Cold Case BC: The Stories Behind the Province’s Most Sensational Murder and Missing Persons Cases

By Eve Lazarus

Eve Lazarus (Cold Case Vancouver) investigates murder and missing persons cases that have perplexed and fascinated British Columbians for years.

In her book Cold Case Vancouver, crime historian and reporter Eve Lazarus used investigative skills to shine a light on the city’s most baffing unsolved murders. In Cold Case BC, Lazarus casts her gaze more widely on long forgotten and unsolved murder cases throughout the province of British Columbia, Canada. These include teenager Molly Justice, who was murdered on the outskirts of Victoria after taking the bus home from work, and a follow-up to the tragic 1948 Babes in the Woods story of two children found murdered in Stanley Park, whose names were finally revealed this year in a story broken by Lazarus herself. There’s also the tale of four police officers in the 1960s who committed a string of robberies that culminated in the biggest heist in Vancouver’s history. Their reign of terror ended with one of the officers murdering his family before killing himself. Or were they all killed by someone else?

           

Lazarus also looks at some of the province’s most intriguing missing persons cases, such as three-year-old Casey Bohun, who vanished from her bed in the middle of the night, and the Jack family of four, who left Prince George to work in a logging camp along the infamous Highway of Tears but were never seen again.

           

Interviews with law enforcement, forensic experts, and family and friends of the victims add new life to these historical cases, some of which date back to World War II. The book also includes some cases that have been solved, revealing the painstaking investigative work and new forensic technology that ultimately brought about closure for victims’ families.

           

Meticulously researched, Cold Case BC is a fascinating true crime book that reveals startling details about British Columbia’s criminal past. 

This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781551529080

Book preview

Introduction

My first book, At Home with History, was published in 2007. The idea was that a house has a social history and comes alive through the stories of the people and the events that took place inside its walls. Sensational Victoria and Sensational Vancouver continued the theme, adding stories about bootleggers and brothels, corrupt cops, and several unsolved murders. By the time I wrote Cold Case Vancouver, I realized that I was no longer writing about Vancouver’s sketchy history; I was writing about the social forces that lie behind and inform historical true crime.

When I started writing Cold Case Vancouver, I was shocked to discover that there are literally hundreds of unsolved murders in British Columbia, some dating back several decades. I intentionally chose cases that weren’t well known, in which the victims had been essentially forgotten by everyone except their family and friends. I wanted to change that by telling the stories of their lives, not just their murders. As I had hoped, in revisiting these old cases, new information came forward and was passed along to police. I don’t know whether these leads helped or even whether they were investigated, because the police won’t talk about unsolved murders, but at the time of writing, no arrests had been made. Then, in February 2022, seven decades after their skeletons were found in Stanley Park, the Babes in the Woods were identified. Their murders are still unsolved, and their identification came about not through a tip, but through the magic of genetic genealogy.

In the last few years, forensic technology has forged ahead in leaps and bounds. The discovery of DNA and its use in criminal investigations was a game changer for law enforcement in the 1990s. The science has gone from being able to match DNA found at a crime scene to a suspect, to matching DNA found at a crime scene with the DNA of offenders in the United States’ Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) and Canada’s National DNA Data Bank (NDDB). More recently, genetic genealogy, which identifies a suspect or a missing person through a family member’s DNA, has found murderers and put names to unidentified human remains where all else has failed. What has taken law enforcement by surprise is that genetic genealogy helps to identify a different kind of killer that has so far defied attempts at profiling. In contrast to a serial killer responsible for multiple murders, this killer is typically a young male who plans and commits a brutal rape and murder, then goes on to live a normal life, never committing another crime.

To date, hundreds of killers and missing people have been identified through genetic genealogy in the United States, but it seems we are slower to embrace this new technology in Canada. This is partially due to cost, but also, tighter privacy controls over personal information make using this technique more difficult here. Another challenge is that, though DNA has allowed us to solve previously unsolvable murders, it is not always available for very cold cases. Before investigators understood the value of blood and body secretions, this type of evidence was often contaminated, lost, or even thrown out.

