CANADA Canada - Toronto Crimes Discussion

CrimeSolver

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Since this section of the forum is not very active, it doesn't make much sense to open multiple new threads on individual cases, unless those cases are prominent and likely to spur lively cross-conversation. So, I'll just periodically add summaries of unsolved Toronto crimes to this thread. Anyone who wants to contribute cases of his or her own, or otherwise comment, go ahead.
I would like to post newspaper articles, but won't for fear of violating copyrights. If I find photographs or other ancillary material, I'll post them too. If I have any remarks to make, I'll either segregate them or put them in italics so as to distinguish them from the factual content.

Here are a few separate threads discussing Toronto-and-area cases:
-The murders of Wendy Tedford and Donna Stearne, 1973
-The murders of Lee Kirk and Kathy Potter, 1971
-The murder of Sharin Keenan and the hunt for her killer, Dennis Melvin Howe, 1983
-The disappearance of Lloyd Larsfolk and John McCormick, 1981
-The disappearance of Marianne Schuett, 1967
 
Case #1: The triple-slaying of the Airst family

In the early morning hours of Sunday, September 30th, 1979, upper-middle-class couple Ike and Celia Airst, aged 55 and 43 respectively, and their son Avrom, 22, were viciously bludgeoned to death in their mid-Toronto home on the southwest corner of Glencairn and Englemount Aves (at the time the area was part of a separate city called North York). The Airst’s married daughter, Simmie, found the three bodies at 1 p.m. on Sunday when she came to visit. She ran across the street to tell neighbours.
The Airsts had somewhat controversial histories. Ike owned 31 commercial buildings in the city, including one that housed a gay bathhouse, which brought him some unwanted attention in 1977 after a boy was murdered by pedophiles in a seedy downtown body rub parlour. Additionally, in 1965, he and his brother had been publicly accused of being slum landlords. However, friends and people who knew him from his work doing repairs on his various properties said he was a hardworking, kind man. Celia was an ardent member of the Jewish Defence League, and had gained some notoriety in 1971 for heckling visiting Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in the name of her cause. Avrom lived at home with his parents and assisted his father with his maintenance work. A neighbour said the family was very private and “kept early hours”. Ike had suffered several strokes and a heart attack in recent years and was thus not in fulsome health.
Based on the daughter’s statements and the layout of the crime scene, police believe the crime transpired as follows: On Sunday evening, Celia and Avrom went out for dinner and drinks with Simmie and her husband. Ike decided to stay home and watch a baseball game. After enjoying dinner at Inn on the Park in the city’s east end, Avrom wanted to go home to tend to his father, who had a pacemaker. He was driven home, and then his mother left again with her daughter and son-in-law for drinks and a stroll in the Yorkville district. At almost 1:30 a.m., Celia was dropped off at her house. It was a foggy night. Police speculate she entered the house and locked the door, but opened it again when she heard a knock, perhaps thinking it was her daughter. She was immediately fatally attacked with a blunt instrument, and then the killer(s) went upstairs and killed Ike and Avrom in their bedrooms in the same manner. Celia’s body was found in the front hall, the men’s upstairs. The crime scene was saturated with blood.
There was no evidence of forced entry, and police determined it was unlikely that Celia would have opened the door to a stranger. Robbery was ruled out as a motive since nothing was taken. Although police probed possible political grievances or anti-Semitism as motives for the murders, no connections were ever established, nor was a link found to Ike’s business dealings. And police could apparently neither confirm nor dispel theories that this crime is related to the nearby murder of an elderly couple, Harold and Florence Fagan, in 1978 (I will consider posting this case in the future). Almost thirty years later, the Airst family murder remains unsolved.

Comments: The most informative article about this crime was published in the Toronto Star on September 30th, 1981. From what is publicly known, police didn’t make much headway in searching for suspects, but this is almost assuredly not a “random” crime. A question I have is why the bludgeoning of Celia in the front hall didn’t rouse the men upstairs from their sleep. It would probably have made quite a racket. Maybe the killer(s) was/were in the house already, and had killed Ike and Avrom, when Celia arrived home.

Below are aerial images of the location:
http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/7358/airst1on3.jpg
http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/1691/airst2zl0.jpg

