Chilliwack

The Disappearance of 7-year-old Terri Lynn Scalf

by Eve Lazarus on February 26, 2025

Seven-year-old Terri Lynn Scalf was last seen outside her Aldergrove, BC townhouse complex on Sunday July 24, 1983. She had been outside playing with friends and never returned.

By 10:30 the next morning, a massive search was underway.

Terri Lynn Scalf:

Terri Lynn Scalf was born on August 11, 1975. She was just 3 foot 9 inches tall and weighed in at 65 pounds. She was a pretty little girl with long blonde hair and blue eyes and when she smiled, you could see a gap at the bottom front of her mouth where she’d recently lost a tooth.

At the time that she went missing, Terri was wearing a light orange tank top with blue and gold trim and the letters USA on the front. The number 14 was on the back of the shirt. She wore white shorts with red trim and she was barefoot.

Cedar Park Estates:

Terri lived with her mother, three sisters and brother Jaie at the Cedar Park Estates. Jaie was 12 when Terri went missing. “She was always the kid with the ready smile, it took a lot to get Terri to not smile. She was just a bubbly person,” he says.

Ten days after Terri went missing, police said they were looking into a link between Terri’s disappearance and that of Joanne Pedersen, a 10-year-old girl from Chilliwack.

Several months went by, and police told reporters that Terri was last seen by a man and a 10-year-old girl between 4:00 and 5:00 pm on the day that she went missing. He refused to tell the reporter their names but would only say that Terri left to go in the direction of her home, and the man and the girl went on their way.

Last seen with pedophile:

The man was Dennis Elden Dodington, a 45-year-old convicted pedophile with a long criminal record. He had convictions for car theft, break and entering, prison escape, weapons offences and sexual assault of boys and girls as young as six in BC and Alberta.

In 1989, Dodington was convicted of sexually assaulting three children, including Delarie, the 10-year-old girl that was with him on the day that Terri disappeared. He served 10 years. While he supposedly told a cell-mate that he had murdered Terri, her body has not been found and he was not charged in her disappearance.

Terri Lynn Scalf’s case file number is #83-14506. If you have any information about her disappearance, please call Langley RCMP at (604) 532-3200 or if you wish to remain anonymous, call crime stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.

Copies of my new book, Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck, are available through my publisher Arsenal Pulp Press, or preorder from any independent bookstore across Canada

Show Notes:

Sponsor: Erin Hakin Jewellery

Music: Andreas Schuld ‘Waiting for You’

Intro: Mark Dunn

Tags Aldergrove, Chilliwack, Joanne Pedersen, Terri Lynn Scalf

The Chilliwack Hostess with the Ghostess

by Eve Lazarus on October 24, 2014

Now a Cold Case Canada Podcast: Halloween Special – Three Ghost Stories and a Murder

The Fredrickson’s haunted house in Chilliwack

For over six decades a large white house stood at the corner of Williams Street North and Portage Avenue in Chilliwack. The stately old manor had a three-storey tower with a turret topped off by a witch’s hat roof, and for a while, the house put the town on the tourist map.

Hetty and Douglas Fredrickson unknowingly bought the haunted house in 1965, and it wasn’t long before strange things starting happening. One upstairs bedroom was particularly active. Drawers opened and slammed shut; a heavy old iron bedstead moved around by itself, and the Fredrickson’s heard footsteps in the room, when the rest of the family were gathered downstairs.

Neighbours told her two stories about the house. One said that a man committed suicide there in 1956. Another said a woman was murdered and cemented in the chimney.

Hetty found a hidden door, a boarded over passageway and a small undiscovered turret room. And if that wasn’t weird enough, things were about to get worse.

She saw an illuminated mist that reeked of perfume, and then she began to dream about a ghost. In these dreams she’d see the shape of a terrified woman in a red dress with yellow flowers.

Hetty, an artist, decided to paint the ghost.

“It was not easy,” she said. “Every time I tried to paint, the face would start out as a man even as I tried to paint a woman. But I really concentrated and at last painted a likeness of the woman.”

In 1966 the Chilliwack Progress wrote about Hetty’s ghost. The national media jumped on the story and it was reported in papers as far away as Japan.

But even scarier than the changing painting and the rumoured deaths, was the public reaction. One Sunday, 700 people turned up at the Fredricksons to try to catch a glimpse of the ghosts. They broke the front steps, prompting the couple to put up a “no sightseers” sign.

It was all too much for Douglas, a logger, and the couple left for Vancouver Island in 1968.

