Crime Immemorial

London, Ontario, lies in the southwestern portion of the province, a little over 100 miles from Toronto. It’s the definition of an average city, in regards to demographics, so much so that it’s often used as a test market for new products being introduced into Canada.

But from approximately 1959 through 1984, London, Ontario saw an unprecedented spike in unsolved murders that many believe were committed by at least one—and probably several—serial killers operating in the area. This is the horrifying and little-known saga of Murder City.

According to author and criminologist Michael Arntfield, who made an in-depth study of the twenty-five-year period in question and wrote a book titled Murder City in 2015, London—then boasting a population of around 200,000 people—may have briefly had the highest per capita number of serial killers of anywhere on the planet. He makes the analogy that had London, Ontario had the population of New York City or Los Angeles, it would have been equivalent to either of those two metropolises housing between 80 and 90 serial killers at one time.

Many theories have been put forth as to what made London in particular so attractive to human predators during this era. Perhaps its very averageness served as a bellwether for the increase in serial killings seen in other, larger cities later on in the 1960s. Perhaps the opening of a new highway to the previously somewhat secluded city encouraged more visitors and transplants, which in turn brought hunters of such prey in their wake. Perhaps London’s abundance of parks and its appellation of Forest City attracted killers with the promise of ample cover and plenty of spots to dump bodies. Perhaps it was a combination of all those things.

Whatever the reason, though, somewhere around thirty murders took place in a very short period of time there, and though thirteen of the cases were ultimately closed—attributed to three separate, apprehended serial killers plying their trade in the area at around the same time—the remainder of the crimes are still unsolved.

One of these, occurring three years prior to the canonical run, served as something of a teaser of the horrors to come. On January 6th, 1956, six-year-old Susan Cadieux was playing with her friends and siblings at the playground of St. Mary’s School, not far from her home.

At around 7:45 p.m., a man approached Susan and said he had something for her. To put the children at ease, he told them he lived nearby, and was at the school so that he could meet with the priest at St. Mary’s.

Susan apparently had no reason to fear the man, and began walking away with him. It so happened that at that moment, another one of the children slipped and fell on the ice, which caused a bit of a commotion and made them temporarily forget about Susan and the stranger.

When the other children got their bearings, Susan was gone, and when fifteen minutes had passed and Susan had not returned, her brothers became alarmed and ran home to alert their parents. Police and local residents searched for the child all through the night.

The following morning at 10 a.m., the body of Susan Cadieux was discovered behind a construction company building. The jeans she’d been wearing beneath her snowsuit pants were missing, and her underwear was torn. Cause of death was found to be exposure, though the lace from an Army boot was still tied around her neck.

The other children described the man who had led Susan away as a tall, thin, and unshaven thirty-to-forty-year-old white male, clad in a light brown overcoat, black galoshes, and a fur hat with ear flaps.

A man fitting this general description, it so happened, was also a person of interest in a much more famous 1959 case, the murder of twelve-year-old Lynne Harper. At the time of her death, Lynne was living on the Royal Canadian Air Force Base Station Clinton, approximately fifty miles from London, Ontario.

On the early evening of June 5th, 1959, Lynne was at a park with some friends when she was spotted by her fourteen-year-old friend Steven Truscott, who also lived on base with his family. Lynne asked Steven to give her a ride up the road on his bike so she could go look at some ponies, and Steven, who was traveling that direction anyway, agreed.

According to Steven’s later account, he let Lynne off his bike at the spot she requested, then turned around and headed back down the lane. At one point he turned around, and saw Lynne getting into a vehicle. It was the last time Lynne Harper was seen alive.

Two days later, on June 11th, Lynne’s body was found very near to the place where she was last seen. She had been raped and strangled with her own blouse.

Police immediately suspected that fourteen-year-old Steven was the culprit, and took him into custody, grilling him for hours. Steven stuck to his guns, claiming he didn’t hurt his friend, but simply saw her getting into a vehicle with an unknown person. Despite his professions of innocence, however, he was arrested and charged, and though much of the evidence against him seemed somewhat flimsy, he was eventually found guilty and sentenced to hang.

His death sentence was commuted to life in prison a year later, and in 1969, he was released on parole, changing his name and moving away. Much later, after the intervention of the Innocence Project, his conviction was overturned, and in 2008, he was awarded a substantial sum for what was termed a miscarriage of justice.

It has since been speculated that the actual killer of Lynne Harper was not Steven Truscott, but rather a man named Alexander Kalichuk, who was also a suspect in the 1956 killing of Susan Cadieux. Kalichuk had served in both the Royal Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force, and lived only an hour away from the Clinton base, though in 1956 he had lived only twenty minutes from it, and in 1959 still visited the area often. He had a wife and three children.

Three weeks prior to Lynne Harper’s murder, Kalichuk was arrested for attempting to lure a ten-year-old girl into his car by offering her a pair of child’s panties, though he was released a week later due to lack of evidence. He had also been reported for indecent exposure by someone at the base where he was stationed.

He was briefly hospitalized for anxiety and “sexual deviation,” and after his release was moved to another base, where reports of his questionable behavior began to bubble to the surface. Evidently, he was well known in the vicinity for prowling around in his car, watching young girls and occasionally trying to lure them inside.

Kalichuk died in 1975, and it is unknown whether he was responsible for the murders of either Susan Cadieux or Lynne Harper.

And on February 18th, 1966, twenty-year-old Georgia Jackson vanished while on her way home from her job at a dairy in her hometown of Aylmer, Ontario, only half an hour away from London. Her body was found that March, raped and smothered to death. A man named David Bodemer was convicted for the crime in 1972, but the extent of his involvement in any of the other murders is unclear, and more will be said about Georgia Jackson and the possible connection to other crimes in the series later on.

Early 1968, it seems, was when the run of murders began in earnest. On January 9th of that year, a high school student in Canada would mysteriously vanish from a bus stop and turn up murdered only hours later.

Sixteen-year-old Jacqueline Dunleavy lived and attended school in London, Ontario. She also had a part-time job two or three evenings a week after classes; she worked the counter at an eclectic, bodega-style shop called the Stanley Variety, where one could buy anything from cigarettes to candy, from housewares to pornographic photos. The store, owned by Joe Clarke, was also a known neighborhood hangout for all sorts of disreputable characters, from kids who used the establishment to fence stolen items, to older men who sipped coffee, flirted with the high school girls who worked there, and occasionally went into the back to watch some of Joe Clarke’s bootleg stag films.

