Hello, it is Ryan, and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot games on chumbacasino dot com. I looked over at the person sitting next to me, and you know what they were doing. They were also playing Chumpa Casino. Coincidence, I think not everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumpa Casino's home to hundreds at casino style games. You can play for free anytime, anywhere, even at thirty thousand feet. So sign up now at Chumbuck Casino dot com to
claim you're free. Welcome bonus. That's Chumbu Casino dot com and live the Chumba Lane.
No persentinesses, every d void where, every by lost the terms conditions of eating.
Plus, Hey guys, it is Ryan. I'm not sure if you know this about me, but I'm a bit of a fun fanatic when I can. I like to work, but I like fun too. It's a thing, and now the truth is out there, I can tell you about my favorite place to have fun, Chumbuck Casino. They have hundreds of social casino style games to choose from, with new games released each week. You can play for free, anytime, anywhere, and each day brings a new chance to collect daily bonuses,
So join me and the fun. Sign up now at Chumba casino dot com.
No personess is every drood Where every by, lost Eaters eating.
Clay blot Toadian.
You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good Evening. Fifty years ago, a serial killer proud the quiet city of London, Ontario, marking it as his hunting grounds. As young women and boys were abducted, raped, murdered, residents of the area held their loved ones closer and closer, terrified of the monster or monsters stocking the streets. Homicide detective Denis Alcep began hunting the killer in the nineteen sixties, and he didn't stop searching until his death forty years later.
For decades, detective's actual and arm chair and the victims families and friends continued to ask questions who was the Forest City Killer. Was there more than one person? Or did a depraved individual commit all of these crimes on his own? Combing through the files, Detective Alcep left behind research of Vanessa Brown reopens the cases, revealing previously unpublished witness statements, details of evidence, and astonishing revelations. And through
her investigation, Vanessa posits the unthinkable. Is it possible that the Forest City Killer is still alive and, like the notorious Golden State Killer, a simple DNA test could bring him to justice. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Forest City Killer, a serial murderer, a cold case sleuth, and a search for justice with my special guest, researcher and author Vanessa Brown. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Vanessa Brown.
Hi, Van, it's great to be here.
Thank you very much for joining me with this incredible book, The Forest City Killer. Tell our audience a little bit about before we start about your occupation and your background and your interest in all things London. Tell us a little bit about your background before we talk about your faithful meeting with Dennis Alcep Junior.
Sure, my day job is at a bookstore. I own with my husband an antiquarian bookstore in downtown and so an antiquarian bookstore. In addition to having general used books for people to enjoy and read, we also specialized in rare books, so first editions, signed editions, hard to find, limited prints, paper matter, old letters, the semera, and all sorts of interesting things anything printed on paper.
So that's my day job, and that.
Means I work a lot in researching history and the importance of cultural artifacts that come under my nose. And I also work a lot with libraries and archives. We really help members of the public who might have something special, something unique or interesting that should be kept in an archive. We help them get in touch with those librarians and archivists. And we also find things ourselves sometimes when we're out
hunting for material. So you know, I've developed an understanding, I think more than the average person about how libraries and archives work and the kind of resources that are available for members of the public to access when it comes to doing research. But I'm also a lifelong Londoner. I've lived here my entire life, and you know, it's a community that I love. So my previous two books
are about London, Ontario and its history. I wrote a book about a historic hotel that's no longer here, and my husband and I wrote a book about one hundred and fifty cultural moments in London's history. So, in addition to being an antiquarian bookseller, I think I'm a.
Bit of a local history buff.
I like to know what's happened in my city, and I like the unusual aspects of my city's history.
So, you know, we all can.
You can look in any history book about London to find out about its founding and important businesses and schools and churches and all of those things. But to me, the really interesting stories are the odd balls that are harder to find, that really tell the story about how our city became the unique place that it is.
You write about a book you discovered in twenty fifteen from Michael Arnfield, a book called Murder City. What does he suggest in that book? And you talk about the anomaly that was that he refers to he suggests about London. Tell us about the population of London, a little bit about its access to Toronto and Detroit, and tell us about Michael Arnfield's book and his suggestion.
Sure, Mike Arnfield is a professor of at Western University, and in twenty fifteen he released a book called Murder City about London, Ontario and the anomalous number of serial killers that were here, mainly in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. He purported that London is the serial killer capital of Canada, if not the world. Now, I can't
speak to that thesis. I'm not a criminologist or a sociologist, but it immediately grabbed my attention and I met with Mike, I interviewed him, I reviewed his book for a local publication, and I was sort of hooked on the subject matter. In Mike's book, one of the things he talks about
is London's unique makeup as a silo city. So you have these sort of independent silo communities where people are very self referential, but it creates these little pockets of independence, and it's very good for test markets.
So London's been.
Known as a test market city, and I like to say we were the test market for chicken McNuggets, for Tim Horton's Dark Roast coffee, and unfortunately, we were a test market for serial killers. London is located, of course equidescent between Detroit and Toronto along a super highway like an interstate.
So it's a very easy.
City to come in and get out of quickly if you need to.
And it's sort of a waspy, conservative place. And in nineteen sixty eight, when the.
Spate of murders, the main section of murders in my book starts, the city had a population of about one hundred and sixty thousand people, And of course that included some annexed rural territory around the city that had been annexed the year before, so that's actually an elevated number of the population was probably something more like one hundred and forty or one hundred and thirty thousand in the
city proper. So it's not a big place. And in two years we have nine unsolved homicide sexual homicide related to women and children, and that's the focus of my book.
Now, you write that when you were reading Michael Arn'tfield's book Murder City, that you read in particular about the Jackie English case, and you said that despite being you know, a local history buff, you didn't know about a lot of these unsolved cases. They really did. You weren't aware whatsoever and reading about Jackie English's case and your research you found Dennis Alsop Junior tell us about this faithful meeting between you both and how it came that you met.
What were you looking at on them?
I was looking at this incredible website called Unsolved Canada dot ca, which is unfortunately no longer working, and that's very disappointing because it was an incredible treasure traive of information, kind of like Canadian webslutes, but even more so, there were you know, family members, victims, family members and community members really working hard together and bringing all their skills to the table to try and solve these crimes on their own.
People going into the archives.
And paying for reproductions of photos, maps, there were people doing you know, pseudo scientific testing on car paint in different lights, historic car paint colors, and you know, water testing.
And all sorts of It's really very.
Impressive what this community of people were doing. So when I read Murder City, I found that website of course, just googling the cases, and that was impressive. But of course Mike wrote about Dennis Junior in his book, and I guess I should tell you who Dennis is. Dennis Alsop Senior was the lead investigator on the Jackie English murderer and the other murders that took place that are unsolved and insults as well, but mainly the unsolved cases. And he died in twenty twelve and his son was
going through his things. He found three banker's boxes filled with notes and files from his father's time as a homicide investigator for the Ontario Provincial Police, which is sort of like our state police, I guess for your American listeners.
And Dennis has.
Had looked through all of these and he realized that there were answers for the family members in those files, people who didn't know what had happened to their loved ones and didn't realize, you know, there was more information I think that they were given.
So, you know, Dennis.
