I am thrilled to tell you that Cold Case Canada is up for a Webby Award – the only Canadian nominee in the Crime and Justice podcast category. This is a really big deal. The New York Times called the Webby’s “the Internet’s highest honor.”
There are two parts to the award. The Webby Award is decided by judges from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences in New York. The Webby People’s Voice Award is decided by you.
I host, produce, research, write, interview, edit and get the word out about Cold Case Canada. In other words, it’s a small indie podcast put together in my home. I’m up against four other shows (three are American and one is based in Qatar). All are network productions with staff and resources.
Episode 41—the Alley Murders has been shortlisted and it was the most difficult and complex case I’ve written about so far.
The Alley Murders
Between April 1988 and August 1990, a serial killer murdered six sex trade workers and dumped their bodies in the laneways of Vancouver. Officially, the murders are unsolved and two (Lisa Gavin and Glenna Sowan) were just added to the Vancouver Police Department’s cold case website in 2022. Although these cases remain officially unsolved, two retired detectives who worked on a joint RCMP/VPD task force called E-Alley, take us through the investigation. They say they know who killed these women, and he died in 2007.
Sharon Tuerlings, Lisa Gavin’s foster sister, talks about the thirty-five heart-breaking years she and her family tried to find answers.
You can listen to the full episode here: The Alley Murders or on Apple, Spotify or wherever you usually listen to your podcasts. Or you can read a summary of the case here: Transcript.
With thanks to Mark Dunn for being script editor on this episode and for his introduction and voiceovers; to Vancouver composer and musician Andrea Schuld for his beautiful music; and to Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours for sponsoring the show.
Please support Cold Case Canada and cast your vote here: The Webby Awards
Michael Smith, 17 missing since December 30, 1967. Last seen at his North Vancouver home. Canada’s Missing website (National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains) RCMP case #2014003272
Canada’s Missing:
I came across this listing and a grainy photo of North Vancouver’s 17-year-old Michael Smith when I was researching missing person cases on Canada’s Missing website for ColdCase BC. There wasn’t much else in the post. Just that Mike was 5 foot 10 and weighed 161 pounds, and a description of the clothes that he was wearing when he was last seen. It also mentioned that he was despondent over a friend’s death. I put up a post on my Facebook page Cold Case BC, and as I’d hoped, several people got in touch with more information and photos.
Courtesy Sherry Forest
Mike lived at 639 East 3rd Street in North Vancouver. He went to Ridgeway Elementary, Sutherland and onto North Vancouver Senior Secondary.
The 1960s:
Art McKay is Mike’s nephew, although he is one year older—his mother being the oldest of the nine siblings—and Mike the youngest. “I don’t know whether he just walked away or if somebody picked him up. I really don’t know and nobody I know has heard a word since,” says Art. “I don’t think there was any kind of a major police investigation given the times. In the late ‘60s, kids just took off all the time.”
Bob Tribe shown diving of Siwash Rock in Stanley Park, seconds before his death. Matthias Klinner photo, June 1966
Bob Tribe:
Art says that he and Mike were close. There was a group of about 25 kids who hung out at Third Beach in Stanley Park. Mike was there on June 5, the day that his close friend and neighbour, Bob Tribe dove off Siwash Rock into shallow water, and died.
Eve Lazarus photo, June 2023
Mike was clearly upset about Bob’s death, but if the date on Canada’s Missing website is correct, Bob died 18 months before Mike went missing. His leaving home likely had more to do with being caught smoking weed, which especially bothered his older brother Butch who was in the Airforce and had no tolerance for drugs and long hair.
James Howe lived across the lane from Mike and says he was told that Mike was living in Toronto but acknowledges that he has no proof of that. “Mike was very quiet and shy—he didn’t say a lot. He had a lot of close friends. His girlfriend lived across the street and he didn’t even tell her, he just disappeared.”
Mike Smith and girlfriend, 1967 Courtesy Sherry Forest
What I did find out was that even though 55 years had passed, he was still very much missed by his large family, who still search for answers.
Lucy Johnson:
The second part of the episode is about Lucy Johnson, a 25-year-old mother of two. Lucy went missing from her Surrey, BC home in 1961. For 52 years she was listed as “missing, foul play suspected” by the RCMP. And then in 2013, Lucy’s story got an ending.
