MONTREAL – The father of a boy sexually assaulted and murdered by a man on an extended pass from prison disrupted Superior Court Monday with an extended rant about injustice.
André Livernoche, whose son Alexandre, 13, was murdered in August, 2000, said there was no point in going through a trial to claim damages from the Quebec government.
"You are responsible," yelled Livernoche, jabbing a shaking finger at government lawyers. "You cause the death. It's your fault."
Livernoche had no lawyer with him but was accompanied by a woman who described herself as an investigator.
Justice Pepita Capriolo tried to calm the man, saying she had sympathy for the pain he felt.
Alexandre disappeared in Sorel, northeast of Montreal in August 2000, after a day of picking cucumbers. Mario Bastien, who was convicted of first-degree murder in 2001, enticed him with the promise of odd jobs.
Livernoche is demanding $2.5 million but refuses to present evidence or call witnesses.
Three weeks after the slaying, then-public security minister Serge Ménard said Bastien shouldn't have been let out.
She had to warn him several times not to approach the government lawyers.
Livernoche then stormed out of the courtroom.
The judge suspended the hearing and said she'd try to fix another date for the case. She said Livernoche should have a lawyer.
Aside from being a major communication and information searching tool, the Internet is often portrayed in the media as a deep dark space where the danger is lurking around like a giant spider spreading its net to elude, seduce and corrupt children and defraud and mislead adults. This reputation in part is well deserved. The censure of the Internet content and transactions even when existent is weak and slow to keep up with exponentially multiplying web pages.
The underbelly of the human expression found its way to the Internet where a lot of dark and heinous thoughts and acts are brewing ready to explode into the real world. Numerous assaulters declared their intentions on Internet before embarking on a shooting rampage. One such sombre personality found the way to expurgate his hatred and frustration on the infamous website Vampirefreaks.com and then opened a gunfire at the Dawson College on September 13, 2006 afternoon. Twenty innocent people were shot, one death reported; but the bullets didn’t just stop there - they have penetrated and shattered many people’s lives, hopes, dreams and sense of security.
QC starts $6M econ fraud squad
Montreal Gazette
MONTREAL -- A new, 11-member specialized squad will be assembled to investigate financial crime, the Quebec government announced Sunday.
Justice Minister Kathleen Weil, Public Security Minister Jacques Dupuis and Finance Minister Raymond Bachand announced $6 million worth of measures to fight financial crimes during a press conference at Sûreté du Québec headquarters.
Quebec will also ask for amendments to the federal Criminal code that would see financial fraudsters spend longer terms behind bars and ensure that criminals are forced to reimburse the proceeds of their crimes.
CANAAN, Vt. — Nobody missed her.
No grieving mother or father. No anguished sibling or grandparent ever came forward to claim her remains. Even the townspeople in this tiny border community forgot her.
To the Vermont State Police, she was simply Canaan Jane Doe, a young woman whose badly decomposed body was found in a Canaan ravine in 1988. She had lain there for nearly a year.
But one detective didn't forget her. Now she has an identity and a history. She was Chantal Sauriol, a 16-year-old runaway who spent her adolescence on the streets of Montreal, sleeping between parked cars or under bridges, doing drugs and selling her body.
Police still don't know who killed her, or how she ended up dead in a ravine off Route 114 a few hundred yards from the Canadian border. But because of the clues left by her life, her violent end seemed inevitable.
The clues lead to Montreal's Ste. Catherine Street, a seedy drug supermarket where teenage prostitutes beckon from street corners and sex shows fill the stores. Where children sleep on park benches and back alleys they regard as homes. Where hunger's a given, and violence, hard drugs and disease are the stuff of everyday life.
This was Chantal's world.
Chantal had long planned on running away from the Maison Notre Dame youth detention center in the Montreal suburb of Laval. She wanted to escape the rules and restrictions and ultimately escape Montreal.
On a Saturday in May 1987, she finally got her chance. She slipped away during a group outing and never came back.
"The last time I was with her before she ran, she was all nervous, paranoid, a package of nerves," said a friend who was with Chantal in the center and the streets. She spoke to a reporter on condition her real name not be published. Instead, she asked to be called "Chat," French for cat.
Now a 26-year-old mother of three, Chat only learned last month that the remains found in the ravine were those of her friend.
"At first I was shocked. Then I cried," said Chat, speaking through an interpreter. She and Chantal were like sisters, she said. "Everything she did, I did."
They had known each other on the streets and at the youth center, a converted convent that shelters young runaways from Quebec. A way station for troubled children on the road to adulthood, it isn't a jail. Only one locked door separates the children from the streets.
In the girls' section, each resident is given a small cubicle to decorate as she wants. Some are plastered with sexually provocative ads for jeans or rock stars such as Toni Braxton. Others are decorated with colorful drawings of Mickey Mouse.
When it comes to solving murders, the Vermont State Police has one of the highest success rates in the nation. But before police could begin their search for Canaan Jane Doe's killer, they had to find out who she was.
They started with a skull, found by a fisherman on May 15, 1988, a day short of a year after Chantal walked away from the outing. The skull, found near Leach Stream just off Route 114, told police how she died: Her head had been smashed repeatedly with a blunt object.
Investigators spent hours on their hands and knees with garden trowels and rakes, in a grid laid out for them by forensic anthropologists.
The mosquitoes were terrible.
They didn't find all the pieces, just enough for the medical examiner to determine they belonged to a woman in her late teens or early 20s, about 5 feet 2, with light hair and a pronounced overbite. At the time they estimated the remains could have been there up to six years.
They made a composite of her face and posted the case on the National Crime Information Center computer. They filed a similar request with the Canadian Royal Mounted Police and scoured the area for someone who might know where Canaan Jane Doe had come from.
Canaan is located where Vermont, New Hampshire and Quebec come together. It's Vermont's most remote community, but it's on the main route between Montreal and the Maine coast, a popular destination for Canadian tourists.
It might be small, but Canaan has its intrigue. Countless small paths lead smugglers across the border. Cigarettes and liquor go north into Canada. People, for the most part, head south.
About two miles east of the spot where Chantal's skull was discovered is Wallace Pond, a small lake that straddles the border. The Canadian side is lined with summer camps.
Experts determined that Canaan Jane Doe had been killed during the warm months, probably when Wallace Pond buzzed with activity.
The locals knew nothing of the girl.
At the youth center in Laval, workers are saddened but not surprised to learn of Chantal's death.
It's not unique. Several years ago a girl from the center was found shot to death in a nearby park. Her killer was just recently convicted. Last year a girl out on a pass to attend a baptism was killed in a drive-by shooting in Montreal. Her companion had been the target. Chantal was reported missing on May 19, 1987, three days after she disappeared. By that time, she was back on the streets of Montreal.
Her father, Gilles, still lives near Montreal, along with Chantal's brothers and a sister. But Gilles refuses to discuss his dead daughter.
The state police will say little about what they know about Chantal. A photo her family gave police shows a squatting teenager with a round face surrounded by cascading curls. In the photo she expressionlessly holds up a V for victory symbol with her right hand.
Her police file in Canada lists her as an alcoholic and a drug abuser. Police say her mother is dead, but they don't know how old Chantal was when her mother died.
The details of Chantal's life come from Chat. She was with Chantal at Notre Dame and knew of her plans to run away. Chat stayed at the center throughout 1987 and didn't know what Chantal did that summer before she died.
They used to sleep under park benches, bridges, between parked cars, anywhere. When asked how they managed in the winter, she said it was easier than the summer.
"We'd find some rich man with a warm bed," Chat said.
But it was an even darker side of Chantal that probably got her killed, Chat said. Chantal worked as a drug courier for one of Montreal's notoriously violent motorcycle gangs.
Chantal would carry the drugs from the dealer to the buyer. Chat and Chantal moved stolen property, prostituted themselves; they'd try anything.
She also had a big mouth. "She used to stick her nose in business that didn't concern her," Chat said.
"She was scared most of the time, but she wouldn't show it," Chat said.
Terrified of the gangs, even a decade later, Chat wouldn't discuss the details of the work, nor would she be more specific about the people they worked for.
Chantal had a dream. It's a dream shared by many Montreal street children: "She said she wanted to go away from Montreal and never be found again." That's why Chat didn't find it unusual when Chantal disappeared.
On the one hand, Chat laughs as she remembers running from police, climbing statues in Montreal's St. Louis Square messed up on drugs and screaming at passersby.
"The best time I spent with her was here," Chat said standing on the edge of the square. "We were free."
Detective Sgt. Roland Prairie of the Vermont State Police was one of the cops who scoured the Canaan ravine in 1988. Even when he moved on to new cases, he never forgot about the unidentified girl from the ravine.
"The case was on my mind all the time," Prairie said recently. "This was somebody's kid. Somebody out there knows who did this."
After the Canaan Jane Doe case was posted on the NCIC computer, the state police got hundreds of calls from across North America. Most were easy to discard, but others weren't;investigators spent countless hours answering those queries. Nothing matched.
The Vermont State Police work closely with their counterparts across the border in Canada. Last summer Prairie was talking with Noel Bolduc, an investigator with the Quebec provincial police, known along the border by its French name, Surete du Quebec, or SQ.
Prairie recited the facts of the Jane Doe case off the top of his head. Bolduc took the case to Luc Gregoire, the head of the SQ's major crimes division for the area.
Combing the missing-person files they narrowed the possibilities down to a handful.
In September Bolduc gave Prairie Chantal's dental records. Two weeks later a dentist working for the Vermont Medical Examiner's office found they matched. Her name was made public in January.
There is no explanation why her file didn't surface in 1988 when the trail to her killer was fresh.
"I have no idea why we came up with the possibilities and they didn't in 1988," said Bolduc. "I wasn't here in 1988."
The state police believe they can trace Chantal's movements in the summer of 1987 and eventually find out who killed her.
"We have homicides that are much older than this one," said state police Lt. Ronald DeVincenzi, who at one time oversaw the investigation. "We will go forth and actively pursue this."
Police won't tell everything they know about the case. They won't speculate if she was killed in Canaan or if her body was thrown into the ravine on Cole Hill.
"If you guess, you guess wrong," Prairie said.
Still, no one has claimed Chantal's remains, which sit in a box at the medical examiner's office in Burlington. There is no law in Vermont governing how to dispose of remains that are identified but unclaimed.
DeVincenzi said the state police would be happy to deliver Chantal to her family, but they haven't been asked to do so.
Margaret Douek, the head of the protection division for the Quebec agency that had custody of Chantal when she ran away, said it bothered her that no one had claimed her body. "I don't have the authority to pick up the remains," she said.
It's up to her family.
Douek said she would reach out to Chantal's father to let him know she needed to go home.
Meanwhile, her bones lie in the box, waiting.
Ummm... Civics lesson Chairperson Dauphin? your mechanisms are only working if you recover the $10 million. Until then it's all smoke.
---------------------
A career civil servant and a computer consultant were arrested and charged yesterday with defrauding the city of Montreal of millions of dollars in what the Crown and the city contend was a phony-billing scheme operating inside Montreal's computer-systems division.
Gilles Parent, who was fired as a section chief in the division one year ago today following an internal city probe, and businessman Benoit Bissonnette appeared in handcuffs at the Montreal courthouse, where they were arraigned on six counts each of fraud, breach of trust, creating false documents and conspiracy.
The Sûreté du Québec arrested Parent, 58, a resident of Ste. Anne des Lacs, and Bissonnette, 47, of Notre Dame de Grâce, earlier yesterday following a 14-month investigation that was dubbed Operation Killer Whale.
Parent and Bissonnette's lawyers entered no plea on their behalf yesterday.
Both men were ordered released on $15,000 bail and several conditions, including that they surrender their passports and agree to have no contact with the owners or directors of a list of companies that work in the computer field.