Felt this responsibility to carry on his father's legacy, and the Jackie English case in particular was one that he had continued to work on until his death. So Dennis Junior, sorry, go ahead, no, go ahead. Dennis Junior had wanted to reach out to the families, but that's a very sort of not tedious, a challenging task. You want to make sure that you don't offend people, or bring up terrible memories for them, or hurt them in any way. Some people don't want to talk about those kinds of tragedies,
you know. So Dennis had been reading the newspaper and he read about the Walk for Jackie. The Walk for Jackie takes place every year, and Jackie English is one of the murder victims the main focus of my book and her surviving sister, and English remembers her sister annually. She goes to the same place where her sister disappeared on the same date, at the same time, and she re walks what she calls her sister's last steps of freedom every year.
And this was covered in the newspaper.
And when Dennis Junior read the article, he thought this is a good opportunity to reach out because he could reach out through the newspaper reporter, so there was sort of a natural buffer there. And if Anne didn't want to talk to him, she didn't have to.
But she did, of course. She wanted to know all the.
Information Dennis had and connected them and that meeting really was a catalyst for all of the citizens, loops and community members who have been working to find resolution to these cases. Because it really opened up the door for any victims' families who wanted to find out more, to be able to talk to Dennis and see what his father had left behind.
Right now, Dennis was an identification officer in special training and fingerprints, so he's especially valuable to the police. You talk about October nineteen sixty nine and Jackie English. You opened this book with this scene where detect Divalso becomes involved and he just gets a call. Of course he's doing something else, but he has to rush to this crime scene. Tell us about Jackie English a little bit about her background before we talk about her disappearance and then the investigation.
Yeah, Jackie was a fifteen year old girl.
She was born that April seventeenth was her birthday, and she she came from an interesting family. She had a single mom and she lived with her mom and her brother. Her older sister had moved away actually to live with her fiance in Hamilton, where her dad actually was in the hospital for cancer, so their family was.
Sort of spread apart a little bit.
But you know, Jackie had a home with her mom and her brother, and they were a working class family. They had jobs, they all worked and contributed to the household.
So Jackie got a job.
At the Latin Quarter restaurant, which was like a say and see restaurant in downtown London, and she got that job through her mom and they worked there together, and Jackie really enjoyed making money. So, you know, the summer when she was fifteen, she sort of made this decision that she was going to probably drop out of school and start working, which her mom did not approve of her dropping.
Out of school. Actually she.
Didn't tell her mom that she hadn't gone back to school. But she got a second job. And the second job was at this sort of discount mall in a plaza way out in the south end of the city. And of course, the posh restaurant she worked at with her mom was right downtown near their house, and this one was way out by the highway, so you actually had to cross over the overpass to get to the restaurant.
And it was like a discount department store and it had a restaurant in it, like a diner, and she worked at the diner at the counter, serving customers as the waitress. So that was Jackie, And you know, she kept a diary and I was able to read that diary and sort of get to know her as a person, and she really was like a fun, loving, incredible fifteen
year old girl. And you know, I think in a lot of true crimes, it's very easy to go back and sort of venerate the victims, you know, like she was a perfect angel and.
All of that.
I'm not gonna say that about Jackie. I don't think she was a perfect angel, but I think she was a very relatable, smart, fun young woman and she I think she would have been an awesome adult woman to know. She was no nonsense. She came from like a no nonsense family. She liked really colorful clothes. She wore taboo perfume, which, as anyone knows about perfumes, that's not it's no Chanelle number five.
It's a distinctive sense. She was a.
Strong personality, but also a very generous person. And she she was raised with the values of giving, you know, basically giving her paycheck to her family, so you know, they all worked together and there was this sort of a survival aspect to that which I really admire. So that was Jackie. She had I guess related to the case. You know, this was her first summer exploring, you know, being a little bit boy crazy, you know, noticing that older guys were looking at her.
She was developing into, you know.
A pretty attractive young lady, and she noticed that she got the attention she wanted. And she wasn't promiscuous, She wasn't living anything I would call a high risk lifestyle at all. She wasn't a party animal, but she was, you know, doing the normal fifteen year old things for nineteen sixty nine for sure.
How is it that she goes missing and then immediately police look at people surrounding her and she has a boyfriend, then another interest at work, there's a search. Tell us about her disappearance, the search, What happens? What's everyone's reaction?
Oh, people were worried right away.
I mean Jackie was very independent, but she was also very reliable, Like was she held down two jobs. Well, she was mature beyond her years because of the life that she had led, and mature in a good way.
So when she didn't show up for her shift.
And she wasn't at home, people knew something was wrong immediately. So her mother checked her out of the hospital and checked herself out of the hospital. That was something I need to rewind here. When Jackie went missing after work, she usually got a ride home with her mom from her job at the Metropolitan, which it was, as I say, way on the edge of town, like there was you could catch a bus, but it came like once an hour, and it was probably a twenty minute walk from the restaurant.
So you know, that night on October fourth, nineteen sixty nine, Jackie left her shift at ten pm. Usually she would walk over to an industrial building called Northern Electric where her mom worked, and her mom would get off an hour after her and they would get.
She would get a ride downtown again with her mom.
But her mom was in the hospital that week having a minor surgery, like a routine surgery. Of course, back in the sixties there weren't these in and out surgeries. You stayed for a week. So Jackie didn't have a ride home, and she didn't ask for a ride. She started to walk over the overpath towards the bus stop, so presumably she was going to catch the bus, but a car pulled up next to her, and there are
several eyewitness accounts of her get into the car. There was no struggle, She didn't have her sum out, so she wasn't sort of generally hitching a ride. So the idea is that it's probably someone she recognized got into the car and then she disappeared. So you know, the next day, the restaurant staff at the Latin Quarter were expecting her to show up for work, and when she didn't show up, they actually used some of their connections with the police who were customers at the restaurant to
start getting the investigation going. And the family got together and they all sort of congregated in the apartment building where they lived, and they there was no official police search for Jackie. They didn't comb fields, they didn't go out with a search dog. It was really just family and friends following up on any lead that they got to see if they could find her.
There was a diary found and by her mother Doris, what clues, if any, are in that diary? And we talked talked about how police didn't conduct a search, and that is consistent in a lot of these cases in this book that Knew Chronicle, but also that the idea that this boyfriend was known to be boyfriend David Papple, that she had said that she had a love for David, She developed a love for David that he would be involved with the family in the search while there was
no official police search. But tell us what if any clues were found in that diary.
Yeah, they searched her room, sort of hoping to get some tidbits about where she might be, and they did find her diary.
And okay, round two.
Name something that's not.
Boring laundry.
Computer solitaire huh.
Oh, Sorry, we were looking for Chumbuck Casino to chum. That's right, Chumbuck Casino dot com as over one hundred casino style games joined today and the play for free for your chance to need some serious prizes Chump Chump by casino dot com.
Eighty plus tarts the conditions of the busy website details.
With Lucky Land Slots, you can get lucky just about anywhere.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today.
Has anyone seen the bride and groom? Sorry?
Sorry, we're here. We were getting lucky in the limo and we lost track of time.
No Lucky Land casino with cash prizes that add up quicker than a guess registered.
In that case, I pronounce you Lucky.
Thanks for free at Lucky land Slots dot com daily bonuses are waiting no purchase necessary BOID. We're prohibited by lack eighteen plus terms and conditions of FLAG. See website for details.
Inside the diary, the first thing they noticed was that there were entries written in code, and they were hoping that those coded entries would help them. So sometimes, you know, if if you hear about this case, some people get very excited that there is a secret code in the diary, but unfortunately it's not that compelling. There are two other compelling clues in the diary. Code was really just about her kissing boys. It does tell us, though, a lot about her as a person.
If you know she.
