CANADA Canada - Toronto Crimes Discussion

[CrimeSolver]

●The nude body of 14-year-old Kelly Mombourquette was found on Monday, October 19th, 1987 in the parking lot of a business on Yorkland Blvd. in the northeast corner of Toronto. The troubled girl, who had run away Oct. 3rd from a group home on Warrendale Ct., had been bludgeoned and her throat slit. A drug user and sometime prostitute, Kelly had lived on the street or with friends since running away from the group home. Since there was little blood at the scene where the body was found, police concluded she had been murdered elsewhere and dumped at the site on Yorkland Blvd.
Police received hundreds of tips in the case, and on October 29th they arrested and charged three men in connection with Mombourquette’s murder. But at the suspects’ preliminary hearing in January, 1988, a judge threw out the charges citing the flimsiness of the evidence, including the unreliability of a 16-year-old witness. No further newspaper reports on this case, including whether additional arrests eventuated.

●Accountant Frank Annetta, 36, was shot to death inside his office at his firm House of Accounting, which was located on St. Clair Ave. W., on May 4th, 1979. An employee found Annetta’s body slumped over his desk. No further information.

●On Saturday, November 14th, 1987, 26-year-old Kevin Benoit was stabbed to death on Silverthorn Ave. in Toronto’s west end. He had been involved in an altercation with unknown parties at Papa Nick’s Pizza on Silverthorn. When police answered the call about a fight at the pizza parlour the combatants had already left, but shortly thereafter a call came in about a body lying on the street nearby.

●The unclothed body of 20-year-old prostitute Susan Siegel was discovered at 7:30 on the morning of Monday, December 17th, 1984 alongside railroad tracks near the Ontario Public Stockyards on Ethel Ave. in an industrial area of west Toronto. She had been strangled. Since the victim’s clothes were absent from the scene, police concluded she had been killed elsewhere and dumped at the desolate Ethel Ave. site.

●On Tuesday, March 20th, 1962, the body of 52-year-old widow Nora Ranford was found in a rooming house on Winchester St. in the northeast sector of downtown Toronto. The victim lay under a blood-saturated bed on the second floor. She had been strangled and hit on the head. Ranford had been dead six days, but an open window kept the stench of decomposition from alarming other residents until she was finally found by her landlady. Following up hundreds of leads, police later learned Ranford had been seen drinking in a hotel on Queen St. E. with an unidentified couple the night she died.

 

[CrimeSolver]

●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

The above case, which summary I included three posts ago (#19), received some renewed public scrutiny today with an article in the newspaper saying police were following up tips about a possible location of a discarded weapon:
www.thestar.com/article/490304

Tip revives 1990 murder case

Leah Sousa was killed Sept. 1, 1990.



OPP search for weapon used in rape, slaying of Leah Sousa, 13

Sep 04, 2008 04:30 AM



Cheryl Browne
Special to the Star

CUMBERLAND BEACH, ONT.–Lora Sousa knows that someone remembers a lot about a hot August night in 1990.
It was the night her 13-year-old daughter Leah was raped and murdered in their small cottage just off the shores of Lake Couchiching, north of Orillia.
Lora Sousa, who was beaten and left for dead in her own bedroom while her daughter was murdered a few short feet away, is still reeling from the loss.
"I'm screaming inside," said Sousa, who now lives far from her former home at Beachview Ave.
The dozens of Ontario Provincial Police officers who have worked the case for the past two decades have interviewed nearly 1,500 people and have never given up hope of finding Leah's murderer.
And maybe that persistence has paid off.
Less than 10 days ago, OPP received a new tip from a source suggesting police might want to look in the ditches on the other side of Highway 11 across from Cumberland Beach for the murder weapon.
Yesterday, six OPP officers walked shoulder-to-shoulder in grid fashion along a 140-metre-wide swath of scrub, beating the bush with rakes and pitchforks as they searched for a heavy blunt object.
"We believe we're looking for something like a crowbar," said Det. Insp. Mark Pritchard of the OPP as they continued their search.
Pritchard believes the increase of the reward from $25,000 to $50,000, along with a new billboard campaign along Highway 11, north of Barrie, will increase their chances of putting the pieces of the puzzle together. The billboard shows a Grade 8 graduation photo of the beautiful blond girl, with a simple question: "Do You Know Who Killed Leah Sousa?"
They've doubled the number of detectives assigned to the case and are imploring the public to come forward with anything they can remember from the early hours of the morning of Sept. 1, 1990.
"No matter how insignificant a piece of information may appear, it may lead us to the clues we need," said Pritchard, adding, "Nothing is insignificant."
In addition to their renewed focus on the murder, Pritchard said new forensic testing capabilities are also offering police an opportunity to test trace amounts of evidence left at the scene a long time ago.
Although traditional nuclear DNA might not be available, he said, mitochondrial DNA – a very small yet prominent organelle within a cell – is now capable of being tested for clues to its owner. Recently, a sample of the mitochondrial DNA was sent to a laboratory in Pennsylvania for additional testing.
Lora Sousa suffered severe head trauma, was hospitalized for three weeks after the attack and, perhaps thankfully, has no memory of what the Orillia OPP have called one of the most violent, horrific unsolved murders in Ontario's history. Sousa's son Michael, the only witness to the murder, was only 9 months old when Leah was murdered.
"There's a cold-blooded killer out there – someone who knows what happened to my daughter – and they haven't come forward," Lora Sousa said, the anguish in her voice still fresh, as if the death happened only days ago.
"How would you feel if your only daughter was raped, brutalized and murdered? I am lost here on Earth. I often feel I don't belong here, that I should be in heaven with her."
The lead investigator, Deputy Commissioner Vince Hawkes of the OPP's Investigations and Organized Crime unit, is hopeful that finding the murder weapon and the new forensic analysis will enable his officers to continue their investigation.
"We now have new blood stain analysis, we can profile the murderers – this touches on a lot of different areas of expertise that we didn't have at the time," said Hawkes. "We will continue to work this file and I'm confident we'll find the people responsible."

