, stop and get some butter. But
Speaker 3: then she's like, it's a crappy night, you know what,
Speaker 3: I'm just going to get in the car and go
Speaker 3: to the grocery store.
Speaker 6: You just come home.
Speaker 3: And when George's mom came home after grocery shopping, her
Speaker 3: daughter had never appeared.
Speaker 6: She wasn't there.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Now with this, these Jehovah witnesses, they know that they
Speaker 5: don't call police right away to report her missing. What
Speaker 5: do they do?
Speaker 8: Oh?
Speaker 3: Right, Well, they started they started a search. They organized
Speaker 3: a search, so you know, they got everyone together to
Speaker 3: go out and look. But the storm was terrible, you know,
Speaker 3: And actually they did call the police, but it was
Speaker 3: Chief Henderson and Chief Henderson who is just a completely
Speaker 3: backwards idiot.
Speaker 6: Of a person.
Speaker 3: It's wonderful that you can't be sued for libel if
Speaker 3: people are dead. This guy was just the worst. And
Speaker 3: you know, he ends up getting his own in the book,
Speaker 3: and I'm very pleased about that. What an idiot. So
Speaker 3: of course they call and tell him and she's like, no,
Speaker 3: no big deal. In fact, one of the members of
Speaker 3: the Jehovah's witness community, to get the news to surrounding
Speaker 3: police forces, had to call their local city council in
Speaker 3: the middle of the night and wake them up. And
Speaker 3: then that individual informed London police and the media about
Speaker 3: this missing girl who really you know, they said, oh,
Speaker 3: she probably ran away too much pressure from her religious community.
Speaker 3: She's just another you know, she's taken off. She's blowing
Speaker 3: off some steam. But everyone who knew her knows that's
Speaker 3: not Georgia. She's not going to take off, you know.
Speaker 3: So they start the search and then then it's too cold,
Speaker 3: so they all go home to bed and they start
Speaker 3: again the next day, again no police assistance. So this
Speaker 3: is February eighteenth. Sebruary nineteenth. The Jehovah's Witnesses were incredible.
Speaker 3: They got hundreds of witnesses to come from all around
Speaker 3: the province.
Speaker 6: They even had someone them.
Speaker 3: A helicopter, They had dogs out, they were doing all
Speaker 3: the work to find Georgia, and no police involvement at all.
Speaker 3: In fact, the police still didn't get involved when Georgia's
Speaker 3: mom got this phone call. There's a phone call to
Speaker 3: the Jackson house and georgia mom speaks to someone she
Speaker 3: believes that's her.
Speaker 6: Daughter, who says, I'm being held by two men. Right.
Speaker 3: She immediately calls police and says, Georgie's alive. She's being
Speaker 3: held by two men, she told me. Police say, oh,
Speaker 3: it's just a crank call. That's three days after she's taken.
Speaker 6: Okay. There's no official law.
Speaker 3: Enforcement involvement in this case until March fifth, So we're
Speaker 3: talking about two weeks of complete inactivity.
Speaker 5: Yeah, incredible. You even write too. The mayor called to
Speaker 5: offer a five hundred dollar reward and the chief said
Speaker 5: it would be a waste of money.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so you get to it when they finally Yeah,
Speaker 6: go ahead.
Speaker 5: Sorry, no, when you're talking too that her body's found.
Speaker 5: February twenty seventh, Some boys are just scavenging on the
Speaker 5: side of the road, and you talk about that or
Speaker 5: what they found not another body, pardon me, her coat
Speaker 5: and it was blessed seemen on it. And that's when
Speaker 5: the opp got involved. And what happens to Chief Henderson
Speaker 5: as a result.
Speaker 6: Oh, he got in huge trouble.
Speaker 3: And I mean even more so once her body was found,
Speaker 3: they immediately asked for an inquiry.
Speaker 6: He lost his job.
Speaker 3: He ended up becoming an ambulance dispatcher in Sudbury. And
Speaker 3: anyone who's from Canada can tell you that being forced
Speaker 3: to move to Sudbury is upnishment.
Speaker 6: Sorry to my sorry to my Sudbury friends. I'm sure
Speaker 6: you love your town and your city, but to the
Speaker 6: rest of us, that doesn't sound great. Yeah, hold up
Speaker 6: there and it's small. Yeah, so he was completely demoted.
Speaker 3: I do understand. Actually I didn't get to include it
Speaker 3: in the book because I found out after it came out.
Speaker 3: But he was also a bootlegger. This was Chief Henderson.