Was doing anything more a lift or risky, you would expect her to have recorded that in her diary in that code, and she didn't. The most risky things Jazzie wrote about really were kissing boys, so you know, she was still a rather naive and an innocent young girl in many ways. But in the diary there are two clues that are still unresolved. The first is a picture
of a young man that is unidentified. The picture has a dark haired young man sitting on steps of some sort of building, like an early twentieth century late nineteenth century, looking sort of Romanesque architecture building.
Smiling. This snapshot had a name written on the back, and the name.
Is Ricardo Fropo. Of course I can't find a record of any Ricardo Forropo ever existing, so I think that name is pretty made up. The other clue is a phone number in the back. There are actually two phone numbers. The first one was scratched out as if it was an error, and using reverse telephone search in the archives, I was able to find out that number doesn't exist from that time period in this area code, so it probably really was an error. The phone number it is there, I did find in the diary.
There's no name with the phone number.
Instead, there is again sort of a code, but if you run it through her diary code, it doesn't give any answers at all. The code is l L L four one K. The four oh one is interesting because of course that's the highway, but that went through town, but I can't figure out the rest. And there is this phone number. I contacted the people who had the phone number during that time. Significantly, Jackie had gotten this diary for her birthday to previous April, so she only
had it for six months. That phone number then had to be concurrent with who had that number during that six month period. It's not like she wrote it in there five years earlier and the number changed hands. When I spoke to the woman whose number it was, she was just shot that a murder victim had her phone number in there. And she and her husband only lived in London, Ontario for a very short period of time,
about eighteen months. But interestingly, she did tell me that she was doing her masters at the University of Toronto, which is two hours away, and she was only home on the weekends. So you know, I haven't been able to account for her husband's whereabouts during the week in that time period. So I think that's an interesting lead that I'd want law enforcement to take up.
Very interesting. You also talk about a horrible scene in that Agnes Murray had to id the body and then the police, insensitive at the time, said listen, she wasn't a virgin. She couldn't even recognize she couldn't even recognize her without that police officer show or that person showing them her birthmark. And then you talk about Doris suicide attempt and where does she end up for a year after.
This in the London psychiatric hospital. Yeah. So she's left her.
Son who's fourteen, and her older daughter who's sixteen.
They have their.
Single mom is in the psych hospital and their father is in Hamilton in the hospital dying of cancer. So these two kids have no one. They're just on their own, and of course they have to work to pay the bills. There's no financial help from them at all from the government. And heartbreakingly, her little brother got a job at the same posh restaurant that she'd worked at, washing dishes to help raise money to pay.
For gravestone for her. So, I mean, the whole story is just agonizing.
Yeah, And then you have a scene where detective also involved in this first involved in this investigation, is at that funeral and as police understood at least at that time, it might be a good idea to observe the funeral in case to see who might come and people's behavior. Now, the next case that you talk about is Jacqueline Dunlevy, and first tell us who her father is, and then you open with three boys. This one deaf mute named
Wayne Heblithwaite. He just first day got a car. He was able to drive, you know, fite this disability, and he was going cruising with his friends. Tell us who Jacqueline dun Levy is. How old? Does she tell us about her father and then tell us about Wayne and his buddies what they discover one night driving.
Yeah, Jacqueline on Levy was sixteen, I believe, and forgive me if I'm getting that wrong. She made it in fifteen. I don't have it in front of me. Jackie Jacqueline was a high school student who had a part time job after school at a variety store in downtown London. Her father was a constable with the London Police. He was actually the head of the union, so you know, he was a well loved, well recognized member of the London Police Force.
And they lived in the West End of the city.
And Jacqueline went to high school in the West End. But she had this part time job a variety store sort of downtown, so she'd go there after school and work a three hour shift twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So it was on one of those Thursdays, on January ninth, nineteen sixty eight, she left work and I mean it was cold, it was January in Canada, and she was supposed to head to the bus stop to go home, but of course she never came home.
And yeah, she had gotten into a vehicle. There was someone who reported that they saw her get into a vehicle.
How was she found, what was the condition on when she was found? And we haven't mentioned Jackie English's condition, but we will just talk about how she was found, how dun Levy was found.
Yeah, I'm really glad you asked me about that because to me, that's one of the more fascinating stories in the book.
And this is exactly the type of.
Local history that really captivates my imagination how people come together at these strange situations. There were these There was to start with Wayne Haltswaite, who was deaf, and he had been in the foster care system and he'd had a rough life, but he'd finally landed on his feet with this great foster family who had their own biological daughter was deaf as well. And you know, Wayne was nineteen and he'd just gotten this car. He hadn't even gotten the ownership papers yet, he'd gotten.
This car that was outfitted so that a deaf.
Person could drive. And he was really excited about it. So he got permission from his parents to go out on the school night and he went and picked up two of his friends that he'd known when he was in an earlier stage of sort of the child welfare system, living in a group home. So he picked up these two guys and they were going out cruising. I mean they were teenagers. The two younger boys were fourteen and
Wayne was nineteen, so there's an age disparity there. But they because of the child welfare system that they were a part of, they would have gone for assessments or treatments out at the Children's Psychiatric Research Institute on the West end of London. So this was a location they knew of and it was a place.
Where they could go to sort of. They knew this was a spot they could be alone, maybe smoke a joint.
Maybe have a beer, or even just they smoke cigarettes and not getting shipp from their parents, so they were they drive. They drove out there in Wayne's new car for what was supposed to be a really fun night, and then they pulled in to the They they pulled into the driveway of one of the schools there. It was the Castine Harley school for unfortunately named the Retrainable Retarded Children, and they pulled into the school parking lot and that's where they found the body of Jacqueline Dunleavy.
Now what was it again? What was the condition? What are the some of the things that they found Initially just with that discovery of her body, well, I.
Mean, the three boys took off right away, and they fortunately found an officer in a cruiser who came to the scene, and that officer I interviewed, and he stayed at the scene. They had this It's an archaic system, I'll admit, but their system was for the officer who was first on the scene to stay with the body all the way through for chain of evidence, and he was to write his name on the victim's hand in ballpoint ten. So he was there through the entire thing.
And he had known Jacqueline Dunleavy personally because she babedat for him, and her body was so badly battered in the face that he did not recognize her, did not realize it was her until they sound her wallet. She had been strangled with her own scarf. She'd been beaten badly around the left side of her face. So if she was the passenger in a vehicle, that would make sense.
Her shirt was torn open, exposing her breast, her skirt was typed up exposing her vaginal area, and the contents of her backpack, like if her bag were sort of strewn about, and there was semen on her coat, and I believe there was some semen in her mouth. But what's very interesting is that in her mouth was stuffed a package on like a travel pat of pink facial tissue. Yeah, which of course means that I don't ever want to have a package of facial tissue around me ever again, Yeah sure, yeah.
Interestingly too, the boys were taken to the police station and Wayne horrifyingly didn't know what was going on, was very confused, very scared, and his foster parents were not notified. Again, this just added to the dismay of everyone, but the parents were relieved when they saw him at five five in the morning. He came home. But in this investigation, which again a very heavy scene in your book, is that this police officer, John Dunlevy, has to go down in id his daughter's body.
And you're right about that.