On January 9th, a Tuesday evening, Jacqueline was closing the store at around 6:15 p.m., as she usually did. After locking up, she walked across the street and down two blocks to the Beaconsfield bus stop, where several witnesses saw her waiting for the bus to arrive. Minutes later, though, another witness stated that she saw Jacqueline getting into a white Chrysler, though she couldn’t tell who was driving the car.

Jacqueline’s parents began to worry when she hadn’t arrived home by 7:00 p.m., and they began making phone calls to all her friends, none of whom had any idea where she could have gone. Shortly thereafter, the young woman’s father, who was a police officer, got into his own vehicle and began driving around town looking for her, though he could see no sign of her anywhere.

About an hour later, and five miles away from where Jacqueline had disappeared, three boys pulled their car into the parking lot of the Oakridge Plaza and discovered the gruesome remains of Jacqueline Dunleavy. The left side of her face had been bashed in, and the scarf that had been used to throttle her was still around her neck. Her clothes had been torn off and thrown around her body, and her skin was covered in small scratches, as if from fingernails.

The scene also featured some bizarre and unsettling details. Jacqueline’s winter coat was found near her remains, stained with vomit and semen, though the victim had not been raped. She had also been grotesquely posed after death, lying stiffly on her back with her eyes open, her legs closed, and her arms straight at her sides, as though she was on a mortuary slab. Most grisly of all, though, was the fact that the coroner discovered a plastic-wrapped pack of pink facial tissues had been crammed down her throat post-mortem, as if in some kind of ritualistic flourish.

Whoever had killed Jacqueline Dunleavy had clearly not been particularly concerned about being seen, or about the body being found quickly. The victim’s remains had not been concealed, and the parking lot where she was found was often busy, even on cold winter nights. Deep marks in the snow suggested that the perpetrator had not only dragged Jacqueline’s body about fifty feet from his vehicle to the spot where she was dumped, but had also returned to the car afterward to retrieve the girl’s backpack and boots, which he carried back to the dump site and discarded near the corpse.

Police were able to obtain clear tire impressions from the vehicle driven by the murderer, which indicated that the car bore four different makes of tires whose tread depths were all different, and that the vehicle’s alignment was so bad that detectives were amazed the car could maneuver at all, especially on the snowy roads. Because the vehicle would have been so distinctive, authorities were confident they would have no trouble tracking it down, and set about examining every car within a several-mile radius, looking for a junker with four mismatched and misaligned tires. Frustratingly, they turned up nothing at all.

The Stanley Variety, where Jacqueline had been working for a little more than a month, seemed quite a promising venue for possible suspects, and only a few days into the investigation, several regulars of the sketchy little establishment were looked into. One of these was a middle-aged man who often came into the store to watch stag films with owner Joe Clarke in the back room. This individual had reportedly made advances toward Jacqueline as well as some of the other teenaged girls who were employed at the Stanley Variety, and he was known to be a violent drunk. It also seemed significant that his own wife was also only sixteen years old.

But the little variety shop attracted so many lowlifes that it proved difficult to narrow down the possible culprits to just one. For example, there was another man who specifically drove quite a long distance to shop at the Stanley Variety on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when he knew Jacqueline would be working after school. This suspect had several prior convictions for indecent exposure.

Another frequent customer, who worked in the morgue at London hospital, had allegedly been spotted attempting to force another teenaged girl into a car at the Beaconsfield bus stop, from which Jacqueline Dunleavy had disappeared. This had occurred a few months prior to Jacqueline’s murder.

Perhaps most ominously, another local who often dropped by the store had been convicted in 1962 of murdering a seven-year-old girl by hanging, and masturbating as he watched the child expire. As this crime had been committed when the killer was a juvenile, he had only spent four years in custody before being released on his eighteenth birthday, despite psychiatric reports that recommended he be kept locked away indefinitely.

Joe Clarke himself, the owner of the Stanley Variety, was a person of interest as well, and it appears he may have known at least something about the crime, for only a few months after Jacqueline’s death, Clarke sold the store for a ridiculously low price and left town in the middle of the night. It remains speculative whether Clarke was the killer, whether he knew who the killer was, or whether he simply felt guilty for facilitating Jacqueline’s murder by regularly exposing his teenaged employees to the array of degenerates who frequented the shop.

Despite the encouraging number of leads in the case and the dogged efforts of the London Police, though, the investigation into the murder of Jacqueline Dunleavy would very quickly grind to a halt. However, exactly one month later, another similar crime less than a mile away would revitalize the inquiry and lead a few researchers to speculate that a budding serial killer might be on the rise.

At a little past 8:00 a.m. on the morning of Friday, February 9th, 1968, nine-year-old Frankie Jensen, bundled up against the cold and carrying his lunchbox, set out for school as usual. He actually hadn’t particularly wanted to go to school that day, as he’d been having problems with bullies, but his parents and siblings had urged him to go about his activities as normal, and not be intimidated by his tormentors.

Ordinarily, Frankie’s older sister would accompany the child on his half-mile walk, but she happened to be running late that day, so little Frankie set out alone for Westdale Elementary. The wooded path that he took was a common shortcut for children walking to school, and though a handful of little boys had reported being chased along the path by adult men on occasion, it doesn’t appear that the reports were taken all that seriously, since police assumed the culprits were escapees from the nearby Harley School for the developmentally disabled, or from the Children’s Psychiatric Research Institute. This rather lax attitude, sadly, would eventually prove to be fatal.

Frankie Jensen never arrived at school, and when he failed to come home that evening, his anxious parents reported him missing. The following morning, hundreds of police officers and citizens turned out to look for him, scouring the woods from which he had purportedly vanished. Investigators at first discounted abduction, believing that perhaps the boy had simply wandered off, but they conceded that even if no foul play was involved, Frankie would not have survived the freezing temperatures overnight. Whatever the cause of his absence, though, no trace of him could be found.

In the ensuing days, various sightings of him were reported to authorities, but none of these proved legitimate, and weeks went by with no clue as to the child’s whereabouts. In the wake of his disappearance, several families in the area banded together to form a loose coalition of safe havens, placing signs in the windows of their homes that encouraged children who found themselves in danger to seek safety within their neighbors’ walls. Local parents also petitioned police to take reports of lurking men in the woods more seriously going forward.