How many unsolved murders are there in British Columbia? No idea. Police only provide clearance rates (which measure the number of cases where an offender has been identified, though not necessarily arrested or charged). And these numbers are deplorable. In British Columbia, homicide clearance rates have ranged from a low of 38 percent in 2020 to a high of 67.7 percent in 2014—an average of 53.5 percent between 2011 and 2020.¹ In other words, one in two murderers are still quite possibly going about their own lives.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) operates like a private corporation with a brand to protect rather than as an organization that should be beholden to the public interest. For instance, when I wrote to the RCMP’s media department in Ottawa requesting clarification on some publicly available statistics, I was told, As you may or may not know, the name, image, and marks of the RCMP are protected under the intellectual property laws of Canada. While I had provided a link to the publishing information for my book, I was told that for the RCMP to consider answering my query, I would also need to provide a synopsis explaining how the RCMP would be featured or portrayed; the scope of participation by the RCMP / RCMP member; the RCMP’s involvement; the full name and title of the person who would sign the Licence Agreement on my behalf; how I planned to commercialize my book; and my intended target audience. When I wrote back explaining that I was asking about statistics, not writing a book about the RCMP, I was told it didn’t matter; I had to supply this information before they would proceed. It’s a quick and effective way to shut down media inquiries and keep information away from the public.

When it comes to missing persons and unsolved murders, in my experience the RCMP and most police departments work under a code of silence and a total lack of transparency. The families of murder victims and missing people are often completely left out of the investigation, even though they know that keeping their loved one’s face and name in the public eye could help to bring about a tip that will crack the case and that media pressure also keeps police investigating, if not actually accountable. While some individual detectives are willing to work with the families and also generously assisted me with this book, most refuse to give out information on cold cases, even those that are several decades old. They hide behind media departments and so-called Freedom of Information requests, which in reality often take several months before they are inevitably turned down.

A recent example of this lack of transparency is the case of twenty-four-year-old Chelsea Poorman, who was last seen in Vancouver on September 6, 2020. That night, Chelsea went out for dinner with her sister, attended a party, and vanished. Her remains were found by a contractor in April 2022 at an unoccupied property in Shaughnessy. Two weeks later, the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) held a media conference. Sergeant Steve Addison said that Chelsea had most likely died soon after she went missing, and the cause of death was unknown. We do not believe that Chelsea was murdered. We don’t believe her death was caused by another person; the exact cause of death may never be known, and at this point it’s considered to be undetermined.² The impression Addison left was missing person found, case closed. But it was far from closed for Chelsea’s family and friends. How, they wanted to know, could the VPD announce that Chelsea had not been murdered if they didn’t know how she died, how she arrived at the property, or who she was with? At the time of writing, the family were still searching for answers, and likely because of this public scrutiny, the VPD’s official line had changed to the investigation remains active.

After Cold Case Vancouver came out, I realized that families needed somewhere to remember and talk about their loved ones, and I wanted to include unsolved murders outside of Metro Vancouver, as well as missing person cases. The Cold Case Canada Facebook group now has several thousand members, and in 2020, I launched a podcast by the same name. Cold Case BC is a continuation of the Facebook group and the podcast. I have included a mix of unsolved murders, missing persons, and cold cases that were solved—sometimes decades after the murders occurred. The cases cover half a century, from 1943 to 1993. They are not well-known cases; most of these women, men, and children were victims of domestic violence, of predators along the Highway of Tears, of family members, and of strangers.

The hardest part for me was researching the cases of missing children and knowing that for every one I write about, there are many more still missing. How many of these children are missing because of abduction, human trafficking, or, as the police like to say, foul play? I wish I could tell you. Unfortunately, the definition of a missing person—anyone whose whereabouts are unknown—is so broad that it renders annual statistics published by the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR) meaningless. According to NCMPUR, 28,033 children were reported missing across Canada in 2021, and 5,544 of them were from British Columbia. Reasons for these disappearances, according to NCMPUR’s categories, include runaway, accident, and parental abduction. A total of eighteen—including one male child from BC—were categorized as stranger abduction. Most of the children reported missing were found within a few days.

