On Sunday December 16, 1973, 96-year-old Albina Christiana Lequiea was found murdered in her bed. She lived on the second floor of the Sisters of Saint Paul School in North Vancouver.
This story is from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History and is also part of a Cold Case Canada Podcast
The Convent:
At first, it was thought that Albina had died from natural causes. But once her body was examined at Lions Gate Hospital, they found that she had been raped and strangled with a nylon stocking. She was still wearing her pink nightgown.
The convent is still there at 524 West Sixth Street, its name is now the Sisters of Instruction of the Child Jesus. The building became part of St. Thomas Aquinas High School in 2003 and backs onto Keith Road.
In 1973, when Albina was a resident, the convent also served as a home for the elderly.
One of the nuns told police that she had found a man in his early 20’s wandering inside the convent at around 3:30 in the morning. He had a beard and shoulder-length dirty blonde hair. He wore jeans, had “striking eyes,” and reeked of booze. He said to her: “Where’s the door? How do I get out?” After he left, she reported it to her superior, but not to the police.
Later they found that he had got in by smashing a glass panel in the front door.
Search for Psychopath Killer:
A few days later the Vancouver Sun ran a story with the headline “Psychopathic killer hunted in strangling at convent.”
There was nothing mentioned about Albina’s long life, so I went searching for a death certificate to find out where she was born. Instead, I found an article written in 2007 by Elizabeth Withey, Albina’s great granddaughter.
According to Withey’s story, she was born Albina Christiana Proulx in Nicolet, Quebec in 1877. When she was 19, she married Phillip Lequiea and they raised nine children on a farm near Battleford, Saskatchewan. Albina was a “fervent catholic” who was “tiny, gentle and devoted to her family and God.” She went to church every morning before breakfast, and it must have made her happy that one of her sons became a priest.
Ed Lequiea led the funeral mass for his mother.
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Unsolved:
Even with the description by the nun and a composite drawing that ran in the newspapers, Albina’s murderer was never found. His description sounds remarkably like the one that was given to police after the murder of 16-year-old Rhona Duncan less than three years later. Rhona had been raped and strangled on her way home from a party at 15th and Bewicke, just blocks from the convent.
Rhona’s murder is detailed in a chapter of Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders.and is part of a Cold Case Canada podcast The murders of Albina Lequiea and Rhona Duncan are two of North Vancouver’s 17 unsolved cases dating back to 1964. After 2003, new investigations were transferred to IHIT—the RCMP’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team.
Top photo: courtesy North Vancouver Museum and Archives #3444 and Suzanne Wilson’s blog: Churches on Sundays
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