Clifford Olson
Vancouver, British Columbia,Canada
Died September 30, 2011(aged 71)
Laval, Quebec, Canada
Cause of death Cancer
Conviction Murder
Sentence Life imprisonment
Country Canada
Date apprehended August 12, 1981The First Victim
Monday, November 17th, 1980 Christine Anne Weller
It was a murky mid-November afternoon as 12-year-old Christine Weller quickly pedaled the 10-speed, making her way home to the Bonanza Motel in the sprawling, rainy hinterlands of Surrey, B.C., 15 miles from the city of Vancouver. It was not unusual for the blue-eyed, happy-go-lucky tomboy to be playing outside since she loved the wide-open spaces. She also liked going into the shops, especially Surrey Place Mall. A new section of the mall had opened and she was meeting a friend after school on that fateful rainy Monday afternoon.
She spent a couple of hours chatting with friends and wandering around the mall, something that the kids did for amusement. By 5 p.m., late for supper, Christine borrowed a friends bicycle to quickly make the three-minute, downhill ride to unit No. Two of the motel where she lived with her parents. She never got there.
Her parents assumed that she was staying at a friends house, as she had done several times before. It took the better part of a week before they filed a missing persons report. Even then, Christine was treated as a runaway. When the police found the bicycle behind an animal hospital on King George Highway, just a few blocks from the motel, they knew something was terribly wrong.
On Christmas Day, a man walking his dog along a dike found her ravaged body at the back of a dump, just north of River Road, along the Fraser River in nearby Richmond. Christine had multiple stab wounds in the chest and abdomen, and had been throttled with a belt.
Unbeknown to law enforcement, Christines death was the first in a series of brutal murders that would claim the lives of at least 10 more youngsters of both sexes, between the ages nine and 18, from the greater Vancouver area. The police would eventually identify her as the first victim.
Clifford Olson Jr.
Clifford Robert Olson Jr. made it into the newspapers the day he was born, January 1st, 1940. He was one of the celebrated New Years babies at St. Pauls Hospital, Vancouver, B.C. Born at 10:10 p.m. to Clifford and Leona Olson, they missed out on the big New Year baby prizes, a silver spoon and a case of canned milk, receiving instead the consolation prizes, a baby book and a dainty gift from Cunningham Drug Store.
An ordinary couple, Leona grew up in the Prairies before moving to Vancouver, getting work at a local fish cannery while Clifford Sr. delivered milk in one of the last of the areas horse-drawn wagons. They lived in a small house near the Pacific National Exhibition grounds on the East Side when Clifford was born.
The Olson family moved to Edmonton, Alberta, returning to the West Coast after the war when Clifford Jr. was five years old. Olson Sr. settled the family in a modest one-story house on Gilmore Crescent in the sprouting suburb of Richmond in an 80-home community built by the government for its servicemen after World War II. Little Clifford started school at Bridgeport Elementary.
Early on, Olson earned a reputation as a show-off. When I taught him, declared a former teacher, he deliberately misbehaved to be the center of attention. Sometimes it was almost as if he wanted to be caught. He was also skipping classes by the time he was 10 years old and by age 15 had failed his grade several times. He was jailed for the first time just after finishing Grade 8.
It was hard for anyone to get a word in edgewise when Olson was around. His compulsive talking was just one of the ways in which he controlled people. Forever the smart-alec, a loner, and a bully at heart, he never did have any close friends. Always in trouble, it was a lark for him to sell out-of-date lottery tickets door to door, steal milk money left on porches, and torment the local dogs and cats. It was rumored that he had smothered two local pet rabbits.
In 1956, he left Cambie Junior High School to work at the Landsdown Racetrack and by age 17, Olsons criminal career went into high gear. Over the next 24 years, he chalked up 83 convictions: obstructing justice; possession of stolen property; possession of firearms; forgery; false pretenses; fraud; parole violation; impaired driving; theft; break, enter and theft; armed robbery; escape from lawful custody.
He was sentenced to the New Haven Borstal Correctional Center in Burnaby in July, 1957, for B&E and theft. He escaped just long enough to go back to Richmond and steal a power boat, get caught, and be sent to Haney Correctional Centre. In fact, while continually involved in burglary, fraud, and theft during his youth and into his adulthood, he managed to stay out of prison only a few months at a stretch.