(I have tried to post photos directly using
 
Case #2: The rape and murder of Lizzie Tomlinson

On Saturday May 24th, 1980, polite, shy 6-year-old Lizzie Tomlinson was playing with friends in a parkette known by neighbourhood kids as “Stinky’s Park” on the southeast corner of Shuter and Sumach Sts in the east of Toronto’s downtown region. At approximately 3:30 p.m., a man later described by numerous witnesses as between 25-35 years old, about 5 ft 7, 160-180 lbs, tanned, blue eyed, with long dark brown hair, a beard, possibly left-handed, and wearing a tan tank top, blue jeans, and brown running shoes, lured her away from the park. An intensive search was immediately launched, but it wasn’t until Monday morning that Lizzie’s defiled body was found in a forlorn industrial area, in some bushes near railway tracks at Bayview Ave. (West Don Roadway) and Front St., roughly a kilometre from where she was taken. It is believed she and her killer walked the entire distance together. She had been beaten and strangled, and was partially covered by weeds and two long boards. The pathologist examining her recorded injuries that included multiple scratches and cuts, a broken jaw, a fist-inflicted injury on her neck, and other bruises on her face and thighs. Horrifically, the killer had shoved the stalk of a weed up into her vagina and through her stomach and upper body until it came to rest near her right shoulder. She lived for at least an hour, and possibly for a few hours, after the insertion of the stalk, but was likely unconscious. Since she had been partially buried, police believed the killer had spent quite a bit of time at the scene.
During the investigation that followed, witnesses came forward with a flurry of sightings. Some kids said they had been approached by a man fitting the suspect’s description, and offering ice cream, in the month prior to the abduction. Other witnesses saw Lizzie and her killer walking hand-in-hand east on Shuter St. and south on River St. A man working outside a factory on Bayview Ave., only a few hundred feet from the scene of the murder, saw Lizzie and her killer walking south along a footpath that runs between Bayview Ave. and Don River, but he thought nothing of it at the time and resumed his work. However, another witness, a taxi driver, said he had picked up a man and a little girl fitting the descriptions of Lizzie and her killer at Sumach St. and Wascana Ave., and had driven them to Bayview Ave. and King St., very close to the murder scene. His statement contradicts those of several other people, so he was quite possibly mistaken.
Hapless bearded men were randomly corralled left and right in the days and weeks after the murder, and the general public was whipped into a fury over reinstating capital punishment.
Because he fit the same description, police speculated the perpetrator may have been the same man responsible for the rape of a waitress one year earlier and just three blocks from the park where Lizzie was taken.
On June 5th, 1980, Lizzie’s 26-year-old cousin Gregory Guerin was arrested and charged with her murder. Guerin was cleared and discharged in late December at his preliminary hearing. No one else was ever arrested for the murder of Lizzie Tomlinson.

Comments: The case was a huge cause célèbre at the time, but after the charges against the cousin were dropped little else was heard. I think it is possible the suspect was wearing a disguise. Given the all-encompassing roundup of bearded men, surely the right person would have been found or identified, unless the perp wasn’t actually bearded in everyday life. It is also possible he was one of the men questioned at the time, but that he didn’t raise suspicion or was mistakenly cleared. If DNA exists in this case, which it must, police should re-approach interviewees from that time to supply samples for comparison – if that hasn’t been done already.

Maps:

Site of abduction:
http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/8099/tomlinson2lq2.jpg
Probable walking route of abduction (yellow is start; blue is end):
http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/8576/tomlinson1xs6.jpg
Approximate location of body:
http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/5692/tomlinson3ho9.jpg
 
Case #3: The murder of Christine Prince

In the early morning of Monday, June 21st, 1982, Welsh nanny Christine Prince disappeared from a mid-Toronto neighbourhood. Her body was found the following day floating in the Rouge River in a remote region just north of the Toronto Zoo, 48 kilometres from her last verified location.
On Sunday evening, Christine had gone out to a show and subsequent coffee-shop snack with her friend, fellow nanny, and fellow Welshwoman, Gloria Betts. At 1:30 a.m., Gloria last saw Christine at Bathurst St. and St. Clair Ave. W. Gloria got off the westbound St. Clair Ave. streetcar and proceeded northbound on Bathurst St. to the home of her employer on Claxton Ave., while Christine stayed aboard the streetcar for the 4-block ride to Pinewood Ave., where she lived with her employers, lawyer Emile Kruzick, his wife Josie, and their toddler. Christine was known to be very cautious about her safety, usually taking a taxicab at night and not wanting to walk a few blocks home by herself. Evidence indicates Christine made it to Pinewood Ave., and had walked about halfway up the long block to her home when she was accosted by her killer. A woman walking on Pinewood Ave. near Humewood Park the next morning, found the umbrella Christine had been carrying lying on the sidewalk. The woman hung it on the doorknob of a shop at St. Clair Ave. and Christie St., but later came forward after hearing about the murder and the victim’s umbrella. Sometime Monday, Christine’s wallet was found along the 401 freeway near Meadowvale Rd., apparently tossed from a moving vehicle.
On Tuesday, several people walking to work along Sewells Rd., about 800 metres north of Finch Ave. E. where Sewells meets the Rouge River, spotted a body lying face down in three feet of water and called police. The body was later identified as Christine Prince by her employer, Mr. Kruzick. Scouring the isolated area, police found the murder scene about 200 metres upstream from where the body was found, off a small track in the bush that was known as Lovers’ Lane. It was later established that Christine had been raped and brutally beaten there, but that she had died of drowning, either at the hands of her assailant or as a consequence of her incapacitating injuries. Police found a set of tire tracks that were later traced to a four-wheel drive Toyota model, but they were unable to conclude that the vehicle was involved.
Police tentatively linked the Prince case to the attempted rape of a woman on Humewood Ave. on May 30th. The woman was walking south on Humewood at 7:30 a.m., on her way to work at a downtown hospital, when she was attacked, but she managed to bite the assailant’s hand and run into the middle of the street where she alerted a passing motorist. The suspect in that attack was vaguely described as a slim black man about 6 ft. tall.
In 1985, the police department commissioned the FBI to do a suspect profile of the Prince killer. FBI profilers surmised Prince was kidnapped by two men, since the act was swift and met with little resistance. They think she was bound by the wrists and taken to a place familiar to the perpetrators. One of the men is likely the leader, and he committed the rape and murder while the other stood by.
Among the named suspects police probed much later when a flurry of them surfaced in the early ‘90s were William Brett Henson, who killed CFL cheerleader Jenny Isford in May, 1982 and wasn’t identified and arrested until 1995 (Isford was raped and killed after getting off a bus late at night, so with the similar modus operandi the cases were informally linked early on), infamous serial rapist and killer Paul Bernardo, and homicidal drifter Danny Wood. Police have been unable to solve the crime to date.

