Forest City Killer

Brown Vanessa

Description

Fifty years ago, a serial killer prowled the quiet city of London, Ontario, marking it as his hunting grounds. As young women and boys were abducted, raped, and murdered, residents of the area held their loved ones closer and closer, terrified of the monster -or monsters- stalking the streets. Homicide detective Dennis Alsop began hunting the killer in the 1960s, and he didn't stop searching until his death 30 years later. For decades, detectives, actual and armchair, 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 these crimes on his own? Combing through the files Detective Alsop left behind, researcher Vanessa Brown reopens the cases, revealing previously unpublished witness statements, details of evidence, and astonishing revelations about how this serial killer got away. through her investigation, Vanessa builds a case around the unthinkable: not only is The Fo

Sujets

• True crime

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 10 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773053974
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Forest City Killer A Serial Murderer, A Cold-Case Sleuth, and a Search for Justice
Vanessa Brown




Contents
Map
A Note on the Text
Prologue
Part I
Chapter One: Meet London
Chapter Two: Meet Detective Alsop
Chapter Three: Meet Jackie English
Chapter Four: Meet the English Family
Chapter Five: The Disappearance of Jackie English
Chapter Six: Jackie English Is Missing
Chapter Seven: Jackie English Is Dead
Chapter Eight: The Funeral of Jackie English
Part II
Chapter Nine: The Murder of Jacqueline Dunleavy
Chapter Ten: The Murders of Frankie Jensen, Scott Leishman, and Helga Beer
Chapter Eleven: The Disappearance of Lynda White and the Murder of Bruce Stapylton
Chapter Twelve: Welcome to Stanley Variety
Chapter Thirteen: Detective Alsop Investigates
Chapter Fourteen: Sightings of Jackie English
Chapter Fifteen: Meet Marilyn Hird
Part III
Chapter Sixteen: The Attack on Betty Harrison
Chapter Seventeen: The Conspiracy Forms
Chapter Eighteen: Meet Glen Fryer
Chapter Nineteen: The Trial of Glen Fryer
Chapter Twenty: The Disappearance of Soraya O’Connell
Part IV
Chapter Twenty-One: The Disappearance of Georgia Jackson
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Body of Georgia Jackson
Chapter Twenty-Three: Meet David Bodemer
Chapter Twenty-Four: The Confession
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Trial of David Bodemer
Part V
Chapter Twenty-Six: Fire!
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Residents of 133 Elmwood
Chapter Twenty-Eight: A Strange Friendship
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Another Possible Confession
Chapter Thirty: Skeletons
Chapter Thirty-One: The Murder of Donna Awcock
Epilogue
Appendix: David Bodemer’s First Confession
Selected Sources
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright

Map



A Note on the Text
This is a true story. All of the information in this book came from reliable sources. Dialogue from the text is based on police reports and interviews. Reconstructions of events throughout are kept to a minimum and are intended to help structure the narrative of the case. You will be given the facts available to me, and it is up to you to draw your own conclusions. More than anything, this book is a call to action, intended to renew interest in these unsolved cases and to urge the Ontario Provincial Police to reinvestigate these crimes vigorously, using all DNA and other evidence in their possession.


Prologue
“We are willows bending in the solitude of October rain, reflecting distorted hues of destiny.”
— Anne English
October 9, 1969 . Dawdling around the back roads of Oxford County in a pickup truck, Ron Kiddie and Peter Kingma were on a duck-hunting excursion. They were two young guys, rifles in the back, gum in their mouths, listening to the radio and talking shit as they bounced along hills and uneven asphalt. It was unusually warm out, so they rolled down their windows to catch the breeze. The sun was low in the sky. With a little time left before dinner, they stopped to check for birds under the gleaming new concrete bridge over Big Otter Creek. It was shouldered by two hills and two curves — a great dark, low hiding place for waterfowl. Ron pulled over next to the narrow bridge. Walking across the short expanse, they each took a side, Ron on the north and Peter on the south, leaning over the guardrail as far as they could.
“Hey, Peter,” called Ron. “Come see this.”
Peter checked for traffic before crossing over. On this road, with the sharp turns and steep incline, they were hidden and trapped if a speeding automobile came over the hill.
“There’s a body,” said Ron, pointing down.
Peter looked. “Oh, that’s just a dummy.” To prove his point, he went and got his gun out of the truck to look down through the scope. As he squinted, he became very still and then slowly looked up at Ron. “There’s a ring on her finger,” he muttered.
Without hesitation, Ron skidded down the steep banks of the creek to find out what was going on. “I can see [pubic] hair,” he shouted, as Peter followed. “And a vaccination mark on her arm!” On the edge of the water, he stumbled and accidentally stepped in the water. “Well, I’m wet now,” he said, turning his head and looking back. “I better wade in and see before we call the police.”
He felt the frigid water creeping up his legs as he pushed through the muck, the soft creekbed beneath his boots. He could see goosebumps on her flesh, her face floating just beneath the surface of the murky water. Her chin was tilted up, as if she were calling out for help. Her left arm and breast protruded from the shallow creek, naked white in the fading fall sunlight, and her right hand floated in a fist, her young finger decorated with a black Alaskan diamond ring.
In shock, Ron and Pete ran to the closest house, at the corner of Furnace and Cornell Road, only 100 metres away from the bridge, where the residents let Ron use the phone to call the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), who agreed to meet with them twenty minutes later at nearby Otterville Fire Hall. Two officers followed them back to the creek, along with the farmer who lived in the house on the corner. He volunteered to get the officers some hip waders. Corporal Wild put them on and descended the treacherously steep riverbank.
It was about a quarter past six when Ron and Peter got back in their truck and drove away.
In a sleepy London, Ontario, neighbourhood, fifty-year-old OPP detective Dennis Alsop had just sat down to dinner. He was grabbing a quick bite to eat before heading out again to pick up his fifteen-year-old daughter Daphne, who would soon be finishing her ballet class.
The phone rang and he answered.
“They found her.”