By the time Olson was 41 years old, he had spent only four years of his adult life as a free man. A petty but chronic offender, prison became a revolving door for him. The Lower Mainland Regional Correctional Institute in Burnaby, known locally as Oakalla, was just one of the many prisons in which Olson spent a lot of time.
He escaped seven times between 1957 and 1968. When granted parole in 1959 and 1972, it would be continually revoked due to Olsons incessant criminal conduct.
Olson was stabbed seven times by a gang of prisoners while in Prince Albert Penitentiary for informing on two convicts planning to smuggle drugs, and managed to persuade the Saskatchewan Criminal Compensation Board to award him $3,500 because of his unusual degree of moral and physical courage.
Olsons siblings, two younger brothers and a sister, grew up to be law biding, middle-class citizens, but Clifford was always in some type of trouble with the law. No one could explain why Olson was the way he was, explains Ian Mulgrew in Final Payoff. Like many psychopaths, there was virtually no traumatic event in his childhood that could be identified as the trigger of his homicidal rage. His parents had simply become inured to the regular visits from police officers, the shame of the newspaper reports and the continued disruptions their sons behavior caused in their lives. They tried to help him out when they could, but they had long since given up hope of rehabilitating him. They aimed only to limit the damage he did to their lives.
Spring Break
The police probe of Christine Wellers murder continued when another young Surrey girl disappeared.
Thursday, April 16, 1981 Colleen Marian Daignault
Colleen Daignault wouldnt talk to just anybody, shy as she was. A shade over 5 feet, the 13-year-old girl, with her lovely long brown hair and fresh face, smiled sweetly in her missing persons photo. She had told her granny that she would be home about 4 oclock in the afternoon, returning from a girlfriends house after spending the night.
Dressed for a fine spring day, she wore a colorful red and white jacket, blue jeans, and white running shoes. Two buses would take her home to Old Yale Road in Surrey, near the Scott Road exit on the Surrey side of the Patullo Bridge that spanned the Fraser River.
Around 1 oclock, while waiting at the bus stop in nearby North Delta, a car pulled up. Clifford Olson called to her from the car window, catching her attention.
Three days later, Colleen was reported missing. The Mounties treated her case as a runaway. With about 300 missing persons reports filed in the Vancouver area every month, Colleen was just another statistic.
It wasnt until September 17th that the skull and skeletal remains of Colleen were found in an isolated Surrey forest, east of 144th Street near 26th Avenue, not far from the American border.
Years later, Colleens sister, Coreen, remembers her as always doing her homework and getting good grades. Just three days before Colleens birthday, Coreen was called to identify her clothes. There was only half a bra, but I recognized the red Adidas T-shirt that she borrowed from me.
Only five days after Colleens disappearance, a 16-year-old boy went missing.
Wednesday, April 22, 1981 Daryn Todd Johnsrude
Also on Easter school break 16-year-old, Daryn Johnsrude vanished. He had been in Vancouver for only two days. His mother flew him to the West Coast as a birthday gift. It was a much-anticipated visit to Coquitlam with her and his 9-year-old sister and 12-year-old brother. The easy going, 5-foot-5-inch, 90-pound boy had traveled from Saskatchewan where he lived with his father. He planned to finish his school year, and then come back to live with his mother and find work. Their home was only a half-block away from the Coquitlam housing complex where Olson moved.
Daryn was last seen in a drug store at the bustling Burquitlam Plaza buying a package of cigarettes. As his luck would have it that day, it was also one of the two shopping malls used as a hang out by several children living at Olsons complex.
There were many other younger boys and girls in the complex who didnt like Olson very much either, writes Jon Ferry and Damian Inwood in The Olson Murders. Behind his back, they called him `the creepy bogey man or `candy man. The tragedy was that there were so many more that could be taken in by him. With his easy smile and fierce brown eyes, no one would deny he had a certain animal magnetism. When he wasnt cruising around in his car for pickups, Olson hung around with the kids at the Burquitlam or Lougheed Mall shopping centers. He seemed to have a huge emotional and physical need for young children.
On May 2nd, Daryns bludgeoned body was found lying beside a lonely dike at Deroche, a small rural community east of Vancouver, seven miles east of Mission on the north bank of the Fraser River. His body lay crumpled at the bottom of a rocky embankment. The coroner said the boy died from repeated hammer blows to the head.