How many were not? We don’t know.

As well as a complete lack of context for these huge numbers, there is inconsistency in reporting—RCMP detachments and police agencies in BC have different ways of mining the data, categorizing the disappearances, and entering them into the system. We don’t know from looking at those numbers how long a child has been missing or whether they are a teen late home for dinner, a body that hasn’t been recovered after a boating accident, or a toddler snatched off the front porch of their home ten years ago. I could find only one jurisdiction able and willing to provide accurate numbers of missing people, and these were surprisingly low. The RCMP Southeast District—one of four in the province—averages three thousand missing person reports every year. Of those, all but about six people are located each year. Corporal Jennifer Sparkes, who oversees missing person investigations for the Southeast District, which includes forty-five detachments, is left with 327 cases that go back to the 1950s. More than 60 percent of these are thought to be drownings. Sparkes provided me with the breakdowns: 278 males and 49 females. The total includes 292 Caucasians and 31 Indigenous people, 5 who are female. This is essential information that should be at the fingertips of every RCMP detachment and police station.

In many ways, Michael Dunahee, the four-year-old boy who was abducted from a Victoria playground in 1991, is the poster child for missing kids. His case is tragic, but the reason we remember him so clearly is because the number of young children who go missing due to stranger abduction is very small. While stranger abduction is rare, there is an epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) in Canada, and BC has some of the highest numbers in the country. Many of these murders happened and continue to happen along the infamous Highway 16—the Highway of Tears—as well as Highways 97 and 5 in Northern BC. In 2005, the RCMP struck up a task force called Project E-PANA to investigate a handful of these cases and determine whether they were the work of a serial killer. More were added, until E-PANA consisted of eighteen cases, but there are many more. In 2010, the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC)³ found 582 cases of MMIWG across Canada over a thirty-year period. British Columbia accounted for 162 cases—a whopping 28 percent—followed by Alberta with 92 cases, or 16 percent. The high numbers of MMIWG in BC were concentrated in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and in Prince George.⁴

I have highlighted the names of those whose murders are unsolved, as well as those still missing, in Chapters 9, 10, and 11, which deal with murdered and missing women and girls from Northern BC. The names include both Indigenous and non-Indigenous females, but by far, the majority are Indigenous. By no means is this meant to be a complete list, but it is a way to remember some of the victims and to show the enormity of this crisis in the north.

I’ve written about Gloria Moody, E-PANA’s first official victim, murdered in Williams Lake in 1969, and Monica Jack, a twelve-year-old girl from Merritt whose body was found seventeen years after she went missing while riding her bike home one summer evening. I’ve included Indigenous victims not on E-PANA’s list—that of the Jack family of four, who went missing from Prince George in 1989, and in the Lower Mainland, twenty-two-year-old Barbara LaRocque, a Vancouver go-go dancer strangled with her own scarf in 1974, her body dumped in Langley.

If you watch a lot of crime shows, you might think justice works something like this: after a crime is committed, police investigate and gather evidence. They arrest the suspect, charge them, and then the case goes to court, where a jury of peers determines the suspect’s guilt or innocence. Well, no, not exactly. While police always say cold cases are never closed, they’re not always open either. In most provinces, police have the power to lay charges on reasonable and probable grounds, but in British Columbia, it’s up to the Crown. Prosecutors will only go ahead with charges if they are convinced that there is a substantial likelihood of conviction and that it’s in the public interest to pursue a trial. If, for example, the Crown feels there is not enough evidence, or the suspect is already in jail serving a life sentence for another murder, it may decide that public interest would not be served by holding a trial. The problem with this is that life sentences are very rarely served in full, and criminals can reoffend. And in the end, the families of victims do not get closure, and killers continue to walk among us.