 

[CrimeSolver]

●On Saturday, October 1st, 1988, Tatiana Anikejew, a 22-year-old graphic arts student at Seneca College, was found stabbed to death in her apartment on Broadway Ave. near Eglinton Ave. E. and Mount Pleasant Rd. The victim was nude and had suffered several stab wounds to the chest. She had lain dead for two or three days before her parents found her. Several neighbours stated they heard screams at 1 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 28th, but no one investigated their source or called police. Not even a blood trail on the third-floor staircase, or the foul stench of decomposition that began to shroud the building by Friday, prompted calls by neighbours. The apartment entryways showed no signs of damage, leading police to infer Anikejew, a loner, had either known or trusted her killer.

●17-year-old Bonnie Tarantino, a prostitute since the age of 13, left her Ulster St. home to visit friends on September 27th, 1985 - one day after getting engaged to her boyfriend - and never returned. Mushroom pickers found her body on Monday, October 26th in a wooded area on the north side of Teston Rd. between Pine Valley Rd. and Weston Rd. in Vaughan, just northwest of Toronto. Her clothes were missing. An autopsy failed to unearth a cause of death. Tarantino’s murder was one of a rash of prostitute slayings in Toronto in the mid-‘80s to late-‘90s period.

●Sunday, August 12th, 1962: The defiled body of 16-year-old Julian (Julie) Wolanski is found in a ditch off Indian Line (at the time relatively remote farm country north of Toronto Airport near what is now the Claireville Reservoir), sparking one of the largest unsuccessful manhunts in the city’s history. The victim, a shy girl who lived on Wallace Ave. in the city’s west end and went to Givins St. public school, had been missing since Tuesday the 7th. She had been stripped of almost all her clothes, brutally raped, beaten about the face and head, shot through the heart with a .32 calibre bullet, and dumped out of a moving car into the ditch where she lay. She must have been held captive for several days, because an autopsy and other evidence determined she had been dead not much longer than 48 hours before she was found. A man living near the isolated body-dump scene recalled hearing a car’s brakes screeching several times on Friday night.
At 4 p.m. on the Tuesday afternoon she disappeared, Julian told her mother she was taking public transit to Eglinton subway station, where she was to meet a teacher about requirements for finishing grade 9. Police later learned the person she went to meet was an imposter, and that the same man had called Julie in the days and weeks before her murder seeming to know a good deal about her life and school activities. A taxi driver saw Julie standing on the northeast corner of Yonge St. and Eglinton Ave. at around 6 p.m. Two other witnesses told police they had seen a sobbing Julie inside Eglinton subway station asking for change to make a telephone call.
In the wake of the crime, many girls and women came forward describing uncannily similar incidents of a man posing over the phone as a doctor with the board of education, insisting he needed to perform examinations on them. He had some knowledge of their lives, just as he did of Julie’s life.
In a newspaper article 21 years after the crime, the lead police investigator stated that he had a strong suspect, but could never amass enough evidence against him to make an arrest.
Comment: Police should now approach the suspect - if alive – with a DNA request, assuming evidence is still retained and still holds DNA after almost 50 years.

●On February 11th, 1976, James Douglas Taylor, 41, was murdered with a baseball bat in a robbery at his home on Elmhurst Ave. Four-and-a-half years later, Taylor’s brother Claire was also beaten to death, this time with a hammer. While Claire’s killer was quickly arrested, James’s has never been identified. His murder was one of a spate of murders of gay men in the mid-to late-‘70s, which raised fears in the homosexual community.

●Officers patrolling parking lots in a deserted northwest-Toronto industrial zone at 2 a.m. on Saturday, March 9th, 1991, found the body of Cheryl Roseann Nelson, 20, behind a factory at 129 Eddystone Ave. Nelson, a prostitute well-liked by everyone who knew her, had been stabbed multiple times. Police believed her killer was most likely a violent john. No further information.

 

[CrimeSolver]

●On November 9th, 1993, 39-year-old Catherine Clark was beaten and strangled to death in her eighth-floor apartment at 200 Wellesley St. in downtown Toronto. Security guards discovered her body sprawled on her bed. Police believed she knew her killer and admitted him to her apartment. Clark, an unemployed registered nurse, frequently used telephone and newspaper dating services, and the theory is her killer was a date with whom she had a violent altercation.

●At 1 p.m. on Wednesday, May 14th, 1975, a teenage boy walking through Marie Curtis Park found the body of 5-year-old Tracey Ann Bruney in 18 inches of water near a bridge in Etobicoke Creek, 15 km from the youngster’s home. She had died of drowning, but there were cuts and bruises all over her head and neck from a beating administered by her killer. An autopsy showed she had not been sexually assaulted. She was last seen alive by her mother at 9a.m., when she was dropped off at St. Clare Catholic School on Northcliffe Blvd. On the weekend, Tracey’s purse was found in a yard on Northcliffe Blvd., suggesting someone forcefully pulled her into a car near the school.
Comment: This case sounds fishy.

●On Thursday, August 1st, 1963, 76-year-old Frances Phillips was beaten to death in a laneway off Queen St. near city hall after she disembarked a streetcar and began to walk to her job at Toronto Western Hospital, where she was a nurse on the midnight shift. A witness described the assailant as a man of medium build with heavy shoulders who walked with a sway. No further information extant.

●The body of Karoly Horvath, 52, was found in his apartment on Bathurst St. near St. Clair Ave. early on the morning of Friday, April 15th, 1988. The man, whom police suspected of dealing cocaine, had his hands cuffed behind his back and he was battered about the head with a blunt instrument. His safe had been stolen. No further information.