It was a confusing case. Olson varied both the sex and the age of his victims. This was one of the problems for investigators, given what was known about sex offenders in the 80s. Experts believed that predators targeted victims of one sex and age bracket. Consequently, the Mounties did not link Daryns case to the murdered girls.
Gotcha!
�I can well understand why those kids got into a car with him; he really had the gift of the gab.
An RCMP officer.
Hey lemme buy ya a beer after work, Olson would say to a youngster. It was just one of the verbal traps he used to get potential victims to a secluded location or talk them into going to a motel room. He plied them with alcohol and drugs, making them virtually helpless. Some he raped, and then released, but many of the victims he killed.
Even with Olsons small frame, at 5 feet 7 inches, 169 pounds, he would have found it easy to overpower the younger boys and girls. Posing as a construction contractor and handing out a Hale & Olson Construction business card, he impressed the youngsters, especially with the promise of work.
A compelling, anonymous story on the Internet, entitled I Survived Clifford Olson, reveals some of the other ways that Olson enticed the young people to trust him:
On a promise of $5.00 per hour for landscaping labor he hired several of us skinny kids while turning away what I thought to be stronger more suitable workers. Olson raped some of the boys by first singling out a person for special duties...and slowly gaining the confidence and respect of each individual by bragging about how bad he was and how he used to be. He used money or recreational rewards as bribes, even before the sexual activities occurred. Gift giving was one way of courting a child.
He would pick up victims at bus stops, walking on the street, riding a bicycle, or hitchhiking - often with promises of work, enticing the youngsters into his car. According to Dr. Kim Rossmo, geographical programming expert, Some he would drive home, some he would sexually assault, others he would murder. Olson himself doesnt seem to know why he killed those he did; on some occasions he has stated they were murdered so they would not report the assault to the police, and on others he has blamed his use of alcohol and pills.
Olson describes how a serial killer selects his victims and crime sites. By doing this in the third person, profilers contend that the information will be more substantial and will reflect their crimes, as did serial killer Ted Bundy in his collaboration with profiler Dr. Robert Keppel Ted Bundy And I Hunt For The Green River Killer, published in 1995 with William Birnes.
In an unpublished manuscript that Olson wrote on serial killers, with numerous misspellings and grammatical errors, Olson talks in the third person about selecting victims:
�In cases a lot are just encountered by the serial killer who is hunting for the victim he needs. As for how are they stalked, approached, attacked, and trapped, each serial killers has his own personal mode and manner or form of current style and fashion ...the serial killer kills strangers 95 percent of the time because as the safest target in terms of avoiding detection.... Children: young boys and girls are frequently desirable victims by the serial killer for sex.... Most serial killers have selected there murder scenes by the place they take there victims to: as for the relevant geographic areas selected by the offender (serial killer) this depends on the seasons, and were the serial killer is killing. In fact, most of their victims are strangers although at times family members and acquaintances are slain.
Serial killer John Wayne Gacy killed young boys, claiming that he too found it easy to find victims anywhere: motels, clubs, parking lots, grocery stores, and if kids are the target, in schools, shopping malls, arcades or on the streets. He believed that he could drive anywhere, see what he wanted, and just get it.
Shadow Victims
Clifford Olson set his sights on Joan Hale at the popular Cariboo Hotel Lougheed Village pub, known locally as the Cariboo. In 1980, the Cariboos country and western d�cor, complete with wagon wheels mounted on the wall, muted lighting, and smoke-filled lounge atmosphere, attracted the locals from various middle class professions.
Joan did not know at first that Olson was just out of prison, but when she found out, it didnt bother her. She thought him charming and loved his beautiful brown eyes. Within an hour, she was smitten. Olson moved in with Joan three days later.
�It was something I thought I needed, Joan explained later in a courtroom defending a lawsuit against her. I needed that companionship, I thought, and I needed someone to protect me from my husband because he was coming around and bothering me. And Clifford seemed the perfect solution.
Joan became pregnant and they planned to marry. A month before the wedding, they had a son, Clifford Olson III. As his father before him, Olson also caused a ruckus just before his sons birth, getting into a shouting match at the Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster. It was already a pattern. Early on, he bilked Joan of her $43,000 divorce settlement, and went on a two-month spending spree. He became violent, and even more so after the news of her pregnancy. He got drunk more often and began to beat her. In a dramatic escalation of violence, Olson had already killed three children, one five days after the birth of his son.