Yeah, the officer who had stayed with her body throughout. Was also at the Morgue when John came in and he said that he just was completely broken, just completely broken. And you can imagine being a constable. Your job is to protect the public. Here is your own daughter. And I honestly, Jane, I can't think of anything worse than losing a child in a random serial homicide. I mean, these are predators and it's the most terrifying thing to me.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And also with detective Also, interestingly, dun Levy's murder was not in his jurisdiction, but he wanted to read the files and you write it reminded him of a case he investigated two years earlier in Elmer. So we'll be talking about that soon. We'll be talking about that soon. So now shortly after this, again I'm skipping over these leads that the police have to contend with. But you also have the issue that you talk about, and we might as well talk about it now that there was
there was an issue. As people know that have watched any kind of police procedurals on TV fiction and non fiction, there's jurisdiction problems. Now there's London Police and then the Ontario Provincial Police explain the differences in the forces and any tension there might be in the jurisdictions as these cases escalate and the pressure from the community escalates as well.
Sure, I think from a geographical standpoint, it's like there's a city and then you have your city police and then you have your sheriff's department. It's sort of similar
to that relationship. So in London, Ontario, London proper, you have a London Police force and their job is to take care of anything that happens within the city, and then the opp the Ontario Provincial Police, they take care of the rural community is surrounding and any small towns or villages that don't have their own independent police force.
But of course, what was happening with these murders consistently is that with the exception of the Dunleavy case, is that the individuals taken from the London area and then their body is disposed of in Ontario provincial jurisdiction.
So wherever the.
Body is found, that's the force that's in charge of the case. So you have these Ontario police who they're not just in charge of the rural area, they're also sort of called in for special special crimes, like major crimes, sort of like how you'd call in the SBI.
The OPP does that too, So for.
The Independent Police in London having the OPP come in, it's sort of like your big brother is showing up at your party and all your friends thank your big brother is really cool, and you're like, get out of my birthday party because you're ruining it. I want the attention. So there's that struggle between the two jurisdictions. I do know of instances where information was just straight up not
passed between the two bodies. And you know it's not just because of you know, computer systems and databases.
There are people who.
Did investigations in London that should have shared that information. So you know, Detective Alsop is having to navigate those relationships while at the same time just trying to find out who's killing these children.
Now you write about a serial killer expert, and I think it's important to talk about this now as we proceed into other victims and other ages. Well not saying necessarily other races, but there is biracial victim. Let's talk about doctor Mike Ahmad, who runs a serial killer database at Radford University. He talks about the common misperception about serial killers. What is that common misperception regarding.
The mixed perception is that serial killers only kill the same type of victim every time. And I think a lot of that public perception comes from Ted Bundy, you know, or David Berkowitz, like women changing their haircuts so they don't match the profile, so the serial killer won't pick them up.
So there's this perception that, you know, a serial killer will only.
Kill teenage girls, or they'll only kill children, or they'll only kill old women, like the Boston Strangler or that sort of thing. Not that the Boston Strangler only kills old women. But you know what I'm saying, and what doctor Amu is saying is that that's not correct. The serial killers often cross lines of gender, cross lines of race, cross lines of age, that there are so many factors that come into play. So victimology can be deceptive. It can seem.
Like pauh, this is a separate set of cases. But if you have those.
Blinders on, you can miss other connections that might tell you, no, this is the same person. This individual is killing men and women, you know, children and teenagers, black people, white people, Indigenous people.
It doesn't have to be so black and white. That's the misperception.
Right now. That leads us to February ninth, nineteen sixty eight and a victim of nine years old, Frankie Jensen. And you write that since the Jacqueline Dunlevy's murdered parents asked their kids, obviously, you know, to stay together. But tell us what Frankie does on his way to school, and again, how do they find his body, what's the condition, and what is the similarity with the dun Levy case.
Remarkably yes, yeah, So Frankie actually lived in the same neighborhood as Jackie and he was taken exactly a month later to the day. So Frankie was on his way to school and there was this group of school kids that were walking together to be safe. But Frankie had gone home sick from school the day before and he was late coming out of his house that morning, so when he didn't come out on time, the group of school kids sort of thought he wasn't coming, so they
went on ahead of him. But in fact, Frankie had had a problem with his winter coat because again it's February in Canada, and by the time he figured out that situation, got out the door, the group of kids was far ahead of him, so he was isolated unpredictably. So so that does tell you something about the killer that they have to be regularly hunting looking for that opportunity.
So Frankie walked to school and in fact he got pretty close to the school but the bell rang and some of his friends saw him on his way, but they all went inside the building and he never made it into the building.
So they found his body.
In early spring, shortly thereafter, I believe it's about six weeks afterwards, and he was again outside of London. Now in this situation, he's not he's like Jackie English in a body of water. So he's in the Thames.
River and they recovered him.
It's interesting because a week before they found his body in the water, there was actually a canoe race that went right by his body. And in fact, the farmer who found him had been at that part of the river watching the canoes go by, and he thought he saw something in the water, but he wasn't sure what it was.
And it was about a week. Oh it was.
The farmer didn't find his body. I'm sorry it was on his property, but A week later, another pair of canoers were going up that same route when they found Frankie in the water and he was partially closed horses, pants were removed, and in his mouth was a wad of pink facial tissue.
Wait the Lucky land Slots. You can get lucky just about anywhere.
It's your captain speaking. We've got clear runway and the weather's fine, but we're just going to circle up here a while and get lucky. No, no, nothing like that. It's just these cash prizes add up quick, so I suggest you sit back, keep your trade table up right, and start getting lucky.
Play for free at Lucky Landslots dot com. Are you feeling lucky? No purchase necessary void. We're prohibited by Law eighteen plus. Terms and conditions apply. See website for details.
Hey guys, it is a Ryan. I'm not sure if you know this about me, but I'm a bit of a fun fanatic when I can. I like to work, but I like fun too. It's a thing, and now the truth is out there, I can tell you about my favorite place to have fun, Chumba Casino. They have hundreds of social I see no style games to choose from with new games released each week. You can play for free anytime, anywhere, and each day brings a new
chance to collect daily bonuses. So join me and the fund sign up now at Chumba Casino dot com.
Non were necessary da where I lost the terms conditions.
Eighteen plus right, you know? And despite this you in the press at that time the London Police Force said they didn't think the killings of Frankie Jensen and Jacqueline dun Levy were connected, and even though the bodies were found so close to each other. Now, despite that, you talk about Scott Leishman. Tell us a little bit about particulars of the Scott Leishman disappearance.
Right, So actually just just before they found Frankie's body, but you know, on the same I mean the same concession. I mean, like hundreds of yards away from where they would find Frankie's body, another boy is picked up Scott Leishman. He gets into a car willingly taking a ride on March Break after a fishing trip with some friends, and then his body is found later that's spring, closer to summer,
in a body of water. For the same body of water by the way that Jackie English was found in just in a different section of that body of water in the harbor of Port Burwell in southwestern Ontario. So you have Jackie Dunleavy whose body is found close to where she lived and close to where Frankie Jensen lived. Frankie's taken from that same spot and then found out is actually in the country in Thorndale, about twenty minutes outside of London.
He's found in the river. And then right where Frankie was found, another boy.
Is taken and he's found in the water that connects to Jackie English's murder. So you know these from the geographical standpoint, it's bizarre. And the pink tissue in the mouth is also an important point. Mike Arnsfield talks about how the press had revealed that Jackie Dunmedy had this pink tissue in her mouth, and so that whoever killed Frankie Jensen was probably a copycat.
That's possible.