Speaker 3: So he was just all around a charming individual.
Speaker 5: Right now, for those people that might be a little
Speaker 5: bit confused your book, you do start in nineteen sixty
Speaker 5: nine and then Detective Alsop and then you go backwards.
Speaker 5: And when we mentioned that Dick, Detective Alsop said, I
Speaker 5: remember a case from a couple of years earlier. We
Speaker 5: were talking about this nineteen sixty six case and because
Speaker 5: of this, the opp had taken over the case from
Speaker 5: Chief Henderson and the London Police, so they because of
Speaker 5: his forensic training, he was involved. Now, tell us about
Speaker 5: Albert Crooker, who's an elder in the Jehovah Witnesses and
Speaker 5: who has a son in law named David Bodemer when
Speaker 5: they are searching for Georgia. How is he involved? And
Speaker 5: tell us what witnesses say about David Bodemer at that time.
Speaker 3: Oh, at that time, I think, well, first of all,
Speaker 3: Albert Crooker is like the head pastor of the local
Speaker 3: Jehovah's Witnesses, an elmer, so it's called an overseer, which
Speaker 3: really just makes me think of Fallout the video game. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So he's the overseer and his daughter is married. His daughter, Elaine,
Speaker 3: is married to David Bottomer, so he's his son in law,
Speaker 3: and David works for his father in law sometimes his
Speaker 3: father has like a business, his father in law has
Speaker 3: a business cleaning after hours. So the story that David gave,
Speaker 3: which I mean I won't get into it, I don't
Speaker 3: necessarily believe the story. But the story that David gave
Speaker 3: was that, you know, they were working at the bank
Speaker 3: that night, cleaning the bank, and Georgia Jackson's brother in law,
Speaker 3: Dennis Sullivant, came by and told him that Georgia was missing,
Speaker 3: and they left the bank and went to go look
Speaker 3: for her in the snow. But David Bottomer didn't have
Speaker 3: a coat on, which he later said he didn't have
Speaker 3: that coat on because it had Georgie's blood on it
Speaker 3: and he had hidden the coat. So he's out looking
Speaker 3: for her in the snow with no coat on. So
Speaker 3: they tell him to go home, you know, because it's
Speaker 3: winter and you can't be out here with no coat.
Speaker 3: But he later participated in searches for her body, and
Speaker 3: he was at her funeral and Albert Cooker, his father
Speaker 3: in law, performed her funeral service.
Speaker 5: Now, how is it that what Crooker does David know?
Speaker 5: And the elders, including Albert in fact, give us how
Speaker 5: that works in that they suspect that somebody knows more
Speaker 5: information about David, and what do they do as a result.
Speaker 3: Well, David was a problem right for Albert and his
Speaker 3: daughter Elaine, and actually after George's murder in nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 3: which you know, we didn't talk about the crime scene there,
Speaker 3: but they did find her body and they never could
Speaker 3: solve the case. And after nineteen sixty six, in fact,
Speaker 3: less than a year after that murder, David moved his
Speaker 3: family with his wife away from Elmer, and he had
Speaker 3: escalating issues with police.
Speaker 6: So he would get caught with.
Speaker 3: Petty theft, public nudity, exposure, leude acts, pornography, so exhibitionism.
Speaker 3: So he had escalating interactions with police, getting caught with
Speaker 3: sexually related and of course, as we know, petty seft
Speaker 3: or voyeurism, peeping tom stuff is often part of, you know,
Speaker 3: a developing issue for sex offenders. You know, like Paul
Speaker 3: Bernardo was keeeping tom for years before he started raping. So,
Speaker 3: you know, David's family, who were very conservative religious people,
Speaker 3: were really disappointed in him. He wasn't becoming he wasn't
Speaker 3: becoming a church elder. I mean his dad's a head pastor.
Speaker 3: I mean, his father in law is a head pastor.
Speaker 3: His parents are part of the Jehovah's Witness community too.
Speaker 3: They lived in Aliston, Ontario. Everyone's really disappointed in David
Speaker 3: every time he gets arrested for these truly embarrassing crimes,
Speaker 3: and you know, he he's someone who they're looking at,
Speaker 3: and they there are all these rumors going on in
Speaker 3: the church that someone from in the church killed Georgia.
Speaker 3: You know, so it kept building and building and building,
Speaker 3: and eventually, six years after her murder, the gossip had
Speaker 3: just kept going on and it was not going away.