Maps:

Overview:
http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/8274/prince3pp6.jpg
Abduction location:
http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/3718/prince2ka7.jpg
Murder scene:
http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/5650/prince1ic7.jpg
 
Case #4: The murder of Delia Adriano

On September 26th, 1982, 25-year-old Delia Adriano was kidnapped and murdered in Oakville, just west of Toronto. Her fiance had just dropped her off at her parents' house when she was abducted. Her decomposed body was found 6 weeks later, 30 km from home.

Rather than writing out a more thorough summary on this case myself, I'll refer readers to an article written on the crime's anniversary, and the police page, which includes a photo of the victim, maps, and sketches of a suspect and vehicle.

www.oakvillebeaver.com/news/article/124052
www.hrps.on.ca/data/homicide/homicide_5.asp
 
Here are some capsule synopses of Toronto murders I came across in old newspapers. Based on the meagre info on them in the newspaper, the cases don’t warrant separate posts. I can assume they were never solved only because I found no further mention of the crimes in searches of later newspaper issues. If anyone knows otherwise, please speak up with a correction.


●Archibald McDougall, 61, was found stabbed to death on June 11th, 1971. A caretaker at Loreto Abbey private girls’ school in the tony north-Toronto enclave of Hoggs Hollow, McDougall was knifed and robbed of 75 cents on a walking path that runs through a wooded area between the school - which is on Mason Blvd. - and a pub on Yonge Street. The path is adjacent to McGlashan Rd.

●Michael Kent, 6, of Port McNicoll, Ontario, was found stabbed to death next to Elmvale Community Centre at approximately 8:40 p.m. on Friday, February 11th, 1966. Elmvale is approximately 125 km north of Toronto; the Elmvale community centre is in George Park on George St. Michael and his family had gone to the arena with his family that evening to watch his brother play in a hockey game. At some point, as the family was milling about in the lobby, Michael became separated from his mother, and was either lured or dragged outside to the side of the arena where he was stabbed. The murder weapon was later found on the roof of the arena, but it did not yield fingerprints.
There were other non-fatal attacks on children at the arena in weeks prior, but they couldn’t be linked to Kent’s murder.

●Glenn Kivell, 46, and Marion Bagshaw, 35, were shot to death with a .303 rifle on Saturday, June 18th, 1960. The two were murdered in Bagshaw’s farmhouse on Fifth Concession Rd. about 2 kilometres northeast of Mount Albert, Ont. (about 50 km north-northeast of Toronto). Their bodies were found the following day by friends concerned that laundry had been left unattended on the clothesline for two days. The two appeared to have been surprised by their killer as they sat at the kitchen table drinking beer, although positioning of the bodies and bullet wounds indicated the killer might have been admitted to the house by one of the victims. Kivell and Bagshaw, who were lovers, were remembered fondly by neighbours as a bright, generous, quiet couple who commuted into Toronto together daily. At first police suspected the killing was committed by a spurned ex-boyfriend of Bagshaw’s, but that was never confirmed. In February of 1961, an article stated police were close to making an arrest, but no further piece was ever written about the case (at least none came up in a search).

●On the cold, rainy evening of November 20th, 1975, Osher Shlass, 55, was beaten to death during a robbery at the rear of his Quality Kosher Meat Market on Eglinton Ave. near Bathurst St. Police believe the killer had been casing the deli and noted when Shlass typically left with the store’s receipts. Since the bank deposit had already been made that day, the murderer only got away with the $20 or $30 in Shlass’s wallet.

●Just before 9 p.m. on Thursday, June 19th, 1980, variety-store owner Kai Gee Ng, 41, was shot to death in front of his wife and children by a man who was trying to stage a hold-up. Ng had unsuccessfully tried to disarm the robber, who was later described to police by Ng’s wife Judy as about 50-years-old with greying black hair, appearing drunk because he had a red face and big nose, and wearing a dark-yellow long-sleeved shirt and dark pants. The murder weapon was a rusty snub-nosed handgun. The man made off with two packs of cigarettes. After hearing Mrs. Ng’s screams for help, a neighbour chased the killer but lost him at Queen St. and Ossington Ave. The IJK Variety store the Ngs ran on Queen St. West was across the street from the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, a large mental hospital, and police theorized the murderer may have been a patient there, but their inquiries apparently yielded no strong suspects. In the years following, the Toronto Star ran several stories on how Ng’s widow and children were coping, keeping the case alive in the public’s collective mind, but the killer was never caught.
 
Some more capsule murder summaries. Again, if anyone knows of any of these cases having been solved, please speak up.

●Sometime around 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, August 28th, 1987, 21-year-old receptionist Margaret McWilliam was raped and strangled to death while out for an evening jog in Warden Woods park in the Scarborough section of Toronto. Her body was found in the northeast sector of the park not far from subway tracks. Police found a clear footprint at the scene and were able to identify the type of shoes worn by the killer as rare Bata grey and white high-top sneakers with the letters AAU on the heel. They also had a composite drawn of a young man - a “witness” - wearing a red cap, who was seen leaving the park around 8 p.m. At one point police suspected the crime may have been committed by Frederick Merrill, an American fugitive featured on “America’s Most Wanted”, who was in Toronto at the time of McWilliams’s murder.