By mid-February, Frankie Jensen had still not turned up, though investigators received a troubling tip from a witness who recalled that at around 8:30 a.m. on February 8th—the day before the child had vanished—he had seen a car idling near the mouth of the path that Frankie would have walked to school. This vehicle was described as a white sedan, possibly a Chrysler, just like the car that had been spotted at the bus stop prior to Jacqueline Dunleavy’s disappearance a month earlier. Detectives were now forced to deal with the possibility that the two crimes were related.

And not too long after that, their worst fears would be realized, when another local teenager would go missing.

Sixteen-year-old Scott Leishman lived in the rural community of West Nissouri, not far outside of London, Ontario. On March 21st, nearly two months after nine-year-old Frankie Jensen had vanished, Scott was home from school for spring break, and decided to enjoy the warming outdoor temperatures by doing a little fishing in Thorndale.

At around 4:00 p.m., a witness saw Scott on a country road around Forest City, carrying a fishing pole and a tackle box. He had presumably been hitchhiking, as many teenagers in the area did at the time. The witness further stated that Scott had climbed into a white sedan, much like the one allegedly seen at the sites of both Frankie Jensen’s and Jacqueline Dunleavy’s disappearances. Scott Leishman was never seen alive again, though his body would not be found for some time.

On April 12th, 1968, however, the question of where little nine-year-old Frankie Jensen had gone would finally have an answer. More than two months after he had turned up missing, two men canoeing in the Thames River near West Nissouri discovered the child’s body caught in a barbed wire fence near the shore. Investigators concluded that had the corpse not become entangled in the fence, it’s likely Frankie Jensen would have been swept out into Lake St. Clair and lost forever.

The boy was found clad in his buttoned shirt and his undershirt, though his pants had come off and were recovered nearby. Police determined that the trousers had probably been pulled off by the water’s current, and had not been removed by the killer. Frankie’s lunchbox, overcoat, and part of his broken thermos were also found floating in the river not far from the remains, though his boots were never located.

An autopsy was duly performed, but a definite cause of death could not be established. Frankie had clearly suffered a heavy blow to the head, but it was uncertain whether this had been what killed him, or whether it had occurred after his body was dropped off the nearby bridge. There was also no sign of sexual assault. Because of the corpse having been submerged in the icy waters, it was also not clear how long the child had been dead.

One chilling detail unearthed during the examination, though, would seemingly link the crime specifically with the earlier murder of Jacqueline Dunleavy. Like Jacqueline, Frankie was found to have had pink facial tissues wadded up and stuffed down his throat after his death. The tissues were not wrapped in cellophane, as the ones recovered from Jacqueline’s body had been, but were of the same type and color.

Though the presence of this striking peculiarity in both victims would appear to suggest that both were murdered by the same individual, some investigators were reluctant to make this claim, pointing out that the detail of the pink tissues had been extensively featured in the media after the Jacqueline Dunleavy slaying, therefore raising the possibility that the killer of Frankie Jensen was a copycat. In the press, however, the ostensible single murderer was quickly given the appellation, “The Tissue Slayer.”

Whether London, Ontario was being plagued by one killer or two was still a mystery, and it would be late spring before any further light would be shed on the case.

On May 21st, 1968, exactly two months after sixteen-year-old Scott Leishman was spotted getting into a white sedan outside of London, Ontario, his remains were discovered in Big Otter Creek, approximately sixty miles away from where he had last been seen alive.

Just as in the case of Frankie Jensen, it appeared that Scott Leishman had been thrown off a bridge into the water, though post-mortem examination suggested that he had still been alive, though unconscious, when he was deposited in the creek. It was also speculated that the killer had been attempting to dispose of the body in such a way that the current would carry it into Lake Erie, but it had become trapped by an obstacle before being swept away, just as Frankie Jensen’s body had been.

There were other eerie similarities between the two boys’ slayings as well. Though most of Scott’s clothing and belongings were not found with the body—leading authorities to believe that they had washed out to sea or that the killer had kept them as souvenirs—at least one lead investigator, Dennis Alsop, noticed something intriguing.

It seemed that whoever had killed the boys had apparently redressed them, situating their clothing in such a way that their trousers would come off after they had been thrown into the water. Though neither Frankie nor Scott had been raped, the specificity of this detail suggested a killer with a paraphilic obsession, who held a very particular fantasy about the boys’ pantless corpses floating among the ripples.

Significantly, no pink tissues were discovered in Scott’s throat, but investigators nonetheless believed that Scott Leishman and Frankie Jensen had most likely been murdered by the same offender, though most also theorized that Jacqueline Dunleavy’s murder had been perpetrated by a different individual.

Detectives pointed out that despite the seven-year difference in age between the two male victims, Scott looked unusually young for a sixteen-year-old, and was physically quite similar in appearance to Frankie Jensen. Jacqueline Dunleavy, then, as a female victim whose remains were discovered in plain view on land rather than partially hidden in the water, seemed the odd victim out.

Dennis Alsop, convinced that the homicides of Scott and Frankie were related and had been carried out by someone with a very specific sexual deviance, began an intensive investigation of all the men living within walking distance of Frankie Jensen’s home. One of the men he scrutinized seemed a very promising suspect, though he has never been named in the media.

This individual was a traveling salesman who had moved to London only a few years before, and lived only two streets away from the Jensen family. The man had previous convictions for exposing himself to children, as well as forgery. His background was dubious enough that investigators were able to obtain a search warrant for his property, which turned up several interesting clues.

Firstly, a white sedan much like those reported at all three crime scenes was discovered in an attached garage, and though the car appeared to have been thoroughly cleaned, police were able to recover a single blond hair from beneath a floor mat, a hair of the same color and length as that of Frankie Jensen.

Secondly, a box of pink tissues exactly like those found in Frankie’s throat was spotted inside the home, along with newspaper articles about Jacqueline Dunleavy’s murder that mentioned the pack of tissues crammed into her throat. This strengthened detectives’ suspicions that this individual had not killed Jacqueline Dunleavy, but had used the detail of the tissues in the killing of Frankie Jensen to fool police into linking the crimes.