At Montreal city hall, down the street from the courthouse on Notre Dame St. E., Mayor Gérald Tremblay's administration took credit for the arrests, reminding reporters at a hastily prepared news conference that it was the city that called in the SQ to investigate the computer-systems division after the internal probe uncovered the false-billing scam that cost the city $10 million.
"It shows today that the (security) mechanisms we have put in place are working," city executive committee chairperson Claude Dauphin said.
"And in that respect I'm not upset about (the arrests), I'm happy, in the sense that those mechanisms are working."
Yesterday's arrests come just as other SQ investigations are under way into city deals that have raised questions about the ethics of some former politicians and former aides who surrounded Tremblay.
The administration is also awaiting a report by the city's auditor-general on a probe of how the city's $355.8-million water-management contract was awarded two years ago. The report is to be tabled in council on Sept. 21. The contract is also the subject of one of the SQ investigations.
With the campaign to the Nov. 1 municipal election set to begin at the end of next week, the mayor has gone to pains in recent weeks to portray himself as a crusader who is cleaning up city hall.
For instance, Tremblay has said he made the decision to phone the SQ to investigate an allegation by a contractor repairing the roof of city hall that a mafia figure tried to shake him down for a bribe that he was told would go to two councillors who sit on the executive committee.
"The message we have to understand today is that it's zero tolerance," Dauphin said.
"It's true there are investigations. But why are there investigations? It's because of our own requests the investigations were made."
Tremblay's political opponents, however, have called attention to the fact that the investigations involve deals that were all made during his tenure, including the water-management contract and a slew of transactions by the city's real-estate arm, the Société d'habitation et de développement de Montréal.
His rivals have also pointed out that an ethics code will be adopted for Montreal councillors at the Sept. 21 council meeting in the wake of controversies involving his team. For instance, former executive committee chairperson Frank Zampino acknowledged earlier this year that while still in office he vacationed on the yacht of a businessman whose company is a partner in the consortium that went on to win the water-management contract.
The lawyer representing Parent, the former mid-level city manager charged with fraud yesterday, said he was mindful of the political spin that would be put on the arrests.
"I'm sure that politicians will use whatever they can to their advantage in an election," lawyer Philip Schneider said.
"What they'll do with it, what they can do with it, I don't know. I'm not into politics, I'm into defending clients charged with criminal offences. They can play the politics. I'll play the courtroom."
Schneider added that while the Tremblay administration says the city lost $10 million, the Crown's charges involve
$4 million worth of fraud.
City officials revealed the results of the internal probe earlier this year. They said the fraud involved payments for consulting hours that were never worked by any of 10 computer firms that had multi-year contracts with the city.
The hours were filled in on time sheets that required Parent's approval.
Parent, who had been working for the city since 1982, was responsible for doling out work to outside computer consultants that were retained by the city following a public call for tenders.
The city fired Parent's superior, Joseph Hélal, earlier this year, for failing to catch onto the fraud scheme. Hélal is contesting his dismissal before a labour-relations board, the city confirmed yesterday.
A third bureaucrat was fired a few months later. The city says it cannot name the individual because the person has so far not contested the dismissal.
The Crown contends the fraud was committed between Aug. 1, 2006 and Sept. 30, 2008.
The Crown has four boxes of evidence, Schneider said.
"I'll look at the evidence before I advise my client what kind of plea he should enter," Schneider said.
The two men will also have a choice of a trial by jury or before a judge alone if they plead not guilty.
Bissonnette's lawyer, Marc Labelle, said he, too, would review the evidence, but added: "He will plead not guilty, that's for sure."
lgyulai@thegazette.canwest.com
Lawyer's request rejected, Jones told to leave Dorval condo
As of tomorrow the once high-flying Bertram Earl Jones will officially be homeless.
The man who once owned four properties in two countries, three cars, membership at the oldest golf club in North America and a lifestyle that included lavish wining and dining, will be evicted from the Dorval condo he has been living in since being charged with theft and fraud on July 28.
Despite an 11th-hour request from his lawyer sent to trustees late Tuesday night asking that Jones be allowed to stay in the condo at 870 Lakeshore Rd. until the end of the month, attendees at yesterday's credit meeting gave an overwhelming thumbs-down to any leniency.
"We would like him removed from the condo on Sept. 11, without exception," said Kevin Curran, son of an alleged Jones victim, and a member of a committee working with RSM Richter.
Bankruptcy trustees have been given keys to three other properties owned either jointly by Jones and his wife, Maxine, or by Maxine alone. All four properties will be handed over to real-estate agents to be put up for sale in the coming weeks.
Jones did not show up at the creditors' meeting, the first since he was declared personally bankrupt on Aug. 19.
The trustee handling both Jones's corporate and personal bankruptcy issued figures yesterday, first reported by The Gazette in July, that Jones's four properties, in Dorval, Mont Tremblant, Boca Raton, Fla. and Cape Cod, Mass., are worth $1.6 million and mortgaged for almost $1 million.
Gilles Robillard, representing trustee RSM Richter, told the assembled alleged victims that all accounts owned by Maxine Jones have been frozen as have her husband's.
Regarding missing bank statements from 1999 to 2008, Robillard said his firm has received six boxes of documents from the Royal Bank of Canada and expects another seven boxes next week.
Other highlights of yesterday's meeting from the trustee:
Subpoenas will be issued to the former employees of Earl Jones and his wife, and on Sept. 16, the trustees expect to begin interviewing these people.
Anyone who received drafts or payments from Jones will also be interviewed to better understand where the money went.
Based on the documents received since the last creditors' meeting on Aug. 18, it appears Jones has been using client funds for personal use since the mid-1980s, possibly up to the level of $20 million from previous estimates of $12.3 million.
The bookkeeper Jones used was not a certified public accountant or was there ever an audit done of the books of Earl Jones Corporation.
151 claims have been filed against Jones by creditors so far, representing a total of $74.5 million.
After his personal bankruptcy judgment last month, the trustee advised Jones and his lawyer that he was required to pay rent for staying in a property he no longer owned. There was no reply to this request.
"I'm not sure what they will do, change the locks as of Sept. 11?" asked Peter Kent, whose mother is an alleged victim
"If he's not out on Friday we will take whatever measures it takes to get him to leave," Robillard said.
asutherland@thegazette.canwest.com
MILWAUKEE — Investigators who used DNA from a toothbrush to link a former prisoner to a string of cold-case killings should have had a sample from him eight years earlier and before the last killing, but police say they couldn't find one.
Corrections officials were required to take DNA from Walter E. Ellis — and all other inmates with felony convictions — under a 2000 state law. Two state agencies now dispute whether Ellis' DNA was obtained while he was in prison and, if so, what happened to it.
The police chief has suggested that if authorities had a DNA sample, they may have identified a suspect more quickly and possibly prevented at least one death, but because police could not find a sample in the state's database, they had to execute a high-risk warrant to obtain the DNA that linked Ellis to the killings.
Police said Ellis, 49, of Milwaukee, was arrested Saturday after a state crime lab matched his DNA to samples taken from nine women killed between 1986 and 2007.
The state agency responsible for collecting samples from inmates insists it obtained DNA from Ellis, who was in prison from 1998 to 2001. But the state Department of Justice said it has no record that it ever received the sample, which would have been processed before the 2007 slaying.
In some cases, a person's sample yields an unusable profile, but the state Justice Department records of those people to ensure proper follow-up. Ellis didn't show up on that list either, Justice Department spokesman Kevin St. John added.
Wisconsin's Department of Corrections, which is responsible for obtaining samples, said it complied with the law.
"The only information we have is an indication in our system that the specimen was collected on Feb. 4, 2001," said John Dipko, a corrections spokesman. He said the sample would have been sent to the state crime lab, which is under the jurisdiction of the state DOJ.
Police Chief Edward Flynn said authorities couldn't find Ellis' DNA profile in a statewide database, forcing them to take the high-risk step of obtaining a sample directly by executing a search warrant Aug. 29, even if doing so tipped off Ellis that police were investigating him.
Ellis was charged in the deaths of two of the nine women, and more charges are expected this week, prosecutors said. The state public defender's office said Tuesday that no attorney had been assigned to him. He could make an initial court appearance Wednesday.
"It's certainly speculative but a plausible speculation that if his DNA had been collected in 2001 that certainly the pattern would have been discerned perhaps more quickly," Flynn told CNN. "Certainly we would have identified a suspect more quickly."
A message left with Flynn's office Tuesday was not returned.
Ellis served his previous prison sentence after pleading no contest to a reduced charge of second-degree reckless injury. He was released from prison in 2001 and from state supervision in 2003, when corrections officials would have verified that his DNA sample was in the system, Dipko said.
Police said Ellis' DNA was found on the bodies of nine women ages 16 to 41 who were killed on the city's north side. Investigators believe eight of the women were prostitutes and one was a runaway.
Authorities previously have speculated that the person whose DNA they recovered on the runaway had sex with that girl but that someone else killed her. But Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm would not say Monday whether anyone else would be charged in the killings.
Associated Press Writer Carrie Antlfinger contributed to this report.
The father of a cyclist killed during an altercation on the streets of Toronto joined native leaders in smoking a peace pipe during a traditional ceremony to commemorate his son.
About 50 people gathered in a hall at the Native Canadian Centre in Toronto this afternoon to pay respects to 33-year-old Darcy Allan Sheppard.
Sheppard was the bike courier who died after a high-profile altercation in downtown Toronto a week ago.
Former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant is charged with criminal negligence causing death and dangerous operation of a vehicle causing death. He is due in court next month, but says he is innocent in the charges he faces.
On Sunday, members of Toronto's aboriginal community beat a drum, sang traditional songs, lit sage and tobacco and passed around a peace pipe in a ceremony to mark Sheppard's passage to the spiritual world.
Sheppard, who is of Cree, Metis and Ojibwa heritage, was remembered as a friendly, car-hating, troubled and generous character with a lust for life.
Sheppard's aunt, Sylvia Segal, read a message from the cyclist's father, Allan Sheppard Senior, who flew from Alberta to collect his son's body and bring it to Edmonton, where his son was raised.
The father's message acknowledged his son's tumultuous past, speaking of his son's teen years spent in a secure treatment facility, his time as a squeeze guy in Toronto, and the time he asked his father for money, only to give it to a friend sleeping on the street and dying of AIDS.
"My son probably wanted the money I gave him to feed his demon of the moment, but he was still willing to share it with someone whose need was greater than his."
He said his son was a proud courier who wanted to make a difference in the community by advocating membership in the Canadian Union of Postal Workers for bicycle messengers.
"He knew firsthand the conditions under which bicycle messengers work, and he wanted to do something to make those conditions better."
Outside, a sacred fire wafted scents of cedar onto the busy downtown streets, while about 10 police officers with bicycles waited in a nearby alley.
Darcy Allan Sheppard died after he was seen hanging onto the side of a convertible sports car following an altercation with the driver. Witnesses said Sheppard slammed into a mail box before falling off the vehicle.
The family of a 2003 Rocky Mount murder victim believes there could be more to the story of five women murdered and abandoned in fields the past four years.
Natasha Battle said Thursday she wonders why her sister, Denise Williams, hasn’t been included in a task force investigation looking into the deaths of at least five black women.
Williams, much like the other victims, was found murdered a few miles outside the city in Edgecombe County. A fisherman found her body June 2, 2003, floating in the Cokey swamp a week after her mother reported her missing to police.
Edgecombe County Sheriff James Knight almost immediately ruled the death was a homicide, but the case remains unsolved.
Williams – a 21-year-old black female from East Rocky Mount who had an on-again, off-again drug problem – matches the profile of five other Rocky Mount women who have been killed in similar circumstances the past four years. That case has drawn national media attention in recent weeks.