Speaker 3: The Jehovah Fronist Church actually gone to the higher ups
Speaker 3: in the national organization to go to Elmer and talk
Speaker 3: to the congregation and try to get to the bottom
Speaker 3: of it.
Speaker 5: Now they realized David Bodemer's in Kitchener, So they go
Speaker 5: to Kitchener. What happens when they bang on his door?
Speaker 5: What happens when they broach the subject of George's death?
Speaker 3: Yea, Kitchener's about an hour's more like forty five minutes
Speaker 3: away from Elmer. So they go to his house there
Speaker 3: where he's living. You know, he works in blue collar jobs.
Speaker 3: He worked at a concrete factory, he worked for the
Speaker 3: rail yard, you know, these kinds of jobs. And they
Speaker 3: knocked on his door on a Friday, and he sort
Speaker 3: of knew he'd been caught and he said to them,
Speaker 3: you know, just give me the weekend to talk to
Speaker 3: my wife.
Speaker 6: And he put it off all weekend. It was Sunday night.
Speaker 3: He was lying in bed with Elaine and he just
Speaker 3: went into emotional hysterics and he told her that he
Speaker 3: had killed Georgia Jackson six years earlier. So Elaine called
Speaker 3: her father, who I think already knew, and the next
Speaker 3: day Albert Crooker and these two up and ups from
Speaker 3: the Jehovah's witness Church drove to Kitchener. And this is
Speaker 3: really interesting. The first confession that David gave for this murder,
Speaker 3: the first statement he gives is a written out confession
Speaker 3: that he gave to the Jehovah's Witnesses that they had
Speaker 3: him sign before they called the police. So they called
Speaker 3: the OPP and Detective Alsop went himself actually to arrest
Speaker 3: David and took him to OPP headquarters where his office
Speaker 3: was and interrogated him and then got a second confession
Speaker 3: from him as well.
Speaker 5: Now with Alsop's second confession and the first one that
Speaker 5: he reviewed, what information did he get? And we talked
Speaker 5: about and we haven't talked so much about, you know,
Speaker 5: this guy that would never give up, but we put
Speaker 5: in the introduction that he he was continuing to investigate
Speaker 5: till he died, you know, forty years after this. So
Speaker 5: this guy was not let this thing go. So when
Speaker 5: he interviewed, when he interviewed Bodemer, what information did he
Speaker 5: have and how much did he believe he had this
Speaker 5: perpetrator not only of Gloria Jackson, but of other victims
Speaker 5: as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean this is if you keep in mind
Speaker 3: that in the six years since Georgia Jackson's been murdered,
Speaker 3: there have been all these other murders, and the whole time,
Speaker 3: Detective Alsop is looking back at Georgia Jackson's murder saying,
Speaker 3: this all seems like the same person. And can I
Speaker 3: tell you with Jackie English, when they found her, clothes
Speaker 3: were scattered along the highway and her shoes were found
Speaker 3: next to a pond in a lover's lane, like in
Speaker 3: a quarry up the road from where Georgia Jackson's body
Speaker 3: was found. So again there's this geography that's so similar.
Speaker 3: And you know, Allstop had his antennas pointed firmly up.
Speaker 3: He was looking at this guy for all of these murders.
Speaker 3: So you know, he interviews him and he is looking
Speaker 3: for any slip up. There was a moment in the
Speaker 3: interview where David used the pronoun we. He says, we
Speaker 3: went here and Detective all Stop catches them on it.
Speaker 6: Who's we?
Speaker 3: You know, he's he's really paying attention to those details.
Speaker 3: But at the same time too, he's working within a system,
Speaker 3: and I think it became a priority for him to
Speaker 3: have Bottomer convicted because Bottomer did not confess to any
Speaker 3: other murders, you know, any murders that he may have
Speaker 3: allegedly committed, and also wanted to get him off the
Speaker 3: street because clearly whoever was doing this to young women
Speaker 3: and children in the London area was not going.
Speaker 6: To stop.
Speaker 5: You right too, that the idea that Bodemer was involved.
Speaker 5: He Bodemer had told him some details about an outbuilding
Speaker 5: they ware he had stashed him stuff. So what does
Speaker 5: Alsip do, you said, they just want a conviction for
Speaker 5: this one murder. But regardless of that, what does Alsip.