●On the evening of Monday, March 9th, 1959, 12-year-old Patricia Lupton was murdered by a man who answered a babysitting ad Lupton had placed in a supermarket. At about 7:20, an hour after she left home to meet with the purported babysitting client, a “Mr. Johnson”, two men found the girl’s body at the construction entrance to a new housing division along McCowan Rd., 150 metres south of Ellesmere Rd., in Scarborough, several kilometres from her home on Kennedy Rd. south of Eglinton Ave. Lupton had been strangled with her own scarf but, although her clothes were disordered, she had not been sexually assaulted. Both of her knees were black and blue, signifying she had put up a fierce struggle. Police said she could not have been dead more than a few minutes before she was found. The suspect is believed to have driven a blue and grey 1951 Pontiac sedan.
A long discussion about the case can be found here: http://www.unsolvedcanada.ca/index.php/topic,728.0.html

 

[CrimeSolver]

●Patricia Stewart, a 71-year-old homeless woman known in her Parkdale neighbourhood as Patti, Rosie, and the Cat Lady, was found dead in the 9th-floor stairwell she called home at 200 Jameson Ave. on Sunday, February 18th, 1990. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. In the spring, police received several calls from an unidentified woman who appeared to know intimate details of the crime, but her calls ceased and a year after the murder police were appealing for her to contact them again.

●22-year-old Laura Hill was murdered in a second-floor bedroom in her townhouse on Balfour Ave. on November 24th, 1984. Hill, a legal secretary with a solid middle-class background, was shot in the head with a .22 calibre gun. Her parents said the headstrong but generally responsible young woman had been hanging around with a bad crowd for a couple of years.

●On the morning of Sunday, September 8th, 1991, the body of Lori Pinkus, 21, was found outside Brockton High School at 90 Croatia St., near Bloor St. and Dufferin St. in Toronto’s west end. The young woman, a high school dropout who worked as a prostitute and was addicted to drugs, had been strangled and left partially clad behind the school.

●Playing on a swing set in a Hamilton (a city 75 km southwest of Toronto) park near Fennell Ave. E. and Upper Ottawa St., just three blocks from her home, 4-year-old Cindy Williams was abducted on Friday, July 26th, 1974. The youngster had been playing with friends when, the children who witnessed the abduction later stated, a black Ford with a stripe on the hood, red primer paint on the driver’s door, and patches on the right front fender and hood, pulled up. Cindy ran over and climbed into the car. Earlier in the day, a 6-year-old acquaintance had seen her talking to a man in a dark suit. It was believed the man may have arranged to pick her up at the park later with the promise of candy or a doll.
On Wednesday, April 30th, 1975, a man gathering moss with his two children found a skull later identified as Cindy’s in a shallow grave near Grover Rd. and Highway 53 in the Burlington area, about 8 km from the abduction scene. Police found additional bones nearby, as well as the child’s shorts and running shoes. No further information in the newspaper on possible leads or suspects.

●As he and two friends headed to a party on July 24th, 1993, Nanh Van Le, 37, was shot to death by a masked gunman in a hallway of his apartment building on Lotherton Pathway, in the vicinity of Lawrence Ave. and Dufferin St. Le’s friends, who were also shot but later recovered, were unable to provide much of value in finding the culprit. No further information.

 

[CrimeSolver]

●At 8 a.m. on Friday, March 19th, 1993, the body of 41-year-old Barbara Brodkin was discovered by her 6-year-old son after he awoke; the boy called 911. The woman had been stabbed in the heart in the Balliol St. apartment where she resided with her son. She had been murdered sometime during the night as her child slept nearby. Brodkin was known to be a marijuana dealer, and police speculated the motive for her murder was robbery since a small cosmetics case belonging to the victim, containing drugs and money, was missing.

●On Thursday, September 1st, 1983, 23-year-old Toronto prostitute Claire Samson was seen in front of the Essex Hotel on Jarvis St. getting into a large, beige car driven by a balding older man. Samson was never seen alive again, and her body was found the following day in a wooded area off Oro Sideroad 20/21 near Highway 93, just north of Barrie, Ontario. She had been shot in the head with a small-calibre gun. In 1987 and 1989, this murder case was publicized by Crimestoppers, and a reward was offered, apparently to no avail.

●Anthony Carnovale, 30, was killed by shotgun blasts that hit his heart and lungs on Friday, January 11th, 1980, as he sat on a couch watching TV in his girlfriend’s apartment on Keele St. near Lawrence Ave. W. The two 12-gauge shotgun blasts that tore through the window of the apartment around 11 p.m. also wounded Carnovale’s girlfriend, Cathleen Pereira, in the shoulder and neck, but she survived. The gun was later determined to have been fired from no farther than 10 feet away. Neighbours saw a silver or grey Cadillac with a black vinyl roof fleeing the scene moments after the shooting.
At the time of his death, Carnovale was on parole and facing trial on drug trafficking charges. Police believe the killing was gangland retribution for something illicit in which the victim was involved. This crime was still confirmed unsolved in 1984.

●The body of Maladevi Latchman (age unknown) was found in the Humber River behind the Old Mill banquet hall on Tuesday, November 15th, 1994. An autopsy showed she had been brutally beaten, and it appeared her body had been thrown from a bridge over the river. No further information.

●At midnight on Tuesday, March 25th, 1969, 23-year-old Yvonne Dorion was walking home on Ferrier Ave., near Danforth and Pape Aves., just steps from the rooming house where she lived, when a tall man wearing a long coat jumped from the shadows of an adjacent parking lot and stabbed her in the back between the shoulder blades. Dorion survived the attack but was left partially paralyzed. An hour-and-a-half before the stabbing of Dorion, an elderly woman was attacked and robbed of her purse on the same street. She was physically unhurt. Dorion’s stabbing and recovery was a cause célèbre in the Toronto media for several months, but her assailant was never caught.

 

[CrimeSolver]

●At about 3 p.m. on Sunday, January 5th, 1997, prostitutes Therese Melanson and Florence Harrison, both 32, were found shot to death in the blood-splattered sixth-floor stairwell of an apartment building at 274 Sackville St., just south of Gerrard St. E. The women didn’t live in the building, but the area was known to be frequented by drug dealers and hookers. Residents had heard gunshots shortly after 3 a.m., but no one had called police. A cook at a drop-in centre said she saw Melanson at 2 a.m. in the doorway of the Golden Ring restaurant on Parliament St. just north of Dundas St. E., just a five-minute walk from the murder scene.
Later, rumour had it the two women had taken a drug dealer’s merchandise without paying and borrowed his car without permission.