Thirdly, the suspect’s work record for February 9th—the day Frankie Jensen disappeared —was found to have been falsified, as clients that the individual claimed he had visited that day specifically stated that he had not been there. Although the work record corresponding to the day of Scott Leishman’s disappearance did not appear to have been tampered with, authorities surmised that the location from which Scott was abducted was very near to where the salesman’s business would have taken him on that particular day, thus negating the need for subterfuge.

Though detectives were certain they had found their man, the lack of compelling physical evidence frustrated their efforts to charge him with murder, and it certainly didn’t help matters that the man had the infuriating habit of voluntarily checking himself into mental hospitals just when police seemed to be closing in on him. Though Dennis Alsop kept tabs on the suspect as he moved from city to city and bounced from hospital to hospital, by the time August of 1968 rolled around, there would be another slaying in London to contend with, one that was apparently unrelated to the others.

Thirty-one-year-old Helga Beer was a native of Germany, but had immigrated to London, Ontario seven years before. Just recently, she had divorced her husband and moved back in with her mother and brother, but she seemed to be adapting well to single life, taking a job as a hairdresser in a popular department store and maintaining an active social schedule.

On the evening of August 5th, 1968, Helga had gone out with some friends after work, hitting a few of the bars around town. Afterwards, she returned to the apartment building where she used to live and where some of her friends still resided, presumably to continue the party. It is unclear exactly what she and her friends did after arriving at the apartment, but witnesses reported that a few hours after Helga arrived, the female friend who she had gone to visit was seen leaving the building, carrying a suitcase. This unknown woman apparently left town, for she was unable to be located during the ensuing investigation.

Helga herself was spotted leaving the building at around 1:00 a.m. in the company of a man who witnesses described as being a white male in his mid-twenties to early thirties, dark-haired, of average height, and with a husky build. More than one witness remarked upon the roundness of this individual’s face and the wideness of his nose.

The following morning at approximately 6:30 a.m., an employee at a service station on Carling Street noticed a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle backed into a parking space on the property. Not sure where the car had come from, the attendant looked into one of the vehicle’s windows and spotted what appeared to be a mannequin, stuffed into the space between the front and rear seats. Upon opening the Volkswagen’s door, however, the attendant quickly realized that he was staring at a human body.

Helga Beer had been severely beaten in the face with a large fist and then strangled. When she was found, she was clad only in a blouse and bra; the rest of her clothing was strewn around the interior of the car in a rather slapdash fashion. Though an autopsy revealed that she had had sexual intercourse shortly before her murder, it was unclear whether she had been raped or if the sex had been consensual.

Authorities were able to determine that Helga had likely been killed elsewhere and then driven to this particular spot, where she was crammed into the car half-nude, perhaps because her killer had wished to humiliate her. The service station where the vehicle was abandoned was only a little more than five-hundred yards from where Helga had last been seen.

A composite sketch of the man who had been spotted with Helga on the night before her death was produced, but it was far too generic to lead to any particular suspect. Although police could have obtained at least a blood group from Helga’s assailant, since semen was found inside her body as well as on a pair of her underwear left in the front seat, investigators for some reason failed to perform this fairly simple task, even though they had done as much in the case of Jacqueline Dunleavy seven months prior, in that case determining that the perpetrator had type O blood.

Indeed, the inquiry later drew criticism for this lack of due diligence, as not only did detectives neglect to procure any significant physical evidence from the scene, but they also allowed persons of interest to leave the city, or even the country, without taking pains to stop them or clear them of suspicion.

Because of this rather slipshod investigatory process, it is not certain whether Helga Beer fell victim to the same killer who had murdered Jacqueline Dunleavy. The specific manner that the two bodies were presented—left more or less in the open in sexually humiliating positions—would seem to indicate a signature of sorts, and it was even speculated that links to the murders of Frankie Jensen and Scott Leishman were possible, since all the victims were found with the bottom halves of their clothing removed.

At any rate, it appeared that authorities were not quite as motivated to apprehend the killer of a thirty-something swinging divorcée as they had been to capture a child killer, and sadly the case of Helga Beer was soon forgotten in the wake of even more baffling homicides that would later transpire in the city.

In November of 1968, yet another young woman would go missing in London, Ontario, but her whereabouts would be unknown for almost half a decade.

Nineteen-year-old Lynda White had just moved to London from her native Burlington to attend Western University’s Huron College. She lived in a rented house on Argyle Street that she shared with some roommates who also happened to be classmates from her old high school. Though the residence was about a half-hour walk away from the campus, Lynda enjoyed living there with her friends, and it helped that she was also very near the home of her typing tutor.

As winter descended, though, Lynda got in the habit of catching a ride to and from class with two boys she knew who lived nearby; they would usually drop her off near her tutor’s place, which was only two blocks away from her own house.

On November 13th, 1968, Lynda had just completed a French mid-term at around 7:00 p.m. and asked some of her friends if they wanted to go blow off some steam at the CPR Tavern nearby, a popular hangout for students. No one did, so Lynda just got into the car of her two male friends, who dropped her off at the same place they always did and watched her walk off into the early evening.

Lynda’s roommates were out and about later that night, but no one found it particularly remarkable that Lynda was a no-show at the campus pubs, assuming that she had simply gone straight home and later decided against going out.

However, the next morning, friends became concerned when they noticed that Lynda’s bed had not been slept in, and there remained no hint in her room as to where the young woman had gone. Her roommates called her brother John, who drove the hundred miles from Burlington to help look for her. A search of the entire campus yielded no sign, and a survey of Lynda’s other friends and acquaintances produced no useful information.

Attempting to cover all the bases, John White went to the nearest London train station and showed the man at the ticket booth a photograph of his sister. The man told John that the girl had just gotten on the train bound for Toronto, but when John jumped on the train and searched all the cars, he didn’t see her anywhere.

In the meantime, Lynda’s parents had also arrived, and they and John searched the Argyle house once again. This time, ominously, they discovered something that had either been missed or hadn’t been there the first go-around: several pieces of Lynda’s clothing had been balled up and shoved underneath the comforter on her bed. Though the clothing did not appear to be damaged or stained, its presence was troubling, to say the least, and could have suggested that Lynda had come back to the room to change for some unknown reason. Why the clothing had been concealed was yet another mystery.

At last, the White family reported Lynda missing, approximately twenty-four hours after she had last been seen. The police, despite the rash of crimes taking place in the city over the previous months, did not seem overly alarmed, operating under the assumption that Lynda had probably just run away of her own volition.