However, I do think we can't ignore that he's coming from the same neighborhood and it's a month to the day, and you know, if you're talking about an opportunistic sexual predator who sees that in the newspaper and says, oh, if I commit a murder now and I put pink tissue in their mouth, they'll think it's this guy and they'll throw them off the scent. Okay, but what are the chances of that person also says I'm going to take a kid from the same neighborhood. I'm going to
do it a month to the day. You know, it's a little too much of a coincidence for me. And the two cases are related, regardless whether one influenced the other and it's two different killers, or if it is the same killer, I think there's definitely a relationship there that can't be ignored. And of course Scott Leishman is to me clearly picked up when a killer is revisiting the scene and revisiting Frankie's body, I that's just two
bizarre coincidence. And he lived across the street from the river where Frankie was found, So it's just implausible to me that it's not the same killer.
And you write too that police were not aware of connections and ideas that killers would till they had Bundy, and that they had spoke to him and others like him. They had no idea that people would go back to a disposal site and then revisit the corpses or anything like that. They didn't assume those things when they looked at a crime scene or the connection between crime scenes, did they.
No.
I mean they have the idea that criminals returned to the scene scene of the crime that old maxim. That's why they're checking all the license plates at the funeral, right, because I figure the killer is going to be curious
and want to see what's going on. But I think the idea with the killer is keeping track to make sure they don't get caught, not that the killer has some sort of erotic sexual arousal from looking at the corpse or some sort of other excitement that comes from looking at the corpse, which, yeah, that comes into play much later. Keeping in mind that this is nineteen sixty eight, so that you're just starting to have the zodiac is the next year the Manson family murders of the next
year public awareness and understanding. We want to think that the cops are ten years ahead of us in our understanding of criminal behavior, but that's not always the case, And just to.
Quickly speak to it.
In nineteen sixty eight, in London, Ontario, police were required to have a grade ten education. There was no one trade trained and homicide, there was no forensic pathologists, so you're talking about essentially glorified bouncers. And if you do have someone with a higher skill level who's going to be looking at serial bank robbers or fraudsters, they're going
to be at the opp level. And they are also a very small handful of identification officers like Dennis Alsop, who fortunately was local and was working on these cases, but he was maybe you know, five or six other officers in the entire province who had that skill set.
So there's there's no awareness of serial well the word serial killer doesn't exist, but there's no awareness of this sort of pathological behavior, and if there is very limited to a select group of individuals and certainly not to anyone on the London Police Force.
Now you include shortly after this another attack, again completely
different victimology. August fifth, nineteen sixty eight, Helga Beer. She's thirty one years old and she's a whig stylist and she's last seen exiting her friend's place with a tall guy about five foot ten, dark hair, thick eyebrows, and that matches a lot of descriptions of this person the thick or bushy eyebrows and late twenties to mid thirties, and somebody discovers her in her VW Beetle, which seems to be pretty popular according to this book of a
vehicle at that time. What is her condition? How is she found?
She is found in the vehicle, on her back, her partially clothed, her bottoms removed, and strangled to death.
In the back of her car.
And of course her car was in this parking lot she has found by the aged parking attendant in the morning. But her car had been parked in reverse under a tree, which is interesting because she never reversed her car to park. In fact, she hated doing it. She would always go out of her way to find a parking spot you could pull into because she was any good at reverse parking.
So the killer must have been driving her car at some point and her underwear there was of course semen internally, but also semen on her underwear, so police at the time thought that she'd had consensual sex, then been murdered and then had her clothing removed, But I don't know about that, Jackie English. Also when they found her underwear, they found a semen sample on her underwear as well as the internal samples, So.
That's a consistency there that I held as older.
She's found in a car, and she's found in an urban area, so I understand why people would want to exclude her based.
On those factors.
But at the same time, the partially closed sexual homicide strangulation on her back, it's very similar, and I do have to admit, as you mentioned, the suspect description is very similar to one of the top suspects in the book, and I wouldn't discount this at all from the list of victims involved.
You talk about. In October, the reward was offered for information about Jackie English, Jacqueline Dunlevy, and Fred Jensen, which for fifty thousand dollars, so it was a very impressive amount at that time. Then we talked you talk about Linda White and Bruce Stapleoton. Linda White's story's very hard breaking. Tell us about she decides to move from Burlington to London, Ontario. Tell us a little bit about Linda White and her family.
You know, Linda came from a very successful family from Burlington. She was a sweet girl and they had everything they needed. She had a happy home life, and they had enough money to make themselves happy.
She was shy, you.
Know, in high school, but in her senior year she sort of changed. She bleached her dark brown hair into this blonde and she started dating the star quarterback. She was an athlete on the track and field team, and she found herself as one of the popular kids. And she was a great student. She was doing really well. She had a very promising feature. So a whole bunch of her friends in Burlington graduated high school and all
decided to go to Western University. So they moved here, and two of her high school friends were actually her roommates, and they got a little cottage off campus to live together, and you know, they were having a good time. She'd only been at Western for a couple months. It was November. She was taking a French exam, and she finished her exam and she wanted to go out and have a drink after class, but she couldn't find anyone to go along with her.
So she got a lift.
Not to her house, but to a neighborhood adjacent to her neighborhood, like a ten minute walk, and presumably she was going to stop by someone else's house and see if they would go for a drink with her, you know, not wanting to give up on celebrating her successful French exams. But she never made at home, so the last person to see her was the individual who dropped her off, and then she she was gone. So her family came from Oh go ahead, no.
Go ahead, sorry.
Her family came immediately from Burlington, and in fact, they knew her roommates had called the family, and her brother came right away, John's, shortly followed by her father. They knew the police wouldn't pay attention, and in fact, when they did finally call the police, the police just said, oh, she's run away. She's just another hippie, you know. But what's interesting is what prompted them to.
Call the police. They were really worried.
I mean, they started their own civilian search for her right away, and they went just like Jackie's family went into her room to search for clothes, and they didn't see anything out of the ordinary. But you know, two days into the search, they go into her room and they see her clothes that she'd been wearing on the night she disappeared, bundled up under her bed. And this is new, and you know they're asking themselves, did you see that before? And this isn't like Linda. Linda's someone
who folds stuff up. She's a neat and tidy girl. So this scared them so much that that's when they called the police.
Now you right that they were asked. The friends were asked, were those clothes under that bed in the first search? And they said no, we're certain they weren't. What did the police conclude, again, not so surprising. What do they say and conclude from that same information?
Oh, yeah, she just came home before she went to the bar, she got changed, she threw her stuff into the bed, and she went out drinking.
Yeah, incredible. Now you include June seventh, nineteen sixty nine, Bruce Stapleoton. He's eleven years old and his remains aren't found in September twenty third. There's not so much information about him, but you say there's a possible connection. What is the condition he's found in and is that part of the possible connection in your mind?
Well, yeah, Bruce was yeah, as you said, eleven years old, and he regularly went off on his own to go camping in the woods. So it took a little longer for his family to clue and that he was missing. But he was living with a single father who had been widowed and had his own children and his step children. He had a large brood of kids to take care of, so these children were very self sufficient and being raised by a dad. So there's kind of rough and tumble boys.
He kind of pictured it as a sitcom, you know, And Bruce goes off to go camping and his body was found, as you say that September, farther than an eleven year old would walk. He's found out on the sort of rural outskirts of northern London at Sunningdale and Adelaide, which doesn't mean anything to anyone who's not from Lunton.
I'm sorry.
He was in the woods and his body was skeletalized and torn apart by animals.
So the scene of his.