Incredibly, the night before the wedding, Olson babysat several children while his fianc�e went out to celebrate with her girlfriends. He sent the older ones to the store to buy bubble gum while he allegedly assaulted a 5-year-old girl. Olson was asked to go to the Coquitlam RCMP detachment because the mother had complained. He went to the station and denied the incident. The child was too young to testify and the police did not have enough evidence to charge him.
The couple was married on May 15, 1981, at the Peoples Full Gospel Church in Surrey. They had regularly attended a fundamentalist church, but changed to another branch when word got out that Olson had sexually abused several of the children. He had been caught sodomizing a young boy in a sauna. No complaints were filed.
The Mounties would eventually find out how he was incapacitating the youngsters. Late in May, Olson was arrested for impaired driving and for contributing to juvenile delinquency. He crashed his car with his 16-year-old female passenger in Agassiz, a farming hamlet in the Valley about an hour from Vancouver. Olson had picked her up in the Cottonwood Avenue and North Road area of Coquitlam, Daryn Johnsrude and Olsons neighborhood. Although the young girl could not be convinced that Olson was a sex offender, she did tell the police that he had offered her a job, had bought her drinks and given her pills. She palmed one of the tiny emerald knock-out pills, later giving it to the police. The laboratory identified it as chloral hydrate, commonly known as knock-out drops or a Mickey Finn.
Tuesday, May 19, 1981 Sandra Lynn Wolfsteiner
Already on the hunt a mere four days after his wedding day, Olson picked up 16-year-old Sandra Wolfsteiner, who lived with her sister in Langley. The pretty, hazel-eyed brunette went to visit her boyfriend to take him to lunch on the Fraser Highway in Surrey. After visiting with his mother for a while, around 11:30 a.m., she made her way to the highway to hitchhike to the auto body shop up the road.
A mere 50 yards from the farmhouse, the boyfriends mother watched Sandy get picked up by a man in a silver-gray, two-door medium-sized car, probably one of Olsons rental cars. He may have offered a job to her because Sandra was seen by a friend as she closed her account at the Royal Bank in Langley. She reportedly said that she had a good job cleaning windows for $13 an hour and that she would get to drive a Trans Am.
Olson persuaded Sandy to go to his cabin in the woods, up the Valley. He drove into the dense bush just off Chilliwack Lake Road. While walking into the woods, he smashed her head from behind. Olson later said he was enraged to find that she had less than $10 in her pockets. She told me she had $100.
The police considered her to be just another runaway. At the early stage, said an RCMP briefing document, it was felt she was simply a missing youth and there was no suspicion of foul play.
They couldnt have been further from the truth.
'I Drive 'em Nuts!'
�It was top of the line for Clifford Robert Olson when it came to office stationery and business cards. When he ordered, he ordered nothing but the best; trouble is, he never paid for them.
In his own words.
The B.C. Penitentiary, an imposing granite fortress along the main thoroughfare between Coquitlam and New Westminster, loomed over the industrial area of the Fraser River and the Patullo Bridge that crosses over to Surrey. The system provided a second home for Olson.
When the B.C. Pen was scheduled to be torn down in 1981, the draconian buildings were opened to the public, simply for curiosity. In Profile of a Serial Killer The Clifford Robert Olson Story, an unpublished manuscript written by Olson, he explained, taking third person perspective, why he too decided to take a last look:
Olson, in spite of his many years in prison, paid a sentimental visit to the Old B.C. Penitentiary when it was opened to the public before closing down in 1981. Unfortunately for Olson this one last look at one of his old homes cost him his freedom. Olson trooped into the 102-year-old building with thousands of other sightseers for a prison tour, unaware there was a Canada-wide warrant out for his arrest. So when he peeked into the cell which had been his home for several years, he was recognized by one of these former guards and was quickly arrested by the New Westminster city police. Olson had last been in the B.C. Pen serving four years and nine months for a variety of offenses including theft, forgery and false pretences. His nostalgic return to the Old B.C. Pen cost Olson another month in the Matsqui before his sentence finally expired.