Her fate would remain undetermined for four and a half years.

In April of 1969, there would be yet another unsolved slaying in London, Ontario, Canada, a city which was fast becoming something of a mecca for murderers, it seemed. As a matter of fact, aside from all the other unsolved London homicides detailed so far, January of 1969 had also seen the first in a series of three killings that would later come to be known as the work of the so-called London Chambermaid Slayer, a serial killer eventually identified as Gerald Thomas Archer. Archer’s three victims—Jane Wooley, Edith Authier, and Belva Russell—were all hotel employees in their fifties and sixties who were beaten and stabbed to death.

The case of Patricia Bovin, though, did not appear to be connected to the chambermaid murders, despite the proximity of the crimes. Patricia was only twenty-two years old, a newly separated mother with two small children at home, Clifford and Kevin. In many ways, her murder was somewhat reminiscent of the August 1968 killing of Helga Beer, another newly single young woman who was trying to get back out and spread her wings in the dating scene.

On the evening of April 22nd, 1969, though, Patricia was home with her boys in their one-bedroom apartment on King Street, completely unaware that a killer was lurking just outside their windows.

The following day, which was a Thursday, a male friend of Patricia’s phoned her apartment in the early afternoon, but received no reply. Slightly concerned, he decided to stop by and check on her and the children.

Inside the apartment, he discovered an unimaginably gruesome scene. Patricia Bovin was lying on the floor in a huge puddle of blood, having been stabbed at least a dozen times in the chest. Her two children—crying and hungry but otherwise physically unharmed—hovered near the body, clearly exhausted and terrified.

A search of the apartment by police turned up no sign of forced entry, and no evidence of robbery. Although some of the furniture had been knocked over or moved around, investigators determined that the two small boys had done this while trying to reach the cabinets to get food.

It appeared that Patricia Bovin had been asleep on the sofa when the assailant entered through the unlocked front door and began stabbing her. A bloody pillowcase recovered from near the front hallway strengthened the theory that this had been the killer’s entry point. Despite the viciousness of the murder, it was established that Patricia had not been sexually assaulted.

Though like the earlier case of Helga Beer, investigators seemed to assign less urgency to solving the murder of a newly single woman who collected welfare benefits and was allegedly dating several men, they did manage to come up with a few promising leads. The first of these involved Patricia’s ex-boyfriend, who committed suicide shortly after hearing about her death. Whether his suicide was spurred by guilt or simple grief has never been determined.

A more intriguing scenario posited that Patricia Bovin had possibly fallen victim to the same killer who had murdered thirty-two-year-old London woman Victoria Mayo in August of 1964. Like Patricia, Victoria had been violently stabbed to death in her home while her young child was also present and unharmed. Further, neither case featured robbery or rape as a motive; in addition, the women’s homes were less than three miles apart.

A man named Sandor Fulep had confessed to killing Victoria Mayo in October of 1967, though because of his mental disability he was only placed in a psychiatric facility for a short time before being released. In 2000, DNA evidence from his exhumed body proved definitively that Sandor Fulep had murdered Victoria Mayo, leaving open the possibility that he may have been responsible for slaying Patricia Bovin as well.

And less than two months after Patricia Bovin’s murder, yet another child in London, Ontario would go missing, hearkening back to the recent disappearances and murders of Frankie Jensen and Scott Leishman, though at this stage it is unclear whether this crime was linked to the previous two.

Eleven-year-old Robert Bruce Stapylton, according to his stepfather, supposedly left his home on Piccadilly Street on June 7th, 1969 and was never seen alive again.

Despite the massive media coverage that had come in the wake of the other recent child murders in the area, press reportage of the disappearance of Robert Stapylton seemed oddly low-key, with few details about the exact circumstances surrounding the child’s vanishing act. There did appear to be an intensive search for the boy in the weeks subsequent to him going missing, but it remains uncertain who officially reported the child missing, and when. On September 23rd, his body was discovered in a wooded area less than four miles from his home.

Though the recent murders of Frankie Jensen and Scott Leishman would lead detectives to believe that the deaths were most likely linked, they were stymied by the fact that Robert’s remains bore no signs of violence, and there was no obvious cause of death. Further, unlike in the cases of the two previously murdered boys, Robert was found partially concealed on land, and not in the water. He was also lacking the pink tissue signature present in the case of Jacqueline Dunleavy, as well as a few later murders in the probable series.

And less than two weeks later, London would see yet another shocking murder of a young teenager, a crime that may not have been connected to the killing of Robert Bruce Stapylton, but was almost certainly related to some other similar murders of young women in the area.

On October 4th, 1969, fifteen-year-old Jackie English left her part-time job as a waitress at the diner inside the Metropolitan Store at the Treasure Island Plaza. It was around 10:30 p.m., and as was her habit, she walked to the Wellington Road Bridge over Highway 401, which eventually led to Exeter Road, where she normally caught her bus home.

But witnesses later reported that Jackie never made it to the Exeter Road bus stop, instead getting into the back seat of a vehicle—variously described as a blue sedan with only one occupant, or a white sedan with two—which had stopped in the middle of the bridge. It is unclear whether the driver was someone she knew or simply a random motorist who she seemingly had no reason to fear, but what is almost certain is that whoever was driving the car was most likely her killer.

As Jackie had been living with friends because of her family’s financial hardships, no one immediately reported her missing, though her worried father finally contacted police on the evening of October 5th, after hearing from her roommates that she had failed to come home. And for four more agonizing days, there would be no sign of her.

Then, on the early evening of October 9th, two duck hunters discovered Jackie’s nude body floating face up in Big Otter Creek, the same body of water where Scott Leishman had been found in May of 1968. The dump site lay approximately forty-five miles from the spot where Jackie was last seen alive.

None of Jackie’s clothing or belongings were found at the scene, though a ring remained on her finger, and a pair of inexpensive earrings she had been wearing was discovered in the water near her body, having been presumably removed by her killer and thrown off the bridge after her. As the remains appeared far too fresh to have been in the water for five days, it was theorized that her body had been kept at some other location and then dumped the night before it was discovered.

