Transcript for The Alley Murder episode trailer
I just want to know what happened. I want the whole story. I want people to know that she was more than a prostitute, she was more than a dancer, she was our little sister and we loved her with our whole heart. She was with us since she was three or four months old, until they took her away and gave her back to her biological mum. Whenever anything went wrong in her life, Lisa always came back. We were her brothers and sisters. If there was a birthday party, Christmas, anything going on, she was there. She was my sister and no matter what anybody says she was ours, she belonged to us . and the fact that they took her away makes me fucking angry.
That was Sharon Tuerlings. Her foster sister Lisa Gavin was murdered in August 1988.
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 three appear on the VPD’s cold case website. But according to two detectives who worked on a joint RCMP/VPD task force called E-Alley, the detectives say they know who killed these women, and he died in 2007.
By the Spring of 1998, at least 400 women were working in the sex trade in the DTES, and over the years, dozens had just vanished. It didn’t help that these women –many of them mothers, and most of them indigenous – were portrayed in the media as prostitutes and drug addicts. These women were a low priority for the Vancouver Police Department, and a lot of the male police officers had dubbed them the “Missing Whores.” But when the numbers became too large to ignore, the VPD struck up a task force. Their assignment was Project Amelia.
This is retired Detective Constable Alex Clarke:
My name is Alex Clarke and I was sworn in as a Vancouver police officer in 1992. From 2006 to 2009 I was succonded to the RCMP and it was a joint task force.
EL: What was it like to work on the task force?
AC: There were no real resources put into it. It was just, find these women basically, prove they are not missing. Let’s face it, most of these people were just expendable human beings. We were basically told to wrap this up, there’s more important things to do.
As well as the huge numbers of missing women from the DTES, there was a disproportionately high number of sex trade workers being murdered. Between April 1988 and August 1990, six women were strangled and dumped like garbage in the back alleys of Vancouver, Mount Pleasant, Shaughnessy, and out at the UBC endowment lands. They were Rose Peters, Lisa Gavin, Glenna Sowan, Tracey Chartrand, Frances Annie Grant; and Karen-Lee Taylor.
Four of the women knew each other well. They stayed in Mount Pleasant and worked the Broadway strip. All four were habitual cocaine users.
Lisa Marie Gavin was found strangled, beaten and raped. Her body was dumped in the lane behind Knight Street and East 49th and discovered by a resident just before 7 in the morning. She was wearing only a black short-sleeved T-Shirt with lace on the sleeves and hem. The blue writing on the T-Shirt said: “Gerry’s Country Inn, Calgary.”
Just over six weeks after Lisa was murdered, her best friend 25-year-old Glenna Sowan, was found strangled, beaten, and dumped behind a house on West 24th Avenue. At the time of her death, had a baby daughter who was four months old and living with her mother in Alberta.
Brian Ball was one of the original investigators
In 1988, I was working as a detective in the homicide office and two of the cases I was assigned to were the murders of Rose Peters and Glenna Sowan. Then in 2007, I was part of a task force that was investigating the alley murder cases which included Peters and Sowan. Glenna Sowan was a sex trade worker. Glenna worked and lived in the Mount Pleasant area. She would stay at different places in the area, usually with her very good friends Lisa Gavin and Tracey Chartrand. Obviously we looked at the murder of Lisa Gavin as well, because there were very strong similarities between the two and everybody agreed that there was a very strong likelihood that the same person killed both women.
The last time Tracey Chartrand was seen was in early October, shortly after Glenna was murdered. Her body was found six months after her murder. There was no cause of death and no DNA.
EL: At what point did you tie Tracey Chartrand into the other two murders?
BB: Tracey went missing in October but as soon as that missing report came up to our office, right away we were thinking yes there’s a strong possibility that Tracey is tied in with Lisa Gavin and Glenna Sowan. The big thing there was that they were very close friends those three women and they usually lived together, crashed at the same places. They shared clothing and things like that, so it just seemed that there had to be a connection.
Thirty-three-year-old Frances Anne Grant, known as Annie, was found in a shed behind a Mount Pleasant rooming house on June 4, 1989.
EL: It must have been a whole game changer when you found Annie Grant’s body in the shed?
BB: Yes. Annie Grant was found one morning at 10th and Carolina. There’s an old rooming house with a few occupants. Behind the house there’s a laneway and there’s an old shed. A fellow was out looking for bottles, and just came onto the property, opened the shed door and got quite a surprise when he found a naked body in there.
The proximity of Annie’s body to the Mount Pleasant house gave police their first big lead, and it led them to one of the residents, a low level drug dealer and drug user, who, we are going to call Dan.
Because of the DNA match to two of the victims, the proximity of one of the victims to the suspect’s house, and the social connection of the fourth victim to the three other women, Brian Ball felt they had a solid case to take to Crown Counsel and charge Dan with the murders. Counsel disagreed, they wanted a confession. But while Crown Counsel was dithering about whether to lay charges; Dan died.
And because Dan died before he could be charged in the murders, Clarke and Ball have asked me not to identify him in the podcast. They believe that should come from the Vancouver Police Department.
EL: How strongly do you feel that he was responsible for at least four of the six murders?
BB: I’m absolutely certain that he was. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind. All of the investigators who I worked with feel exactly the same way. Dan had left his DNA on two of the victims. There’s a third victim who was found at the back of his house and there is the fourth victim, Tracey Chartrand. There’s nothing forensically because she wasn’t found for a number of months but she was taken from the area and killed right at the same timeframe as Lisa Gavin and Glenna Sowan.
Glenna Sowan and Lisa Gavin are featured on the VPD’s cold case website. When Sharon Tuerlings heard that her sister Lisa Gavin was going to be highlighted on the website, it gave her renewed hope that her case may be reopened and the family could finally get some answers.
EL: Did they tell you why they put Lisa’s case on the website?
ST: They just said they wanted to highlight it and bring more attention to it, and that’s really all the information they gave to me. We had all sorts of expectations, it was so frustrating. I will go to my grave trying to find out who did this to her. And even if they’re dead and gone it doesn’t matter she deserves it. She was a good kid who got a really really really shitty deal.
EL So the families, or at least one of the families of the victims, still think their murderer is wandering around. What would you see happen now?
BB: What I think should happen is that the VPD should come out and do a news conference and present the facts on this case. This is a case where at least FOUR people have been murdered by this person named Dan. It’s clear to everybody who worked on the taskforce, that he’s the person responsible. There’s nothing more to investigate in my opinion and I believe that everybody has a right to know his name. The family members have a right to know all of the details about the case and why this is the guy who was responsible for the murder of their loved ones.
Eve Lazarus, host and producer Cold Case Canada