You know, his body's disposal scene is much more difficult to interpret than that of the other victims. I don't know how much clothing he had on. I don't know if there was any semen found at the scene. I do have one tidbit of information that they suspected he was killed by blunt force trauma.
With a brick.
There was also a lead that there was a shed not far from where his body was found that had actually been torn down in between the time he went missing and when his body was found, and the property owners said that when they tore the shed down, part of their motivation for that was that they could tell people had been living in it. So that's an interesting note as well for that case. But I think in general, when you have an anomalous state of child murders going
on in a place, you include all of them. And you know, Bruce was clearly taken by.
Someone who was in a vehicle. He's a young boy. You know he's murdered. It's probably by bunt force traumas.
There are enough commonalities that you know, I wouldn't exclude him. I'd keep them in there because what are the chances that this is a one off murder? When you have the context of a serial killer, right, you have to include it until you can exclude.
My opinion, we have.
In your book, you have a particular it's not a detour, but it's as great true crime and fantastic nonfiction stories. You can't even come up with stuff like this in fiction. There is a Betty Harrison, and there's a Glenn Friar, but we won't have enough time to go down this. It's not a rabbit hole, but it's a very very complex, interesting case. Betty Harrison. Let's just go and describe this in general, because it ends up in a trial and it ends up in a discharge with the judge making
a statement to him. But we don't want to skip over David Bodemer and the Jehovah witnesses and that incredible story and investigation and trial, So let's summarize somewhat Betty Harrison and Glenn Fryer and their connection and this incredible trial that's part of just a small part of your book.
Yeah, and I thank you for bringing it up because I think for those readers who do you want to engage with the material on that level, I think the Glenn Friar trial and investigation is incredibly revealing in regards to the Jackie English murder, and it can't be discounted at all. But it is that sort of complex puzzle solving detective work that has to go into it and
putting these sort of intricate pieces together. So it is bizarre, but essentially Betty Harrison was this woman who came forward as an eyewitness, not an eyewitness, but as a witness for the Jackie English murder. And she said that the night before Jackie disappeared, she saw these two men at the Metropolitan restaurant talking to Jackie and that Jackie was upset, and these men, of course became persons of interest for the police. They made a composite sketch and it was published widely in.
The local media.
So Betty had come forward as this witness, and she starts getting harassing phone calls, you know, knocks on the door in the middle of the night, threatening letters, and eventually she is attacked. Lucy's a whole bunch of cuts, twenty seven lacerations, hospitalized, and eventually she fingers her attacker as Glenn Fryer, who's actually the principle of Children's Psychiatric
Research Institute where Jackie Dunleedy's body was found. So the London community assumed that whoever had attacked Betty Harrison was also responsible for Jackie English's murder.
So the trial that.
Came up about a year later in November of nineteen seventy really was for the community.
Also a trial for all of these.
Unsolved murders, and Londoners really wanted a resolution. It's a very exciting chapter in the story, actually the whole chunk of chapters of the story.
But essentially what happens is.
Glenn Fryar is given a Scottish verdict. So the judge is saying to him, there's not enough for me to find you guilty, but I can't equate you. You are neither guilty nor innocent, and he pleads with him. And actually, Dan I talked to one of the reporters who was there, whose articles I used, actually his research on him recently at a book event, and he said to.
Me that the judge was prequent, just desperately.
Saying to him, if you committed these crimes, giving the impression really that he thought he had, but that he didn't have enough evidence to put him behind bars. Just
please get help, please stop, you know. And of course Glenn Fryer leaves with a huge smile in his face, a much bigger smile than most of us would have, I think, after a judge basically said you're guilty, but I can't lock you up, she goes out there like he's really exonerated with this huge smile on his face with the cameras and kissing his wife and showing off to the press and telling jokes. I mean, he is he is a character. So I know we're not going to get into him, but to me, he's a major
suspect in these murders. I have interviewed him, I've spoken to him, and I would never take him off the table. He's definitely of vital interest. But yes, you're right, that trial and the investigation is very complicated and bizarre, and I think people who like that in true crime are really going to enjoy that section of the book. People who like a more straightforward bad guy caught by you know, cop, more straightforward thing aren't going.
To be But if you like puzzles, that's that's the best. That's the best section I think of the book.
Mm hmm. Now you include the case of again a very sad case of Sararah O'Connell. And this is his biracial she's Pakistani and her father is a Caucasian, I believe, and she goes to she is in school, she's shy. Her friends are telling her, listen, this is the kind of time where this at this community dance. You need to reach out and approach somebody. It's just a dance. And of course she does tell us what happens at this dance.
Yeah, she was at this dance and they had you know, the switch with the girls asked the boys.
And of course, as I say in the book, she thought she should ask the boys she wanted to dance with, not the boy she could dance with. So she goes to one of the most handsome, popular boys in school and asks him to dance, and he turns around in front of everyone and tells her he would never dance with you know, I think he said, like a fat, smelling immigrant. And she's embarrassed and horrified and she runs out of the dance. And of course this dance is on the edge of town. She doesn't have a ride.
The dances on the northern end of the city, this time in actually an old country schoolhouse that had been shut down and essentially in a rural area. I grew up right near there, and there was nothing. I mean, it's built up now, but there was nothing. So she walked over towards what's really highway for it's Highbury abb. Once it gets into the city, but in this section at that time it was really a country road and presumably gotten a vehicle.
There were some people who said they saw.
Her hitching to get home and she was never seen alive.
Again, let's talk about Georgia Jackson and tell us where Elmer is in relation to London, and tell us a little bit about her work at the dairy bar and who owned the dairy bar and this fascinating introduction of the Jehovah Witness members.
Yeah, before I tell you about Georgia, I want to tell you that when I met Dennis Alsop junior and he knew I wanted to look at his dad's files, he brought two file folders with him and these file folders were next to each other when he went.
Through his dad's boxes.
They were the two fattest folders he had on these murders, and one was Jackie English and the other was Georgia Jackson. So he thought this murder was important, Okay. Georgia was a twenty year old girl, a member of the Jehovah's Witness community in Elma on Terra.
Now. Elmer is like about.
A half hour drive outside of London, heading southeast, a small community it's actually the home of the Ontario Police College, so there's a lot of you know, cops and cops and training around the area. It was a former World War Two our RCAF training like a well Canadian Air Force training grounds too, so there's always been men in
uniform around there. And it's also a community that's surrounded by Mennonites and Amish, so it really comes across as like the safest place in the world because it's all Mennonites and Amish and cops. Right, there's nothing, there's nothing bad going on, and there was a really thriving Jehovah's Witness community, a community that really appreciated that sort of atmosphere, and Georgia was part of that group.
She lives with her parents.
She'd never had a boyfriend, she didn't drink, she didn't swear, and she was actually hoping to go into the ministry as far as women were allowed to within her faith community. She worked at the Dairy Bar, which is like the temperance response to bars. So the idea is that it's a bar, but it's milk, you know, so it's okay.
I love that they call it a bar.
So she works there and actually I believe. I believe the owner was Jehovah's witness as well, and her coworkers were Jehovah's witness. So she got off work at six pm on February eighteenth, nineteen sixty six. It was stormy like it was a gross winter night, and she actually had called home. She only lived three or four blocks away, but she called home to see if her mom wanted her to pick anything up. And at first her mom said,
oh yeah, oh yeah, stop and get some butter. But then she's like, it's a crappy night, you know what, I'm just going to get in the car and go to the grocery store.
You just come home.