●On Tuesday, October 7th, 1975, 33-year-old data processing student Albert Chan was shot to death in the underground parking garage of his apartment building on Isabella St. in downtown Toronto. The killer stole Chan’s car and dumped it near the intersection of Carlton and Metcalfe Sts., not far from the crime scene.

●On Thursday, April 24th, 1980, Brink’s security guard Larry Roberts, 29, was gunned down with a machine gun in a well-planned robbery at Agincourt Mall, which is located at 3850 Sheppard Ave. E. in the Scarborough section of Toronto. His partner, 51-year-old Ted Montgomery, was shot and wounded. Multiple witnesses watched the incident go down as the three robbers grabbed the $178,500 the Brink’s men were transporting, dashed through a library and out the west side of the mall, jumped a fence that separated the mall from a nursing home, hopped into a car, and screeched out onto Bonis Ave. where they disappeared. A police manhunt failed to find the culprits, but police later found two cars nearby that had been stolen in Montreal and used by the robbers. The robbers were all described as white males between their late twenties and early forties. The gunman was described by witnesses as 40-45 years old, 175 pounds, with a short, stocky build, an olive complexion, a dark moustache and eyebrows, a strong jaw, a broad face. One accomplice was in his late-20s, 175 lbs, with a medium build and light to medium brown hair. The third man was described as 5’5” to 5’8”, 175 lbs, stocky, with medium to light hair. An investigation led police to believe the robbers were from Montreal, since the crime bore hallmarks of similar robberies there.

●Shortly before 8 a.m. on Thursday, February 10th, 1983, 42-year-old Philip Rimmington, Toronto’s deputy planning commissioner, was shot dead with a .22 handgun in the parking garage of the apartment building where he lived at 231 Balliol St., near Mt. Pleasant Rd. A nearby resident reported seeing a grey-haired man in his mid-50s fleeing the garage through a staircase at the northeast corner of the building shortly after the shooting. There were also reports that police had been called in weeks prior to the crime to investigate a stranger lurking around the parking area.
Rimmington, who was separated from his wife, with whom he had a 12-year-old daughter, was well-liked by his colleagues and was active in sports. In searching for a motive, police learned Rimmington did not have a tendency to engage in partisan political discussions or activities, so the possibility of angering someone through his work at city hall was virtually ruled out. Three guns owned by the victim were discovered missing, and for a time there was speculation he was shot with one of his own weapons.

●Maintenance man Donald Gibbons, 33, was stabbed to death with a butcher knife on July 18th, 1971 after chasing a man he believed was stealing a TV set from his apartment above a deli at Queen St. E. and Pape Ave. The killer ended up stealing a tape recorder and an amplifier belonging to Gibbons.
 
More capsule summaries:

●On Monday, November 24th, 1979, William Warburton, 42, of no fixed address, was found stabbed to death downtown in an alley near Jarvis and Shuter Sts. Warburton had been at a drinking party the previous night, and had been picked up at 2 a.m. by police and taken to the drunk tank. It was after police released him that he was murdered. His body was found sometime before 7 a.m.

●Susan Tice, 45, a social worker separated from her husband, with whom she had four children, was stabbed in the chest by an intruder in an upstairs bedroom of her home on Grace St., near Harbord St., on Sunday, August 14th or Monday, August 15th, 1983. Her body wasn’t discovered until Wednesday the 17th, when she failed to show up for a function and a family member came looking for her. Police believe Tice had just returned home from spending a weekend with relatives north of Toronto when she was murdered, and that she may have surprised her killer as he was ransacking her house. Another theory is that she was killed by a hitchhiker she picked up on the drive home. The killer may have committed the crime for as little as $75, as nothing in the house appeared to have been stolen.

●On March 30th, 1976, 69-year-old Gladys Lynn was raped and murdered by a man who police believe also raped a 57-year-old woman the same evening. He was described by the rape victim as a good-looking man in his early to mid 20s, of average height and build, with shoulder-length light brown or dirty blond hair, and with a soft-spoken, polite demeanour. Murder victim Gladys Lynn was found strangled in the backyard of a house near Ontario and Dundas Sts., about a block from where she lived.

●The disappearance of Crystal Van Huuksloot in 1976: www.doenetwork.org/cases/907dfon.html

●On Friday, October 24th, 1980, the charred bodies of psychiatric nurse Gaye Corley, 33, and aircraft mechanic Zdenek Hajek, 33, were found in the house they shared on Mulholland Ave., near Yorkdale Mall. Hajek owned the house, while Corley rented a room from him. There’s no indication the two were romantically involved. Corley’s body was found in her bed, while Hajek’s was found just outside Corley’s bedroom door. Both had been stabbed and set alight. A hunting knife lay nearby. Police theorize Hajek heard Corley’s screams and ran to help her when he too was killed. Afterward, the killer stole Hajek’s 1972 Gremlin and abandoned it nearby in a parking lot on Bentworth Ave.
 
