On Friday March 10, I held a Facebook live event through my Facebook page Cold Case BC, and the podcast group page Cold Case Canada. It was a good excuse to introduce myself to the thousands of new members who have joined in the past year and talk about the process of writing my book Cold Case BC: the stories behind the most intriguing murder and missing person cases.
In the Halloween Special of 2022, we visit the Victoria Golf Course, two mansions in Burnaby, and travel to a haunted highway in BC’s interior. Keep the lights on while you listen!
Based on stories from:
- Belyk, Robert: Ghosts: More Eerie Encounters
- Lazarus, Eve: At Home with History: The secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes
- Lazarus, Eve: Blood, Sweat and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance,
- Mansfield, Greg: Ghosts of Vancouver
- Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck by Eve Lazarus, coming April 2025.
On June 26, 1969, 16-year-old Philip Porter left his home in Townsite, Kimberley to run some errands for his mother. The son of the Cominco boss never came home. A ransom note demanding $100,000 for his safe return arrived instead.
In the late 1960s, Kimberley was a one-company town located in the East Kootenays.
Ronnie Jack, 26, Doreen Jack, 26, Russell 9 and Ryan 4 were last seen on August 2, 1989 in Prince George. They told their family they had jobs at a logging camp and they’d be gone for about 10 days. And then they vanished.
This story is from my new book Cold Case BC: The stories behind the Province’s most sensational murders and missing persons cases
On August 1, 1989, Ronnie Jack, 26, was at the First Litre Pub, a sketchy Prince George drinking hole about four blocks from his home.
Monica Jack, 12 was riding her bike near her home in Quilchena when she was abducted and murdered in 1978. And, even though Garry Taylor Handlen was a suspect early on in this investigation and questioned in the 1975 murder of 11-year-old Kathryn-Mary Herbert, it would take another 36 years and a Mr. Big sting to convict him.
Saanich residents Tanya Van Cuylenborg, 18 and Jay Cook, 20 were murdered while on an overnight trip to Washington State in 1987. Episode includes interviews with Detective Jim Scharf of the Snohomish Country Sheriff’s Office and CeCe Moore, Chief Genetic Genealogist at Parabon Nanolabs, who cracked this case three decades later.
On November 18, 1987, Tanya Van Cuylenborg, 18 and Jay Cook, 20 left their homes in Saanich on Vancouver Island for an overnight trip to Seattle.
Len Hogue was one of three dirty VPD cops who supplemented their salaries initially through B&Es, escalated to bank robberies, and in 1965 pulled off the biggest heist in Vancouver’s history – $1.2 million worth of bank notes that were being sent back to Ottawa to be destroyed.
They called themselves the terrible three. Three dirty Vancouver cops who met during training in the notorious “Class of 1956.”
This story is from Cold Case BC: The stories behind the province’s most sensational murder and missing person cases
Constable Leonard Hogue was one of three rogue cops who supplemented their police paychecks through an escalating series of robberies.