Speaker 3: Do Well, The first thing he does is he wants
Speaker 3: to track down the car. So David tells them essentially
Speaker 3: that he picked up Georgia without planning on killing her,
Speaker 3: that he hit her over the back of the head
Speaker 3: with a coke bottle from the back of the backseat
Speaker 3: of the car spontaneously, then drove out to a country
Speaker 3: road with her sort of coming in and out of
Speaker 3: cont his myths on his shoulder, bleeding all over his
Speaker 3: winter coat and all over the car seat. And then
Speaker 3: he took her out into you know, a quiet country road,
Speaker 3: and she decided to have sex with her, and she
Speaker 3: was screaming, so he put his hand over her mouth
Speaker 3: and accidentally suffocated her while he was raping her. This
Speaker 3: was the story he told police.
Speaker 6: So then he said that he went back to his house, which.
Speaker 3: Had like a garage attached to it, which incidentally he
Speaker 3: continued to not incidentally, but as a piece of information,
Speaker 3: he continued to rent that garage after his family moved away.
Speaker 3: He rented that garage until nineteen seventy two or seventy
Speaker 3: one when it was torn down. So he had stashed
Speaker 3: down dashed George's gloves and her bloody jacket and.
Speaker 6: His bloody jacket in the walls of that garage.
Speaker 3: So the first thing Detective Alsop does is he tracks
Speaker 3: down this car because there.
Speaker 6: Should be blood in the.
Speaker 3: Car, and that's feet on his own. The car had
Speaker 3: been sold almost immediately in nineteen sixty six and had
Speaker 3: been gone around secondhand, you know, and had ended up
Speaker 3: in a junkyard. But they had to dig this car
Speaker 3: out of the snow and they did indeed find George's
Speaker 3: blood in the car. So that's a pretty incredible piece
Speaker 3: of detective work there. Because that's on the ground. There's
Speaker 3: no computer tracking system for ownership. He's got to go
Speaker 3: to each owner and ask what did you do with
Speaker 3: this car? You know, he's driving around all over southwestern Ontario,
Speaker 3: and then he wants to confirm that this bloody coat
Speaker 3: and George's gloves are in this garage. So he goes
Speaker 3: to where the garage was and it's been torn down
Speaker 3: really recently, like within the last six months. So he
Speaker 3: talks to the property owner and he finds out where
Speaker 3: they disposed of the garage, and you know, they had
Speaker 3: put it in like a farmer's field in Dorchester Unti area.
Speaker 3: So Alsop is so dogged that he takes a shovel
Speaker 3: and in March I think is March seventeenth, Oh, Saint
Speaker 3: Patrick's day.
Speaker 6: I just realized that, or it might have been the twenty.
Speaker 3: First goes out to this field with the frozen dirt,
Speaker 3: and he digs and he himself signs George's gloves in
Speaker 3: the debris from that garage. So now he has physical
Speaker 3: evidence that matches the confession to convict David Bottomer of
Speaker 3: murdering Georgia Jackson. And to me, that's just incredible detective work.
Speaker 3: I'm very impressed by that.
Speaker 5: You right too. Later, Elaine, Bodemer's wife said to Alsop
Speaker 5: unprompted and mentioned Jackie English, just reinforcing his idea that
Speaker 5: there was always a connection that must have struck him
Speaker 5: as incredible.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: For readers who want to put it together, that story
Speaker 3: is crucial. You need to pay attention to the relationships
Speaker 3: between these individuals. Elayne said that she and her husband
Speaker 3: were in London a couple of days before Jackie English
Speaker 3: went missing and she saw them. They saw her having
Speaker 3: lunch with an excuse of vernacular, a colored man had
Speaker 3: a diner in London, And in fact, Jackie had had
Speaker 3: lunch with Bill Groat, a person of color that she
Speaker 3: went to school with, and she had told her boyfriend
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 6: I think she wrote about.
Speaker 3: It in her diary as well, so you know that
Speaker 3: was confirmed that actually happened.
Speaker 6: But I have to ask myself. You know, if if
Speaker 6: I go to dinner.
Speaker 3: And then someone who was having dinner in that same restaurant,
Speaker 3: or even a small restaurant you know, with ten tables
Speaker 3: went missing and was hurt shortly thereafter, I wouldn't remember them,
Speaker 3: Like you don't pay that much close attention to people
Speaker 3: around you in a restaurant that you would remember.
Speaker 6: Sure, do you know what I mean?
Speaker 3: It leads me to think that they must have interacted somehow,
Speaker 3: or how would she have known that was her?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Very interesting you write June twenty seventh, nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 5: Despite the confessions, he pleads not guilty. It's not capital murder.