●On Wednesday, September 20th, 1978, Alex Leblanc, 29, a manager at a disco club, was found murdered in his St. Joseph St. apartment. No further information is available, including on the cause of death, but the deceased’s murder was one of a rash of murders of homosexuals in Toronto in the late-‘70s and early-‘80s, some cases of which have been covered in earlier posts of this thread.

●On Friday, June 28th, 1991, 62-year-old Gord McAllister and his 59-year-old wife Jackie were asleep in their R.V., which was parked in a deserted rest area just off Highway 17, 12 km west of Blind River, Ontario, a small town located about 500 km northwest of Toronto. At 1 a.m. they were awakened by a knock on the door from someone who claimed to be a police officer. When they opened the door, a man stood there holding a shotgun. He told the couple he would rob and shoot them. Both husband and wife were subsequently blasted with the shotgun, but Gord managed to bolt, wounded, from the motorhome and hide under the vehicle. Before the gunman could hunt Gord down, he was distracted by the arrival of another vehicle at the rest stop. The driver of that vehicle, 29-year-old Brian Major, was shot as well, before the shooter left the scene. Gord McAllister survived his wounds, but his wife of 38 years died, as did the unwitting witness, Major.
A witness later came forward saying she had almost been hit on Hwy 17 as a wildly swerving blue van pulled out of the rest area around the time of the murders. Gord McAllister described the killer as a man of about 30 years, 5’10”, with a slight build, stringy blond hair, and a receding hairline.
In 2000, Ronald West, an ex-policemen charged (and later convicted) in the murders of two Toronto-area nurses in 1970, became a suspect in the Blind River case. He had lived in Blind River at the time of the crime. However, he has not been charged to date.
The case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries in 1993. Here is a link to a video of the segment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgeoP0p4mVQ

●On Saturday, July 23rd, 1994, 21-year-old university drama student Simone Sandler was canvassing the corner of Yonge St. and Gerrard Ave. as part of her summer job recruiting passersby for positions as film extras, when she vanished. Her decomposing body, naked from the waist down, was found on Saturday the 30th floating in the Keating Channel, where the Don River meets Lake Ontario. She had been strangled.
Sandler, described as an innocent, sweet young woman, was, by some reports, last seen in the company of a tall, thin, dark-haired, tattooed young man known in the area as “Joe”. But an anonymous caller said she saw Sandler getting into a dark-coloured sedan driven by a man with a mulatto complexion and dark hair.

●26-year-old American Alison Thomas disappeared after leaving a dinner party on Hillsdale Ave. in the Yonge St. and Eglinton Ave. vicinity on September 29th, 1978. The young woman, who had spent the previous 9 years in Paris and was staying in Toronto with her brother before moving to Montreal to start a new job, had attended the dinner party with three male friends. They later stated Alison left around midnight with the intention of catching a cab on Yonge St. She was never seen again.
There is some question as to whether Thomas met foul play or disappeared voluntarily. Her boyfriend of two weeks said she didn’t know where she fit in, and might have taken off to “find herself”.

 

[CrimeSolver]

●On Friday, December 2nd, 1977, William Hughes, 15, was stabbed in the heart by a stranger who had offered Hughes and his friend Alan Barker a ride. Hughes died in hospital on December 7th.
On the night of the murder, Hughes, of Pamcrest Dr., and Barker were at a billiard hall on Yonge St. near Steeles Ave. in north Toronto. A man offered the boys a ride, but when the vehicle reached Dufferin St. and Langstaff Rd. in Concord, just north of the city, the man turned around with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other, and demanded money. When the youths refused, the man stabbed Hughes and forced both teens out of the car. Barker ran to a nearby farm for help.
The murderer was described as slim but muscular, 5’ 10”, 190 lbs, with black wavy collar-length hair. He had a companion, a blond female between the ages of 16 and 19. The vehicle was a red 1974 or ’75 Monte Carlo with a white vinyl roof and red interior. In the ensuing months, police checked more than 300 cars of similar description but came up empty.

●Just before midnight on Saturday, September 7th, 1998, Freddas (Jim) Bwabwa, 32, a Congolese immigrant and father of four, came to the aid of an elderly man who was being mugged by a group of nine or more Tamil youths near the intersection of Wellesley St. E. and Rose Ave. in Toronto. A witness saw Bwabwa struggling with the gang before Bwabwa was stabbed to death by one of the assailants.
The mugging victim was apparently never located. Several suspects were supposedly later identified and sought, but it is not known if anyone was ever arrested for this crime. The last newspaper citation of the crime, in August, 1999, indicated it was still unsolved.

●18-year-old Veronica Kaye vanished on November 7th, 1980. Her skeleton was found northwest of Bolton, Ontario almost a year later, on October 9th, 1981. An autopsy revealed she had died of vicious blows to the head.
Speculation was that Kaye, who lived with her grandmother near Hwy. 427 and Bloor St. W., was picked up by her killer as she tried to hitchhike to Square One mall in Mississauga. Initially there were questions as to whether she had run away, but the young woman was close to her family, was attending Humber College, and had just started a part-time job at a pizza parlour, so she had no reason to leave.

●The disappearance of 19-year-old Mabel Crumback on May 28th, 1950 is profiled here: www.websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?t=40026

●At 6 p.m. on Thursday, June 20th, 1991, 23-year-old Navid Shaikh, a security guard at the Bi-Way discount store on Dundas St. W. at Indian Grove Rd., was mortally stabbed as he stood in front of the store questioning a man suspected of shoplifting. A registered nurse who happened to be on scene re-established the victim’s pulse and breathing before emergency crews arrived, but it was too late and he died in hospital a short time later.
Multiple witnesses to the crime described the suspect as having a mulatto complexion, being between 20 and 25 years of age, 5’ 7” to 5’ 10”, and having a slim build and short curly dark hair.

 

[CrimeSolver]

Update:

●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 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.

Police announced today that DNA has indicated the above two murders were committed by the same person: http://www.torontopolice.on.ca/homicide/case/6
The announcement was made in conjunction with the advent of a new cold case section at the Toronto Police website.

