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
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.”
In the months leading up to her murder, Muriel Lindsay had been targeted and harassed. Her cat was stolen, she’d received bizarre anonymous letters, and someone had used her credit card to take out subscriptions and make a donation to the United Way in her name. Who was stalking Muriel and why was this 40-year-old postal worker found beaten to death in her West End apartment?
Muriel Lindsay, 40 recently beat cancer and she was about to move into a new apartment overlooking Vancouver’s English Bay. But before she could finish packing, she was found beaten to death in her room in a West End boarding house.
1120 Comox Street, where Muriel was murdered in 1996. Eve Lazarus photo, 2015
Background:
Muriel grew up with her brother Kent in the exclusive British Properties area of West Vancouver. Her father, Eric Lindsay, was a celebrity photographer with the Vancouver Sun and her mother Marjorie stayed home to look after the family. When Muriel was 12, Eric took a job with CBC’s the National and the family moved to Toronto. Soon after they separated, Marjorie and Kent moved back to Vancouver, and Muriel’s mental health started to unravel.
Kent, Marjorie, Muriel and Eric Lindsay at home in West Vancouver, 1950s. Courtesy Kent LIndsay
Bizarre letters:
Muriel eventually followed her mother back to B.C., and in 1983, moved into a room in a heritage house in the West End’s Mole Hill, where she stayed for the next 13 years. In the months before her death, she received bizarre anonymous letters. One of her much-loved cats was taken and a note was slipped under her door saying she owed a vet bill. Magazines and newspaper subscriptions were taken out in her name using her credit card, and she was being harassed by two men who lived in her rooming house.
Part of a chilling letter Muriel sent to her father shortly before her murder. Courtesy Kent Lindsay
Muriel died on February 16, 1996 from blows to her head and larynx. She had just finished her shift at Canada Post. Her mother found her body the next day.
A young Muriel Lindsay, courtesy Kent Lindsay
Constable Richard Levis:
Eight decades before Muriel’s murder, her great-grandfather Richard Levis, a 28-year-old Vancouver police officer, was shot and killed while hunting down a criminal known as “Mickey the Dago.” His wife Estelle was left to raise their three children—Cyril, Carroll and May (Muriel’s grandmother)—all under the age of five. Estelle was hired as a matron in the women’s division of the Vancouver Police Department and worked there until 1919.
Muriel Lindsay waiting for cancer treatment at St. Paul’s Hospital ca.1990s. Photo courtesy Kent Lindsay
SHOW NOTES
If you have any information about these murders please call Vancouver Police Department at 604-717-3321, or if you wish to remain anonymous, call crime stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or visit the website solvecrime.ca
Rhona Duncan, 16 was murdered in the early hours of July 17, 1976 after walking home from a high school birthday party. She was in sight of her North Vancouver house, when she was intercepted, raped and strangled. Although 45 years has gone by, Rhona’s friends still get together to remember her and to try and solve her murder. Some believe they know who did it.
Rhona Duncan. Carson Graham Secondary Yearbook, 1976
The Party:
I’m not sure when I first heard about the murder of 16-year-old Rhona Duncan, but I do remember that it was through my daughter and that she was quite young. We lived across the road from Shawn and Peggy Mapoles, our kids are around the same age and our daughters are still close friends. Shawn Mapoles was Rhona Duncan’s boyfriend and on July 16, 1976, he took her to a party on East Queens Road. It was meant to be a small celebration for his friend Margaret’s 16th birthday, but the party quickly got out of hand and teens poured in from all over North and West Vancouver. Around 1:00 am the family called police and broke up the party.
Carson Graham Students in 1976. Rhona front row left. Photo courtesy Gord Curl
Shawn, Rhona and their friends Marion and Owen took their time walking in the direction of their homes. The teens, who were to enter Grade 12 at Carson Graham in the fall, stopped at the district hall on West Queens. Owen and Shawn lived up the hill, and Rhona and Marion lived in the Hamilton area. The girls wanted to be by themselves to talk about the night; it was an easy walk down Jones Avenue. They stopped at Marion’s home and Rhona disappeared into the darkness. She was at the intersection at West 15th, the quiet residential street where she lived, when someone stopped her.
Duncan home on West 15th. Eve Lazarus photo 2015
In sight of home:
By 4:00 a.m. Rhona, the oldest of four girls, was dead. She had been raped and strangled in sight of the safety of her home.
Initially, the RCMP had Shawn Mapoles firmly in their sights. A polygraph and his DNA taken decades later cleared him completely, but 45 years later Rhona’s cold case—one of 17 unsolved murders in North Vancouver—remains a stain on this tight knit community. Every year her high school friends get together to remember her and try and solve her murder. Some believe they know who did it.