More capsulized case descriptions:

●On Tuesday, June 23rd, 1981, 30-year-old Donna Anne Proian, a secretary at the University of Toronto, was stabbed and strangled to death inside her luxury penthouse apartment in the Village on the Grange complex on St. Patrick St. in downtown Toronto. Her husband Charles found her body soon after he received a phone call from the university at 11:30 a.m., informing him she had not shown up for work. Concerned, he walked home from his nearby workplace and discovered her body. He had last seen her shortly after 8 a.m. when he left for work. She would normally leave the apartment for work at 8:30 a.m.
According to the victim’s husband, the front door’s deadbolt was locked when he arrived, which would have required the killer turning a key from the outside. No one in the building reported hearing anything suspicious on the morning of the 23rd. Prioan was found with some of her clothing wrapped tightly around her neck, but there was no evidence of a sexual assault.

●On Monday, July 12th, 1982, on her 21st birthday, Claudia Geburt was viciously stabbed to death in a second-floor sitting room of her rented house on Leslie St., six doors south of Dundas St. Her fiancé found Geburt’s nude, blood-spattered body facedown on the floor when he called on her mid-afternoon.
On September 2nd, Geburt’s fiancé and best friend died in a murder-suicide pact. They had been extremely depressed in the wake of Geburt’s murder. Despite this bizarre, suspicious turn of events, police were never able to definitively solve the murder of Claudia Geburt, but police speculation at the time was that the killer was someone who had spotted the victim sunbathing on her deck.

●Vasilios Andriankos, 30, was shot to death by an armed robber on the night of Thursday, November 4th, 1971 in a Becker’s convenience store he managed on Vaughan Rd. at Kenwood Ave. A female customer who witnessed the shooting said the robber was enraged that Andriankos was only handing him $1 bills. Police later found the sawed-off shotgun used in the murder on the roof of a nearby garage, and a stolen car used by the killer was found still running behind 80 Vaughan Rd., ½ kilometre south of the murder scene.

●At 3:30 a.m. on Sunday, July 27th, 1997, club patrons Michele Gonzales and Ruddin Dexter Greaves, both 22, were killed after being hit by gunfire outside the Calypso Hut 3 at 1230 Sheppard Ave. W. A crowd of people was standing outside the club when a gunman opened fire with abandon, killing the two partygoers and injuring a third person. The three suspects were all described as Tamil-speaking male Sri Lankans in their early 20s, and may have been disgruntled patrons ejected earlier in the night. The Calypso Hut 3 had been the scene of previous trouble, including a murder in 1994, when it was under a different name and different ownership.

●Julia Ann Cox, 92, was found murdered in a closet in her basement flat on Queen St E. near Beech Ave. on Sunday, June 14, 1970. The elderly woman, who weighed only 77 lbs, had been dead about 1 week when police broke down her door based on concerns from the victim’s 84-year-old sister, who lived nearby. The killer, who entered through a street-level bathroom window, ripped off Ms. Cox’s clothes, then garrotted her with cord and clothes hanger and stabbed her in the head with a screwdriver. There was no apparent sexual assault. The attack must have happened in the evening or at night, because Ms. Cox’s lights were still on when she was found.
 
More capsules:

●On Friday, May 31st, 1974, seven-year-old Cheryl Hanson vanished while walking east along Bloomington Sideroad near Yonge St. in the town of Aurora, about 35 km north of downtown Toronto. Her parents had permitted her to walk to her cousin’s house for a sleepover, and the little girl left her home at about 6:30 p.m. Her route from her home to her cousin’s would have taken her about one kilometre east along Bloomington Rd., at the time a dirt road dotted with the odd residence or farm.
Despite massive searches, no trace of Cheryl was ever found, however the presumption is she was murdered. In 1976, a mental patient locked up for other crimes against young women confessed to murdering her, but his story was unable to be verified.
Link: www.police.york.on.ca/cold_cases/hanson.HTM

●Nine-year-old Simon Wilson of Willowridge Rd. in Rexdale, a northwestern section of Toronto, disappeared on Wednesday, January 29th, 1975 while walking to his school, Parkfield Elementary, which is on Redgrave Dr., less than 1 km from his home. Simon was described by his parents as very independent and adventurous, and in the initial days there were fears he had either fallen into shallow Mimico Creek, which runs behind his home, or was playing hide-and-seek with searchers in the area’s extensive sewer tunnel system. Searchers heard voices in the tunnels, but could not locate their origin.
Despite weeks of exhaustive searching by police and volunteers, no trace of Simon Wilson was ever found.

●Lisa Lynn Anstey, 21, was found beaten to death in a desolate downtown parking lot behind the Street City hostel, at 393 Front St. E., on Monday, May 12th, 1997. Anstey, a prostitute and known crack-cocaine addict who worked the corner of Wellesley and Bleecker Sts., was one of a number of prostitutes murdered in Toronto in the mid and late-‘90s. Most of the other cases remain open as well.

●On Tuesday, December 20th, 1983, Erin Gilmour, 22, was murdered in her apartment on Hazelton Ave. in Toronto’s ritzy Yorkville neighbourhood. She had been bound to her bed and stabbed several times, with one knife thrust piercing her heart, an autopsy later found. On the night of her murder, Gilmour finished work at a clothing store beneath her flat and went upstairs to wait for a male friend, Anthony Munk, to pick her up to go to a cocktail party; police theorized she opened her door absent-mindedly, expecting Munk, but finding her killer instead. Munk found his friend’s body when he arrived at 9:30 p.m. Gilmour had received obscene and threatening phone calls in the days prior to her murder, but police were unable to trace them.

