Jennie Conroy

The life’s work of Inspector Vance, Vancouver’s first forensic investigator

by Eve Lazarus on February 10, 2018

In July 2016, several large cardboard boxes filled with photographs, clippings, forensic samples, and case notes pre-dating 1950, and thought to be thrown out decades ago, were discovered in a garage on Gabriola Island. They form the basis of Blood, Sweat, and Fear: the story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver’s first forensic investigator.

Crime Scene:

I first “met” Inspector John F.C.B. Vance when I was writing Cold Case Vancouver. He turned up at a crime scene in Chapter 1, the murder of Jennie Eldon Conroy, a 24-year-old war worker who was beaten to death and dumped at the West Vancouver Cemetery. It turned out that Vance wasn’t actually a police officer–he ran the Police Bureau of Science for the Vancouver Police Department, and his cutting-edge work in forensics solved some of the most sensational cases in the first half of the last century.

Unfortunately, Jennie’s wasn’t one of them.

Blood, Sweat, and Fear — Vance examines a spent bullet through a comparison microscope in 1932. Courtesy Vance family

240 Cordova:

For most of his career, Vance worked out of 240 East Cordova Street, the building that now houses the Vancouver Police Museum. With their help, I was able to track down a couple of Vance’s grandchildren. Janey and David remembered that J.F.C.B.—as Vance was known in the family—had packed up several cardboard boxes full of photographs, clippings, and case notes from dozens of cases when he retired in 1949. He took them with him when he moved in 1960, but no one had seen them for years, and it was thought that they’d been thrown out. And then, in July 2016, more than half a century after Vance’s death, the boxes were found in another grandchild’s garage on Gabriola Island.

Jennie Conroy:

Incredibly, when Janey opened the first box she found a large, tattered envelope labelled Jennie Eldon Conroy murdered West Vancouver, Dec 28, 1944. Inside there were smaller envelopes marked with the VPD insignia and filled with hair and gravel samples from the crime scene, an autopsy report, crime scene photos, and several newspaper clippings.

Vance was skilled in serology, toxicology, ballistics, trace evidence and autopsy. He was a familiar face at crime scenes and in the courtroom, and was called the Sherlock Holmes of Canada by the international media. Yet few people have heard of him.

Hopefully that will change with the publication of Blood, Sweat, and Fear, but best of all, all those boxes, the crime scene photos, the case notes, even Vance’s personal diary, are now with the Vancouver Police Museum and Archives. They’ll be properly processed, cared for, and eventually made available to the public.

Blood, Sweat and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance is now a 12-episode True Crime podcast

Tags 240 East Cordova Street, J.F.C.B. Vance, Jennie Conroy, Police Bureau of Science, Vancouver Police Department, Vancouver Police Museum and Archives

Murder, Investigation, and a Dash of Forensics

by Eve Lazarus on April 8, 2017

Laura Yazedjian, coroner with the Police Museum’s Rozz Shipp

The first time I went to the Vancouver Police Museum was in the late 1980s. It was a breakfast meeting for a tourist organization called Vancouver AM, and we ate in the autopsy room. I fell in love with the place then in all its macabre glory, and nearly three decades later I still love going there.

Last night I was at a reception to launch the new true crime exhibit. I talked to plain clothes detectives, museum curators, librarians, a criminologist, a forensic anthropologist and a GIS specialist from the coroner’s office who have the grim, but rewarding job of matching remains to missing people—sometimes decades later.

Rosslyn Shipp by part of the new true crime exhibit

Museum director, Rosslyn Shipp has spearheaded the changes, mostly on a shoestring budget, and transformed the old morgue in the process. The musty old wooden cases are gone, replaced by stories, case files, trace evidence and photographs from some of the most fascinating murders of last century. Rather than focus on the murder, the exhibits now tell the stories of the victims, putting them front and centre where they belong.

Sandra Boutilier and Carolyn Soltau, whose impending loss from the Sun/Province library will be keenly felt

The Babes in the Woods, the Pauls and the Kosberg murders have been updated and joined by three more. There’s a skull of a farmer found in the 1970s. He’d been shot in the head and buried along the edge of a river. The remains were matched to a missing person’s report by the coroner’s office. There’s the story of Viano Alto, a night watchman who was shot and killed while on the job in 1959. And there’s the 1994 murder of David Curnick, stabbed 146 times with his own kitchen knife.

Proper attention is now given to the work that went on in the building and its place in the evolution of forensics in Canada. John F.C.B. Vance, a city analyst and scientist (and the subject of my next book Blood, Sweat and Fear) has his place in the exhibit and much more emphasis is placed on the building’s history as the VPD crime lab (1932 to 1996).