And when George's mom came home after grocery shopping, her daughter had never appeared.
She wasn't there.
Yeah.
Now with this, these Jehovah witnesses, they know that they don't call police right away to report her missing. What do they do?
Oh?
Right, Well, they started they started a search. They organized a search, so you know, they got everyone together to go out and look. But the storm was terrible, you know, And actually they did call the police, but it was Chief Henderson and Chief Henderson who is just a completely backwards idiot.
Of a person.
It's wonderful that you can't be sued for libel if people are dead. This guy was just the worst. And you know, he ends up getting his own in the book, and I'm very pleased about that. What an idiot. So of course they call and tell him and she's like, no, no big deal. In fact, one of the members of the Jehovah's witness community, to get the news to surrounding police forces, had to call their local city council in
the middle of the night and wake them up. And then that individual informed London police and the media about this missing girl who really you know, they said, oh, she probably ran away too much pressure from her religious community. She's just another you know, she's taken off. She's blowing off some steam. But everyone who knew her knows that's not Georgia. She's not going to take off, you know. So they start the search and then then it's too cold, so they all go home to bed and they start
again the next day, again no police assistance. So this is February eighteenth. Sebruary nineteenth. The Jehovah's Witnesses were incredible. They got hundreds of witnesses to come from all around the province.
They even had someone them.
A helicopter, They had dogs out, they were doing all the work to find Georgia, and no police involvement at all. In fact, the police still didn't get involved when Georgia's mom got this phone call. There's a phone call to the Jackson house and georgia mom speaks to someone she believes that's her.
Daughter, who says, I'm being held by two men. Right.
She immediately calls police and says, Georgie's alive. She's being held by two men, she told me. Police say, oh, it's just a crank call. That's three days after she's taken.
Okay. There's no official law.
Enforcement involvement in this case until March fifth, So we're talking about two weeks of complete inactivity.
Yeah, incredible. You even write too. The mayor called to offer a five hundred dollar reward and the chief said it would be a waste of money.
Yeah, so you get to it when they finally Yeah, go ahead.
Sorry, no, when you're talking too that her body's found. February twenty seventh, Some boys are just scavenging on the side of the road, and you talk about that or what they found not another body, pardon me, her coat and it was blessed seemen on it. And that's when the opp got involved. And what happens to Chief Henderson as a result.
Oh, he got in huge trouble.
And I mean even more so once her body was found, they immediately asked for an inquiry.
He lost his job.
He ended up becoming an ambulance dispatcher in Sudbury. And anyone who's from Canada can tell you that being forced to move to Sudbury is upnishment.
Sorry to my sorry to my Sudbury friends. I'm sure you love your town and your city, but to the rest of us, that doesn't sound great. Yeah, hold up there and it's small. Yeah, so he was completely demoted.
I do understand. Actually I didn't get to include it in the book because I found out after it came out. But he was also a bootlegger. This was Chief Henderson. So he was just all around a charming individual.
Right now, for those people that might be a little bit confused your book, you do start in nineteen sixty nine and then Detective Alsop and then you go backwards. And when we mentioned that Dick, Detective Alsop said, I remember a case from a couple of years earlier. We were talking about this nineteen sixty six case and because of this, the opp had taken over the case from Chief Henderson and the London Police, so they because of
his forensic training, he was involved. Now, tell us about Albert Crooker, who's an elder in the Jehovah Witnesses and who has a son in law named David Bodemer when they are searching for Georgia. How is he involved? And tell us what witnesses say about David Bodemer at that time.
Oh, at that time, I think, well, first of all, Albert Crooker is like the head pastor of the local Jehovah's Witnesses, an elmer, so it's called an overseer, which really just makes me think of Fallout the video game. Yeah, So he's the overseer and his daughter is married. His daughter, Elaine, is married to David Bottomer, so he's his son in law, and David works for his father in law sometimes his father has like a business, his father in law has
a business cleaning after hours. So the story that David gave, which I mean I won't get into it, I don't necessarily believe the story. But the story that David gave was that, you know, they were working at the bank that night, cleaning the bank, and Georgia Jackson's brother in law, Dennis Sullivant, came by and told him that Georgia was missing, and they left the bank and went to go look
for her in the snow. But David Bottomer didn't have a coat on, which he later said he didn't have that coat on because it had Georgie's blood on it and he had hidden the coat. So he's out looking for her in the snow with no coat on. So they tell him to go home, you know, because it's winter and you can't be out here with no coat. But he later participated in searches for her body, and he was at her funeral and Albert Cooker, his father in law, performed her funeral service.
Now, how is it that what Crooker does David know? And the elders, including Albert in fact, give us how that works in that they suspect that somebody knows more information about David, and what do they do as a result.
Well, David was a problem right for Albert and his daughter Elaine, and actually after George's murder in nineteen sixty six, which you know, we didn't talk about the crime scene there, but they did find her body and they never could solve the case. And after nineteen sixty six, in fact, less than a year after that murder, David moved his family with his wife away from Elmer, and he had escalating issues with police.
So he would get caught with.
Petty theft, public nudity, exposure, leude acts, pornography, so exhibitionism. So he had escalating interactions with police, getting caught with sexually related and of course, as we know, petty seft or voyeurism, peeping tom stuff is often part of, you know, a developing issue for sex offenders. You know, like Paul Bernardo was keeeping tom for years before he started raping. So, you know, David's family, who were very conservative religious people,
were really disappointed in him. He wasn't becoming he wasn't becoming a church elder. I mean his dad's a head pastor. I mean, his father in law is a head pastor. His parents are part of the Jehovah's Witness community too.
They lived in Aliston, Ontario. Everyone's really disappointed in David every time he gets arrested for these truly embarrassing crimes, and you know, he he's someone who they're looking at, and they there are all these rumors going on in the church that someone from in the church killed Georgia. You know, so it kept building and building and building, and eventually, six years after her murder, the gossip had just kept going on and it was not going away.
The Jehovah Fronist Church actually gone to the higher ups in the national organization to go to Elmer and talk to the congregation and try to get to the bottom of it.
Now they realized David Bodemer's in Kitchener, So they go to Kitchener. What happens when they bang on his door? What happens when they broach the subject of George's death?
Yea, Kitchener's about an hour's more like forty five minutes away from Elmer. So they go to his house there where he's living. You know, he works in blue collar jobs. He worked at a concrete factory, he worked for the rail yard, you know, these kinds of jobs. And they knocked on his door on a Friday, and he sort of knew he'd been caught and he said to them, you know, just give me the weekend to talk to my wife.
And he put it off all weekend. It was Sunday night.
He was lying in bed with Elaine and he just went into emotional hysterics and he told her that he had killed Georgia Jackson six years earlier. So Elaine called her father, who I think already knew, and the next day Albert Crooker and these two up and ups from the Jehovah's witness Church drove to Kitchener. And this is
really interesting. The first confession that David gave for this murder, the first statement he gives is a written out confession that he gave to the Jehovah's Witnesses that they had him sign before they called the police. So they called the OPP and Detective Alsop went himself actually to arrest David and took him to OPP headquarters where his office was and interrogated him and then got a second confession from him as well.
Now with Alsop's second confession and the first one that he reviewed, what information did he get? And we talked about and we haven't talked so much about, you know, this guy that would never give up, but we put in the introduction that he he was continuing to investigate till he died, you know, forty years after this. So
this guy was not let this thing go. So when he interviewed, when he interviewed Bodemer, what information did he have and how much did he believe he had this perpetrator not only of Gloria Jackson, but of other victims as well.