 

[CrimeSolver]

●Tuesday, January 25th, 1977: The nude body of 24-year-old Brian Latocki is found tied to a bed in his Erskine Ave. apartment. The victim, a financial analyst with the Toronto Dominion bank, had been strangled, beaten, and stabbed several times in the chest and back. Latocki was last seen on the evening of Friday the 21st as he left a gay bar on Yonge St. with a man who purportedly offered him a ride home. That man was described as of East or West Indian origin, in his mid-twenties, with thin features, a medium-brown complexion, and an Afro.
Police at the time believed the killer was a sadist who enjoyed torturing and killing homosexuals. He may have been responsible for the deaths of several other gay men around the same time.

●On Monday, October 17th, 1994, a shooting erupted at Tae’s Restaurant and Nite Club on Dufferin St. south of Lawrence Ave. W. When the smoke cleared, Stephen Braithwaite, 26, was dead, and Hopeton Morrison, 31, and Carl Walsh, 28, were left critically injured. They would survive their wounds.
Police faced a wall of silence from the 200-or-so witnesses in the nightclub.

●At 3:50 a.m. on Thursday, October 13th, 1983, Donna Awcock, 17, left a neighbour’s house where she had been babysitting in London, Ontario - a city 200 km southwest of Toronto - to buy cigarettes at a nearby convenience store. She never returned, and her battered body was found on Friday in a gully near the Fanshawe Dam. She had been raped and strangled, and a plastic bag had been jammed deep into her throat.
The clerk at the Mac’s Milk store Donna had patronized just before her abduction claimed the girl had appeared terrified while in the store, and looked like she had been crying.

●Frank Roberts was gunned down on the morning of Thursday, August 13th, 1998 in the parking lot of the OBUS Forme Ltd. factory on Hopewell Ave. at Dufferin St. Roberts, 67, the inventor of the OBUS Forme backrest support cushion, and president of the company, arrived at work at 7:30 every morning, and police speculated his killer knew his schedule and ambushed him the morning of the 13th. The murder had hallmarks of a professional hit.
Roberts’s life had seen some changes in recent months, things he had kept secret from many of those close to him. He had been dating Etty Sorrentino, a 31-year-old married Florida woman. Earlier in the year, he had taken out an $830,000 mortgage on his Toronto home and bought a dream house in North Beach, Florida, a new Mercedes, and expensive gifts for Sorrentino. His extravagance may have been beyond his ability to afford.
Several witnesses to the slaying came forward and, days after the murder, police received an anonymous call from someone who provided what authorities considered “vital information”. Police have never revealed what that information was, and it is unknown if the unknown caller ever contacted police again.

●On Friday, May 20th, 1983, the body of 86-year-old Evelyn McIlraith was discovered in her apartment on Bloor St. W. at Ellis Park Rd. Her granddaughter and the apartment building superintendent made the horrible discovery. The elderly McIlraith, who had lived in the same abode since 1940, had been stabbed and beaten to death, possibly by a burglar she surprised as he was ransacking her apartment. She had last been seen by the superintendent’s son as she entered the building on Thursday afternoon, and police believed she was murdered sometime between 4 and 7 p.m. that day.

 

[CrimeSolver]

Here are five more summaries of unsolved cases. Once again, if anyone is privy to information that any of the cases have been solved, please speak up. The extent of my information is what I find in the Toronto Star database.

●At about 12:30 on the afternoon of Friday, December 2nd, 1983, 30-year-old Vincenzo Cherubino, of Torbolton Dr., was shot in the head and chest inside a moving car. His killer or killers then dumped him onto Rosemount Ave. in the Dufferin St. and St. Clair Ave. W. area, and drove off. According to witnesses, Cherubino staggered east on Rosemount for about 100 ft. before collapsing and dying in front of number 114. He died before reaching hospital.
Investigation later led to the suspicion the murder was a mob hit.

●At 1 am on Thursday, January 21st, 1993, 77-year-old Osyp Kawun, a much-adored shopkeeper known in his neighbourhood as “Mr. Thank You”, was beaten to death as he stood behind the meat counter in his store, the Annette Food Market on Annette St. west of Quebec Ave. His 72-year-old wife, Pat, found him lying in a pool of blood when she came downstairs from the Kawuns’ apartment after hearing a commotion.
At some point, police recovered an unspecified blunt instrument they linked to the crime. Then, on Wednesday, February 3rd, police found an abandoned stolen Honda Accord outside York Humber High School at 100 Emmett Ave., near Jane St. and Weston Rd. It was determined to have been stolen the night of the murder from a street around the corner from the Annette Food Market.

●62-year-old Abraham Wolfson vanished on December 17th, 1970. The South African millionaire was in Toronto to sign papers finalizing the sale of an apartment building he owned on Rathburn Rd. in Etobicoke. In the weeks following, there was speculation Wolfson may have developed amnesia because of the stress of the business transaction, and was unknowingly living in Toronto under an assumed name. He never materialized. There is no proof he met with foul play, but it is a distinct possibility since he was carrying a large sum of money on his person.

●On Tuesday, September 21st, 1982, 36-year-old purported music producer Edward Gillespie was abducted from his Sylvan Ave. home by two armed men as his ex-wife, 15-year-old son, and friends looked on helplessly. Gillespie’s body was found Saturday the 25th in a field alongside Wilhelm Rd. east of Port Colborne, a town about 100 km due south of Toronto. He had been shot in the chest and neck.
Police initially identified the motive for the murder as competition in the country music record business, but their investigation found no connection between the victim and the music business. Instead, it appeared to have been a dispute over drugs and money, and on September 28th police issued warrants for 38-year-old James “Jimmy” King and a man later identified as James Robert Leydic, 36. The last found newspaper citation of the case in 1984 indicated the men were still on the loose.

●Gary Newman, 22, a community college student, was shot during a party surrounding Caribana festivities on Saturday, August 2nd, 1997. Newman, his brother, and a cousin were walking south on Yonge St., directly next to Sam the Record Man, at about 4:30 a.m., when a man emerged from the sea of people milling about and shot Newman in the head. Just minutes earlier, another man had been shot in the leg two blocks away. Based on witness statements, police believed Newman, who was known to police, was specifically, not randomly, targeted.
Two weeks later, police made a public plea asking for help in identifying a person who went by the street name “Hughie”. Tips named him the shooter. Witnesses to the shooting described him as black, about 20 to 22 years of age, 5’7”, skinny, with a dark complexion, clean-shaven, with hair that was braided or in dreadlocks.
The last time the newspaper mentioned the case, in August, 1999, it was still unsolved.