Post-mortem examination determined that Jackie had been killed by a single blow to the back of the head with an implement akin to a tire iron or a crowbar. There were no obvious signs of sexual assault; she was found to have had sexual intercourse prior to her death, but as she had spent most of October 4th with her boyfriend Dave, who had the same blood type as the semen found in her body, it was speculated that the sex had likely been consensual.

On October 12th, several articles of Jackie English’s torn clothing were discovered in Bayham Township, along County Road 46. The location where the clothes were found was about eighteen miles away from the spot where her body had been dumped. Police recovered a semen sample from Jackie’s torn underwear that was different from the semen found inside her body, though a blood grouping could not be established. There was no way of determining whether Jackie had consensual sex with a second person on October 4th, whether she had been raped by her killer, or whether her killer had simply masturbated into her underwear at some point before or after her murder.

On October 19th, a woman named Betty Harrison reported to police that she and her family had been eating at the diner in the Metropolitan Store on the night Jackie English was abducted. According to Betty, she had seen two dark-haired men of very similar appearance speaking to Jackie that night on separate occasions, and that Jackie appeared to be frightened. Police developed a composite sketch based on the Harrison family’s testimony, and this sketch would lead to an alarming attack later on that year.

On October 20th, more of Jackie English’s possessions turned up in Ontario. This time it was a pair of brown penny loafers she had been seen wearing on the night she disappeared. The killer had apparently attempted to throw the shoes into a pond off a remote country lane in Malahide Township, but had missed the mark, leaving the loafers on the bank.

Significantly, the spot where the shoes were found corresponded very closely to the location where the body of twenty-year-old Georgia Jackson had been discovered back in March of 1966. Though it seems that investigators did not explore a link between the two murders at the time, more recent researchers have pointed out that the slaying of Georgia Jackson bore many other eerie resemblances to the murder of Jackie English.

For example, both young women had dark hair, both worked as waitresses, and both had been abducted while walking home from work. Georgia was raped and smothered, and her body was not discovered until a month after she went missing. As in the case of Jackie English, some of Georgia’s clothing was later found discarded in various sites some distance away from the body.

In 1971, twenty-one-year-old David Bodemer, who knew Georgia Jackson through membership in the Jehovah’s Witness congregation in Alymer, Ontario, confessed to raping and killing Georgia, and was convicted in 1972, though he only served ten years. His current whereabouts are unclear, but former cop and criminologist Michael Arntfield has stated that Bodemer seems a compelling suspect in the death of Jackie English as well, especially considering that the family of previously mentioned witness Betty Harrison spotted a man bearing some resemblance to Bodemer at the Metropolitan Store talking to Jackie on the night she vanished.

In one additional, bizarre flourish, Jackie’s killer also left a small shrine consisting of a few of her possessions—such as a pencil case and a cosmetic bag—in front of her former family home, approximately two weeks after her murder.

And on November 14th, Betty Harrison, whose testimony had resulted in a composite sketch of an individual who had been seen speaking to Jackie on the night of her disappearance, began receiving obscene phone calls. Considering Betty’s status as a possible witness, police took the calls rather seriously, and put the Harrison home under protective surveillance. Despite the precautions, however, the calls would later blossom into a horrifying assault.

Before that, though, on November 21st, 1969, a sixteen-year-old girl named Marilyn Hird was discovered unresponsive outside of the Simpsons Department Store—coincidentally the same store where murder victim Helga Beer had worked.

Upon being taken to the hospital, Marilyn was found to have attempted suicide by swallowing a large number of painkillers and sleeping pills. However, when the teenager’s pockets were searched, hospital staff came across a photograph of Jackie English, on the back of which Marilyn had written, “Let her killer remain a secret to be buried with me.”

As it turned out, Marilyn Hird also worked at the Metropolitan Store, and claimed to be one of Jackie’s best friends, though other witnesses disputed this assertion. Marilyn had been interviewed several times by police in the weeks following Jackie’s murder, though her story seemed to vary with each questioning. She told authorities on different occasions that Jackie had confided in her that she was frightened of someone; claimed that Jackie often went riding in a car with a bunch of American men who picked her up from work; and even at one stage accused two London police officers of killing Jackie and covering up the crime.

It remains unknown whether Marilyn Hird actually knew who had killed Jackie, or was simply making up stories for whatever reason. In a 2014 interview for the program To Catch A Killer, she again insisted to host and criminologist Michael Arntfield that she knew who the killer or killers were, but refused to name them, presumably due to fear of reprisals.

On the same program, Arntfield and his team speculated that Marilyn possibly could have been protecting an unnamed relative, who was arrested for stabbing a five-year-old child not long before Jackie English was killed.

At 4:30 a.m. on the morning of December 7th, witness Betty Harrison and her family reported to police that they had heard a loud thud on their front door, and had subsequently spotted a vehicle speeding away, which they believed to be a Ford. Four days after that, on December 11th, Betty found a sympathy card that had been left in her mailbox, bearing no address and no stamp. Inside the card, someone had written, “Watching you,” in large red letters.

Later that same day, Betty was out running errands, and at some point early in the evening, took the family dog Cindy to run around at the nearby dog park. When she got back into her Volkswagen with the dog, a man emerged out of the darkness, slipped into the passenger seat of her car, and held a knife to her throat.

After asking her to turn on the dome light, informing Elizabeth that he “like[d] to watch” (a request she declined), he proceeded to slice open her cheek, lick the blood off her face, fondle her over her clothes, and tell her that he enjoyed having sex with dead women. The assailant then began stabbing and slashing at her, cutting her face nearly thirty times and also inflicting wounds on her hands, back, and thighs. After a few minutes of this frenzied assault, the man jumped out of the car and fled into the winter night.

Betty Harrison managed to drive herself to the nearest hospital, where she was treated for her injuries. Though she had not got a very good look at the man who had attacked her, and was unsure if it was the same man she had seen at the diner the night Jackie English disappeared, she did confirm to police that the man’s voice was the same as the voice of the man who had been making obscene phone calls to the Harrison home.

A man named Glen Fryer, the principal of the Children’s Psychiatric Research Institute, was eventually charged with perpetrating the December 1969 stabbing attack on Betty Harrison, and was also by extension thought to be responsible for the obscene phone calls that Harrison household had received. It was unclear whether he was also a significant suspect in the slaying of Jackie English.

At his trial, which took place in July of 1970, he was acquitted of all charges, and no other suspects were ever arrested for the assault on Betty Harrison.