Lucy Johnson was reported missing May 14, 1965. RCMP handout
Exciting News! The Alley Murders episode is a Webby Award nominee in the Crime and Justice category.
Between April 1988 and August 1990, a serial killer murdered six sex trade workers and dumped their bodies in the laneways of Vancouver. Officially, the murders are unsolved and two were added to the Vancouver Police Department’s cold case website just last year. But two retired detectives who worked on a joint RCMP/VPD task force called E-Alley, say they know who killed these women, and he died in 2009.
Rose Minnie Peters
Rose Peters was the first of the Alley Murders. She was strangled, beaten and raped. Her body left in a lane behind the 4900 block of St. Catherines on Easter Sunday 1988. Rose was a 28-year-old Indigenous woman from Port Alberni. Ten years before her murder, she was shot in the neck by a police bullet as she walked too close to the scene of a bungled robbery. Rose was left partially paralysed with a slight limp. Shortly after she got out of hospital, she moved to the Downtown Eastside and began using the street drug Talwin—an addictive prescription drug used as a substitute for heroin.
Rose Minnie Peters (1959-1988)
Lisa Marie Gavin
The second woman found dead in an alley, was 21-year-old Lisa Gavin. She was also strangled, beaten and raped. Her body found in the lane behind Knight Street and East 49th on August 13, 1988. Lisa was born in a prison hospital addicted to heroin. She lived with a family in Richmond from the time she was a few months old until just after her ninth birthday. Lisa’s foster sister, Sharon Tuerlings says: “She was a great kid, she was a funny kid, she loved horses. She would walk up to Shadow and hold onto his leg and that old horse would just walk around the corral with that kid on his leg. Lisa had no fear. It was a wonderful happy childhood. We had it all, and then we didn’t.”
Lisa Marie Gavin (1966-1988)
Glenna marie Sowan
Just over six weeks after Lisa was murdered, the body of her best friend Glenna Sowan, 25 was found strangled, beaten, and left behind a house on West 24th Avenue. An Indigenous woman, Glenna was born in High Prairie, and at the time of her death, had a baby daughter who was four months old and living with her mother in Alberta.
Glenna Marie Sowan (1963-1988)
Tracey Leigh Chartrand
Tracey Chartrand, 25 was last seen in early October 1988. Like her friends Lisa and Glenna, she was a habitual cocaine user and resorted to sex work to pay for her drugs. When her body was found six months after her murder, it was in a shallow grave at the UBC Endowment lands. Originally from North Vancouver, Tracey was separated from her husband, and had a son.
Tracey Leigh Chartrand (1963-1988)
Frances “Annie” Grant
Like Tracey, Frances “Annie” Grant, grew up in North Vancouver. She had been off the streets for about a year but was back about a month before her death working the Broadway stroll. Annie knew Lisa, Glenna and Tracey. Her body was found in a shed behind a Mount Pleasant rooming house on June 4, 1989.
Francis “Annie” Grant (1956-1989)
Karen Lee Taylor
The sixth Alley Murder victim was Karen Taylor. She was a bubbly 19-year-old from Ontario. On the night that she died she had been out with friends at the Cecil Hotel on Granville Street and left with a girlfriend to get a pizza. It’s not clear whether a man had followed them from the pub or if she met him there, but she left with him and her body was found in a Shaughnessy lane on August 24, 1990.
Karen Lee Taylor (1970-1990)
At the Missing Women Inquiry in 2012, retired RCMP inspector Don Adam and the officer in charge of the task force said that the E-Alley investigation led to the discovery of the serial killer responsible for the Alley Murders. Because he died during the investigation, he was not charged and his name was not made public.
Retired detectives Alex Clarke and Brian Ball want that changed. Ball was one of the original investigators on Rose Peters and Glenna Sowan’s murders, and he and Clarke worked on the E-Alley task force. Both are convinced that “Dan” was responsible for the murders, and they would like to see the VPD issue a press release with his full name and photo and close these cases.
“I’m certain that he was responsible for these murders, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind,” says Ball. “All of the investigators who I worked with feel exactly the same way.”