“I think my sister’s murder could be connected, but nobody has contacted us,” Battle said Thursday. “We haven’t heard anything from the sheriff since they found her.”
Rumors of a serial killer stalking poor women have spread through East Rocky Mount the past few months, ever since June when authorities publicly connected the dots between the murders of at least five women from the community. A sixth potential victim found inside city limits has yet to be identified, but that case has not been ruled a homicide.
Family members of the victims and community organizers rallied to raise awareness about the murders Thursday, marching through the East Rocky Mount neighborhoods where the women lived and calling out for anyone with information about the deaths to come forward.
Women like Denise Shae say the story, which broke in local media early this summer, is not new to them.
Shae, who met most of the victims as a prostitute working the streets of East Rocky Mount, said women like her have been going missing for more than a few years, but the stories have rarely spread beyond the neighborhood.
“We’ve been talking about a serial killer for 15 years now,” said Shae, whose name has been changed for confidentiality.
Rocky Mount NAACP President Andre Knight said he is calling on deputies to release a complete list of Rocky Mount women who have been found dead in and around the outskirts of town during the past 20 years.
“I believe there’s more to this,” Andre Knight said. “That 2003 case, Williams, was a classmate of mine. We grew up together. I believe they need to expand this investigation beyond 2005. That should have been done a long time ago.”
Sheriff Knight is leading the task force investigation of FBI profilers, the State Bureau of Investigation and the Rocky Mount Police Department into the murders of the five confirmed victims. Sheriff Knight could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Police Chief John Manley said his department is working with the other agencies to solve the crimes and is willing to speak with any resident who have concerns about the probe.
“There is a lot of emotion around this case,” Manley said. “But the truth is, we’re willing to address any concern that anyone might have. Nobody has been in touch with me or anyone else in my department about expanding this investigation.”
Because all the women have been found dead in Edgecombe County, the sheriff’s department has had jurisdiction over the investigation, as well as Williams’ case.
“We’re still willing to do whatever we can to help these families,” Manley said.
Bodies of all the women – Taraha Nicholson, 28, Jarniece Hargrove, 31, Ernestine Battle, 50, Jackie Nikelia Thorpe, 35, and Melody Wiggins, 29 – were found between 2005 and early this year along the same rural stretch outside the city.
Authorities charged 31-year-old Antwan Pittman this week with Nicholson’s murder and are continuing to investigate to determine if he was involved in any of the other cases.
Police are searching for three other missing women – Yolanda “Snap” Lancaster, 37, Joyce Renee Durham, 46, and Christine Boone, 43 – in connection with the investigation.
Deputies have not said if they had considered Williams’ murder in connection with the other cases. Williams’ mother, Helina Williams, thinks they should.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Helina Williams said. “I do know there are lot of unsolved murders out (in Edgecombe County) that they should be looking at. I wish I could find out who put my girl in that swamp.”
And the commenter who can tell which historical cold case this most resembles gets a gold star!
Micheline Charron, the 62-year-old woman who went missing last Sunday from the lower Laurentian community of Entrelacs, has been found alive in a wooded area not far from there.
She was found just before 4 o'clock on Saturday afternoon, alive, but somewhat confused. She was spotted by a man hiking in the woods, who recognized Charron from her description, and immediately alerted the SQ.
Anne Marie Lemieux with the SQ says they're glad she's alive, and now they're trying to figure out what she's been up to this whole week.
She was taken to hospital to be checked out, and by then, police are hoping to find out more about what happened, and whether there was any sort of foul play.
MONTREAL–It's the battle no one wants to fight – except the CBC.
Canada's national broadcaster will mark the 250th anniversary of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham with a documentary on the decisive British-French conflict, months after threats from hardline separatists forced the cancellation of a planned re-enactment in Quebec City.
The one-hour documentary, set to air during prime time next Thursday, is already ruffling the feathers of those who opposed the real-life re-enactment.
"Why is the CBC choosing to invest money from the Canadian government to reconstruct such a painful moment of Canadian history, one that caused so many deaths, assassinations, fires, and thefts?" said Jean-Paul Perreault, president of Impératif français.
"It's the battle no one wants to talk about because it's perceived to be too politically charged," said CBC documentary unit executive producer Mark Starowicz.
"It's quite striking that one of the principal turning points ... in Canadian history is going by in a very muted way."
The CBC's French sister network, Radio-Canada, said it's not planning anything special to mark the anniversary.
Asked whether that decision had anything to do with the previous controversy, a spokesperson said "absolutely not."
Perreault, who helped plan a Parliament Hill protest against the planned re-enactment in Quebec City, said its cancellation by National Battlefields Commission was an excellent idea. "It's bizarre the CBC" would air a re-enactment, he said.
Organizers and participants of the Quebec City event received threats from separatist fringe groups that raised fears of violence.
The groups felt a re-enactment of the battle would have been a disrespectful reminder of the defeat of their French ancestors, which set the stage for British dominance in North America.
They vowed to disrupt the event. The militant separatist Réseau de Résistance du Québécois warned tourists would "not forget their visit for a very long time."
Commission president André Juneau said his agency couldn't guarantee the safety of the public at the event.
"We don't want it to become a clash. There was one in 1759 and we don't want another," he said at the time.
The battle will now be marked on its Sept. 13 anniversary with the simple unveiling of a monument. A poetry and prose reading is also being organized.
The re-enactment became an orphan of sorts after the commission nixed it. Offers were made to hold it in Ontario, but then Premier Dalton McGuinty told Radio-Canada that he disapproved of it taking place in his province.
Mario Beaulieu, president of the St. Jean Baptiste Society, which also protested the re-enactment, said the subject is still sensitive because the defeat marked the beginning of an assimilation and political domination of French Canadians.
"The battle is still not finished because in Quebec the future of French (culture and language) is not assured," Beaulieu said.
In Battle for a Continent, CBC viewers will see the largest reconstruction of the battle ever made, said Starowicz, which required years of research, 2 1/2 days of filming, and re-enactors from the U.S., Quebec and the rest of Canada. It was completed for the epic TV series, Canada: A Peoples' History, and has been re-edited and narrated for the documentary.
The characters in the documentary speak in English, with English or French accents. There were 180 actors in the reconstruction, versus about 4,400 English soldiers and 5,000 French.
"I regret we have a constructed amnesia," Starowicz said. "It was a vast story on a human scale that deserves to be remembered and respected regardless of what side you're on."
He said most don't know about the fact there were two battles on the plains, or the "Dresden-like" destruction of the city for nine weeks, or that one-quarter of the British navy was sent to the battle.
Responding to the criticism, he adds, "There's no argument about hiding one's national history. Where are we going to go after that? Never speak about what happened to aboriginal people in this country?
"This is an act of history and journalism by a documentary unit and people should understand what happened. It's not a celebration of anything."
Starowicz also emphasized that the documentary plainly outlines the brutalities committed mostly by the British, and makes sure to highlight the subsequent French victory in the Battle of Sainte-Foy.
One of the loudest voices against the re-enactment, Patrick Bourgeois, said in an interview that since it's the CBC, he expects the documentary to be politically biased, whitewashing British atrocities in order to "promote unity."
When told of Starowicz's description, however, he changed his tune. "Then I have nothing to say!" he laughed.
The documentary will run on Sept. 10 at 8 p.m. on the main CBC network.
Updated: Thu Sep. 03 2009 8:15:31 AM
ctvmontreal.ca
The Sûreté du Québec and firefighters will continue to search Thursday for a body spotted in the
A witness saw the body from a few metres away and was able to provide the SQ with a detailed description. Police began the search in Sorel-Tracy, about 90 kilometres northeast of
Last Wednesday, firefighters pulled two other bodies from the
Updated: Wed Sep. 02 2009 6:00:29 PM
ctvmontreal.ca
The Surete du Quebec says it fears for the safety of a woman whose car was abandoned with the engine running Sunday morning near her home.
62-year-old Micheline Charron was last seen in her home in Entrelacs, about 100 kilometres north of Montreal.
Fifty people have spent three days searching a wooded area.
Her family is puzzled by the disappearance.
Charron's sister Monique says she was not depressed, did not drink, and did not have any money problems.
"We miss her a lot," said Monique. "We just want her back with us."
Charron was last heard from near midnight Saturday, when she called a friend to say she was nervous.
The friend came to Charron's home and found the door open, the lights on, and her dog barking, but no sign of Charron.
A neighbour says she saw Charron driving away Saturday night, and that she was moving much faster than usual.
Police officers found Charron's Hyundai Accent in a ditch near her home the next morning.
"The car was running, the keys were inside and the purse was on the passenger seat. Everything was in it," said Sgt. Benoit Richard of the SQ.
People in the town of Entrelacs find the disappearance shocking, because Charron was known as a pillar of the community.
She volunteered at the local food bank and could be regularly seen walking her dog.
Charron is described as 5'4", 141 pounds with blue eyes and brown hair.
Anyone with information on her whereabouts is asked to call the SQ at 1-800-659-4264.
ROCKY MOUNT, N.C. — Juray Tucker drives around with fliers posted in her car windows that ask for information about her missing daughter, Yolanda Lancaster.
"It has been heart wrenching. It tears me up," Tucker said Tuesday. "Every day the phone rings, I'm scared to pick it up. It's terrible."
Lancaster, 37, is one of three missing Rocky Mount women at the center of a special task force's investigation into the disappearances, as well as six homicides spanning the past four years.
Authorities have yet to identify one of the victims.
Each of the known victims, however, was black, had a history of drug use, prostitution or both and had been reported missing before their bodies were discovered in the same rural area of Edgecombe County.
Like the known victims, the missing share similarities. Family and friends have also said that many of the women knew one another.
Tucker reported her daughter missing on March 30. The last time she saw her was Feb. 5.
The Tuesday arrest of Antwan Maurice Pittman in the death of one of the slain women, Taraha Nicholson, has Lancaster's family hoping it leads to more information for them.
"We would like this to come to an end, as soon as possible, and bring her home so we can move on with our life," Lancaster's stepfather, Bruce Tucker said.
Life for Corneta Battle hasn't been easy either, and she too is looking for answers.
A farmer discovered the remains of her sister, 50-year-old Ernestine Battle, on March 14, 2008, along Seven Bridges Road.
Corneta Battle reported her sister missing more than a month earlier. She is also optimistic after Tuesday's arrest.
"I'm hoping this is a break in the case, so we can find out who's doing all the murdering," she said. "If he's guilty, he needs to pay. Justice needs to be done."
Authorities, however, have only charged Pittman in Nicholson's death, and citing the sensitivity of their investigation, they won't say whether he is a suspect in any of the other slayings or in the missing persons cases.
"The task force (made up of Rocky Mount police, Edgecombe sheriff's investigators and the State Bureau of Investigation) is still active, and the investigation is still continuing," SBI special agent Renee Robinson said Tuesday. "We're following up on leads as they develop."
Family members have said they will continue to press authorities for information and continue to hope that something more comes out of the arrest.
In the meantime, community leaders have said they will not stop. The grassroots group Murdered or Missing Sisters plans to continue raising awareness with billboards with the women's photos.
"It is a beginning but it's not an end," Rocky Mount City Councilman Andre Knight said.
Knight was among the first to call for federal authorities to get involved in the investigation. Although encouraged by Pittman's arrest, he said the investigation should push forward at full force.
"We're going to continue to rally until the perpetrator who is responsible for all the murders is caught."
And for the women who are still missing – Juray Tucker just hopes for some kind of closure.
"I would be so happy. It has been so hard for me to go through daily life, not knowing one way or the other," she said. "It's a struggle."
OTTAWA — A year ago two native girls from the Maniwaki area went missing.