He loved to play the system maintaining, I drive em nuts! In the words of several of his custodians, they couldnt agree more. He demanded constant attention and made life tough for everyone. He was universally loathed but somehow managed to survive. Some of the law officers at Matsqui Institution characterized him as a con man, not as a killer. He was seen as a thief, a false-pretense artist, a garrulous, extroverted, egotistical kind of person, but not as a sexual offender, said a former parole worker.
Olson was adept at playing the con game, knowing his way through the system. For many years, Olson reveled in petty crime. Initially, his record showed him to be a thief and fraud artist. His early years, 1957 to 1974, from the time he was an adolescent, were riddled with break-ins, escapes, and robberies. But, it did not stop there. Olsons deviant sexual side was also developing.
Olson started exhibiting more violent behavior in and out of the penitentiary. While in B.C. Pen in 1974, he repeatedly and persistently sexually attacked a 17-year-old fellow inmate. And in 1978, while on the outside, he indecently assaulted a seven-year-old girl in Sydney, Nova Scotia. When he actually began his murderous rampage, he was on bail for sex and firearms charges with pending child abuse charges in Nova Scotia, although the warrant could not be enforced outside of the province.
Back in prison once again in 1978, a deviant sexual side started to show while serving a two-year sentence for fraud, possession of stolen property, and possession of housebreaking instruments.The Olson Murders mention his reputation while incarcerated:
During those seven years Olsons prison style changed. To some he was known as Bobo, a man who viciously muscled or buggered young inmates. To others he became knows as The Senator. This was because he honed his cell-room lawyers skills, by writing incessantly to both federal and provincial politicians with a barrage of complaints about prison conditions. He was also a `stoolie, a person who would inform on anyone for any reason. This trait made him unpopular with both inmates and guards and he eventually needed protective custody.
Olson was moved to the Super Maximum Unit (SMU), commonly known as the Penthouse, the rat and rapo unit, where the most despised cons were housed. It was here that he met accused child-killer Gary Francis Marcoux.
The 'Penthouse'
Olson was an informer on the outside of the prison walls and a snitch on the inside. While in the Penthouse, he enticed rapist-murderer Gary Francis Marcoux to discuss the murder of a little girl, in written form, and eventually used it as evidence against him in a court of law. These letters and maps that were passed between Olson and Marcoux not only helped convict Marcoux, but taught Olson his own future method of operation.
Marcoux dumped the body of nine-year-old Jeanna Doove at Weaver Lake, a popular camping area in the coastal mountains overlooking the valley east of Vancouver. The letters between them described in graphic detail how Marcoux lured the little girl to his car from her trailer court in Mission, some 50 yards from the Genesis Halfway House where he was living, bought her ice cream, then raped, strangled, and mutilated her, leaving her tied to a large tree near Weaver Lake. He also described a nearby back road that connected to Pemberton and Whistler. He even provided maps on how to drive to the murder site. She was found on the July 1 Canadian holiday.
By January 1981, especially since Olsons release on mandatory supervision, a more sinister and frightening persona had emerged. He had charges in different jurisdictions. The Squamish charges included rape, buggery, and gross indecency; the Richmond charges consisted of buggery and indecent assault on a male; a May incident at Agassiz with a young girl; and a July indecent assault of another young girl.
Early in Olsons criminal career, after he had escaped from Shaughnessy Hospital, his parents made an appeal to the media: Id like him to give himself up, said Olson Sr., But he knows what hes facing. He might have to serve 10 years. If he doesnt give himself up, I hope they get him before he does something really bad. Hes done bad enough now.
�Hes a coward by himself, said his mother, knowing her Clifford to be a show off. Hes got to have a partner. Clifford never does anything alone.
In retrospect, Olsons mother was partially right. Olson in his prison partnership with Marcoux had developed a taste and a methodology for killing. Olson bragged in his unpublished manuscript that he started as a petty thief and graduated from the Canadian prison system as a prolific killer.
Ada Court
5th Sunday, June 21, 1981 Ada Court
On a sunny Sunday morning, Ada caught a bus to meet her boyfriend. Then, she simply vanished. Burnaby police were baffled. Nothing was missing from her locker at Cascade Heights Elementary School and there was no evidence that she packed any belongings from home.
Fifty-two-year-old Jim Parranto, a White Rock resident, believed he saw Olson disposing of Adas body. Interestingly, this was not the first time that someone saw Olson as he disposed of a body, but the people involved did not understand what they were witnessing. It would later be discovered that Olsons vehicle had been stuck in the mud at least twice while disposing of two bodies. In one case, he even called a tow truck.