As already mentioned, most RCMP detachments and police departments won’t talk to me about unsolved cases, even really old ones, so I’ve relied heavily on contemporary newspaper accounts, vital statistics, autopsy reports, coroner’s inquests, obituaries, and interviews with retired homicide detectives, forensics experts, and genetic genealogists. Wherever possible, I have worked with the families and friends of the victims to get to know the people behind the headlines and to understand the impact a murder or missing person has had not only on the family, but on the entire community, often for decades after the crime took place.

Finally, I’m convinced that many of these cases can still be solved, and that telling their stories is a way to help bring attention to them and keep them in the minds of the public and the police. In a best-case scenario, this could lead to new information that might help close a case, or at least see it reinvestigated. If you have information on one of these or any other cases, please contact the RCMP or police department where the crime took place, or, if you wish to remain anonymous, call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or visit solvecrime.ca.

1 Policing and Security Branch, Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, British Columbia Crime Trends, 2011–2020 (2021).

2 Search for missing Vancouver woman ends tragically, YouTube video, posted by Vancouver Sun, May 7, 2022.

3 The federal government cut NWAC’s funding in 2010, and up until 2021 all the updated information was kept in storage in paper form. Funding has now been found to update these numbers through the organization’s Safe Passage website, and as of March 2022, there were 957 cases of MMIWG identified across Canada. Chloe Hamilton (manager, executive policy, NWAC), email to the author, March 28, 2022.

4 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in British Columbia, Canada (2014), 11.

While no arrests have been made, I can tell you with confidence that the person who likely killed these boys was a close family member, said VPD inspector Dale Weidman. But at this stage of the investigation, it was never about seeing someone charged or arrested for these crimes. We knew with the passage of time that was extremely unlikely, but it was always about giving these boys their names and finally telling their story.

VPD MEDIA CONFERENCE, FEBRUARY 15, 2022⁵

Chapter 1

The Babes in the Woods Get Their Names Back

I’ve been obsessed with the Babes in the Woods case ever since I first heard about the murders on a visit to the Vancouver Police Museum & Archives in the late 1980s. It was a breakfast meeting for a tourism organization called Vancouver AM, and we drank coffee and ate croissants smothered in jam in the old autopsy suite. Wandering through the former morgue, which hosts the true crime exhibits, it was heartbreaking to see two tiny skulls on display. Two little kids that nobody had missed or at least reported missing.

Over the ensuing years, I’ve connected with others who are equally obsessed with the fate of the two children. Some were independent researchers, and for others it was their job to find out who murdered the boys and, more importantly, to find out who they were. Laura Yazedjian, coroner; a long line of Vancouver homicide detectives, including Brian Honeybourn and Dale Weidman; former CKNW investigative reporter George Garrett; and Katarina Thorsen, artist and researcher, have all worked diligently to give these boys their names back. And, over the years, they have all generously given me their time so that I could write about these tragic unsolved murders.

Cold Case Vancouver, published in 2015, covered twenty-five unsolved murders, including the Babes in the Woods. I had hoped that bringing attention to these mysteries, some reaching back as far as 1944, might bring new leads that could help to solve these seemingly unsolvable cases. Although not one of the murders I wrote about has been solved in the intervening years, we did have a breakthrough in February 2022. Nearly seventy years after their two skeletons were found in the woods, the Babes in the Woods were identified as Derek and David D’Alton, aged seven and six when they were bludgeoned to death with a hatchet.⁶

An illustration of David and Derek D'Alton, young white boys aged 6 and 7. They are smiling and wearing plaid aviator jackets and bomber hats with goggles. Behind them is a large tree with bare branches and long roots.

DAVID AND DEREK REIMAGINED | ART BY KATARINA THORSEN, 2022

The Backstory

In January 1953, Albert Tong was working with a Vancouver Park Board crew, clearing bush in a remote part of Stanley Park, when he stepped on a lump and heard a loud crack. Raking away the leaves, he found that the cracking sound had come from a skull. And as he carefully lifted away an old fur coat, he saw remains that were later revealed to be two human skeletons. Tong’s discovery in the woods that winter morning set off a chain of events that would confound and fascinate the citizens of British Columbia for the next seven decades.