Thursday morning, investigators from the Surete du Quebec and the Ontario Provincial Police will provide an update about the on-going search for Maisy Odjick and Shannon Alexander.
The OPP has recently joined the effort to find the two.
So far there has been little to go on in the search for these two teens, and the relatives of the two are reported to be growing frustrated and impatient.
Traffic nightmare on Montreal's Highway 15
Montreal Northbound traffic on the Laurentian Autoroute was disrupted Wednesday afternoon when a trailer truck transporting a house got stuck as it tried to drive under an overpass known as the Viaduct Grand Héron near St. Jérôme.
The accident happened at 1:45 p.m. It was exacerbated when a truck carrying a back hoe was unable to brake and smashed into the stuck truck.
Nobody was injured, but two of three northbound lanes were closed, said Sûreté du Québec Sgt. Claude Denis. Southbound traffic was not affected.
Millions of miles of terrestrial and undersea cables connect computer networks worldwide. These are the weak links—and your best shot at bringing down the Web.
TAKE UP FISHING
NETS pulling up undersea cables are the single biggest cause of Internet breakages. (Make it look like an accident.)
GRAB A HACKSAW
FOLLOW the lead of vandals near Santa Clara, Calif., who cut through underground fiber-optic wires, halting all service to the area.
PRAY FOR AN UNDERWATER EARTHQUAKE
PREFERABLY, a repeat of the quake that took down cables carrying 75 percent of Internet traffic between Europe and the Middle East last December.
BECOME THE HEAD OF ICANN
ONCE in charge of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers—the organization that coordinates the global system of IP addresses—you can redirect traffic at will.
BREAK INTO AN INTERNET DATA CENTER
THERE are thousands of centers housing computer servers in the United States alone. Take your pick and get mischievous.
SABOTAGE A FEW BOATS
INTERNET providers like Verizon lease fleets equipped to locate and repair broken cables. Stop the ships and you stop the fix.
WAIT 29 YEARS
ON Jan. 19, 2038, the internal clock for Unix, the operating system for many servers, will overflow, Y2K style. Big meltdown or big letdown? Only time will tell.
TRAIN SHARKS
THE stealthy sea creatures have been known to gnaw through a few cables.
Is it too much to ask for a better shot of this woman? This one looks like it was taken in the 60s:
Police are seeking the public's help in locating a 62-year-old woman who disappeared Sunday night from her home in the municipality of L'Entrelac, about 30 kilometres northeast of Sainte-Adele.
Micheline Charron reportedly called a friend shortly before midnight in a panic, telling her she needed a ride, but would not say where she wanted to go. When the friend arrived at the house about 15 minutes later, police say the doors were unlocked and the lights were on, but Charron's Hyundai Accent was gone and she was nowhere in sight. Sûreté du Québec officers found the car at 7 a.m. Monday morning, parked on the side of the road not far from Charron's home. The motor was running, the doors were unlocked and her purse was on the seat.
According to SQ Sgt. Claude Denis, none of Charron's personal belongings, cash or credit cards appeared to be missing.
“At this point, we have many more questions than we have answers,” said Denis.
Charron is described as five-foot-three, 140 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes.
Anyone with information related to her disappearance is asked to phone the SQ at 1-800-659-4264
When 19-year-old Theresa Allore went missing from school in Quebec's Eastern Townships in November, 1978, Champlain College was in disarray.
The campus was bursting at the seams due to record enrolment. Students were housed at dormitories in the countryside where there was limited supervision and infrequent transport to and from classes. Many students, including Theresa, resorted to hitchhiking.
Theresa's disappearance went unnoticed for a week, and in the end it was her friends who alerted police. School officials of the day did little to support her parents in their search.
Instead, the campus director of the day suggested to Theresa's father her vanishing had something to do with "lesbian tendencies" and that she'd need psychiatric help when she eventually turned up.
During the long winter between Theresa's disappearance and the discovery of her body face-down in a creek on a farm the following spring, Champlain continued to bill her parents for her room and tuition, plus interest.
Theresa's younger brother, John, has been a harsh critic of the cold indifference shown to his sister's fate since going on a quest for closure six years ago. That quest quickly morphed into amateur sleuthing of a likely murder by a possible serial predator who went undetected due to small-town police incompetence -- and remains unsolved.
But Mr. Allore's pressure on Quebec's big bureaucracy -- from the college to the provincial police force and the justice department -- may have finally turned a corner.
Tomorrow he will attend a ceremony at Champlain Regional College in Lennoxville, Que., as it is now formally called, to announce a $1,000-a-year memorial scholarship in Theresa's name and launch a $20,000 fundraising drive for the endowment.
Mr. Allore vows not talk to about the mystery surrounding Theresa's death, nor his ongoing efforts to resolve it.
"In that room it's going to be about Theresa and celebrating her memory," he said.
Mr. Allore has other reasons for returning to Quebec this week. He will be talking up the chapter he contributed for a new book, which came about when he was called upon to tell his story to Kim Rossmo, a former Vancouver police officer who invented the widely used crime-solving technique called geographic profiling.
Mr. Rossmo, now a professor at Texas State University, was the first to sound the alarm about a serial killer stalking sex workers on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside when he was pioneering his methods in B. C. But he was dismissed and left town before he was eventually proven right with the conviction of Robert Pickton.
Mr. Rossmo used statistics to substantiate Mr. Allore's theory that a serial killer was stalking Quebec's Eastern Townships in the late 1970s and helped him draw a possible link between Theresa's death and two others: Louise Camirand and Manon Dube.
Mr. Rossmo book, Criminal Investigative Failures, is due out in November and will serve as a manual for how law enforcement can avoid the blind spots and biases that often undermine police work.
Mr. Allore said it meant a lot to him to be able to provide the human touch to a very technical text.
"He told me this is like the anchor of the book," he said. "I'm really honoured and really proud of that.? This is an academic book. It's not a titillating kind of thing. It's going to be used for research and teaching."
Mr. Allore said he is under no illusion Theresa's slaying will be solved imminently, but he hasn't raised his hopes, either.
"I'm at peace with the crime never being solved. I was at peace with that five years ago -- the point was to make sure that kind of thing never happened again."
ahanes@nationalpost.com
Patricia Pearson, National Post
August 10, 2002
When 19-year-old Theresa Allore went missing from school and then turned up dead on a lonely country road, Quebec police led her family to believe she had died of a drug overdose. Now, 23 years later, her brother John Allore and National Post reporter Patricia Pearson have spent five months investigating Theresa's disappearance. In a three-part series beginning today, Pearson uncovers the story of Theresa's death, which was almost certainly a murder by a serial killer who may still be at large.
We tend to think of unsolved mysteries as a parlour game. But that isn't the case for everyone. For some, like John Allore, treasury manager of the city of Durham, N.C., the mystery he cannot solve is the one that keeps his heart from mending.
Twenty-three years after his sister was found face-down in a creek in Quebec's Eastern Townships, dumped there like garbage by strangers who have never been caught, he cannot unearth the secret of her death. Somebody, somewhere, knows what happened to Theresa Allore, a bright 19-year-old Cégep student who was attending Champlain Regional College in Lennoxville. And that somebody should not own a secret like that, what a girl's last words were, whether she was frightened, or in pain. That is a secret that belongs to the people who love her, and they are the ones who don't know.
When you have lived with an unanswerable and shattering question since the age of 14, as Allore has, there are several tactics you can take. You can stay close to the scene of the crime, as John's brother, Andre, has, living in Montreal, following the French-language papers for any hint that might surface, requestioning the original investigators.
You can gently close the book because you know the answer will not bring your sweet child back, which is what his parents have done.
Or you can run. John Allore opted to put distance, even a national border, between himself and the past. He moved to New York, then to Houston, on to Los Angeles, and finally to Chapel Hill, N.C., marrying a U.S. woman who had never heard of Lennoxville, Que., and had never seen the look on his father's face when he identified Theresa's remains.
But life has a way of catching up with you, and it caught up with Allore in a manner so stark that it bordered on the comical. He had taken a job as treasury manager of the city of Durham; he and his wife, Elisabeth, had two daughters, and felt settled enough to buy their first house, a "fixer-upper" on a pretty wooded lane. One day, less than two months after they moved in, the State Bureau of Investigation, county sheriff and two forensic teams arrived on their doorstep with sniffer dogs. They were looking for the body of a local woman named Deborah Key, who they suspected had been killed in the house by the previous owner.
The Allores watched as the police dismantled their septic tank searching for body parts, while the hounds bounded around the property. One dog finally picked up a scent in the crawl space under the house. It was a trace of the woman, enough to excite the dog, who started pacing and scratching in the rich Carolina clay. Investigators wormed their way underneath the floors and began digging. They got about half a metre down before they realized she had been there, dragged there dead by her captor after vanishing from downtown Chapel Hill, but she must have since been moved. All that remained was her ghost.
"Well, that's just bloody great," John said mordantly to Elisabeth. The house was now as haunted as its owner.
Over the ensuing months, as the investigators doggedly kept up their search for Deborah Key, even bringing over a psychic with her preposterous, only-in-America television crew in tow, John began to feel called to action.
What the police were doing for Deborah Key, he realized, he had never done for his sister. His brother, Andre, had tried, and all but given up. Nobody else, ever, was going to investigate the crime that was her death. He had to try.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In March, 2001, John called me in Toronto. We had been in touch off and on since university, having been high school sweethearts and then wary friends. I had last seen him in Los Angeles in 1995; I was researching a serial homicide case for a book I was writing, and I enlisted his help. We drove around Van Nuys while I checked the apartments and bars where a woman named Carole Bundy and her boyfriend Doug Clark had abducted and murdered several women. Fate does love irony.
Now it was his turn to call upon me for assistance. "What do you remember about what happened to my sister?" he ventured.
I cast my mind back to the autumn of 1979, when I had arrived at boarding school in Rothesay, N.B., and met John for the first time. His family had moved to New Brunswick from Montreal in the summer of '78, leaving Theresa and her brother Andre behind to finish the Quebec version of Grades 12 and 13 at the Cégep in Lennoxville.
I recall being told Theresa had gone missing from her campus, and been found six months later enmeshed in the thawing ice of a creek beside a corn field, stripped down to her bra and panties.
The following autumn, I ventured into the realm of a ruined family with the typical insouciance of a 15-year-old. I still feel ashamed about that, all these years later, how I noticed the silences in the house but didn't really understand them. I remember pictures of Theresa, with her curly auburn hair and dark, amused eyes. Her personality -- intelligent, independent, witty -- shone through the images. I remember sleeping in her bedroom when I received "weekend leave" from school, and noticing her hiking boots lined up neatly by the closet door.
I remember John telling me her story: how the investigators advised the Allores that their daughter, a fearless girl who rock-climbed and sky-dived, had possibly overdosed on drugs, and been taken from her dorm to the creek by panicked friends. There was talk of her choking on vomit, or perhaps having an allergic reaction. Two months after her body was found, the Sûreté du Québec mailed her personal effects -- her wallet, her watch and earrings -- to the family. Apparently, as far as the Sûreté was concerned, she had been pulled under by the riptide of '70s party culture.
"Sooner or later, someone will talk," investigators assured them.
But for 23 years, no one had said a word.
From North Carolina, John asked me if I could write an article, to somehow encourage those kids -- those well-heeled, middle-class Canadian kids who had dumped their friend's corpse -- to break a conspiracy of silence they had apparently observed since 1978, and come forward with an account of Theresa's last night.
I thought about this, but from a different perspective than I would have had at the age of 15, when everything grown-ups said was true.
"I don't buy the theory, John. It doesn't make sense to me," I ventured. "Why would they take off her clothes?" He didn't know. In 1997, his brother, Andre, had contacted several of Theresa's friends in search of the truth, and none had been able to help him.