If you have any information about this murders please call North Vancouver RCMP at 604-985-1311, or if you wish to remain anonymous, call crime stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or visit the website solvecrime.ca
On January 7, 1976 Brenda Young was found murdered at her store the Good Earth in the Lower Lonsdale area of North Vancouver. It was a brazen murder and it felt like a hit, but why would anyone target this much-loved 38-year-old mother of four?
The Good Earth, 238 Lonsdale Avenue. Courtesy Vancouver Sun, January 8, 1976
Brenda was an attractive, petite woman with long black curly hair, rosy cheeks and always smiling. She liked to dress in the clothes that she sourced from Guatemala and Mexico—long flowing denim skirts that she wore with big dangling earrings. She was well-known and much loved in North Vancouver, especially Deep Cove and the adjoining Dollarton area where she lived. Neighbours described her as a beautiful person, warm, generous and kind.
Interior of the Good Earth which sold handicrafts and traditional Mayan clothing that the Youngs handpicked on their buying trips to Mexico and Central America. Courtesy Vancouver Sun, January 8, 1976
The Good Earth:
Bruce Young dropped his wife off at her store on January 7, 1976, The morning was uneventful. Brenda talked to a few regulars and served several customers. Bruce tried to phone her several times that afternoon. When he failed to get through, he phoned their friend Harry O’Day who operated the bookstore next door. Harry went to check on Brenda, but found the front door locked. He broke in through the bookstore and found Brenda’s body.
#238 and #240 Lonsdale ca.2013
The Brenda Young murder was the last case Staff Sgt. Fred Bodnaruk worked on before his retirement in July 1976. Bodnaruk thought that Brenda’s murder was so rapid and risky that it smacked of professionalism. As it turns out, he was probably right. After Brenda’s story came out in Cold Case Vancouver a retired detective contacted me. He told me that RCMP had pursued the theory that a hit had been put out on a female police informant—who ran a store right across the road from the Good Earth. It made more sense to me than anything else I’d heard.
This bizarre “streeter” appeared in the North Shore News, January 14, 1976.
17 Unsolved murders:
Brenda Young’s murder is one of 17 unsolved cases currently with the North Vancouver RCMP that date between 1964 and 2003. Episode 17 looks at another murder in North Vancouver that happened six months after Brenda Young was killed. Rhona Duncan was a 16-year-old Carson Graham student murdered after walking home from a party.
The former convent where Albina Lequiea was murdered in 1973 on West Sixth in North Vancouver. Eve Lazarus photo from Vancouver Exposed, 2020
If you have any information about this murder please call North Vancouver RCMP at 604-985-1311, or if you wish to remain anonymous, call crime stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or visit the website solvecrime.ca
The Babes in the Woods is the story of two tiny skeletons found in Stanley Park in 1953. The case is still unsolved, but the investigation continues, and in part two I visit the site where the boys were found with the researcher who worked on a Babes in the Woods task force in the early 2000s. I talk with the VPD Inspector who moved the investigation forward in 2015, and we hear about the latest development from the coroner who is currently revisiting Vancouver’s most famous cold case.
The strongest lead in recent years has come from a former VPD officer named Ron Amiel. Ron, now 90, believes the boys were born in England between 1937 and 1939 and were killed because their mother wanted a new beginning by marrying an American soldier. A son born in 1941 and who died in 1974 was exhumed in 2015 so his DNA could be tested against that of the Babes in the woods.
For my last post of the year, I’ve chosen the top 10 Facebook group pages. This list is highly subjective and based on a loose criteria—they have to deal with some aspect of the history of Greater Vancouver or Victoria, and you have to be able to see the posts without having to join (I’m intrigued by East Vancouver Selfies and Lululemon Barter Wars, but fear either rejection or disappointment).
I’m addicted to this page. I love that people are scanning photos from the family album and posting everything from Mum and Dad outside some long-lost house, to old posters, postcards and clubs. I also love the comments—it’s like time travel. Administrator and North Van resident Michael Arnold started the page about six years ago, and says half his members are ex pats from all over wanting to reconnect with Vancouver. The rest are locals, and a mixture of those who have moved to the ‘burbs and don’t make it into the city too often.
Glen Mofford has amazing knowledge of old pubs and their artifacts. I’m not sure if his recent book Aqua Vitae came out of this page or the page came out of the book, but worth checking out both.
Full disclosure, this is my page, and it evolved from my book Cold Case Vancouver. I wanted to recognize victims of unsolved murders and give people a place to talk about their loved ones; maybe even solve a murder. That hasn’t happened yet, but you never know.