Yeah, I mean this is if you keep in mind that in the six years since Georgia Jackson's been murdered, there have been all these other murders, and the whole time, Detective Alsop is looking back at Georgia Jackson's murder saying, this all seems like the same person. And can I tell you with Jackie English, when they found her, clothes were scattered along the highway and her shoes were found next to a pond in a lover's lane, like in a quarry up the road from where Georgia Jackson's body
was found. So again there's this geography that's so similar. And you know, Allstop had his antennas pointed firmly up. He was looking at this guy for all of these murders. So you know, he interviews him and he is looking for any slip up. There was a moment in the interview where David used the pronoun we. He says, we went here and Detective all Stop catches them on it.
Who's we?
You know, he's he's really paying attention to those details. But at the same time too, he's working within a system, and I think it became a priority for him to have Bottomer convicted because Bottomer did not confess to any other murders, you know, any murders that he may have allegedly committed, and also wanted to get him off the street because clearly whoever was doing this to young women and children in the London area was not going.
To stop.
You right too, that the idea that Bodemer was involved. He Bodemer had told him some details about an outbuilding they ware he had stashed him stuff. So what does Alsip do, you said, they just want a conviction for this one murder. But regardless of that, what does Alsip.
Do Well, The first thing he does is he wants to track down the car. So David tells them essentially that he picked up Georgia without planning on killing her, that he hit her over the back of the head with a coke bottle from the back of the backseat of the car spontaneously, then drove out to a country road with her sort of coming in and out of cont his myths on his shoulder, bleeding all over his
winter coat and all over the car seat. And then he took her out into you know, a quiet country road, and she decided to have sex with her, and she was screaming, so he put his hand over her mouth and accidentally suffocated her while he was raping her. This was the story he told police.
So then he said that he went back to his house, which.
Had like a garage attached to it, which incidentally he continued to not incidentally, but as a piece of information, he continued to rent that garage after his family moved away. He rented that garage until nineteen seventy two or seventy one when it was torn down. So he had stashed down dashed George's gloves and her bloody jacket and.
His bloody jacket in the walls of that garage.
So the first thing Detective Alsop does is he tracks down this car because there.
Should be blood in the.
Car, and that's feet on his own. The car had been sold almost immediately in nineteen sixty six and had been gone around secondhand, you know, and had ended up in a junkyard. But they had to dig this car out of the snow and they did indeed find George's blood in the car. So that's a pretty incredible piece of detective work there. Because that's on the ground. There's no computer tracking system for ownership. He's got to go to each owner and ask what did you do with
this car? You know, he's driving around all over southwestern Ontario, and then he wants to confirm that this bloody coat and George's gloves are in this garage. So he goes to where the garage was and it's been torn down really recently, like within the last six months. So he talks to the property owner and he finds out where they disposed of the garage, and you know, they had put it in like a farmer's field in Dorchester Unti area.
So Alsop is so dogged that he takes a shovel and in March I think is March seventeenth, Oh, Saint Patrick's day.
I just realized that, or it might have been the twenty.
First goes out to this field with the frozen dirt, and he digs and he himself signs George's gloves in the debris from that garage. So now he has physical evidence that matches the confession to convict David Bottomer of murdering Georgia Jackson. And to me, that's just incredible detective work. I'm very impressed by that.
You right too. Later, Elaine, Bodemer's wife said to Alsop unprompted and mentioned Jackie English, just reinforcing his idea that there was always a connection that must have struck him as incredible.
Yeah.
For readers who want to put it together, that story is crucial. You need to pay attention to the relationships between these individuals. Elayne said that she and her husband were in London a couple of days before Jackie English went missing and she saw them. They saw her having lunch with an excuse of vernacular, a colored man had a diner in London, And in fact, Jackie had had lunch with Bill Groat, a person of color that she went to school with, and she had told her boyfriend about it.
I think she wrote about.
It in her diary as well, so you know that was confirmed that actually happened.
But I have to ask myself. You know, if if I go to dinner.
And then someone who was having dinner in that same restaurant, or even a small restaurant you know, with ten tables went missing and was hurt shortly thereafter, I wouldn't remember them, Like you don't pay that much close attention to people around you in a restaurant that you would remember.
Sure, do you know what I mean?
It leads me to think that they must have interacted somehow, or how would she have known that was her?
Yeah? Very interesting you write June twenty seventh, nineteen seventy two. Despite the confessions, he pleads not guilty. It's not capital murder. In Canada, they hadn't had an execution since sixty two. In this particular case, it's not a capital murder case. Tell us a little bit about the trial itself. Any incredible features of that trial.
Well, first of all, that he pled not guilty after giving two confessions and there's physical evidence to back up his confessions is just absurd. So you know, his lawyer had first tried to get him NCR ruling, which is not criminally responsible, so he sent him for psychiatric testing. And of course that failed, and you know, maybe he didn't want to go to the psych The psych hospital was particularly unpleasant in nineteen seventy two, so you know,
I'd rather go to jail. Frankly, they had this idea that, you know, there was some sort of religious pressure that created a false confession. But of course the physical evidence backed up the confession, and you know, Alsop and his team made sure that they had witnesses on the stand that would back up that confession. Now, I don't know what's everything, and the confession is accurate, I don't think it is, but I think the focus was on getting a conviction. I found it really astounding.
They took the rape charge off because they said they couldn't prove that.
The sex that he had with Georgia Jackson wasn't consensual, which is just ridiculous to me because you know, after I have consensual effects, I always get raped and murdered.
It's like.
So that there's some pretty horrifying misogyny in the text for the trial, but that aside, you know, the community really came together and what was really astounding. You know, he's convicted, but even before his conviction, which I think they were pretty sure they were going to get a conviction, and he got a life sentence, which in Canada at the time went twenty five to life And I'll follow
up on that with you in a minute. In London, at the same time this was going on, this trial was going on, the Chief of Police recommended to city Council that they rescinned the fifty thousand dollars reward they had put out for Jackie English George for Jackie Dunlevy and Frankie Jensen's murders.
So police didn't think that reward.
Needed to be on the table anymore, and that was finalized during David Bottomer's trial.
Yeah, you write that Alcep was heavily involved in the Linda White investigation, but that was the last homicide he worked in London area. He moved to Toronto with a new job, superintendent. And then you write too that basically this man who was dedicated to his job once upon a time, worked eighty hours a week and took the file boxes home and took the cases home with him and kept them in his heart and in his mind.
Now he just concentrated on his family. He was married sixty six years and had a great family life after that, but never forgot about this, kept those files and then faithfully his son walked into your bookstore and you had developed a relationship and the product was this incredible book, The Forest City Killer. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about The Forest City Killer, a surreal murderer, a cold case sleuth, and a search
for justice. For people that want to take a look at more information or find out about this book, is there a Facebook page website that they might take a look at.
Yeah, they can go to forthitykiller dot com. I've got some extra material there that wasn't in the book. And since the Unsold Canada website went down, I actually have archived the Jackie English forum thread, which was like sixty one pages or something absurd like that.
So there are extra photos and things that didn't make it into the book.
So Foresitykiller dot com and people can email me at info at Forestitykiller dot com if they want to chat or if they have any tips or questions. I'm always happy to talk to people about the case.
It's been a remarkable time spent with you talking about The Forest City Killer, an incredible, remarkable book. Thank you very much Vanessa Brown.
Thank you, you have a great night. Go say