On the day that 14-year-old Lindsey Nicholls disappeared, she was last seen walking down Royston Road, outside of Comox on Vancouver Island. It was August 2, 1993—the Monday of the BC Day long weekend, and Lindsey was meeting friends at the annual Comox Nautical Days Festival.
Kim, Lindsey and Judy at Disneyland shortly before LIndsey went missing in 1993. Courtesy Judy Peterson.
Comox:
Lindsey was a slim five foot three with green eyes and long blond hair. The family had relocated to Comox from Delta in the summer of 1992. Lindsey missed her friends and was constantly at odds with her parents. A few months earlier, Lindsey and her dad got into a fight after Martin, an RCMP officer, caught her sneaking out one night. The next morning she pretended to go to school, but instead packed her clothes and Snowflake her teddy bear in a backpack, wrote a note for her mother, and ran away to Delta.
Judy quickly discovered that when a teen runs away and refuses to come home, there is little a parent can do. In the end, she struck a bargain with Lindsey: if Lindsey agreed to come home, she could live in temporary foster care, and the family would attend counselling.
A young Lindsey in Delta. Courtesy Judy Peterson.
Foster Home:
Lindsey was placed with a foster family in Royston, a seaside village located across the bay from Comox. The last time Judy spoke with Lindsey was on the Friday before the long weekend, when Lindsey phoned from the foster home. “I told her how much I loved her and that I missed her.” She sounded fine, but even though it had only been a few days, she was already unhappy in the new home. “And, I thought, ‘Perfect,’ because I wanted her to come home,” says Judy. “It never occurred to me that being out there now, she was in more danger because she was going to hitchhike into town.”
The Nicholls went away for the long weekend. When they arrived back, Judy phoned the foster home and was shocked to learn that Lindsey had not been seen since the previous day, and nobody had reported her missing. Judy phoned the police.
Because Lindsey had run away three months before and had threatened to do so again, police were sure that she’d headed back to Delta. But Judy didn’t think so. “They treated her as a runaway because she had run away before, and there was almost nothing done initially.”
Judy Peterson and Kim Nicholls, Comox Valley, July 2018. Erin Haluschak photo, Black Press Media.
Over the last three decades, police have had received more than 400 tips, administered 15 polygraph examinations, and interviewed over 100 people.
Lindsey’s file is categorized as “missing, foul play suspected.”
If you have any information about Lindsey Nicholl’s disappearance, please call the Comox Valley RCMP at 250-338-1321 or Crime Stoppers 1-800-222-8477.
Vanessa was four years old when her mother, Gloria Levina Moody, was murdered. Her brother, Dan, was three. Gloria, who everyone called Lee, was from the Bella Coola reserve of the Nuxalk Nation. She was the second oldest of eight children.
On October 23, 1969, Lee, her brother Dave and her parents left for Williams Lake. The family checked into a room at the Ranch Hotel. The following day, Lee and Dave hit the local bars before ending up back at the Ranch Hotel, where Lee was last seen at 10:00 p.m. No one remembered what time she left or who she was with, and no one had seen her get into a car.
Gloria Levina Moody
Lee’s body was found the next day on a cattle trail outside Williams Lake. She had been sexually assaulted and beaten to death.
Her parents, David and Daisy, took in Vanessa and Dan and raised them along with their own children. “My grandfather really blamed himself,” says Vanessa. “He locked himself in my mom’s room, and he just lay there. He didn’t eat or sleep, and when he came out, everybody in the whole town talked about how his hair went pure white.”
Vanessa says the first time the family heard from the RCMP was nearly three decades after her mother’s murder. Two RCMP officers brought along several boxes of files from the murder investigation and told the family that they believed three men from Williams Lake were responsible. All three were dead.
Lee was last seen alive at the Ranch Hotel, Williams Lake, Photo Courtesy Bob Samchuck, 1960s
In 2007, the RCMP’s E-Pana unit added Lee’s case to their list of 18 murdered and missing women along Highways 16, 97 and 5.
Vanessa’s grandparents are gone, and sadly so is her brother Dan. “My kid brother would always introduce himself as, ‘Hi, my name is Dan, and I’m damaged goods,” Vanessa says. “Every one of our lives took a wrong turn after the murder. Even within the community, even today, people have a hard time talking about it.”
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