●Joseph Sarriano, 30, was shot to death in a gas station parking lot on Royal York Rd. in Etobicoke on September 10th, 1975. No further information is available, but it is presumed this case is unsolved.

●Kenneth John Worth, 17, was shot to death in Serena Gundy Park (Sunnybrook Park) on June 24th, 1975. No further information is available, but it is presumed this case is unsolved.
 
●At about 8 p.m. on Friday, November 7th, 1975, 16-year-old Mariam Peters was stabbed 16 times at St. Patrick subway station in downtown Toronto. She died of her injuries in hospital the following Tuesday. Peters had left her home on Bruce Farm Dr. in North York and taken the subway downtown to visit her sickly grandfather at Mount Sinai hospital.
The suspect was described as a Caucasian man, mid-20s to mid-30s in age, 5’8” – 5’10”, medium build, chalk-white skin, clean-shaven, dark hair and eyes, and soft-spoken

●On the morning of Tuesday, April 22nd, 1980, Larry Heiman, 33, was savagely beaten about the head and killed by an assailant who had asked to see an apartment in a vacant building on King St. E. for which Heiman was the superintendent. Fragments in Heiman’s hair indicated the instrument of murder was a brick. Police believed he was the victim of a contract killing, but despite a very detailed suspect description, there is no word on the case ever having been solved. The suspect, believed to be a motorcycle gang member, was white, in his late 20s, 5’8” – 5’10”, 190-230 lbs, with a small potbelly, tattoos on both arms, hazel or blue eyes, a reddish beard, and hair close-cropped in the back.

●Harold Walkley, 51, a one-time high school teacher and part-time lecturer at the University of Toronto, was stabbed five times in the back and chest at his home on Borden St. on February 18th, 1975. No further information, but case remained unsolved in 1978 when last newspaper citation occurred.

●On Friday, April 10th, 1959, 63-year-old cleaning woman Catherine Didluke was murdered by three blows to the back of her head from a blunt instrument. Her daughter discovered her in her Hastings Ave. house after a client called the daughter to enquire about her mother’s missing a cleaning appointment. The killer apparently stole her purse, for it was missing.

●The blood-spattered body of 69-year-old widow Andrea Peter was found by a concerned friend on Tuesday, March 9th, 1982 in her 18th floor apartment on Vaughan Rd. near Bathurst St. She died of blunt-force trauma to the head at least several hours before she was found. The industrious Peter, an immigrant from Hungary, opened the still-operational Country Style Restaurant on Bloor St. and also ran a boarding house from her previous residence, but she had wanted to spend her remaining years in leisure.
 
Case #4: The murder of Delia Adriano

Too bad the investigators remain so secretive after so many years. After 25 years they better go public about what they have or chances are they'll never solve it. I get the impression that for some cops asking for help from the public is still being perceived as an admission of failure when it should on the contrary be considered integral part of sound investigative process when all else fails. I understand that going public early in the investigation may harm the prosecution's case in court but come on, it's been a quarter of a century fer cris'sakes.
 
I don't understand that mentality either. What do they have to lose in releasing all information?

Nothing, the worse that can happen if they go public is that it won't yield valid clues but that's hardly a loss. The "ongoing investigation" pretense sounds like a bad joke in this context. The FBI has seen its crime solving rate climb significantly after policies promoting the release of investigation details to the public in "stuck" cases were implemented starting in the late 1970's.
 
●Elementary school teacher Graham Pearce, 36, was stabbed in the throat in the master bathroom of his 25th-floor apartment at 35 High Park Ave. on Sunday, March 20th, 1983. By the time his roommate found him shortly before 1 p.m., Pearce had bled to death. Police believed the bachelor was murdered by someone he either brought home with him or admitted to the apartment early on Sunday morning. Police later learned Pearce had spent Saturday night at Stages, an upstairs gay bar at the Parkside Tavern on Yonge St. near Wellesley St., where he was last seen by a friend walking to his car at 3:30 a.m. Sunday morning.

●At 1 a.m. on Monday, December 7th, 1992, Balbir Singh Brar was shot dead in the driveway of his house on Foxacre Row in Brampton, just northwest of Toronto. His wife found his body at 8 a.m. Brar was a well-known activist in the Sikh community who had recently been embroiled in a war of words between different Sikh factions over control of temples and property. Witnesses saw two males in their late teens or early twenties driving away from the scene. Both were of average height and build, and wore bomber jackets and some type of headgear.

●On January 22nd, 1980, 29-year-old Delmer Gilchrist was shot to death in an underground garage on Markham Rd. He had just picked up the day’s earnings from a pinball parlour owned by a friend when he was shot from behind. The crime remained unsolved as of one year later, when the last newspaper report ran.

●80-year-old Margaret McDonald died from the severe blows to the head and slashed throat she suffered at the hands of one or more intruders to her home on Lascelles Blvd (at Kilbarry Rd.) in the affluent Toronto neighbourhood Forest Hill on Friday, June 24th, 1994. McDonald was last heard from at 12:30 p.m. that day when she talked with a friend on the phone; her 26-year-old granddaughter found her body in her bedroom at 7 that evening. McDonald had also been sexually assaulted. The upscale house had been ransacked from top to bottom. The killer had gained entry by forcing open a rear sliding door.
The most probable suspect was a suspicious man seen in the area. He was described as white, early or mid-20s, 5’10”, medium build, black hair in a ponytail, wearing black leather pants and leather boots with large heels. DNA found at the scene could still lead to the killer, as could an expensive, distinctive ring the culprit stole from McDonald’s jewelry collection.