And less than a month after the acquittal, the so-called “Serial Killer Capital” of London, Ontario would once again live up to its morbid reputation.

At around 7:00 p.m. on the evening of August 14th, 1970, fifteen-year-old Soraya O’Connell decided she wanted to go down to the youth center on Fanshawe Park Road to play cards with her friends. Perhaps coincidentally, the site where the Fanshawe Park Road youth center was located was very near to the area where the body of eleven-year-old Robert Stapylton had been discovered back in September of 1969.

Soraya’s mother dropped her daughter off at the youth center, and said she’d be back at 10:00 p.m. to pick her up. But when Mrs. O’Connell returned as scheduled, she was told that Soraya had left the youth center at around 9:30 p.m. Another boy who was present at the center told Mrs. O’Connell that Soraya had for some reason decided that she wanted to leave earlier than ten, and though he initially told her he would give her a ride home, he later chose to stay at the center longer, and claimed that Soraya had subsequently left on her own, presumably to hitch a ride back to her home three miles away.

Initially, Mrs. O’Connell was not concerned, and headed back, thinking that Soraya would have gotten a lift from another friend and would have already arrived home ahead of her. However, the O’Connell residence was deserted, and at that point, Mrs. O’Connell called her husband, who was working in Toronto, and the moment he returned home, the couple contacted police and began searching for their missing daughter.

Mindful of the previous case of Lynda White, who had vanished in November of 1968, police immediately treated the disappearance of Soraya O’Connell as a probable abduction and homicide, and poured all their investigative efforts into finding the girl. In spite of their dedication, however, it would be four long years before Soraya was found.

And long before then, yet another young woman would vanish under mysterious circumstances, only to meet an unimaginably grim end that would only slowly be revealed over the subsequent months.

Twenty-one-year-old Priscilla Merle had been out drinking with friends on the night of Saturday, March 4th, 1972, after which she returned to her sister’s apartment on Hill Street. Shortly following her return, at around 2:15 a.m. on the morning of March 5th, her boyfriend’s brother—thirty-nine-year-old David Pullin—drove up in his car, ostensibly to take her to a party she wanted to go to in nearby Exeter.

Neither friends nor family ever heard from Priscilla again, though she was never reported missing as her relatives simply believed she was out partying and living her own life somewhere. Less than a month later, though, gruesome hints of her appalling death would begin to appear in creeks around the city.

On March 26th, for example, a man was fishing in Kettle Creek when he noticed something unusual that had washed in with the tide. Upon closer inspection, this item proved to be a severed woman’s arm.

The limb remained unidentified for the time being, but on April 13th, another grisly relic was discovered by another fisherman in the same body of water. This particular find was the upper half of a woman’s torso, presumably belonging to the same individual as the arm.

On May 11th, 1972, the lower portion of a woman’s torso was discovered floating in Kettle Creek, approximately half a mile from where the arm and upper torso had been found. Though the head and legs of the victim were never recovered, authorities were finally able to identify the remains as those of twenty-one-year-old Priscilla Merle, who had gone missing from her sister’s home the previous March.

Because the body was woefully incomplete, police were unable to determine an exact cause of death, though they were fairly certain that the young woman had been killed prior to being dismembered. They also surmised that whoever had murdered Priscilla was something of an amateur, who nonetheless must have had access to a private dwelling where the extensive mutilations were carried out. The pieces of the body, they further theorized, had likely been thrown off the bridge just outside the beach town of Port Stanley.

Chief investigator Dennis Alsop was convinced that the last person who had seen Priscilla alive—David Pullin, the brother of her boyfriend—was the same person who had killed her. To this end, Alsop questioned the suspect on numerous occasions, and even placed him under surveillance for a time.

The case against David Pullin was fairly compelling: not only had he been seen picking the victim up in his car on the night she disappeared, but his vehicle also contained small traces of blood inside which had been diluted with a cleaning solution. Further, a hacksaw found in his toolbox was suspiciously missing its blade.

Despite the circumstantial evidence, however, Pullin never admitted any wrongdoing, and authorities were unable to construct a solid enough edifice to convince a jury of his guilt. The murder of Priscilla Merle, unfortunately, was soon overshadowed in the alarming whirlwind of homicides taking place in the city of London during the period.

At least seven of these killings (and a further eleven sexual assaults), taking place between 1973 and 1977, would eventually be laid at the feet of a serial killer known as the Bedroom Strangler or the Balcony Killer. This individual would later be identified as a man named Russell Johnson, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1977 and confined indefinitely at Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care.

Another area serial killer who was eventually caught was the so-called Mad Slasher, Christian Magee, who raped and murdered at least three women between 1974 and 1976, and for a time was confined to the same facility. The fact that three serial killers—the two just referred to and the previously mentioned Chambermaid Slayer, Gerald Thomas Archer—were known to be operating in the area, but demonstrably did not murder many of the victims discussed so far, is emblematic of the enormity of the problem in London.

April and May of 1973 in the increasingly murderous city, for instance, would finally bring an end to a missing persons case that had haunted the area for nearly five years. A farmer in Bayham Township—the same location where some of murder victim Jackie English’s clothing had been found in 1969—was making the rounds of his property in April when he came across another set of clothing wrapped in a bundle around what looked like part of a surveyor’s pole. Police immediately suspected that the clothing had belonged to nineteen-year-old Lynda White, who had gone missing after taking a French exam on November 13th, 1968. Authorities were able to confirm their hunch when Lynda’s former roommates came forward and positively identified the items of clothing as belonging to Lynda.

Then, about a month later and nearly thirty miles away, another farmer stumbled across a nearly complete set of skeletal remains that were identified as Lynda White through dental records. In a macabre touch, the killer had posed the body with the limbs outstretched, as if in a grim reenactment of the Vitruvian Man, though the right arm was missing and never recovered. Not only had the skeleton been found twenty-six miles away from the site where Lynda White’s clothing had been abandoned, but the location of the remains lay approximately seventy miles from the spot where Lynda was last seen alive.

Due to the extent of the decomposition, the cause of death could never be determined, though examination of the remains suggested that the body had been frozen or kept somewhere else for a time before being dumped where it was found, across from Hillcrest Cemetery in the tiny hamlet of Forestville.