 

[Patience]

Hi Crimsolver, I copied this blurb from one of your above posts and I thing the balding man sounds like Dennis Melvin Howe as he was in the area that year which was 1983. I wonder if we could find out what Dennis Melvin Howe drove? I will never forget Sharon Moringstar Kennen, never.

●On Thursday, September 1st, 1983, 23-year-old Toronto prostitute Claire Samson was seen in front of the Essex Hotel on Jarvis St. getting into a large, beige car driven by a balding older man. Samson was never seen alive again, and her body was found the following day in a wooded area off Oro Sideroad 20/21 near Highway 93, just north of Barrie, Ontario. She had been shot in the head with a small-calibre gun. In 1987 and 1989, this murder case was publicized by Crimestoppers, and a reward was offered, apparently to no avail.

 

[CrimeSolver]

Hi, Patience. Thanks for commenting. That's an intriguing theory, but I think a couple of facts speak against it. Sharin Keenan was murdered on January 23rd of 1983, her body was found on Feb. 1st, and Howe was identified as the suspect on March 5th. There was a massive manhunt for him. He was from western Canada, and I highly doubt he would have still been hanging around an unfamiliar city, with a manhunt in full swing, in September, when Claire Samson was murdered. It's not impossible to imagine, but I doubt it.
Secondly, Howe was 42-years-old at the time and had more or less a full head of hair. I don't think he could have been desrcibed as "older and balding".
Thirdly, Keenan was a child, and killers usually (not always, but usually) stick with victims of the roughly the same age. Also, Keenan was strangled, while Samson was shot.
I pored over some newspaper articles about the Keenan killing. Although there were some early mentions of Howe having possibly driven a 1975 Mercury, that was later ruled out.

It's hard to accept that Howe has eluded justice all these years.

 

[CrimeSolver]

●Francis Tan, 24, a recent university graduate who worked as a mechanical engineer, left his rooming house at 200 Tower Dr. on October 27th, 1962 and disappeared. Tan told his landlady he was travelling to Montreal to pick up his clothes. He was picked up in a car by two Chinese men. Police believe he met foul play. There had still been no sign of Tan twenty years later, when his case was last referenced in the newspaper. No further information.

●On Saturday, December 27th, 1997, Kapilan Palasanthiran, 19, a university student, was sitting with two friends at a window table in Cross Country Donuts, on Finch Ave. E. at Bridletowne Circle, when four men opened fire from the parking lot. Palasanthiran was pronounced dead in hospital; his two friends were injured, but not seriously.
The suspects were described as Sri Lankan, in their late teens or early twenties, wearing baggy clothes with dark hoods. It later emerged that the killing was a result of a gang turf war between two Tamil gangs, the VVT and the AK-Kannan, but there was never sufficient evidence to make arrests. The killing was apparently a case of mistaken identity, since the victim had no known involvement in gangs or crime.

●At 3 p.m. on Wednesday, May 7th, 1975, 4-year-old Cameron March, described as a happy, very smart boy, vanished while playing in front of or near his home at 5349 Blind Line Rd. near Colling Rd., in Lowville, Ont., a village 40 km southwest of Toronto. In the days following, hundreds of searchers, including police, search dogs, and volunteers, scoured the nearby countryside for any trace of the boy. Firefighters drained area ponds, without result.
Tips investigated by police included the sighting of a white and green car parked near the boy’s home around the time he disappeared, a red sedan spied in the area, and the sighting of a bearded man walking up and down Blind Line Rd. at about the same time.
Some time after the abduction, a man tried to extort $20,000 out of the parents by claiming he had their son. He was arrested, charged, and sentenced to two years in jail, but whether he had any actual connection to the boy’s disappearance is not known.
Here’s an online missing poster for Cameron: www.hrps.on.ca/CrimeFiles/Lists/MissingPersons/DispForm.aspx?ID=5
Comments: I wonder if this boy’s probable abduction is related to the kidnapping-murders of Cindy Williams or Marianne Schuett. Williams was taken just a year earlier from Hamilton, which is about 20 km south; more interestingly, Schuett was taken in 1967 from Kilbride, Ontario, a mere 4 km from March’s rural home.

●On Wednesday, October 3rd, 1984, 8-year-old Christine Jessop was abducted in Queensville, a tiny hamlet 50 km north of Toronto. Jessop’s kidnapping, and the events that followed, received massive national publicity and sparked one of the most tortuous and unsatisfying searches for justice in Canadian history.
At 3:50 on the afternoon she vanished, Jessop returned home from school, set down her knapsack, and rode her bike half-a-kilometre south to the Queensville General Store, at 20497 Leslie St., to buy gum. She was last seen alive by the store clerk as she left the store at 4:05. She evidently made it back home, as her bicycle was found in the garage. But at 4:15, her mother and brother returned from a dental appointment to find the house empty.
On Monday, December 31st, a man looking for his dog found the skeleton of a child, later determined to be Jessop, in a wooded area south of 4th Concession and west of Simcoe St. (Hwy 2), north of the village of Sonya, which is 50 km east-northeast of Queensville.
On Monday, April 22nd, 1985, police charged eccentric, soft-spoken 25-year-old Guy Paul Morin, a next-door neighbour of the Jessops’, with first-degree murder. Morin went on trial and was acquitted in February, 1986. The Crown appealed the decision, and a year-and-a-half later the Court of Appeal reversed it. Morin was rearrested and recharged. The new trial saw many postponements that dragged on for years, but Morin finally went on trial again in November, 1991. In June, 1992, he was found guilty. This time Morin, always maintaining his innocence, appealed the decision. By now, DNA testing had become available to investigators, and tests done in early 1995 on evidence found on Jessop’s body did not match Morin. He was immediately released. Probings into investigative conduct surrounding the Jessop murder found widespread fraud – in essence a frameup of Morin.
No one else has ever been charged in the rape-murder of Christine Jessop; it remains unsolved.