Questions spun around in my mind, as they had in both Andre's and John's: "Why heave her body into a creek, when it wasn't their fault that she died? I can see them trying to distance themselves from her death, but why hide her? Why not take her to the hospital and leave her on the lawn, or at least leave her on the lawn of the residence where she lived?"
"Her wallet was found several miles away from her body," he offered, following my train of thought.
"So, they stripped her of clothes and ID?" They took a friend who had overdosed on drugs and coolly, systematically turned her into a Jane Doe.
Why?
John had been assembling a file of miscellaneous notes and official documents, including climate reports from Environment Canada for November, 1978. He sent me photocopies. When the package arrived, I sat down at my dining room table with a cup of coffee.
I looked at the report from the coroner in Montreal. The autopsy was maddeningly inconclusive: "violent death of undetermined nature," the coroner had been obliged to conclude. With the body in a state of advanced decomposition, the pathologist could rule out bludgeoning, stabbing, shooting and organic disease. Not much else. It wasn't possible to determine whether she had been raped. The results of a toxicology work-up on Theresa's body were negative: no evidence of either prescription or illicit drugs had been found in her liver, lungs or other tissues.
Why was the hypothesis a drug overdose? What was the evidence? I sat back in my chair, musing. The investigators had not closed the case of Theresa Allore, so much as they had left the grieving family in New Brunswick with a hypothesis that effectively shamed them.
- - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Allore and I met up in Sherbrooke, Que., in March, 2002. Our plan was to review Theresa's police file -- stored away and gathering dust in the Sherbrooke police office.
I was expecting John to be a nervous wreck, but he was quite the opposite. He is a tall man, slender, highly energetic. He had been running around Sherbrooke all day without a coat in spite of the cold, wearing only a light-blue cotton sweater. There was even a jauntiness about him, as if he felt huge relief that he was finally confronting his demons. His hotel room was littered with papers, news clippings, notebooks, the lights of his lap-top winking beside the coffee machine.
He had a surprise for me. "I was just over at Champlain College talking to Gerald Cutting," he said, referring to the director of the Cégep, who had been the newly appointed director of student services in the autumn of Theresa's disappearance. "Cutting told me that the Sûreté thought way back in '79 that Theresa was murdered."
My jaw dropped. It seemed inconceivable that the Sûreté's chief investigator, Roch Gaudreault, could have left the Allore family with the impression that their daughter's death was a mishap, when he himself was chasing suspects and talking to Cutting --with whom the investigator had gone to high school -- about his theories of foul play. Why was the family not informed?
Fourteen years after his sister died, Andre Allore had tracked the retired Gaudreault down for a brief and fruitless phone conversation. Gaudreault reiterated the drug overdose theory, but otherwise had nothing to say. "I got the impression," Andre wrote in his notebook, "that Gaudreault couldn't understand why this was still bothering me."
When I arrived in Sherbrooke, John had already been to the office of the Sûreté du Québec. Corporal Robert Theoret, a handsome, curly-haired man who didn't miss a trick, was cordial and watchful as John pored over sections of Theresa's crime file for seven hours. Theoret had removed from the file -- as we later determined -- the listing of evidence, photographs of the crime scene, certain witness statements, Gaudreault's final report, and all notations about suspects, which remain confidential under Canada's privacy laws.
When he had first written to them from Chapel Hill in early summer, 2001, the Sûreté had offered John broader access to the file, but by March, 2002, they were restricting what he could see. Perhaps they were feeling defensive, or maybe this was standard protocol. They certainly weren't worried about compromising their investigation. John asked Theoret if he would investigate, given the revelation from Cutting that his sister was probably murdered. As he recalls, Theoret was smooth and affable but evinced little interest, pointing out that he was short-staffed. "I have lots of cases," he said. "Why should I investigate this case?"
All right, John said. "I want to investigate it myself, then. What was Roch Gaudreault's final conclusion?"
That information is privileged, Corporal Theoret replied.
OK. What about forensic evidence? Where were Theresa's bra and underwear, which we could perhaps test for DNA?
"We threw them out," Theoret said. (Other detectives we spoke to could offer no reasonable explanation for disposing of evidence in an unsolved crime.)
"Do you have Gaudreault's number?" John persisted, in a subsequent phone call to Theoret. He wanted to question the retired investigator.
"He doesn't want to talk to you," Theoret replied, as if Allore were a pesky reporter from the National Enquirer.
"The Sûreté don't like to be challenged," a law-enforcement source later explained. And challenged they were. John retained a lawyer and filed a Freedom of Information Request. The response sluggishly wended its way back from provincial officials: He could see his brother Andre's statement from November, 1978. That was all.
To say that John Allore felt stymied is an understatement. Who owns the secrets to a young woman's death? The cops and the robbers, apparently.
Nosy family members: Butt out.
We had a quandary. The Sûreté was disinclined to investigate Theresa's death, but wouldn't divulge their findings from 23 years ago. Without access to key parts of her file, John didn't know where to begin. He was just a guy -- an accountant -- who lived hundreds of miles away. I was a former crime journalist. We both had small children, jobs, lives...
We sat in the hotel bar that night with John's brother, Andre, and decided to pool our resources: Andre's prior investigation and the meticulous notes that he had kept, my crime journalism background, John's talent for incisive analysis. "We can do this," we told each other.
That weekend visit to Sherbrooke marked the beginning of a five-month investigation of murder.
The next morning, John and I climbed into a rental car and drove from Sherbrooke southeast to Lennoxville, a 15-minute run down Rue Belvidere and over to Highway 143, which we would later discover was a critical piece of the puzzle.
Lennoxville is a pretty town in the riding of Jean Charest, filled with gabled, clapboard houses and mom-and-pop shops. Champlain College sits at its outskirts beside the older and much statelier Bishop's University, from which it rents some facilities. Amidst the hills of the Eastern Townships and the lush surrounding farmland, the Cégep -- which was founded in 1967 -- would have been a lovely place to attend one's final years of high school.
Unless, like Theresa Allore, one happened to arrive in late August of 1978. Over the previous decade, Champlain College's enrolment had risen to over 1,000 students. Officials faced a housing crisis. Plans were underway to build another dormitory, but in the meantime, as a stop-gap measure, two buildings had been hastily leased in the tiny farming village of Compton, 20 kilometres from the school.
The distance of the dorms had already sparked controversy among the students, as John and I learned by reading Champlain's student newspaper from that period, The Touchstone. Students were complaining about the shuttle buses that had been provided as their only means of transportation to and from the dorms. If they missed the bus from Lennoxville, they were obliged to either pay for a 20-km taxi ride, or hitchhike. The student handbook provided a brief list of hitchhiking dos and don'ts.
We drove south down Highway 143 and then headed eastward to Compton down 147, a two-lane black-top that even now is an unlit, rural byway winding its way through hill and dale into the middle of nowhere. It must have felt daunting for teenagers living away from home for the first time. In February, 1978, the winter before Theresa arrived, The Touchstone reported that a Champlain student had been the victim of an attempted rape. Several other assaults were reported that semester. Students were uneasy. Female students said they were afraid to walk alone, and scared to hitchhike. "Will someone have to get raped," one girl wrote, "before the police stop shrugging off the problem?"
The new residence being built closer to campus fell behind schedule, however, and Champlain staff announced in the spring of 1978 that they would have to "run Compton again." Editors at The Touchstone were aghast. "I was enraged," one wrote, "by the smug way in which the fates of two hundred more new students were so easily dispatched."
Over half of the students quartered in Compton were under the age of 18. They had two staff members on site, a 25-year-old named Jeanne Eddisford, and a former elementary school principal named Stuart Peacock. Both slept in King's Hall, a rambling Victorian mansion that had once served as a girl's boarding school. Neither inhabited Gillard House, the squat, co-ed brick dormitory next door. No one conducted room checks. The students were encouraged to make their own meals and to be as independent as possible.
It was an optimistic experiment in free living, but what it meant, in essence, was that 240 high school students were living in an isolated, poorly lit area without adequate transportation or effective supervision. "There is definitely something wrong at Compton," The Touchstone editorialized. "Stuart Peacock is very seldom seen at Gillard House, of which he is the newly appointed director."
The result was wholly predictable. "For most boys and girls, it's their first time away from home," one Compton resident told The Touchstone. "There are no restrictions, no curfews, and especially no parents. They go wild."
Co-ed parties featuring beer, pot and LSD were common enough that the night watchman for the Compton dorms grew fed up. After confronting Peacock about "the drug problem," to no avail, he quit in disgust, according to a statement he later gave to the Sûreté du Québec. Two school officials, Doug MacAuley, director of student services, and Joe Gallagher, assistant director of student services and counselling, abruptly resigned from Champlain around this time. Gallagher said only that his position had become "structurally unsound," making it impossible for him to "accomplish his goals." Gallagher further told The Touchstone he hoped the problems he saw on the campus would be solved, and that those in the position to act upon them knew what they were.
Were they related to the Compton residence, which seemed in danger of spinning out of control?
John and I stood in the foyer of King's Hall, the Victorian mansion in which Peacock and Eddisford slept, and where my mother once resided as a boarding-school student in the 1940s. It was now an inn, with guests scurrying back and forth past the oak reception desk as we looked around, out of place and out of time, contemplating the carpeted staircase where Theresa Allore was last seen.
- - --------------------------------------------------------------------
Friday, Nov. 3, 1978, was gloriously mild for late autumn in the Eastern Townships. Theresa left her room on the second floor of Gillard House early that morning and walked across the lawn in a long, beige sweater-coat, wearing a diminutive pair of Chinese slippers, no socks and a flowing green scarf that her mother had given her for her 19th birthday.
She joined her girlfriends, Jo-Anne Laurie and Caroline Greenwood, in the pretty dining room at King's Hall, where sun streamed through the French doors. She made herself toast, perhaps, or scrambled eggs. They chatted about their weekend plans, and then the three girls boarded their shuttle bus and parted ways on the main campus to attend their Friday classes.
Theresa was an excellent student, curious, creative and sharp, pulling down straight-As in art as well as physics. She was not much inclined to "go wild," according to her friends, because she had already lived away from home for a year, working in a ski factory while she shared an apartment with girlfriends in Pointe Claire, Que. She was happy to be re-engaging her quick mind. She paid little attention to campus parties, for she was in love with a young man who had gone out West to work. She spoke to him on the dormitory telephone using handfuls of quarters. I imagine her with her feet up against the wall, twisting her fingers in the telephone cord, the way I used to, murmuring and smiling.
Theresa also spoke frequently to her parents, whom she had last seen less than a month before on Thanksgiving weekend, when they celebrated her 19th birthday in their new house in Saint John. A fog rolled in from the Bay of Fundy on the day she and Andre were to fly back to Montreal. Marilyn Allore remembers their flight being cancelled. She and her husband drove them to the train station instead, for both children were anxious to get back to school for exams.
"I remember there was a billboard in the train station advertising Mexico," Marilyn told me, "and I said to Theresa, 'Whatever you do, do not run off to Mexico. Because you can get arrested for drugs there and that kind of thing.' I remember that." She paused, reflecting. "And I remember that Theresa kept getting off the train. She must have come off that train five times, to hug us goodbye."
"Was that unusual for her?"
"Very." She chuckled. "I remember going home and feeling really happy, and yet thinking something wasn't right. It's hard to explain. I was standing at the kitchen sink looking out the window, and I just had the feeling, that feeling of happiness, and the sense that something was about to change."
Of course she remembers these details: My heart breaks listening to her on the telephone, her light voice calm, but poised, careful, because she has steeled herself for the stirring of these waters. She remembers the fog, the billboard, the goodbyes, everything, because it was the last time she ever saw her child.