The next owners moved into the house with their eight kids and the family dog. Known only as Mrs. X in the media, the owner told a reporter that while she didn’t believe in ghosts, there were at least three sharing the house, including a mother ghost who liked to watch television with the family. Her husband, who didn’t believe in ghosts either, slept with a gun under his pillow.

Hetty Frederickson's ghost In 1973, a clever realtor decided to embrace the poltergeist. The house he said was available for $23,000 and included six bedrooms, a new roof, and a very old ghost.

“It used to be that selling a haunted house was a real estate man’s nightmare,” the realtor said. “Today haunted houses seem to attract more interest than those that are not.”

Two years later the house burned down.

For more ghostly stories check out these podcast episodes:

S1 E9 Three Ghost Stories and a Murder

S2 E24 Halloween Special 2021

Victoria’s Ghost

Tags Chilliwack, Chilliwack Progress, Douglas Frederickson, Hetty Frederickson, Royal Hotel

Meet Tom Carter Artist

by Eve Lazarus on January 8, 2014

Tom Carter is a Vancouver-based artist known for exploring the city’s gritty urban environments.

by Tom Carter — Harry Carter–Tom’s grandfather outside his East Hastings Street cafe in the 1930s

Heritage Loft:

I visited Tom Carter in his heritage loft a couple of weeks ago. It was the same afternoon that we climbed up to the top of the Sun Tower, in what was in 1912, the tallest building in the British Empire. Tom lives next door in a 100-year-old converted warehouse designed for Storey & Campbell Limited by William Tuff Whiteway, the same architect who designed the Sun Tower for Mayor L.D. Taylor.

His loft looks out onto Pender Street and its floor to ceiling windows give a great view of Victory Square and some of the building stock we’ve managed to hang onto such as the Dominion and the Standard Buildings. The brick walls of the loft make a fitting background for Tom’s paintings of Vancouver’s street scenes and heritage buildings—many now long gone.

"Night falls over the City of Vancouver" by Tom Carter — “Night falls over the City of Vancouver” by Tom Carter

Missing Heritage:

Tom is fascinated by Vancouver’s early theatre industry and has an amazing collection of photographs, books and even some of the original plaster that he managed to salvage on his daily trips to the Pantages Theatre during its destruction two years ago.

Before he starting painting, Tom lived the rock and roll dream. He co-owned and managed a recording studio in Surrey working with artists like Long John Baldry, and members of Chilliwack and Trooper. Tom played keyboard on a lot of the albums, and his beautiful concert grand takes up a prominent position in his loft.

Tom at home with "Warmth at the edge of wilderness" — Tom at home with “Warmth at the edge of wilderness”

Music:

“We did blues albums that were nominated for Juno awards, a lot of roots rock,” says Tom. “I loved it, it was a lot of fun, but then it got to the point it just wasn’t fun anymore.”

Tom bought the loft in 2003, turned 40, stopped drinking, and dabbled in real estate.

“I found myself sitting in this place, I was unemployed, and I didn’t have a clue how I was going to make the next mortgage payment.”

Then he started to research his family history and had a kind of epiphany.

Tom Carter is a Vancouver artist — Plaster from the Pantages Theatre saved from the landfill

“I realized my grandfather was the same age—39—when he moved to Vancouver from the Prairies,” says Tom. “I knew his life from the early 40s on because he had businesses in the Okanagan, he was mayor of Oliver, but I didn’t know much about this transition period, and I was going through the same transition.”

Vancouver Cafe:

Tom learned that his grandfather had owned the Vancouver Cafe and Grill next to the Balmoral Hotel on East Hastings. His father told him about the bombing of the Royal Theatre across the street in 1933, and how a piece of the Royal had smashed into his restaurant.

Tom hit Special Collections at the Vancouver Public Library and the Vancouver Archives and searched through old newspaper articles and photos from the ‘30s and ‘40s. The stories melded with his own memories as a kid in the ‘60s coming into the city to see films at the Orpheum and the Strand.

Tom Carter painting

“There was still Woodwards downtown, we still had the PNE parade—all those Vancouver institutions that are gone now,” he says. “I was trying to find a style—something I really want to paint.”

Tom sold his first painting at a small gallery in West Vancouver for $900, his second for $1,250 and his third for $13,500. Now his sought-after paintings hang on boardroom walls and in private collections all over the city.

Tags 518 Beatty Street, Balmoral Hotel, Chilliwack, Dominion Building, Harry Carter, L.D. Taylor, Long John Baldry, Standard Building, Storey and Campbell, Sun Tower, Tom Carter, Trooper, Vancouver Cafe and Grill, William Tuff Whiteway

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