In 1944, Jennie Conroy was a 24-year-old war worker living in North Vancouver. She was murdered and left near the West Vancouver cemetery.
In 2015, I was almost finished Cold Case Vancouver when research archivist Daien Ide sent me an email from the NVMA. Daien had just acquired an album with photos that went up to the early 1940s. The owner’s name Miss. J. Conroy and address were inscribed in the inside front cover. Daien did some digging and thought that I would be interested in what she found out.
I was.
This podcast is from a chapter in Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders and includes interviews with Jennie’s daughter Mary and her niece Debbie.
Worked at the Shipyards:
Daien found out that Jennie Conroy was a 24-year-old shipyards war worker who was born and raised in North Vancouver. She was brutally murdered in 1944, her body left near the West Vancouver cemetery.
I wrote up a post on my blog and the next day I received an email from Jennie Conroy’s niece, Debbie.
Debbie told me that Jennie had given birth to a daughter just a couple of months before her murder and kindly put me in touch with her. Jennie was unmarried and Mary was adopted by a Chilliwack family. She married, raised five boys and now lives in New Zealand.
Jennie’s Family:
The story in Cold Case Vancouver, became a collaborative effort between Mary, Debbie and myself. You’ll hear from these incredible women, and how several decades later, Jennie’s unsolved murder continues to impact their lives.
Mary spent years researching her biological mother. And together, we built a profile of Jennie – what she looked like, what her family background was like, and the amazing person that she was.
And then bizarrely, when I was researching my book Blood, Sweat, and Fear, I came across several boxes that had been packed away by Inspector Vance, a forensic scientist with the Vancouver Police Department who retired in 1949. One of the boxes had an envelope marked Jennie Eldon Conroy. Inside were dozens of newspaper clippings, crime scene photos, an autopsy report, even samples of Jennie’s hair and gravel from the murder site that spilled out on my desk.
Inspector Vance solved a lot of cases over his 42-year- career, unfortunately Jennie’s wasn’t one of them.
Sponsors: Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours and Erin Hakin Jewellery
Show notes:
If you have any information about these murders please call North Vancouver RCMP at 604-985-3311. If you wish to remain anonymous, call crime stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or visit the website solvecrime.ca
Music: You by thedarkpiano.com
Intro: Mark Dunn
Voice overs: Mark Dunn, Megan Dunn
Promo: Blood, Sweat, and Fear: the story of Inspector Vance
With immense gratitude to Jennie’s daughter Mary and her niece Debbie.
© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, content copyright Eve Lazarus.
11 comments on “The Murder of Jennie Eldon Conroy”
Very interesting and informative. My mother was a shipyard worker too, and a year younger than Jenny Conroy. She may have known her. I am sorry the murder was never solved, and that an unmarried woman was shamed or frowned upon at that time.
Thanks for stopping by Brad. And I agree. Her daughter, niece and grandchildren believe she’s owed some justice, and so do I.
The fact that she was as many during the war working in “a man’s” job may not set well either. The guy if it were a guy should have been oversea helping defend as the women were! Unfortunately it may never be solved. God Bless her!
This case has way to many unanswered questions.The two biggest being
1-Who killed her obviously?
2- Why what this so covered up?And on so many levels?
BTW,I was adopted also,met my birth mother and she also explained all the shaming and her horrible treatment by the church and society in general.
Vance was amazing!
Love your books and very much enjoyed hearing your podcast.
Cheers.
Crazy and the first suspect must be the childs father.
Could you do also Donna Kolosky who was bookkeeper who tried to get out of the association but as she knew too much she was murdered. School records gone, VGH denies she was there but Dr. Notes are on VGH stationary. Her pix in a bikini in 53 the first though not published till 66. Ill send you pixs of who they met in Havana in the late 50,s
How sad – very interesting & wish this case can be solved. Hopefully Jenny`s story can be told.
My grandmother became pregnant in 1943 at 16. She had the child just after she turned 17. She did marry the man and had another baby at 18 and another at 19. Then the man left her and she had to raise the three children on her own. (It turned out he was gay. He died under mysterious circumstances on the streets of Vancouver in 1983.) My grandmother, though so kind and loving to her family, was a very sad woman. I can’t imagine how hard her life had been. And likewise, I can’t imagine how hard it was for my grandfather, being a gay man, in the 1940’s. The irony of it all, is that so many women became pregnant before marriage. I have been doing geneology for 20 + years and when you look back at marriages, the birth of the first child there was not always ‘9 months’. I would say about 30% of women were pregnant when they got married. The hypocrisy of it all astounds me.
Thank you so much Eve for bringing this case to light. I have a daughter her age and can’t imagine how Jennie could cope being so young and without support. I hope her killer is found.
I can’t even begin to imagine how tough that must have been, thanks for writing and sharing your grandmother’s story. When I was researching another case around that time period, I was going through copies of the Vancouver Police Department’s annual report. In 1948 it mentions seven murders in which 3 involved mothers and children. In two, a mother shut herself in a room with a child an committed suicide by gas oven, another mother threw her two children and herself off a bridge. There’s no mention of the number of suicides by young women.
Was the father of the children gay? Gay people then were not as public! Unlike now. But they have and still are persecuted, regardless of how good they are!
I was born in 1942, and things hadn’t changed much in the 1950’s when I was a teen. Girls would go visit an aunt or older sister for a few months, and there were homes “for unwed mothers” then too.
I was married in 1961 and pregnant with our first child in 1964. The firm I worked for expected women to take a leave of absence when they started showing. It was considered obscene for the male employees to be subjected to the sight of an obviously pregnant women.
Ideas began changing in the 1960’s with the “hippies”, free love, single motherhood and of course “the pill”. I would never want to go back to “the good old days”. They were just awful for women.
Love your shows!!!
Thanks so much! It never fails to shock me how badly women were treated especially single mothers. It’s like they got pregnant all by themselves