- - -
Theresa planned to spend the weekend of Nov. 3 working on a book report about Zen Buddhism for her psychology class. She declined an invitation to go to her friend Caroline Greenwood's family farm. At supper time, an acquaintance ran into her in the dining hall on the Champlain campus. Theresa bummed a cigarette, and the girls agreed to meet up later in Gillard House to listen to new albums. (What was playing that year? Genesis, the Alan Parsons Project. What Theresa listened to, her little brother, John, picked up on and later introduced to me.)
Theresa missed the 6:15 shuttle bus. Another one was not scheduled to take students out to Compton until 11 p.m. Did she position herself on the gravelled edge of Highway 143, illuminated by a street lamp, and stick out her thumb? She was fearless about hitchhiking, as I would have been at that age. Grow up loved and think the best of the world.
Who picked her up? No one has ever come forward to say that a petite redhead in a beige sweater-coat climbed into their car. She did come back to the village of Compton. A friend named Sharon Buzzee saw her on the stairs in King's Hall -- where students watched television, fixed snacks and ostensibly studied -- at around 9 p.m. on the night of Nov. 3, shortly before she was planning to head over to Gillard House and listen to records.
Perhaps she was on her way up to the second floor to visit her brother Andre, who wasn't in. Did she descend that central staircase once again, walk through the vestibule and out onto the lawn? Did she return to her room in Gillard House? Or turn the other way, and walk down the circular driveway and set off along Highway 147 toward Compton Village?
These questions bob up and down in the mind like horses on a carousel, they do not still just because the police lost interest. This summer, Marilyn Allore walked from King's Hall along the gravelled side of the highway until she picked up the sidewalk in Compton, passing the faded clapboard houses with people staring suspiciously out of windows, the handful of stores, walking along in silence, a quiet, graceful woman whom I shall always picture with her luxuriant black hair swept into a chignon. Wordlessly retracing a possible route that her daughter took in her little Chinese slippers, sporting that long flowing scarf like Isadora Duncan, before vanishing thereafter into darkness.
Champlain College, it appears, did not notice that one of its students was missing for close to a week. Theresa's friends began to worry much sooner -- as they returned from their respective weekend adventures, and knocked on her door to gossip with her, only to find her absent. None of them were confident enough to raise an alarm. "Theresa didn't need anyone to worry about her," Greenwood later stated. "She always told us not to be her parents," Laurie said. They didn't wish to seem nosy or neurotic. But when she still hadn't appeared on Tuesday, they kept checking around, telephoning friends of hers in Montreal, poking through her room for clues. Laurie and her boyfriend, Ian Catteril, opened Theresa's locker and tried to glean from its unassuming contents where she had gone.
On Friday, Nov. 10, her brother overcame his own fear of "checking up on Theresa," and called home. His parents were more confident in their judgement. They immediately notified the Lennoxville Police, and jumped into their car to drive westward from Saint John.
The cold month that followed was one scene among many in a parent's worst nightmare. Few people offered to help the Allores. This was not like the recent searches for Chandra Levy in Washington, D.C., or Elizabeth Smart in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was more nearly the experience of the thousands of families in North America whose missing children are neither famous enough nor young enough to compel wide sympathetic attention. No one organized a search of the farmland and woods surrounding Compton, where Theresa would lie one kilometre from Gillard House through the winter. Robert Allore went knocking on doors, a desperate, frantic father, asking everyone everywhere, in shops and houses and farms and rectories throughout the Eastern Townships, if they had seen his daughter. People merely shook their heads and shrugged.
The police were reluctant to expend much effort on a probable runaway, who they imagined had hitchhiked directly from Lennoxville to points unknown. Still, Detective Leo Hamell of the Lennoxville police took a picture of Theresa to show border guards in Vermont. He checked with her old roommates in Montreal. He gathered statements from students in Compton but didn't search the premises.
Marilyn Allore recalls that he was compassionate, but she thought he might be somehow out of his depth. Corporal Roch Gaudreault of the Sûreté, who would later become the lead investigator, told Robert Allore that there was little they could do, that Theresa's body would probably turn up when the snow melted. The comment, Allore said later, was like "a nail between the eyes."
Meanwhile, at Champlain College, Stuart Peacock, Director of Residence, did not make himself known to the Allores. Comptroller Jean Luc Gregoire continued to bill the Allores for Theresa's tuition and board, with interest and penalties accruing.
Campus Director Bill Matson suggested to the family that Theresa may have had problems.
"Dr. Matson," Robert Allore wrote in notes he made at the time, "gave me the theory that Theresa may have had lesbian tendencies. He said Theresa, if found, would need psychiatric treatment, by court order if necessary. He asked us if Theresa was an adopted child." (A question that Leo Hamell reiterated.) "He said he had indications that Theresa may have gone somewhere where disturbed people go (and) advised us to go back to New Brunswick, get back to normal and wait for something to happen."
Instead, the Allores hired a private detective.
Robert Beullac of the Bureau D'Investigation Metropol arrived on the scene in late November, and immediately searched for physical evidence at Gillard and King's Hall. He noted that Theresa's purse was still in her room, as were her hiking boots, which she invariably took with her when she left the village overnight. He uncovered the fact that Sharon Buzzee had seen Theresa at King's Hall, thus unravelling Matson's theory that she had hitchhiked off into the wild-blue yonder to pursue her lesbian tendencies with disturbed people.
Both Dr. Matson and Detective Hamell implied that Buzzee's statement wasn't credible, as Buzzee told John Allore this year. Hamell had already speculated in the local press that Theresa may have headed off to Vermont, and in December, one month after she disappeared, he began to speculate that she had been involved in drugs. Sherbrooke was rife with drug dealers at that time. It just took a gargantuan leap in logic to conclude that a studious girl who had arrived in the area six weeks earlier had been whacked by a drug associate.
So why were the police thinking in this way? Was it a function of the times, to implicate a young woman in her own disappearance? Or were other factors at play?
Interestingly, we discovered that earlier in the year of Theresa's disappearance, a young man was found dead of exposure on a golf course, having laid there, apparently for several months, after wandering off drunk from the Bishop's University pub. Private Investigator Beullac had determined that on November 3rd, 1978, two Gillard House students were taken to hospital after imbibing an intoxicating blend of LSD and booze.
One was found face-down on the lawn after midnight, and ferried to Sherbrooke by the disgruntled night watchman.
Added to the reported sexual assaults of the previous year, the shuttle controversy and a housing crisis, and rumoured affairs between teachers and students, one would be naïve to think that Champlain had no concerns about its reputation. Gerald Cutting wrote a letter to John Allore this summer, stating that the college had done all it could to assist with the search for his sister.
Perhaps it had, but Suzanne DeRome, who was on the College board, recalls that the disappearance and death of Theresa Allore was not discussed board meetings. And Sharon Buzzee remained unaware that Theresa was dead until someone mentioned it to her in the 1990s. Another woman I spoke with whose husband taught at Champlain in those years was shocked to learn – in 2002 – that a student had died.
No one from Champlain sent the Allores a note of condolence, as John Allore pointed out in a letter to Cutting. There were no candle-light vigils and no posters. It was almost as though Theresa had vanished without a trace.
Sitting in my office late one night, leafing through Robert Allore's notebook from that time, I came upon a page where he'd jotted down what Sharon Buzzee saw at King's Hall. It was dated December 4th, 1978. The notation was terse: "Bottom of main stair case. One foot on bottom step. Going up."
Beneath this he added, with heart-sinking poignancy, "7:15 p.m. -- Broke down."
My God, of course. I have a daughter now. I understand the hunger for that foot on the stair, the hunger to reach for it, to pull it to safety, and to know about where it stepped next.
Unsatisfied with the way the police and the college were handling the case, the Allores hired a private investigator, Robert Beullac, of Bureau Metropol. Mr. Beullac managed to retrace Theresa's movements a week before she went missing. She had gone hiking with the assistant director of her residence, Jeanne Eddisford. She had gone to a Halloween party on the Lennoxville campus at Champlain College, and to a birthday party for her brother Andre. She had hitchhiked to Montreal to stay overnight with her friends. She had attended all of her classes. She was neither depressed nor stressed out. Life was normal.
In the absence of any other evidence, however, the police knew that on the night she disappeared, some students at Gillard House, an off-campus residence in nearby Compton where Theresa lived, had taken LSD. What if the kids doing acid had invited Theresa to join them? the police speculated. What if she had had an allergic reaction, or the acid had been laced with something more toxic? What if she had overdosed? Would the kids have panicked and hidden her body, terrified of being caught out?
But it was all speculation. Theresa liked testing her limits. "She was into extreme sports before they became a trend," as her brother John put it. But she wasn't the type to get whoo-whoo drunk, or party overboard. In a statement to the Sûreté du Québec, her friend Jo-Anne Laurie said that Theresa occasionally smoked pot, but "wasn't into drugs."
Other students echoed this view. The students who had done acid insisted, in their statements, that they hadn't even seen her that night.
Still, you never knew about these things. What if she had yielded to a sudden impulse and dropped acid that night? The possibility wormed its way into the Allores' mind. You never know what your kids are really like. They remain miraculously strange -- of you, but not of you.
This was particularly true for parents who had grown up in the Forties and Fifties and were then faced with the alien landscape of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. And it was reinforced by things the Champlain College officials suggested to the Allores. Kids today. Deviant. Lesbian. Into drugs. You never knew.
Or did you?
Christmas came and went with no news of Theresa.
Officials at the college, it appeared, had a hard time coping with the disappearance. In January, the director of Gillard House, where Theresa lived, quietly resigned, citing "personal reasons." His replacement, Jeanne Eddisford, later confessed to John Allore that she had felt overwhelmed and alone in her job that winter, with 240 adolescents almost hysterical with anxiety over the missing student. In January, she called in the Lennoxville Police and a number of students were carted away for marijuana possession. At the same time, a neighbouring residence, King's Hall, was shut down, and all the students -- including Theresa's brother Andre -- were herded over to the dorm where Theresa had lived. Rumours and anxieties flared.
On Valentine's Day, 1979, Robert and Marilyn Allore and their younger son, John, were having dinner around their pretty glass dining table at their house in Saint John, N.B., knives and forks clattering gently, the conversation quiet, when a piece of plaster suddenly loosed itself from the ceiling, and fell to the table in the shape of a heart. I remember John telling me about this when I later sat at the same table for dinner. We had met at boarding school and had begun to date, and John told me how he knew then -- how they all knew, in that instant -- that Theresa wasn't missing. She was dead.
Her body was found on Good Friday, April 13, 1979. To this date, her death remains unexplained.
- - ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Twenty-three years later, John Allore, who was now living in North Carolina and working as treasury manager of the city of Durham, called to enlist my help in trying to get to the bottom of his sister's death. In March of this year, we met in Sherbrooke to review the evidence. One morning, we pulled out of the driveway at Gillard House, where Theresa had lived for six weeks before she disappeared and, for a minute or two, followed Hwy. 147 leading out of Compton before turning south on Compton Station, a local concession road -- unpaved and unlit in the '70s -- that cuts south between acres of corn fields in the direction of Vermont.
In early spring, the corn fields are dark and stubbled, still covered in tattered strips of snow. The landscape would have looked virtually identical on the day that a muskrat trapper, walking along the edge of the road, saw Theresa's body, partially submerged in ice and caught in the forked branch of a tree.
We slowed the car and pulled over to the shoulder on the right. Here was a very small creek, flowing toward the road and then away from it in a U shape, necessitating a small bridge where the water trickled underneath before seeping into the field on the other side of the road. The water was so shallow that the creek bed would be dry in high summer. In the autumn, it would have been little more than a ditch.