Rozz is also the force behind the speaker series now in its 5th year. The series kicks off next Wednesday (April 12) with a talk by Heidi Currie on the Kosberg murders. I’ll be looking at the unsolved murder of 24-year-old Jennie Conroy in 1944, former homicide sergeant Kevin McLaren will walk us through the murder investigation of four members of the Etibako family and Ashley Singh in 2006, former VPD sergeant Brian Honeybourn talks about his time in the Provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit, and staff Sergeant Lindsey Houghton will address how the VPD investigates and prosecutes organized crime.

Book your tickets: https://vancouverpolicemuseum.ca/speaker-series/

The skull of a murdered farmer found in the 1970s

Tags Babes in the Woods, David Curnick, Jennie Conroy, Kosberg murders, the Pauls, Vancouver Police Museum, Viano Alto

Foncie’s North Vancouver Connection

by Eve Lazarus on May 28, 2016

When Foncie Pulice was 21 in 1934, he quit house painting and went to work for Joe Iaci and his street photography company Kandid Kamera.

Foncie, to my knowledge, never crossed the bridge or took the ferry to North Vancouver—at least not for his work. He did capture many of our most colourful citizens. A street photographer who worked mostly on Hastings and Granville Streets, he photographed people out shopping, going to a show, or on their way to work.

He created over 15 million images with his home made camera.

Janet Turner has curated a small exhibition at the Community History Centre in Lynn Valley from photos from the collection.

Foncie photos aren’t dated unless the recipient writes on the back, so the time period is mostly a good guess, but that’s part of the fun.

Gertie Wepsala:

Gertie Wepsala was a Canadian Olympic Ski Champion. She married Al Beaton, a Sports Hall of Famer for the Canadian Olympic Basketball team in 1940 and 1941. Al helped develop Grouse Mountain Resorts and built the world’s first double chairlift from the top of Skyline Drive. He later managed Grouse Mountain. Both he and Gertie qualified for the Olympics, but the games were cancelled during the war years.

The Fromme Sisters:

There’s a photo of the three Fromme sisters—Vera, Julia and Margaret—spending a day on the town; one of a young Walter Draycott, and another of his friend Tom Menzies, the curator at the Museum of Vancouver in the ‘40s.

Like the Fromme family, Draycott was a North Vancouver pioneer, he has a street named after him, and his statue sits in the little square at the corner of Lynn Valley Road and Mountain Highway.

Walter Draycott. Eve Lazarus photo, 2016

Marie Desimone:

Marie Desimone, a shipyard worker is captured on the way to catch the ferry to work at the Burrard Dry Dock.

Bette and Bob Booth:

Bette Booth is photographed with her husband Bob, an architect who built his own West Coast modern home near Capilano River. Bob worked on both the Burrard Dry Dock and Westminster Abbey in Mission.

Jack Cash, a prolific photographer himself, and son of the formidable Gwen Cash, who appears in Sensational Victoria, is shown in a photo with his oldest son and wife Aileen (Binns).

Jennie and Eva Conroy:

Eva and her sister Jennie Conroy are photographed shortly before Jennie’s murder in 1944.

When Foncie retired in November of 1979 he told a Province reporter that when he started as a 20-year-old back in 1934 there were six companies in Vancouver. Street photography, he said, really started to take off during the war. “At one time, I was taking 4,000 to 5,000 pictures every day,” he told the reporter.

Millions of photos were thrown out. “I’d keep them for a year, then throw them out. I realize now I should have saved them but it’s too late.”

Foncie Pulice died in 2003 at the age of 88.

Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders

by Eve Lazarus on October 9, 2015

Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders

Cold Case Vancouver

Jennie Eldon Conroy:

A few days after Cold Case Vancouver was finished and sent off for editing; I received an email from Daien Ide at the North Vancouver Museum and Archives. Daien had come into the possession of a family album with the owner’s name, Miss J. Conroy, inscribed in the inside front cover. Daien was intrigued and found out that 24-year-old Jennie Conroy was murdered in 1944, and that her murder remained unsolved.

I wrote up a blog post about Daien and the album, and got another email, this time from Jennie’s niece. She told me that Jennie had given birth to a daughter a few months before she was murdered, and that Mary was alive and well and living in New Zealand. Mary has spent years trying to fill in the details of her mother and of her adoption, of her father and of her mother’s murder, and she generously shared that information with me.