In 1953, there wasn’t much in the way of crime scene forensics. Two police officers arrived and used their hands to scrape off the rotting leaves and unearth what was left of two children, one slightly smaller than the other. They counted the layers of leaves to guess at the number of years that the remains had been there, took a couple of photos, and threw the bones and the rest of the evidence—which included the woman’s coat, two children’s aviator helmets, a pair of goggles, two pairs of children’s shoes, a woman’s brown penny loafer, a child’s blue metal lunch box, and a hatchet—into a cardboard box. Everything was taken to the city morgue, where Dr. T.R. Harmon and the coroner, Dr. John Whitbread, attempted to reassemble the bones.

Harmon was a medical doctor and not trained in forensics. He determined that the children were aged between seven and ten and had been bludgeoned to death with the hatchet, whose blade, he demonstrated, fit neatly into the fractures. Even though the skeletons were wearing boys’ outfits, and it was difficult to determine sex from skeletal remains, the original case file said the victims were a boy and a girl. This mistake sent detectives off on the wrong track for the next forty-five years, as police searched for a missing brother and sister.

There had been no reports of missing children. The police hired Erna Engel Baiersdorf, a forensic anthropologist and sculptor, to create likenesses of the children, working with the broken and decomposed skulls and the information she was given by the medical examiner. Police borrowed an outfit from a department store similar to the ones they believed the children to have worn, based on the scraps of material found with the skeletons. What was left of the cheap fur coat found covering the skeletons was also recreated and photographed. Investigators estimated from the sizes of the coat (made in 1943) and the women’s shoe left at the scene that the woman was a short and stocky five foot three, weighing between 125 and 135 pounds.

The boy’s outfit—a Canadian-manufactured red Fraser tartan jacket, beige corduroy pants, brown shoes, and a leather aviator helmet—was placed on a store mannequin the size of a small child, and a photo was taken and sent to the media. Tips poured in from all over North America. More than a hundred people said they remembered seeing a boy and a girl in Stanley Park in the late 1940s. Each of these tips was checked out.

Police have always suspected that the boys were killed by their mother, who then likely killed herself. Murder-suicide was certainly a plausible theory. The years after the war were rough on women, particularly single mothers who’d lost decently paying jobs when veterans returned from the war. Vancouver was in the throes of a housing shortage, and judging by the headlines of the day, crime was escalating. Often, women’s only option was working in badly paid retail or domestic jobs, and the long hours and low wages left few options for child care. The 1948 annual report for the VPD mentioned a population increase of 22,000 and seven murders, three involving mothers and children—in two, a mother shut herself in a room with a child and committed suicide by gas, and in the other, a mother threw her two children off a bridge.⁷

A newspaper article with the headline “Babes in Woods Slain by Mother: Police Reconstruct Deaths of Boy, Girl Found in Park.” The article includes a photo of a mannequin wearing a plaid aviator jacket and a bomber hat with goggles.

VANCOUVER SUN, APRIL 15, 1953

VPD detective Don MacKay headed up the initial investigation. He thought the murderer was a woman because of the strength of the blows. They were light blows that barely made a depression in the skull, he said. I believe a man would have struck harder.⁸ MacKay thought the woman had then thrown herself into the waters of the nearby Burrard Inlet. Based on the layers of leaves over the remains and what he thought was a credible tip, MacKay focused on 1947 as the year of the murders. Tips flooded in from members of the public who remembered someone with children between seven and ten in Stanley Park that year whose present whereabouts were unknown. MacKay checked every lead. He traced seventy-six pairs of children who were unaccounted for in Western Canada, finding some as far away as Scotland and Australia. He searched through missing person records and contacted local school boards to find out if a boy and a girl, probably brother and sister, had failed to return to school around 1947. Social agencies were also