We stepped into the mud and matted corn stalks, and followed the creek away from the car. John stopped where the creek curved. He pointed. "You could drive to this point in November, no problem. There are no street lights on that road, no houses around. Nothing. You could leave her right here." He was gesturing calmly toward the ground. "The farmer who owned this land told the Sûreté that the water rose eight to 10 feet that spring. She got caught in the spring runoff and floated toward the bridge."
John stood there in his cheerful blue cotton sweater, musing. Did his big sister come here, to this bend in the creek, in her bra and underwear? Walking barefoot through the corn? Or was she hauled out of a car that turned off the road and juddered along the bank of the creek, driven by someone who knew exactly where he was, how invisible he would be?
Where were her clothes? Where were those Chinese slippers? Why had the police found women's clothing in a garbage bag 300 feet from the body, clothes that didn't belong to Theresa?
If she died here, why weren't her clothes here?
We stood there staring for the longest time, as if the earth itself would reveal a memory, as if we could will ourselves to see what happened in this quiet place of mud and corn stalks.
Later, John e-mailed me: "I keep seeing her walking barefoot across the corn stubble."
He sees other things too, as his family does. They are haunted by dreams, and images. John was shaken to the core by the drowning face in water that he saw in the movie Night of the Hunter.
He remembers hitchhiking with Theresa along the freeways through Montreal. He envies his older brother, Andre, who has more memories of her, more moments to retrieve and to contemplate: a peculiar kind of sibling rivalry. Once, he went to hear James Ellroy read from My Dark Places, the famous crime author's memoir of never knowing how his own mother was killed. Afterward, the two of them talked, bonding in the rarity of their misery.
- - -
For a time, John and I chased the ghosts of whispered suspects, pondering the teachers at Champlain (a possible affair?), considering the students, as Andre and Robert Allore had done. We tracked the movements of a sex murderer newly arrested on Montreal's South Shore. We were committing the classic mistake of novice investigators. "Work from the evidence," a homicide detective I know advised me. "Never work from the suspects."
I phoned an acquaintance in Washington, D.C., a profiler named Kim Rossmo who directs research at a criminological think-tank called the Police Foundation. Originally from Vancouver, Rossmo was a beat cop who earned his doctorate from Simon Fraser University by pioneering a technique called geoprofiling, that maps the local pathways of serial offenders. His technique --and the software he developed -- is now used by the RCMP, the FBI, and Scotland Yard.
Rossmo became famous in Canada for arguing a serial killer was behind the disappearances of dozens of prostitutes in B.C. long before his superiors conceded those vanishings were linked. His arguments ultimately led police to undertake the ghoulish dig at a pig farm in Port Coquitlam, B.C., which allegedly continues to yield human remains to this day.
I described to Rossmo what had happened to Theresa, how she had been found, and the theory of her death the police had proposed -- the overdose and the panicking friends. He questioned me carefully and then said: "The theory doesn't fit."
"Why not?"
"Because she was found in her bra and panties. What you've described appears to be a sex murder."
"But the pathologist didn't find any evidence of rape."
"That doesn't mean anything. He could have used a condom. He could have had a deviance that didn't include intercourse."
I nodded, and followed his logic. Perhaps the assailant had forced her into oral sex. I thought about something I read in the autopsy report, how Theresa still had 300 centimetres of "stomach contents" when she died, meaning that she had not thrown up. Yet traces of vomit had been found in her throat.
Had she gagged? On what? On the man who was assaulting her, or because of the way she was dying?
John sent Theresa's autopsy report to a pathologist, and had it re-analyzed. Was it possible that she had been strangled, we wanted to know?
"Yes," he said, "it is possible." This was the kind of case, he added, where police work was vital to solving the crime.
- - -
If Theresa Allore was murdered on the night she vanished, on Nov. 3, 1978, the question that her brother John and I asked ourselves now was: where? How, we wondered, could Theresa have been killed at her student residence without anybody noticing? This was a problem with all of the theories.
How could she have died of a drug overdose without any witnesses? There were students milling about everywhere that evening. There was a night watchman outside. How could someone have laboriously stuffed her body into a car and dumped her one kilometre away?
We re-examined the buildings, and then we re-read the original statements. Then, suddenly, I got it. Theresa had bummed a smoke from Josie Stephenhorst, a fellow student, at 6 p.m on the evening of Nov. 3.
The week before, according to private investigator Beullac, she had turned up at the Entre Deux restaurant in Compton to buy Player's Light cigarettes from the vending machine. I phoned Andre Allore to ask if Theresa was a regular smoker. She was, he said.
The restaurant was a quarter of a mile down Hwy. 147 from her residence. A quick walk on a warm, dark night. Maybe she left her residence and went to the restaurant in Compton to buy cigarettes before meeting up with her friends to listen to records.
That's why no one heard her scream. She went out on to the unlit highway with nothing but her wallet, and on the dark stretch of road before the sidewalks of Compton village begin, she met someone who stole her away.
That someone was driving. And with Theresa in the car, he doubled back, past her residence, and turned left onto the concession road at Compton Station where he left her.
Once we had established the possibility that Theresa was out on the highway, we could think about the assailant's route. Panicking students, for instance, would have returned to Gillard House where Theresa lived, or perhaps to a student residence in Lennoxville. But Theresa's wallet was found on a road that leads directly into the city of Sherbrooke. The Sûreté du Québec, actually, had never mentioned to the Allores that a farmer found the wallet on his property one week after Theresa's body turned up, on the south side of Macdonald Road, a kilometer north of where she disappeared. They had simply handed it back to the family two months later, on the afternoon that Roch Gaudreault, the chief investigator in the case, had told Robert Allore that someone, eventually, would talk.
It was Andre Allore who later determined where his sister's wallet was found. As someone who had lived in the area and completed his schooling in Sherbrooke, Andre knew Chemin Macdonald was a back door route into Sherbrooke -- a concession road that locals used to bypass Lennoxville if they were heading north from the villages in Compton and Stanstead Counties.
Chemin Macdonald comes off Hwy. 143 before you get to Lennoxville, and runs steeply uphill past a few houses and farms before becoming Rue Belvidere, a boulevard that takes you straight into south Sherbrooke. Whoever left Theresa Allore on the side of Compton Station did not return to Compton, or head into Lennoxville. They drove up to Sherbrooke.
Why?
If you follow Rue Belvidere into the city, you come within a block of the intersection of two streets in a working-class neighbourhood of south Sherbrooke: Rue Union and Rue Craig. And it was at this intersection, John Allore and I learned, that a 10-year-old girl named Manon Dubé had vanished on a Friday evening in January, 1978. That was just nine months before Theresa disappeared.
Manon had been walking with her eight-year-old sister, Chantal, to their little house on nearby Bienville Street. Chantal ran ahead, because she was cold.
She last saw Manon in a salmon-pink toque and blue snowsuit, walking behind her across the icy yard of Saint-Joseph Elementary School. The girls were within 500 yards of their house, but Manon did not make it home. Her body was found on Good Friday, 1978, lying face-down in a creek near Kingscroft Road in the village of Ayer's Cliff, dumped six kilometres east of where Theresa Allore's body was found at Compton Station.
To get to the creek from where Manon was last seen, you would drive down Rue Belvidere, across Chemin Macdonald, and south on Hwy. 143 -- the exact route that Allore's assailant took when he disposed of her wallet.
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Manon Dubé's autopsy, like Theresa Allore's, revealed no determinate cause of death, for she was equally decomposed and there was no lasting evidence of trauma: no bone fractures or bullet wounds. Except for a superficial gash in her forehead, which may have occurred post-mortem as she was transported in the trunk of a car or rolled into the creek, the reason for Manon's death remained a mystery.
The Sherbrooke Municipal Police theorized Manon had been struck by a car and the panicked driver drove her body to the creek. The case was never solved.
I explained the hit-and-run theory to Kim Rossmo, an expert in serial crime and the pioneer of a technique called geographical profiling. Rossmo, formerly of Vancouver and now head of a criminological think-tank in Washington, D.C., called the theory bizarre, and reminded me of the "least-effort principle" in criminology.
Criminals minimize their effort. If they hit, they run. They do not stop, gather up the body, lift it into their vehicle, drive it several kilometres, drag it through the woods in deep snow and dump it in a creek. That would be what you call "most effort."
Last year, Chantal Dubé, now an adult, demanded that her sister's case be reinvestigated. The detective who took on the job, Patrick Villmeuin of Sherbrooke Municipal Police, was appalled to discover the evidence -- as in the Allore case -- had been tossed out.
John and I began to look more closely at newspaper stories. The family's hired private detective, Robert Beullac, who had remained bothered by his inability to solve Theresa's death, sent us a clipping about the case of Louise Camirand -- the third unsolved death of a petite, dark-haired female near Sherbrooke within an 18-month period.
Camirand was 20 years old in 1977, and worked part-time in the archives of a Sherbrooke hospital on Portland Street while she prepared for her wedding in May. On the evening of March 19, she left her home on Bryant Street -- several blocks north from where Manon Dubé disappeared -- and headed to the variety store at the intersection of Rue King and Jacques Cartier Boulevard. Then she vanished.
On Friday, March 24, Camirand's nude body was found in a snowdrift along McDonald Road, a dead-end street in the countryside near the village of Magog.
This time, because the body had barely decomposed, the pathologist was easily able to determine the cause of death. Camirand had been raped and strangled. A military boot lace had been tied around her neck. Her pants and suede jacket were left beside her body, but there was no sign of her blouse or undergarments. Her purse was never recovered. According to an uncle, Camirand was a member of the Army Reserves.
Eighteen months after her murder, and two days after Theresa Allore disappeared, two young men walking along a wooded road between Magog and Austin came across a pair of woman's slacks and a shirt, draped across a log. When Theresa was reported missing some days later, the men called Detective Leo Hamell, who went over to investigate. The clothes could no longer be found.
I checked Hamell's notes, which John had copied from his sister's file, and studied my map of the Eastern Townships. The road where the young men had seen the women's slacks and shirt was Rue Giguere. It is the only road that intersects the narrow McDonald Road, where Camirand was dumped.
I telephoned Kim Rossmo with a burgeoning suspicion.
Experience has taught Rossmo to be prudent and highly skeptical. "First, you have to confirm that it's a cluster of homicides," he said. "You need to know how many female stranger murders there are, on average, in the Sherbrooke area. You need to confirm this as an unusual cluster."
I telephoned around. I hit the books. Murder in the Sherbrooke region is -- not surprisingly -- quite rare. This small city and its rural environs have an average of two homicides every year, with occasional spikes to four or five, largely due to the presence of bike gangs. In 1978, there were 42 murders in all of Quebec. Of these, only a tiny fraction were sex murders. Not that they didn't grab headlines, but ironically, it was the U.S. cases the Canadian media sensationalized that year. In 1978, the Hillside Stranglers were murdering young women in Los Angeles, while John Wayne Gacy was arrested in Chicago for the killings of 33 boys, and Ted Bundy was preying upon young co-eds in Seattle.
In Canada, over the period from 1974 to 1986, sexual homicides accounted for 4% of all homicides. Fifty-seven of these murders occurred in Quebec, or roughly four per year. Montreal and its south and north shores accounted for the lion's share, as one would expect. I'm talking about a lion's share of four.
Three dead females dumped on roadsides in the Sherbrooke region within 18 months of one another may, unaccountably, have failed to generate headlines. But in the context of those Quebec statistics, it was almost certainly "a cluster."
Rossmo was sufficiently suspicious to have me draw up a map, marking the sites of the abductions and the bodies. He wanted to see what the geographic connections were. I sent my map to Washington and while I awaited his report I ruminated about Theresa's wallet.
The wallet bothered me. I found it weirdly coincidental that the wallet would be found one week after the body, even though climate reports told me snow didn't fall in Sherbrooke that year until December. Why did it lie undetected through November and why was it found where it was on April 20, 1979?