Part I
The English Girl


Chapter One Meet London
“London, Ontario, my joy, my sorrow.”
— Orlo Miller
An introductory description of my hometown of London, Ontario — the Forest City — usually starts with population, geography, industry.
Almost 400,000.
Halfway between Detroit and Toronto in a valley surrounded by moraines, bisected by the Thames River, at whose forks the city was founded.
The dried-up industrial background and economic struggles of the average mid-sized North American city, a thriving medical science community, a burgeoning tech sector. There’s a university here.
This is all the boring stuff.
I’ve lived in London, Ontario, my entire life. People say it’s a small town wearing big-city clothes. There are two Londons, really. One of them is packed with aluminum siding, chain restaurants, and big box stores. The other one is where I live. It’s full of art and music and eccentrics. It’s a community where everyone is only one or two degrees of separation from everyone else. My partner and I live in a downtown-adjacent pocket of tiny century cottages, and we make our living with our used bookstore on Richmond Row. Our social sphere is the local arts scene and have spent the past twenty years cultivating our obsession with London’s past. Sometimes we joke that London is the real site of the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks .
In all sincerity, London has many similarities to that twisted small town. It has a wild vibe about it down by the river, where addicts and homeless people have set up camps, but where you can also see posh yuppies jogging along beautifully kept paved pathways. In the east end are modest, sometimes shabby, bungalows with faded plastic toys on the lawn. There are seedy motels with heart-shaped bathtubs, flea markets, and pawnshops. We also offer enormous beautiful mansions, shaded by heritage oak trees lining boulevards with cobblestone sidewalks. The summers are hot. The humidity is oppressive and the mosquitoes are massive. In the winter, you’ll find yourself trudging through knee-deep snow. We’re at the bottom of an ice-age valley, so your allergies act up like crazy. In between brutalist and ugly glass skyscrapers, two cathedrals chime the hours downtown and have done so for the past century; one of these has Tiffany stained-glass windows.
Such deep contrasts mean you can experience a lot of different ways of life here. I’ve hung around the corner of Dundas and Richmond streets (known locally as “DNR,” for all the drug addicts found there) wearing a dog collar and smoking clove cigarettes, partying with ten homeless kids in a one-bedroom apartment. I’ve also had dinner at the university president’s manor on the northern hill of the city, overlooking wealthy Masonville. Some of the homes in Woodfield or Old North are over-the-top gorgeous, with detailed paint jobs on nineteenth-century wooden gingerbread trim, cherry wainscoting, pantries stocked with fancy jars, and living rooms you aren’t allowed to sit in. At one time, London had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the country. It also has about as bad a drug problem as Vancouver. Each aspect of the Forest City has its own lore, a cast of characters that is unforgettable, but perhaps only meaningful to someone who has spent a lifetime living here.
My irrational passion is hearing storytellers reveal the hidden layers of my hometown. While I grew up wanting to write novels, I’ve been heartily sidetracked by my irrepressible desire to hear old men (and women) tell tales. After spending eight years writing the history of a long-demolished hotel in downtown London, I focused on bookselling. Then I found out about the murders. Criminologist Michael Arntfield released Murder City in 2015, suggesting that London was the serial killer capital of Canada, if not the world. I devoured the book in a day or tw