●Shortly after 6 on the morning of Friday, January 6th, 1967, 34-year-old Salvatore “Sammy” Triumbari, a known racketeer who was part of the Siderno mafia outfit and also ran a soft drink company, was gunned down by two hit men as he left his house on Sherman Court, in the area of Jane St. and Wilson Ave. The assassins then ran through the victim’s backyard, an adjacent backyard, and out onto Peacham Cres., where their getaway car was waiting. The victim was armed with a loaded handgun, but never had a chance to use it.
After some investigation, police believed Triumbari was marked for death after a meeting of about 30 mobsters at his home three days before the murder. One of the few relevant witness statements was from a bus driver, who recalled that a motorist with a bandage on his face had asked for directions to Sherman Ct. Two official inquests into the murder failed to lead to arrests.

 

[CrimeSolver]

●At 5:30 on the evening of Thursday, February 18th, 1993, 56-year-old SuckJu Ryu was minding his variety store in a senior citizens’ building on Arleta Ave., in the Sheppard Ave. W. and Jane St. area, when two young men attempted to rob him. One of the robbers shot Ryu in the chest when the store owner slammed shut his cash register. The killers took off and were spotted boarding a Sheppard Ave. bus. They disembarked at Oakdale Rd., a short distance west of the crime scene. The suspects were described as black, between 14 and 17 years of age, both wearing dark, hooded jackets. One was about 6 ft in height, the other about 5’ 8”.

●Duncan Robinson, 24, was stabbed and slashed to death early on Sunday, November 26th, 1978 in the bedroom of his apartment on Vaughan Rd. His mutilated body was found by police on Tuesday after Robinson’s sister was alerted by his employer that he hadn’t shown up for work for two days.
The shy, well-dressed Robinson was seen leaving his apartment at 9:30 Saturday night on his way to a gay bar downtown. A neighbour said she had heard “a strange hollow sound” coming from Robinson’s apartment sometime between 11 p.m. and 12:30 a.m., but she had decided against calling police. Further investigation disproved the importance of what the neighbour heard, for witnesses saw Robinson leaving a Yonge St. tavern with a man at 2:30 a.m. The man was described as Caucasian, late-20s, 6’5” to 6’7”, with a lanky build, greasy brown hair past his ears, a scruffy goatee, sloping shoulders, dirty hands, a clumsy walk, and a foul body odour. He had asked bar patrons about buying drugs and was seen to roll his own cigarettes.
Robinson’s murder was the 14th slaying of a homosexual man in 3 ½ years at the time, and there would be more to come in the ensuing years. Half of those 14 cases remained unsolved at the time. The circumstances of a number of the cases were very similar.

●At 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, February 16th, 1986, 49-year-old Dr. Cornelius Dima Dragan was shot dead with a .22 calibre handgun after he answered the door of his second-floor apartment on Islington Ave. north of Rexdale Blvd. in northwest Toronto. Dragan’s wife Angela, 46, was wounded in the abdomen but survived. Their 15-year-old son witnessed the crime. He described the killer as a tall, dark-haired young man who wore a dark coat and spoke with a Romanian accent.
Romanian immigrant Dragan was editor of Tricolorul, a local pro-Communist Romanian newspaper, and secretary-general of a Romanian cultural organization. Rumours began to circulate that he was a spy for Romania’s Ceausescu government and that his killing was a politically-motivated assassination.

●On Sunday, June 13th, 1971, a farmer picking up refuse on a roadside stumbled upon the decomposed remains of 41-year-old Leroy Kerwin (nee Silverstein) in a shallow grave alongside Hwy. 27 near Cookstown, Ont., a village about 70 km north of Toronto. An autopsy revealed he had been shot twice in the head.
Kerwin, an Atlanta life insurance broker, had disappeared on or shortly after December 3rd, 1970, after flying to Toronto to conclude a supposed business deal. His wife notified Atlanta police when he failed to telephone her as he always did when away on business. On March 29th, Kerwin’s briefcase was found on the 11th Concession, one mile west of Hwy. 27. The briefcase contained documents relating to a company called Buffalo Gas & Oil, which was later found to be the subject of stock market manipulation at the hands of Toronto and Montreal organized crime groups.
The victim was linked to a Chicago mafia group and had been convicted of fraud in 1961. Detectives theorized Kerwin had been lured to Toronto with the promise of a big insurance sale and was met at the airport by his killer(s). Investigators believed the man who picked up the victim at the airport was a mobster named Teddy Yankovich, but Yankovich was murdered near Montreal on June 26th, 1971 before police could question him. Before Kerwin’s business trip, his Atlanta secretary had taken phone calls from a man who called himself Don and who claimed to be phoning from Toronto, but no record of those calls could be found.
Comment: Because of arrests made in the related stock fraud and the murder of another major player (Yankovich), this case may well be considered closed by the relevant law enforcement entity.

