On November 6, 1967 sometime before 6:00 pm, seven-year-old Nancy Johnsen went missing from her Cloverdale, BC farmhouse. Nancy, one of 10 children ranging in age from six months to 16 years, was found on the property the next morning. She had been strangled. No one reported seeing a stranger around the house that night and Nancy was not known to wander outside alone. The case went cold.
The boisterous Johnsen family had finished dinner and around 6:00 pm on November 6, 1967. several of the kids were playing in the house. Mary, who was nine, says she remembers going to play hide and seek after dinner with her three of her siblings when they noticed Nancy wasn’t with them.
The Johnsen’s searched all over for Nancy, and at 6:45 pm, Irvan called police. In less than two hours more than 100 volunteers joined police to help with the search which continued until it started to rain heavily, shortly after midnight.
At 8:00 a.m. a searcher found Nancy’s tiny body lying face down in a marshy bush area by a creek, just a third of a kilometre from the Johnsen home. She had been strangled.
The police quickly focussed their investigation on the family, accusing the older brothers and even Shirley herself.
Move to Aldergrove:
About two years after her murder, Irvan built a house in Aldergrove, and moved his family there. They lived near the Hildebrandt family and the kids became friends. Then on the May long weekend in 1976, 15-year-old Theresa Hildebrandt disappeared. Police immediately wrote off her disappearance as a runaway—there was nothing done to find her. Four years later her remains were found in a shallow grave in a gully near Downes and Mt. Lehman roads. Theresa had died from blunt force trauma to the head.
Mary always suspected her older brother killed her sister and her mother covered it up. “It always bothered me that we moved to Aldergrove and Theresa Hildebrandt went missing,” she says. “We lived on the next road from her. She was a friend of my sister.”
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Show Notes:
Sponsors: Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours and Erin Hakin Jewellery
Music: Andreas Schuld ‘Waiting for You’
Intro: Mark Dunn
Script Consultant: Richard Berrow
Buy me a coffee promo: McBride Communications and Media
Podcast promo: Blood, Sweat and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance
Related:
- Episode 26: Evangeline Azarcon, Abducted
- Episode 27: Tanya Busch, the Prison Guard
- Episode 31: The Monica Jack Murder
5 comments on “Nancy Johnsen: The Cloverdale Murder”
Is the case still open?
It’s unsolved.
Sad no closure.
Didn’t the forensic team save blood work, hairs, semen, any or all bodily fluids pertinent to this young girl’s murder?
DNA would probably convicted the monster now.
Very unlikely back then unfortunately. This was almost 25 years before we’d heard about DNA.