The Olson Murders relates the events with Parranto: It was at about 8 p.m. on June 21 when the logging camp chef was driving through Weaver Lake, a popular picnic area. He turned a corner and saw a man beside a black pick-up truck, bending over the body of a young girl in a multi-colored sweater.
I thought he was in trouble and I pulled up. I got out of the car and spoke to him and he turned around and looked at me. He wouldnt answer me when I talked to him. He just stared at me and I could see something wasnt right. I got back in the car. I thought, `hey, Im getting out of here. After a harrowing chase by Olson, Parranto swerved onto a logging road leading to the Eagle River forestry camp where he worked, losing Olson on the road. A month or two later he reported what he saw to the White Rock RCMP.
Two months later, after Olsons arrest, dental charts confirmed that a skull and upper jawbone found by searchers near Weaver Lake in the Agassiz area belonged to Ada Court.
Parranto was asked if he was sure that he was looking at the serial murderer.
�It was Olson, he replied. I was staring him right in the face.
By the end of June, Olson had murdered five children but only two bodies had been recovered: Christine Weller in Richmond and Daryn Johnsrude at Deroche, near Mission. But Christine Wellers murder had not been connected to Daryn Johnsrudes and Olsons other victims had not yet been found.
Suspected
The Mounties already had Olson in their sights in early July as a prime suspect while they were probing the Ada Court disappearance. He was a suspect of the basis of his previous record of assaults and sex crimes, said Det. Dennis Tarr, Delta municipal police fraud investigator. He was a good suspect. The probabilities were certainly there.
6th Thursday, July 2, 1981 Simon Partington
It was the disappearance of a nine-year-old Surrey boy, Simon Partington that was the turning point in The Case of the Missing Lower Mainland Children. The police could hardly list him as a runaway, given his young age and angelic-looking face. Police were sure that the slight, 4-foot-2-inch, 80-pound boy had been abducted.
At about 10:30 a.m., after Simons usual big breakfast of cornflakes, he dressed in blue jeans and a blue T-shirt, hopped on his bike, with his brand new orange Snoopy book in the bikes basket, and headed for a friends house. He never arrived. He disappeared only a few blocks from where Christine Weller was last seen alive. One of his school projects, a story he wrote called The Hungry Tiger and the Gullible Duck, foreshadowed his untimely death.
An emotional public outcry spurred the police into high gear. The Mounties launched the biggest manhunt in Canadian history. At its height, as many as 200 officers worked on the case. The police had to admit that Simon was the victim of foul play, and the media began to note that news editors had underplayed the spate of earlier disappearances in Vancouvers suburbs. It was the tragic disappearance of this charming child that ultimately symbolized the horror of the series of child slayings.
Olson did not appear phased by all the media attention. Five days after killing the nine-year-old, he picked up a 16-year-old girl and her friend. After the usual offer of a window-washing job at $10 an hour, he persuaded one of the girls to go with him alone. Olson plied her with liquor and fondled her. When the girl resisted, Olson stopped. Later, when he was charged with indecent assault on this girl, the police still did not tie him to Partingtons disappearance or the murders of Johnsrude and Weller.
Still, the death of Simon Partington just didnt seem to fit a pattern. Crown prosecutor John Hall later remarked: It just doesnt fit, it doesnt fit still. I never could figure that one out.
The reticence of police departments to link cases of serial murder is very common. Several reasons are generally offered for this linkage blindness: over dependence on generalized patterns and profiles provided by experts, the tendency to assume that most missing children are runaways, and concern that recognizing that a serial killer is at work in the community will have serious negative affects on police department resources, budgets and media scrutiny. Linkage blindness has allowed serial killers to go on murdering months and sometimes years longer because it has delayed alerting the public to the danger of an active serial predator and the mobilization of police resources to catch the murderer.
The Beast of B.C.
�The beast can take over to complete an identity if you leave a hole in yourself. In other words, it seeks a vacuum. In a healthy person the vacuum doesnt exist. Theres a sense of identity that prevents a need for the dark awareness.