●On September 15th, 1974, Suzanne Miller, 26, a mother of three young children, was seen getting into a car in London, Ontario, about 200 km west-southwest of Toronto. Her body was found on Saturday, October 12th in dense bush in Thorndale, just northeast of London. She had died of blows to the head. No further information is available, but it is presumed this case remains unsolved.
 
●The decomposed body of 45-year-old Phyllis Farquhar was discovered on Friday, November 23rd, 1979 under an old mattress behind her apartment on Edgewood Ave. She had been stabbed. The apartment superintendent notified police when he hadn’t seen Farquhar since early October and she hadn’t paid her rent.
Ironically, Farquhar had been a witness in a stabbing-murder court case back in 1964.

●Cindy Halliday, 17, disappeared on Monday, April 20th, 1992 after she attempted to hitchhike from Barrie, Ontario (100 km north of Toronto) to her mother’s home in Waverley, 30 km north of Barrie. Halliday, a habitual runaway, had spent April 19th at a dance in Penetanguishene, then hitchhiked south to Barrie to visit her jailed boyfriend, and then headed north for home. The last sighting of Halliday was of her trying to thumb a ride in front of the Hasty Market on Hwy 27 in Midhurst between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. on the 20th. Four witnesses who later came forward said they saw her get into a light-coloured older model Chrysler LeBaron or Dodge Diplomat driven by a single male.
A man walking his dog found her skull on Sunday, June 21st in a forest off Horseshoe Valley Rd. about 2 km east of Hwy 27. The rest of her remains were found by police 500 metres to the east of where her skull was located. An autopsy revealed Halliday had been stabbed, but, due to decomposition, it could not be determined if she had been sexually assaulted. Further tests conducted almost two years after her body was found showed Halliday may have been alive for up to a month after she disappeared. Similarities between Halliday’s murder and that of university student Lynda Shaw two years earlier near Woodstock led police to believe the two might have been committed by the same person. At one time, notorious serial killer Paul Bernardo was a suspect.
Link: www.opp.ca/Intranetdev/groups/public/documents/investigative/opp_001222.pdf

●On Sunday, December 4th, 1983, art teacher Thomas Cahill was stabbed to death in his home on Berkeley St. Charles Furlong, a tenant in Cahill’s house, had heard Cahill talking to someone downstairs, and then, at 4:45 a.m., he heard Cahill call his name. When Furlong came downstairs, he found the front door open and Cahill lying in a pool of his own blood. Police believed Cahill was stabbed by a departing visitor. He had spent Saturday night at the Parkside Tavern on Yonge St.
Comments: I wonder if this case is related to the murder of Graham Pearce (see previous post)? Both Pearce and Cahill were apparently gay men stabbed in their homes in the post-midnight hours, both had spent their last nights at the Parkside Tavern, and both were killed in 1983.

●At 2:15 a.m. on Sunday, November 17th, 1985, the body of Lorelei Brose, 19, was found with a bullet to the head in a room in the Inglewood Arms hotel on Jarvis St. She was found fully clothed and had not been robbed. Police were alerted after hotel employees received complaints of a woman’s screams. Brose was a prostitute who frequented the Jarvis-Gerrard Sts. area. Many of Brose’s fellow prostitutes raised the theory that Brose had been slain by a contract killer hired to settle a personal dispute. Brose was known to rip off her clients.

●Marie Woods, a 31-year-old single mother of a six-year-old daughter, vanished on September 21st, 1981. Her Subaru station wagon was found abandoned on Oct. 5th at the Scarborough Town Centre. Police found no clues to her disappearance in her home or car. Although there was no specific evidence immediately to suggest she had been abducted, Woods had a normal life, a well-paying job, and the responsibility of her daughter, suggesting she wouldn’t have left of her own volition.
Then, five years later, in November, 1986, remains later identified as Woods were found in Newmarket, about 50 km north of where her car was abandoned. Police had a strong suspect in the early ‘90s, Peter Stark, who had once dated Woods and was convicted of the 1990 murder of a teenage girl, but there was apparently never enough evidence to lay charges. At least, I could find no reference to an arrest in this case.
As a tragic postscript, Woods’s daughter Jennifer died of cancer at age 14 in September, 1989.
 
The disappearance of Lloyd Larsfolk and John McCormick, 1981

That was fascinating, but sad. So little leads to go on. What motive did the father of John have in murdering them? He died in 1987 I think it said and one article said he was the only suspect. Was he a closet sexual predator?
I wish I knew. A couple of the participants in that thread (Roy Harrold and dearmont) have more personal insight into the case than I do, but the police are keeping whatever details they have very close to the vest for no apparent reason.
 
●Pregnant 19-year-old Valerie Karen Stevens vanished in the early morning of Saturday, September 9th, 1989 after leaving her 15-month-old daughter in the care of a teenage couple. She left her apartment on Vendome Place to go dancing downtown at the Diamond Club and was never seen alive again. Days later, the police were alerted of her disappearance by the teenage babysitters, who had been taking care of her daughter for four days straight. After her disappearance, Stevens’s welfare cheques went uncashed and her bank account remained untouched.
Stevens’s skeletal remains were found on October 22nd, 1992 in a wooded area near Burford, Ontario, 100 km southwest of Toronto. An autopsy failed to find the cause of death, but all signs led police to suspect murder. They suspect Stevens may have been hitchhiking on Eglinton Ave. E. near her home when she was picked up by her killer.

