Cold Case Vancouver: The City's Most Baffling Unsolved Murders by Eve Lazarus (Arsenal Pulp Press). Vancouver Police Museum - Book reading and discussion at the morgue, tonight 7 p.m. No tickets required. Standing room with seating for 20 people.
In her latest book, Cold Case Vancouver, Eve Lazarus goes beyond the tabloid headlines to learn more about the murder victims and their personal stories in some of the city's most infamous crimes.
Lazarus conducted new interviews with family, friends and police who were connected with the cases at the time. Her writing brings an immediacy to stories that in some cases have been forgotten for decades. She's chosen to look at crimes between 1944 and 1996 including five with North Shore connections.
The North Vancouver writer spoke to the North Shore News about her book and some of the work that was involved in researching the cold cases.
North Shore News: You specialize in history in your writing. What drew you to the subject matter in Cold Case Vancouver?
Eve Lazarus: I've written about murders in each of my last three books, so I've probably been collecting murder stories for over a decade now. I found the ones that really disturbed me were the unsolved ones. When I was writing about the Pauls murder for Sensational Vancouver I came across a woman called Evelyn Roche who had been murdered in 1958 about three months before the Pauls. It really bothered me what happened to her and I wanted to find out what happened to her two kids. I really wanted to write a book about people and not just their murders but who they were and what happened to their families afterwards and to put it all in a historical context.
North Shore News: There's literally hundreds of unsolved murders how did you narrow it down to the ones you cover in the book?
Eve Lazarus: They almost chose me. There's a lot of gang and drug-related murders and I took those out not because (they were any less significant) but what I really found chilling was people in the wrong place at the wrong time: children who were abducted, a gay man who was killed in 1954. Just random acts which are really the hardest to solve for the police. Nine out of 10 victims know their murderer but I'm looking at the one per cent who didn't.
North Shore News: Senseless and psychotic are two words that come to mind when reading the individual stories. One thing that's missing in each case is the identity of the killer. Every story is different but they all have that in common. At some point you think there is going to be some sort of resolution but there never is.
Eve Lazarus: The last chapter is actually a solved murder. I did that for a number of reasons. It does get really gruesome reading all these stories with no ending and also I didn't want it to be a police-bashing book.
The last chapter was really fascinating to me because it was a cold case about a 15-year-old boy who was killed in 2000 and the police ended up solving the case several years later.
This case shows the lengths that police will go to in solving a murder, particularly when there is a child involved. In this case they had a partial fingerprint from the murderer, they had his DNA and they ended up doing a Mr. Big sting operation because they didn't have enough evidence to bring him to trial.
North Shore News: There are theories about guilt attached to some of the crimes with fairly solid leads such as the abduction and murders of the three seven-year-old girls. Those are chilling accounts which suggest a serial killer was involved.
Eve Lazarus: In the '70s a lot of young women were murdered and the RCMP did form a group looking for a serial killer as it seems there were a few operating at that time.
North Shore News: The first story in your book was the last you worked on - the Jennie Conroy case. That story has a little bit of everything.
Eve Lazarus: Yes, it came to me from the North Vancouver Museum and Archives.
North Shore News: Were you familiar with the case before they brought it to your attention?
Eve Lazarus: I'd never heard of it before. I wrote up an item for my blog Every Place has a Story: about how the archives had come into possession of this "mystery" album and the little that they'd found out about it. That Jennie Conroy had owned the album, that she was murdered in 1944, and that her murder was never solved. The next day Jennie's niece Debbie, got in contact with me, told me that Jennie was an unwed mother, and put me in touch with Mary, her adopted daughter, who was living in New Zealand.
North Shore News: In the Jennie Conroy case there was a suspect, a grocer, but the police seemed either inept or indifferent and nothing was ever done about her murder.
Eve Lazarus: That was a story that came up in the '50s where a former police officer who had worked on the case mentioned that he was a viable suspect in the case but the police had never pursued it. Mary, Jennie's daughter, visited Vancouver in 2003. When she talked to the police they told her that the file had been lost decades ago.
North Shore News: In several of the stories you talk to family members. What approach do you take in your research with people who were close to the victims?