A homicide offender describes his experience of the development of this dark side of the human psyche
Children are easy prey. Well aware of this, Clifford Olson took advantage of their innocence. He later told police that he quickly figured out that teenagers were alike, that they will tell you just about anything if you look and talk like you were interested in hiring them. Most were eager to get a job. Being the classic hardened con enabled him to control many situations. The confidence game gave him the opportunity to shield his real motives. He was used to getting his way, one way or another.
He appeared pleasant, friendly, even charming, openly approaching the children. However, his goal, far from friendly, was to gain their confidence until he was in a position to overcome any resistance.
Olson picks up the kids and offers them a job, said Cpl. Les Forsythe, Burnaby RCMP. He tells them hes a construction contractor and takes them to building sites to show them the jobs. Thats the line. He gets their confidenceand remember hes good at that. Hes shrewd. Hes not dumb. Hes not a bad-looking individual. He could be somebodys dad. These kids would follow along and hed offer them drugs, or a drink, or a beer. This is after hes felt them out and knows that he can probably do it with a degree of safety.
Robert Shantz, who would serve as Olsons defense lawyer for the child slayings, intended to show that his client had adopted Marcoux personality. Some evidence supported this theory:
��������������������� Olson left five children in the same Weaver Lake-Mission area that Marcoux used for his victim.
��������������������� One of the children was found close to where Marcouxs victim, Jeanna Doove, died.
��������������������� Olson used the same type of ruse to pick up some of his victims.
��������������������� Olson killed one of the victims at Whistler, connected to Weaver Lake by the back road Marcoux had mapped.
��������������������� Like Marcoux, Olson used strangulation to dispatch some of his victims.
��������������������� After Olsons sessions with Marcoux, Olson showed an insatiable appetite for child pornography.
More likely, Olson wanted to experience what Marcoux did. He has gone from being essentially a nobody to being a somebody now, said forensic psychiatrist Dr. Stanley Semrau. In his own eyes, he has celebrity status. He sees himself as the ultimate serial killer.
Peter Worthington, founding editor and a columnist of The Toronto Sun asked Olson after he was convicted how he compared himself with the famed fictional Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic killer of The Silence of the Lambs.
�Peter, there is no comparison, Olson replied. Hannibal Lecter is fiction, I'm real.
Addicted to Murder
�Clifford Olson some say had a Jekyll and Hyde personality who posed as a happy family man and a devout church goer, but in reality no one could see the monster ready to be let loose once he started drinking.
In his own words.
Thursday, July 9, 1981 Judy Kozma
Clifford Olson drove up North Road toward downtown New Westminster, passing the looming B.C. Penitentiary on the way, as he did many times before on this main thoroughfare through the quiet residential streets of Coquitlam. It also accessed one of his favorite haunts, the Cariboo, where he often purchased off-sale beer. He liked to drink and drive, and have his passengers drink as well.
It was not unusual to be traveling with younger people in the car as he cruised the streets. This time, 18-year-old Randy Ludlow was with him. Little did Ludlow know that only a week ago, Olson killed Simon Partington and two days before was charged with indecent assault on a 16-year-old girl. Ludlow rendered an eye-witness account of the last few hours of Judy Kozmas life.
�Between eleven and noon on July 9th I was with Olson, Ludlow confirmed. We were driving toward downtown New Westminster. Olson spotted a girl leaving a phone booth on Columbia Street in front of the Royal Columbian Hospital. He obviously knew her because he waved to her. She smiled and seemed to be happy to see him. He pulled over. She came across the street and talked with him.
Judy Kozma was on her way to Richmond to see a friend and to apply for a job at Wendys restaurant. A shy, pretty brunette, she was desperately looking for a second job. She had met Olson at McDonalds where she already worked as a part-time cashier.
Once in the car, Judy exclaimed, This is good. This will be faster than the bus. I would have had to go all through Vancouver to get there.
Olson offered the two youths the ever-present beer in his car as he drove to Richmond. They arrived long before it was time for Judys job interview and too early for her to meet her friend, so they stopped at the Richmond Inn to buy some more beer. At one point Olson handed Ludlow a big wad of money to impress Kozma, only to take it back while getting more liquor.
�When we returned to the car, Ludlow would later explain, Judy sat in the front passenger seat. I sat in back. Olson offered Judy a job cleaning windows at ten dollars an hour.