●On Monday, June 26th, 1972, 77-year-old Lillian (Lily) Dunsmore died of severe head trauma after someone beat her in her third-floor room in a rooming house on Gloucester St., near Yonge and Wellesley Sts. The killer did not ransack her room or steal anything, and police could not determine a motive or suspect. Dunsmore was described by a caretaker who knew her as a quiet and kind elderly woman. No further information.

●On September 19th, 1980, 18-year-old high school student Julie Fortier disappeared after getting off a school bus in Haileybury, Ontario, roughly 500 km north of Toronto. Five years to the day after she went missing, Fortier’s schoolbooks, running shoes, school jacket, and ID card were found near Haileybury. Then, almost ten years after her disappearance, on the 8th of May, 1990, a skeleton identified by dental records as Fortier was found near a dump in the vicinity of Haileybury (there is nothing in the paper on cause of death, but police concluded murder). In the early ‘90s, police had a strong suspect, Danny Wood, who they suspected was a serial killer of young women along Hwy 11 in central Ontario, but he refused to talk to them, and they did not have enough to charge him.

●Awoken from their sleep, 13-year-old Leah Sousa and her mother were raped and brutally beaten with a weapon by an attacker in their home in Cumberland Beach, Ontario, about 130 km north of Toronto, on September 1st, 1990. While her mother survived, young Leah died of her injuries.
www.opp.ca/Intranetdev/groups/public/documents/investigative/opp_000953.pdf

●Franco Sapone, 53, was stabbed to death after an altercation in Christie subway station on April 19th, 1979, moments after he stepped off a train on his way home from work. Two women overhead an argument in Italian on the subway station’s second level and screamed for police. Police believed the murder may have stemmed from a petty dispute over who was first in getting on an escalator. After stabbing Sapone, the assailant escaped from the station and was last seen running south on Grace St. He was described as about six feet tall, 190 lbs, between 40 and 50 years of ago, with a weather-beaten complexion, and wearing a brown cap with a narrow stripe, light brown construction boots, and a three-quarter length brown coat.
The victim was described as a gentle, hardworking man, who had worked as a janitor at the same east-end Toronto company since 1963.
 
●On Monday, March 6th, 1978, Harold and Florence Fagan, 63 and 62 respectively, were found shot to death in their home on Dewbourne Ave., near Bathurst St. and Eglinton Ave. W. Their chauffeur found their bodies when he came to pick up Mr. Fagan at 8:30 a.m. They are believed to have been killed late Sunday, the 5th. They were last known to be alive at 8 p.m. Sunday when their daughter telephoned.
Harold was a well-known, well-liked entrepreneur and concession stand owner at the Canadian National Exhibition, and police believed the killer’s motive was robbery and that he was familiar to the victims. The Fagans were reported to have kept $500 in their house, and police theorized the killer thought he would find more cash.
A year and a half later, the triple murder of the Airst family (see case #1 above) brought renewed interest to the murder of the Fagans because of the superficial similarities between the two crimes. Both sets of victims lived in the same area (about 1.5 km apart), were well-off, and were prominent members of Toronto’s Jewish community.

●On February 2nd, 1973, 10-year-old Sheryl Blundell was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver in Stouffville, Ontario, about 40 km north of downtown Toronto. She and a friend were giving directions to a motorist when a passing vehicle struck both girls in front of 233 Main St. in Stouffville. Sheryl's friend was seriously injured. The offending vehicle left the scene and was last seen driving north on either 9th Line or Fairview Ave.
Link: www.police.york.on.ca/cold_cases/blundell.htm

●Margaret Cedrone, 57, was found murdered in her burning Highbury Rd. home when firefighters responded to a call at 6 a.m. on Tuesday, June 6th, 1989. Although she died of smoke inhalation, police ruled her death a homicide. The mother of five had last been heard from at 11 p.m. Monday night. No further information.

●The near-naked body of 23-year-old prostitute Julieanne Middleton was found on Thursday, July 7th, 1994 behind the pool in Sunnyside Park at Lakeshore Blvd. W. and Parkside Dr. She drowned in the waters of Lake Ontario after being strangled, presumably by a sex-trade customer.
On Friday, October 28th, 1994, another prostitute, Virginia Coote, 33, was found strangled in Lake Ontario behind the lakeside Palais Royale nightclub, just one or two hundred metres east of where Middleton’s body has been discarded. Police looked into the possibility the same person killed Middleton and Coote, as well as two additional prostitute murder victims, Darlene MacNeill and Donna Ogilve, who were found slain in 1997 and 1998 respectively.

●At 7 a.m. on Tuesday, August 16th, 1983, a co-worker found 27-year-old taxi driver Steve Goldie’s battered and slashed body in room 47 of the Penthouse Motel on Military Trail (at Kingston Rd.) in the Scarborough section of Toronto. Goldie died of a slashed throat, fractured skull, and brain injuries.
A resident of the motel said he overheard several voices arguing loudly over money at approximately 2 a.m., but instead of calling police he turned his radio louder. The victim, 6 feet tall and over 300 lbs, was described by friends and acquaintances as a gentle person, despite several brushes with the law.
 

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