Thanks to my understanding editor, Susan Safyan, Jennie is now part of my book, and one of the hundreds of murders that remain unsolved in Metro Vancouver, some dating back several decades.

Jennie Conroy photo album — The photo album came via the West Vancouver Archives. Eve Lazarus photo

The Babes in the Woods:

I’ve included the story of the Babes in the Woods—the two small skeletons discovered in Stanley Park in 1953. The story has taken on almost mythical proportions, and the case offers a fascinating insight into how investigative techniques have evolved and how the development of DNA analysis changed the face of the investigation.

Province photo, March 20, 1998 - Babes in the Woods — Province photo, March 20, 1998 – Babes in the Woods

The other stories likely won’t be as familiar. The women, children and men that I’ve written about are essentially invisible, forgotten by everyone except their family and friends. I wanted to write a book that would help to change that, to tell the stories of their lives, not just of their murders, and I wanted to look at their murders through a historical filter.

Part history, part true crime:

I think of Cold Case Vancouver as part history book, part crime story, because the events that happened between 1944 and 1996 are often intertwined with the times. For instance, in the process of writing this book, a lot of people told me how much safer Vancouver was in the good old days. It’s not true. Vancouver had a violent streak and a string of sexual predators. The city could be a dangerous place, particularly for women, children, immigrants and gay men.

I picked up my first copies of Cold Case Vancouver from my publisher Arsenal Pulp Press on Wednesday, and copies are gradually make their way into bookstores over the next week or so.

I’ve also just launched a FB Page called Cold Case Canada. I’m hoping that it will be a place that people will drop by to discuss these and other cases, maybe add more detail, and perhaps even remember some piece of information that could help the police solve these murders.

Tags Babes in the Woods, book launch, Cold Case Vancouver: the city's most baffling unsolved murders, Daien Ide, Jennie Conroy, North Vancouver Museum & Archives, unsolved murder

The unsolved murder of North Vancouver’s Jennie Eldon Conroy

by Eve Lazarus on July 25, 2015

Look for the full story of Jennie Eldon Conroy in Cold Case Vancouver: the city’s most baffling unsolved murders

A couple of weeks ago, Daien Ide, reference historian at the North Vancouver Museum and Archives came into the possession of a photo album. At first she thought it was just a nice family photo album once owned by a Miss J. Conroy of North Vancouver. The photos, which stopped in 1942, were carefully placed in the album, and the owner had identified people by their first names—there’s “dad and me,” for instance, and various others such as Milly, Carl, Ruth, Mabel, Percy and Eva.

Daien wanted to know more.

She found that the owner of the album—Jennie Eldon Conroy died in 1944 at just 24 years old. Digging a little deeper she discovered that Jennie was murdered in West Vancouver, and to her knowledge, no one was ever charged.

Inside the album was the Conroy’s address—539 East 7^th Street in North Vancouver. Her father John Cecil Conroy (1882-1964), was a Seaman in the Canadian Navy. He married Minnie Eldon in 1910, and later became a Watchman for North Vancouver Ferries. Jennie was named after John’s mother who also had the unusual spelling. She was a grain loader at Midland and Pacific Elevator in North Vancouver.

In 1943 the family moved to 876 Churchill, behind the Indigo on Marine Drive. By 1944 the family disappears from the directory altogether.

Daien did some more sleuthing and found a story in the Vancouver Sun. In 2012, reporter John Mackie came across an old file marked “confidential for Sun Staff use only” with documents dating back to 1925. There was a file holding tips for unsolved murders. One was for Jennie Conroy “found slain in bush beside the road on Third Street, not far from Capilano View Cemetery on December 28, 1944.”

Jennie Conroy — The Conroy home on East 7th Street. Eve Lazarus photo, 2015

There was little information available on the online database, but one article from January 3, 1945 said, “Police began a check of all green coupes in greater Vancouver in an attempt to break the Jenny (sic) Conroy murder case. The green coupe remained the leading lead in the six-day-old mystery. Miss Conroy’s body was found last Thursday just off a dead-end street in an isolated section of suburban West Vancouver. Police said they believe blunt and sharp weapons caused the fatal head wounds.”

And, then Jennie disappears.

Since this story came out on my blog, I have connected with Jennie’s niece Debbie, and her daughter Mary. Jennie’s story is amazing and it’s now Chapter One of Cold Case Vancouver.

Tags 539 East 7th Street, 876 Churchill, Daien Ide, Jennie Conroy, John Cecil Conroy, Minnie Eldon, North Vancouver Museum and Archives

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