Investigator Dennis Alsop, who worked many of the crimes taking place in the London, Ontario area during the period, believed that the killer of Lynda White—as well as some of the other victims—may have had necrophilic tendencies, and left the bodies in various poses in somewhat open areas so that he could periodically return to survey his handiwork. However, the person who killed Lynda White would remain a mystery, one of many in the Canadian town known as Murder City.

On May 26th, 1974, a skeleton was found in Perth County by a man out scrounging for old bottles. The bones, only partially visible beneath a thin layer of leaves that had fallen on them, were soon identified through dental records as belonging to fifteen-year-old Soraya O’Connell, who had gone missing in August of 1970 after spending an evening with friends at a youth center near her home on Bridle Path. The girl’s remains lay approximately thirty miles from where she had last been seen alive, nearly four years earlier.

The circumstances surrounding the finding of the body of Soraya O’Connell bore an unmistakable resemblance to the previously discussed case of Lynda White, who had vanished in November of 1968, only to have her bones turn up in May of 1973. And also like Lynda White, the remains of Soraya O’Connell had been taken some distance from her home, and had been deliberately posed and left partly in the open by her killer, perhaps so that he could later return to the spot to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

Authorities also noted that Soraya’s body had only been at the dump site for a maximum of three years, meaning that the murderer had kept the girl—either dead or alive—at another location for some time before dumping her where she was ultimately found. This was another aspect of the case mirroring that of Lynda White.

Unlike in the Lynda White homicide, though, Soraya’s clothing was never found, though her earrings had been removed and left nearby, a detail that recalled the abduction and murder of Jackie English from October of 1969. The similarities between the three crimes, in fact, led Inspector Dennis Alsop to surmise that Soraya, Lynda, and Jackie had likely all been killed by the same assailant. Who this killer was, however, has never been determined, and it is almost certain his victims numbered more than just those three. And as July of 1975 shaded into August, the town known as “Murder City” would live up to its name once again.

On the late morning of Thursday, July 31st, sixty-six-year-old Irene Gibbons left her home in Strathroy, Ontario, Canada—a town a little more than twenty miles from London—to do her weekly grocery shopping. Once arriving at the store, she selected the items she wanted to be delivered to her house later on, and then walked back to her home on Keefe Street nearby. By all accounts, she arrived safely back at her house at around noon, and briefly spoke to a friend on the phone shortly afterward.

Less than an hour later, a delivery boy brought Irene’s groceries to her home, and simply left the bag on the porch after there was no answer to his knocks.

On Monday, August 3rd, a girl delivering newspapers noticed the rotting bag of food still sitting on Irene’s front porch and contacted the police, fearing that the elderly woman might have suffered a fall or a heart attack inside the home where she lived alone. When authorities arrived, however, they found that something far more sinister had befallen her.

Irene Gibbons was lying dead on her kitchen floor, her eyes still open and staring. She had been bound tightly with nylons, which had been elaborately knotted around her wrists and ankles. Her mouth was also stuffed with stockings and rags, and she had been strangled with yet another length of nylon, which had been twisted like a tourniquet around her throat.

Irene was found fully clothed and had not been raped, but the configuration of the ligatures and the time they would have taken to engineer suggested a killer who was motivated by the process of overpowering his victim, and perhaps the sexual satisfaction gleaned from complete control over her movements. Police were unable to detect any sign of forced entry into the home, and theorized that the assailant had either convinced Irene to let him in, or had entered through an unlocked door or window while she was out at the grocery store.

Because of the excessive amounts of rags and nylon stuffed into the mouth of the victim, some investigators posited a possible link between the murder of Irene Gibbons and the earlier killings of Jacqueline Dunleavy and Frankie Jensen, both of whom were found to have wads of pink facial tissues crammed down their throats.

Sadly, the investigation into the vicious slaying of Irene Gibbons produced no valuable clues, and later that fall, another horrifying and similar murder in the same town would overshadow her case.

This time, the victim was nineteen-year-old mother of one Louise Jenner, who was at home with her baby daughter on the afternoon of Monday, October 20th, 1975 when a killer came knocking at her door.

The body of Louise Jenner was discovered at approximately 5:00 p.m. by her husband when he arrived home from work. She had been raped, strangled with a boot lace, and then had her throat cut. The baby was unharmed in her crib upstairs.

Investigators speculated that the assailant had come to the door and convinced Louise to let him inside, or was alternately an individual who was known to the victim. Chillingly, it appeared that the murderer had allowed Louise to put her clothes back on after the rape, perhaps trying to convince her that she wouldn’t be killed.

Much like the earlier murder of Irene Gibbons, no suspects were ever identified, and no solid physical evidence could be recovered.

Eight long years went by with none of the previous crimes approaching a resolution. Then, in the autumn of 1983, a young woman was gruesomely murdered in a fashion reminiscent of some earlier crimes in the area, and the city’s unofficial moniker of “the serial killer capital of the world” would get yet another possible point for accuracy.

Seventeen-year-old Donna Jean Awcock had been babysitting for a neighbor on the night of October 13th, 1983, but hadn’t yet phoned home to tell her mother when she would be getting back. In fact, it seems that at around 2:30 a.m. on the morning of the 14th, Donna walked to a convenience store a couple of blocks away to purchase some cigarettes. She was never seen alive again.

On the following afternoon, police recovered her half-nude and badly bruised body from the banks of the Thames River near Fanshawe Dam. She had been raped and manually strangled.

Significantly, the killer had also left an orange plastic bag stuffed down the victim’s throat, perhaps to prevent her from screaming. This detail was telling, as it tied in with a handful of other murders by the so-called “Tissue Slayer” that had taken place years earlier, specifically the killings of sixteen-year-old Jacqueline Dunleavy and nine-year-old Frankie Jensen, both of whom had been murdered in 1968 and found with pink facial tissues stuffed down their throats. A third victim, sixty-six-year-old Irene Gibbons, was slain in her home in the summer of 1975 in a somewhat similar manner.

It remains possible that Donna may have been a victim of one of the serial killers operating around London, Ontario at the time, though her family has gone on record as stating that they believe the man who killed her had been stalking her for quite some time and moved west after the murder, never to be heard from again.

With the death of Donna Jean Awcock, London’s quarter-century run as the serial killer capital of the world evidently came to an end, and to this day, no one is entirely sure what caused the unusual flurry of murders in this seemingly mundane city, and exactly how many killers once stalked its tree-lined streets.