Speaker 5: In Canada, they hadn't had an execution since sixty two.
Speaker 5: In this particular case, it's not a capital murder case.
Speaker 5: Tell us a little bit about the trial itself. Any
Speaker 5: incredible features of that trial.
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, that he pled not guilty after
Speaker 3: giving two confessions and there's physical evidence to back up
Speaker 3: his confessions is just absurd. So you know, his lawyer
Speaker 3: had first tried to get him NCR ruling, which is
Speaker 3: not criminally responsible, so he sent him for psychiatric testing.
Speaker 3: And of course that failed, and you know, maybe he
Speaker 3: didn't want to go to the psych The psych hospital
Speaker 3: was particularly unpleasant in nineteen seventy two, so you know,
Speaker 3: I'd rather go to jail. Frankly, they had this idea that,
Speaker 3: you know, there was some sort of religious pressure that
Speaker 3: created a false confession. But of course the physical evidence
Speaker 3: backed up the confession, and you know, Alsop and his
Speaker 3: team made sure that they had witnesses on the stand
Speaker 3: that would back up that confession. Now, I don't know
Speaker 3: what's everything, and the confession is accurate, I don't think
Speaker 3: it is, but I think the focus was on getting
Speaker 3: a conviction. I found it really astounding.
Speaker 6: They took the rape charge off because they said they
Speaker 6: couldn't prove that.
Speaker 3: The sex that he had with Georgia Jackson wasn't consensual,
Speaker 3: which is just ridiculous to me because you know, after
Speaker 3: I have consensual effects, I always get raped and murdered.
Speaker 6: It's like.
Speaker 3: So that there's some pretty horrifying misogyny in the text
Speaker 3: for the trial, but that aside, you know, the community
Speaker 3: really came together and what was really astounding. You know,
Speaker 3: he's convicted, but even before his conviction, which I think
Speaker 3: they were pretty sure they were going to get a conviction,
Speaker 3: and he got a life sentence, which in Canada at
Speaker 3: the time went twenty five to life And I'll follow
Speaker 3: up on that with you in a minute. In London,
Speaker 3: at the same time this was going on, this trial
Speaker 3: was going on, the Chief of Police recommended to city
Speaker 3: Council that they rescinned the fifty thousand dollars reward they
Speaker 3: had put out for Jackie English George for Jackie Dunlevy
Speaker 3: and Frankie Jensen's murders.
Speaker 6: So police didn't think that reward.
Speaker 3: Needed to be on the table anymore, and that was
Speaker 3: finalized during David Bottomer's trial.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you write that Alcep was heavily involved in the
Speaker 5: Linda White investigation, but that was the last homicide he
Speaker 5: worked in London area. He moved to Toronto with a
Speaker 5: new job, superintendent. And then you write too that basically
Speaker 5: this man who was dedicated to his job once upon
Speaker 5: a time, worked eighty hours a week and took the
Speaker 5: file boxes home and took the cases home with him
Speaker 5: and kept them in his heart and in his mind.
Speaker 5: Now he just concentrated on his family. He was married
Speaker 5: sixty six years and had a great family life after that,
Speaker 5: but never forgot about this, kept those files and then
Speaker 5: faithfully his son walked into your bookstore and you had
Speaker 5: developed a relationship and the product was this incredible book,
Speaker 5: The Forest City Killer. I want to thank you very
Speaker 5: much for coming on and talking about The Forest City Killer,
Speaker 5: a surreal murderer, a cold case sleuth, and a search
Speaker 5: for justice. For people that want to take a look
Speaker 5: at more information or find out about this book, is
Speaker 5: there a Facebook page website that they might take a
Speaker 5: look at.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they can go to forthitykiller dot com. I've got
Speaker 3: some extra material there that wasn't in the book. And
Speaker 3: since the Unsold Canada website went down, I actually have
Speaker 3: archived the Jackie English forum thread, which was like sixty
Speaker 3: one pages or something absurd like that.
Speaker 6: So there are extra photos and things that didn't make
Speaker 6: it into the book.
Speaker 3: So Foresitykiller dot com and people can email me at
Speaker 3: info at Forestitykiller dot com if they want to chat
Speaker 3: or if they have any tips or questions. I'm always
Speaker 3: happy to talk to people about the case.
Speaker 5: It's been a remarkable time spent with you talking about
Speaker 5: The Forest City Killer, an incredible, remarkable book. Thank you
Speaker 5: very much Vanessa Brown.
Speaker 6: Thank you, you have a great night. Go say