John Allore went home to New Brunswick and at my urging examined the wallet.
It was a Buxton wallet, cherry-red, which his parents had given to Theresa one Christmas. Apart from some salt stains and a touch of mildew, it was in fine condition. I checked with some leather craftsmen.
A wallet that has been left outside for six months in rain followed by snow followed by rain, will turn uniformly darker and also stiffen.
Why not this wallet? Why weren't its contents damaged by water? Was it left on Chemin MacDonald after Theresa's body turned up, as a statement of some kind?
Inside the wallet, police had found Theresa's driver's licence, her health card and a ticket stub for a play in Montreal, dated Friday, Nov. 7, 1975. John watched a home movie and noted, with hair rising on his neck, that he and his siblings opened their Christmas presents of Buxton wallets in 1977, Theresa's last Christmas. The ticket predated the wallet by two years and Theresa's vanishing by exactly three.
It was a ticket to a play called Crime and Punishment.
I was in the process of double-checking our geography for the crime map when we came across a clue to this mystery. The man who found the wallet on his property told John that his daughter had also been attacked. On Oct. 3, 1978, she was an 18-year-old student at the local French-language Cégep, a petite brunette with dark eyes -- like the other victims.
That evening, she had taken her dog for a walk along Chemin MacDonald. Across the road and slightly behind her, a man suddenly jumped out of his car and began running at her on a diagonal across the two-lane black-top, like an animal sprinting toward its prey.
Instantly, she understood her life was in danger. She had been approached before by cruising men, had been heckled, lured. "Baby, baby. Wanna party?" The woman wanted John to know -- when he called her -- that this was not that. She was immediately terrified. She ran into her father's apple orchard, thinking, "I can outwit him, I know the area better, I've got my dog." The man followed, chasing her through the shadows.
She felt as if she'd fallen out of her life and into a horror movie.
In a remarkable stroke of good fortune, a police car belonging to the Coaticook Detachment of the Sûreté du Québec came down the steep hilly road. The officers saw the man and grasped at once that his behaviour was alarming, even though they didn't see his intended victim. They leapt out of their cruiser and rounded him up. She was so terrified that she remained hidden in the orchard, scarcely daring to breathe.
The next morning, her mother coaxed her into phoning the police to describe what had happened. The officers told her they had run a check on the man. He had convictions for sex offences in Manitoba. Since no crime had taken place, they had let him go. All she can remember about him now is that he was small. A small man with a prior conviction and a feverish appetite for predation.
One month later, Theresa went out at the same time of night and was never seen alive again.
It needs to be said that the police investigating the Allore case were a different group than these officers in Coaticook, who were, in turn, different than the investigators for Dubé, who were distinct from the ones looking at Camirand. These were not co-operative men. As one source in Sherbrooke's complicated and rivalrous law enforcement system told me: "Back then, it was terre de chasseur. Hunter's turf. We didn't talk, we didn't share files. We were the greens and they were the blues."
Adds private investigator Beullac: "When I went down to Sherbrooke from Montreal in that period, I used to call it my Chinatown." The scene was unruly, all of my sources agree. Every one had their turf. "We were making the rules of investigation up as we went along," says one cop.
Ironically, this was the year in which the Canadian Police Association ran an ad in Montreal's The Gazette to protest the repealing of the death penalty. "Too Many People In Canada Are Getting Away with Murder," the ad said. Indeed they were. In Quebec in 1978, 23 homicides went unsolved.
Kim Rossmo studied my map of the abductions and dump sites, using his expertise in geoprofiling, a criminological technique that can link crimes, or localize the areas in which a serial rapist or killer lives, by analyzing the geography of the attacks. There are several premises behind geoprofiling, which Rossmo pioneered for his doctoral thesis at Simon Fraser. One is that predators will operate along routine pathways in their work and home lives. They seldom stray into unfamiliar areas to attack. On the contrary, they will often have passed the same victim -- or type of victim -- dozens of times at a bus stop or a parking garage near their work, before they summon the nerve to attack.
Where victims disappear and where their bodies are found are significant clues in geoprofiling. For one thing, they can tell you whether three disparate murders are linked. Rossmo sent me this formal report:
"Each of these incidents involve multiple locations that, when combined, form a persuasive pattern," he wrote "Camirand disappeared in Sherbrooke, close to where Dubé went missing. She was later found in Magog, near what may have been Allore's clothes. Dubé, in turn, was found a few miles from Allore's body outside Compton, just off a route linking Compton to Magog. Allore's wallet was found just south of the area where both Camirand and Dubé disappeared, very near an attack on a fourth woman. The last link is that Allore's wallet was recovered near the place where Dubé's body was found, by Hwy. 143, which leads back to Lennoxville and Sherbrooke.
"The locations associated with these three deaths are intertwined, woven together in the landscape south of Sherbrooke. Three murders of low-risk young women in a 19-month period, in such a tight geographic cluster, is highly suspicious, and not likely to be a chance occurrence. These cases should be fed into ViCLAS (Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System), and re-examined as a group of potentially linked sex murders. Serial murderers typically live closer to the victim encounter sites than body disposal locations.
"This offender was most likely based in Lennoxville or south Sherbrooke during the period from 1977 to 1978."
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We are, as you read this, turning our investigation over to detectives with the Sherbrooke Municipal Police. We have identified two likely suspects, both of whom are now in custody for sex murder. Both are unusually short, as our witness described, and have family addresses in the area that Rossmo identified as a likely base. One of them was in the Canadian Forces at the time. Louise Camirand was a member of the Reserve Forces, and was found strangled with a military-issue boot lace. That suspect, described to me as "highly impulsive" by a criminologist who has interviewed him, was convicted for a rape and attempted strangulation in Quebec in early 1980s. He went on to rape and strangle a waitress in the West, for which he is now serving a life sentence.
In the last year, for the first time since this cluster in the late 1970s, four women have gone missing from the Sherbrooke area. One of them was found in July, strangled, wearing nothing but her bra, lying face-down in a creek.
We can only hope that homicide investigators in the Eastern Townships have improved their approach in the last two decades, and will not leave friends and family members to investigate a murder on their own.
To Corporal Robert Theoret of the Sherbrooke District of the Surete: you asked John Allore why the case of his sister, Theresa, should be reopened.
The culprit was likely a serial killer. We need to know who he is and where he is now. That is why.
Theresa Allore Memorial Fund
The family of Theresa Allore and Champlain Regional College are pleased to announce the
launching of the Theresa Allore Memorial Fund.
Theresa Allore was a promising student at the Champlain Lennoxville Campus in Quebec’s Eastern
Townships. At the time of her death, she was studying the behavioral sciences, and had expressed an
interest in the field of criminology. Theresa loved adventure, which lead to her interest in cycling,
skydiving, and hiking. She loved being outdoors, and particularly enjoyed hiking the local trails of
Mount Orford. Her special qualities included being a good friend, who did not judge others, but
rather chose to draw encouragement and inspiration from everyone and everything she encountered.
Based on these qualities inspired by Theresa, the hope is to establish a scholarship that will take into
consideration the student as a “total person”, including academic achievement, active participation in
campus life, desire to serve others, and financial need. Beyond these qualities, benefactors will have
the opportunity to contribute to the development of specific criteria that will open this scholarship to
a wide spectrum of students, providing support to both traditional and non-traditional applicants.
While we have struggled for many years with the tragic loss of a young life filled with a spirit of
adventure, it has come the time to celebrate her life so that Theresa may inspire others. There is no
doubt in the hearts of those who had the privilege to share in her all too short life that this is exactly
how Theresa would want to be remembered.
We are presently seeking benefactors that wish to contribute to an endowment scholarship in her
memory. With your help, we hope to be able to offer the first scholarship for the 2008-2009
academic year. We ask that you consider donating to the Theresa Allore Memorial Fund, so that we
can continue to celebrate her life by encouraging a worthy student.
Thank you for your consideration of this important tribute.
John Allore J. Kenneth Robertson
Brother of Theresa Director General
Contributions can be made to:
Benefactors from the United States:
Triangle Community Foundation
Theresa Allore Memorial Fund
c/o Fred Stang, Director of Development
324 Blackwell Street, Suite 1220
Durham, NC, 27701
http://www.trianglecf.org/page10001837.cfm
Benefactors from Canada:
Foundation Champlain-Lennoxville Inc.
Theresa Allore Memorial Fund
c/o Marielle Denis, Treasurer
P.O. 5003 (Champlain Lennoxville Campus)
Sherbrooke, Québec, J1M 2A1
En 1979, Theresa Allore est retrouvée morte près de Sherbrooke. À l'époque, la police avait conclu que cette étudiante de 19 ans avait succombé à une overdose de drogues. Insatisfait des résultats de l'enquête, son frère John décide de réouvrir le dossier 23 ans plus tard. Selon lui, sa súur a plutÙt été victime d'un tueur en série. .
Theresa Allore était une jeune femme sans histoire. De bons résultats scolaires, un petit copain, des amies... Elle a été aperçue vivante pour la dernière fois le 3 novembre 1978 à King's Hall, la résidence étudiante du Collège Champlain, à Lennoxville, où elle poursuivait ses études.
Cinq mois plus tard, son cadavre est retrouvé en bordure d'une route de campagne, à moins d'un kilomètre de là. Son visage fait face au sol et son corps est vêtu seulement de sous-vêtements. Il est dans un état de décomposition avancé. Une autopsie est pratiquée. Le rapport toxicologique est négatif. Le coroner conclut à une «mort violente de nature indéterminée».
Les policiers informent alors la famille de Theresa Allore que leur fille est probablement morte d'une overdose de drogues. Ils évoquent même ses tendances lesbiennes. Leur hypothèse est que la jeune femme a succombé à une overdose de drogues à la résidence étudiante et que son corps a été transporté jusqu'à la route de campagne par des étudiants paniqués à l'idée d'avoir à affronter cette réalité.
Une hypothèse différente
Son frère John, qui vit aux États-Unis, n'a jamais réellement cru à cette hypothèse. Au printemps 2002, il demande à la Sureté du Québec de réouvrir l'enquête mais on refuse de donner suite à sa requête. John Allore décide alors de faire appel à une amie, journaliste du National Post qui est spécialisée dans les enquêtes criminelles. Depuis, ils essaient de retracer le fil des événements qui ont mené à la mort de Theresa Allore.
En effectuant ses recherches, John Allore découvre que deux autres femmes sont mortes à la même époque dans des circonstances similaires. Louise Camirand, 20 ans, est morte par strangulation après avoir été violée dans la région d'Austin, en mars 1977. Manon Dubé, 10 ans, est retrouvée sans vie dans le ruisseau qui se jette dans le lac Massawipi, dans la région de King's Croft, en mars 1978. Ainsi, trois jeunes femmes sont retrouvées mortes dans la même région en l'espace de 20 mois.
Mais ce n'est pas tout. John Allore découvre qu'il y aurait pu y avoir une quatrième victime. Un mois avant la disparition de Theresa, une jeune femme de 18 ans qui rentrait chez-elle à pied se fait couper la route par une voiture, entre Compton et Sherbrooke. Un homme en descend et marche vers elle. La femme sent le danger et s'enfuit en courant. Le hasard veut que des agents de la SQ passent à ce moment par là. Ils aperçoivent la voiture, interceptent l'homme en question puis le relâchent.
Le lendemain, la jeune femme porte plainte auprès de la police. Les agents réalisent alors que l'homme qu'il avait rel‚ché la veille avait déjà été accusé d'agression sexuelle dans l'Ouest canadien. Aucune suite n'est donnée à ce dossier. Les policiers n'ont jamais fait le lien entre tous ces événements. Mais pour Kim Rossmo, un profileur renommé de Washington, l'explication la plus plausible est celle d'un meurtrier en série.