Eve Lazarus: I think in almost all of the cases they wanted to have the story of their loved one out there. Not just the murders but the stories about them.
A lot of the victims were treated really badly, especially Jennie Conroy, who was an unwed mother. When police leaked that to the media they almost blamed her for her own murder, suggesting that she somehow deserved it. In the Evelyn Roche murder, the media printed that she had a drink or two before she went out, making it sound like she was an unfit mother who went out to party.
North Shore News: Jennie Conroy is one of five cases that involve North Shore victims. In a couple of the cases you know people who were connected to the victims.
Eve Lazarus: Rhona Duncan's 16-year-old boyfriend at the time is a former neighbour of mine, his daughter is good friends with my daughter. It was really interesting to talk to him about how the police treated him as a suspect at first, and how when DNA came on the scene in the 1990s they reinvestigated the case.
North Shore News: Even though Rhona Duncan was murdered in the '70s there's an immediacy about the story. All the locations still exist it's as if it happened yesterday. You can picture her walking home after the party, after the police kicked everybody out.
Eve Lazarus: I think of her when I drive down past Larson and Bewicke. That's where she was killed. It seems so real nothing has really changed around that area.
North Shore News: You change some of the names in retelling her story.
Eve Lazarus: The girl who held the party wanted her name changed and there were a couple of others who didn't want their names mentioned. They were at the party with Rhona and there's still a lot of guilt left, a lot of them felt they should have been able to do something to stop her murder.
I was talking to another neighbour and she said, 'I was in her French class at Carson Graham. I didn't really know her but I knew who she was to say hello to.' She gave me the annual for that year, that's where the photo came from, so it was really closely connected.
North Shore News: A lot of people will be familiar with that story.
Eve Lazarus: I think so. Shawn, her boyfriend at the time, says a group of friends still get together and try to figure out who murdered her, and why certain people refused to give their DNA.
North Shore News: In that particular case it seems like the police had almost too much information as you say there was DNA of hundreds of suspects but no one has been caught. And not everyone gave their DNA because they cannot be forced to do that.
Eve Lazarus: The Good Earth murder was a random act that devastated a Deep Cove family. Brenda Young lived there and worked at Lower Lonsdale.
The murderer was probably the man who was seen by witnesses in the store but there was never an arrest made. I was talking to an RCMP officer earlier this year and he said they thought they may have found her murderer. This guy was in jail for murdering at least one other woman, he wouldn't tell me how many. The officer said in the time they discovered that he was a viable suspect and went off to interview him, that he died in jail. I asked him why he couldn't just take a DNA sample because she was stabbed in the store, but he said that hadn't kept any of the evidence, that there was nothing to compare it to.
North Shore News: The one suspect who was caught was through fingerprints.
Eve Lazarus: That was through luck, serendipity basically. The murder was in Kamloops and it had gone cold and they had a partial fingerprint and some DNA on duct tape. There was a snatch and grab on Davie Street by a guy who tried to snatch a woman's purse. A policeman had just happened to be there on the scene at the time. He caught him took him in and had him fingerprinted. The fingerprint was sent back to Ottawa and the same woman that had got the partial print from the murder in 2000 also processed this print and remembered it. It wasn't a full match but it was just enough for her to send it back to the police in Kamloops and they agreed to reinvestigate this murder.
North Shore News: Muriel Lindsay grew up in West Vancouver. Her story is all about context and the randomness of fate. Her family was really connected to Vancouver's history including the murder of her great-grandfather.
Eve Lazarus: That was a particularly sad one. I talked to her brother. Everybody felt that her case wasn't well investigated. She was a bipolar woman having difficulties and it was thought the police could have put more into it than they did.
North Shore News: The Masee case is different than most of the other stories in that there were people who probably were out to get them. They may have had enemies through Nick Masee's work.
Eve Lazarus: Police still don't know if the Masee's are missing or murdered, because their bodies were never found. Conceivably they could be sipping Mai-Tais in Hawaii, but Nick Masee had some sketchy connections at the Vancouver Stock Exchange and it sounds more likely that he had got into something shady or a deal had gone bad.