●In a two-month period in 1954, two women were murdered by a man who came to be known as The Strangler. He was suspected of other non-fatal attacks on women in the years before and thereafter, but was never caught. He may also have been responsible for the murder of a woman in 1952.
Marie Lypoweckyj, 45, was strangled to death on Saturday, September 25th, 1954. Her nude body was found between two houses on Sheridan Ave., the street where she resided with her husband, in the Dufferin St. and Dundas St. W. area. Co-workers of hers at the King Edward Hotel described Lypoweckyj as a very nervous woman who would break into a run when she got off the streetcar at College St. and Dundas St. W. on her way home. She had been accosted by strangers at least twice before, according to family and friends. Normally her husband would accompany her home from work, but the night of her death he was unable to. She was last seen alive getting off a streetcar at around 1 a.m. on Saturday. It is believed she was about to enter the side door of her home on the southeast corner of Sheridan Ave. and Bank St. when she was accosted, and that she then ran across several front yards before her killer got the best of her. Lypoweckyj’s belongings were scattered across multiple yards north of her residence, yet, despite the large crime scene, no one in the vicinity admitted to hearing anything. Fingerprints were found on both sides of the woman’s neck. A safety pin had been jammed into her body. Blood of the perpetrator was found on the victim’s bra.
With the anti-communist fervour in the West at the time, police suspected her death might be retaliation for her husband’s anti-communist agitation. Other theories thrown around were that she had a lover or lovers, one of whom may have had motive, and that possibly more than one person was involved in the crime. People who knew the Lypoweckyjes claimed they were happily married.
On October 12th, police received a taunting letter from someone claiming to be Lypoweckyj’s killer.
Then, on the night of Tuesday, October 19th, 29-year-old Olga Zacharko was brutally strangled as she walked home from work carrying a bag of groceries on Phoebe St., in the Spadina Ave. and Queen St. W. area, about 3 km east of the Lypoweckyj murder scene. Zacharko’s body, which was found in Soho Sq. where it had been dragged, just off Phoebe St., and mere metres from R.C.M.P. headquarters on Sullivan St., was not nude when it was found, but she had been partially disrobed, so the killer may have been frightened off by an approaching car or other passersby.
In early 1956, police announced they had a strong suspect in the Strangler killings, a schizophrenic mental patient at Penetanguishene insane asylum, but the man was not cooperative and there was not enough evidence to arrest him. The suspect lived in Lypoweckyj’s neighbourhood in 1954 and was known to visit friends in Zacharko’s neighbourhood. It is not known if the man was ever released from the institution. After 1956, the murders of Lypoweckyj and Zacharko were not mentioned in the Toronto Star again.
Comment: The blood taken from Lypoweckyj’s bra, if still in evidence, can be DNA typed and compared to the DNA of the suspect (exhumation if necessary) alluded to by police in 1956.

 

[x117236]

Do you know if they ever solved the disappearance of Caroline Case? I moved after she disappeared and don't know if they ever found her body or arrested anyone.

 

[CrimeSolver]

Do you know if they ever solved the disappearance of Caroline Case? I moved after she disappeared and don't know if they ever found her body or arrested anyone.

Case, a 47-year-old businesswoman, disappeared on October 2nd, 1991. Her skeletal remains were found on November 5th, 1992 in a Caledon field.
From what I have been able to gather, police strongly suspected David Snow as her killer, but were never able to prove it. Snow murdered Nancy and Ian Blackburn at their Caledon cottage in April, 1992, and was later convicted of that crime and others. He was captured in B.C. after an intense manhunt.
http://www.citizen.on.ca/news/2006/0831/Columns/031.html

 

[x117236]

Thanks. I saw a tv show about the Blackburns this weekend that briefly mentioned David Snow and Caroline Case, but didn't say if she was ever found.

 

[CrimeSolver]

No problem. Yeah, Snow was quite a piece of work.

 

[CrimeSolver]

●On Thursday, July 31st, 1986, William Dawe Norman was found murdered in the small rooming house he shared with five others at 606 Greenwood Ave., just south of Danforth Ave. The frail 68-year-old widower, who, neighbours said, kept to himself and liked to drink beer and listen to country music in his backyard, had been stabbed several times in the chest with a pair of scissors.
No further information, but the murder was still unsolved when it was last mentioned in the newspaper in a year-end roundup of murder cases.

●46-year-old Larry Arnold disappeared on the evening of October 14th, 1994 from the Traxx gay bar at Yonge and Wellesley Sts. He was last seen in the company of a young man. Arnold’s badly beaten, decomposed body was found on November 19th in a ravine near Roxborough Dr. and Mt. Pleasant Rd. Arnold’s companion that evening was described as white, 25, stocky, 5’8”, 200 lbs, with long blond curly hair and blue eyes, and having a French Canadian accent. The man was believed to be a male prostitute, and Toronto police conferred with police agencies across North America believing the man may have been responsible for other murders of gay men. It is not known if any progress was made on that front.
Arnold, who lived in Chatham, a town 300 km southwest of Toronto, often came to Toronto to visit friends and go to bars and restaurants in Toronto’s gay district, Church and Wellesley Sts.

●At about 5 a.m. on Saturday, August 12th, 1978, 21-year-old Debbie Silverman was abducted in the hallway of her apartment building at 4854 Bathurst St. near Finch Ave. W. She had just come home from a night out with friends and was entering her apartment building when the abductor struck. Some of her belongings were found strewn in the hallway.
Silverman’s body was found on November 12th, 1978 in a shallow grave near Sunderland, Ontario, about 80 km northeast of Toronto.
There is a $50,000 reward in this case:
http://www.opp.ca/Intranetdev/groups/public/documents/investigative/opp_000964.pdf
http://www.drps.ca/internet_explorer/whatsnew/unsolvedcases_view.asp?ID=49

●On the night of Saturday, July 9th, 1960, a freight train hit a car that was parked, lights out, across the tracks on Fifth Line in Albion Township (now Caledon), about 40 km northwest of Toronto. Lying across the back seat of the car was the body of 29-year-old Socrates Scott Pappas, a music teacher at Faywood elementary school in North York.
Pappas’s death wasn’t classified a homicide until his body was exhumed in early August and an autopsy revealed he had been dead before the train collided with his car. He had died of a ruptured liver, probably as a result of a kick. Pappas’s neighbours on Belsize Dr. came forward and attested to seeing the victim in his car fighting with a heavily built man at about 12:30 a.m., roughly three-and-a-half hours before the train crash. One neighbour said she approached the car but retreated after hearing moaning.
The victim’s wife, Freda, came under suspicion after it was learned she and her husband had been in a contentious dispute over divorce proceedings for some time.
Police said at the time they had a strong suspicion of who was responsible, but they had not enough evidence or witnesses, and the person they suspected had retained a lawyer and refused to cooperate.

●35-year-old Trinidadian immigrant Hirmal Ramnanan was found dead in his second-floor apartment on Avenue Rd. near Eglinton Ave. W. on Saturday, August 7th, 1982. The man’s nude body was found by police after they were alerted by neighbours disturbed by the man’s stereo, which had been blaring all night. Ramnanan had been tied up and stabbed several times. No further information.