Leslie Holmes and Bruce Northorp in Where Shadows Linger tell what happened next: They returned to New Westminster where Olson bought a bottle of rum at the liquor store near the foot of 10th Street. He returned to the car with the rum, coke, and plastic glasses. On Olsons instructions, Randy mixed drinks for all three.
Olson encouraged Judy to have another drink, related Ludlow. She didnt want more.
Olson persisted. Give her another drink, give her another drink, he ordered.
Eventually Judy agreed to take a light one. Olson told me to mix it, said Randy. I gave her a glass of coke with no rum. I caught Judys eye and signaled it was only coke.
Judy took a sip and said, This is really strong.
Olson looked at me and nodded, indicating I had done well by giving her a stiff drink, Ludlow continued.
Olson then gave Judy some tiny green pills, saying, Here, take these, theyll straighten you out. They keep you from getting drunk. She took the pills.
Olson parked in the underground garage at the complex where he lived. Ludlow and Judy stayed in the car while he went to his apartment. Ludlow reflected, This was the only time I detected any anxiety on her part. She was nervous and upset. I put it down to the fact she was fifteen years old, she had been drinking, and she was going to miss her job interview. She was crying and I wiped the tears from her eyes. Olson returned shortly and she seemed her old self again.
Olson then dropped Ludlow off at the Lougheed Mall.
The next time I saw Olson he said he dropped her off at Richmond. I learned much later he killed Judy, then went on vacation the next day. Olson took Joan and little Clifford to Knotts Berry Farm near Los Angeles in the U.S. until July 21.
More Disappearances
A serial killer was on the loose and the people in the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley region of British Columbia were gripped with fear. In the short time span, from November 1980 to July 1981, a number of children had gone missing, and were later found dead. Parents in suburban Vancouver complained that the police were not treating reports of the missing youths seriously enough. The 200 Mounties in the Surrey detachment processed roughly 2000 missing-person cases and investigated some 18,000 criminal code offenses in those two years. Many of the juveniles turned out to be runaways, congregating on the Granville Street area downtown, while some stayed with friends or out partying past their curfew, without informing their parents. The police figured, Theyd turn up and for the most part they did.
When a child of ten or less is missing for more than a day, writes Derrick Murdoch inDisappearances, it is unlikely to be from the childs own choice. In the second half of childhood the reverse is true, particularly between the ages of eleven and fourteen when the child is dealing with emerging sexuality.... The combined totals for the next age group from fifteen up are not so high.... For the police, runaways who are over the age at which they are considered juveniles in their province (sixteen, seventeen or eighteen, as the case may be) must be treated as free agents.
The book Final Payoff explains what the policing was like then: There were roughly six thousand traffic cops, fraud investigators, homicide detectives, Indian special constables, political bodyguards, analysts and administrators in the provinces law enforcement system. Each force and detachment was a separate and distinct entity with its own internal bureaucracy, but they were expected to act in concert. That rarely happened and the problems of inter-detachment and inter-force communication was one of the reasons Cpl. Les Forsythe wanted everyone who had dealt with Olson or who might have an active missing-person file at a meeting.
Unfortunately the RCMP chain of command was undergoing dramatic upheaval in the spring and summer of 1981. The West Coast ranks were experiencing widespread staff shortages and low morale, which affected daily operations that coincided with Olsons killing spree.
July 15, 1981 Olsons name was first mentioned at a law enforcement conference
As the person responsible for Ada Courts case, Forsythe continued to build a case against Olson. In a more coordinated effort, a meeting was scheduled for RCMP officers and local police departments from Vancouver and the Lower Mainland communities of Richmond, New Westminster, Surrey, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Mission, Langley, Agassiz, and Maple Ridge. He prepared a five-page profile on Olson for the July 15 meeting with the Mission Detachment investigators: It outlined Olsons known and suspected recent criminal activities, his trait of offering his intended victims a job for ten dollars per hour, his penchant for borrowed or rented cars, and his known recent addresses in Surrey and Coquitlam.
This meeting, Les explained, is simply a brainstorming session of investigators from around the Lower Mainland who have a common interest in missing persons investigations. When the story aired, viewers took note of the polices growing concern about the missing children in the Greater Vancouver area.
The police decided to consider Olson as a suspect in The Case of the Missing Lower Mainland Children. An RCMP police-briefing document took up the story of the crucial July 15 meeting. It is stressed that at this juncture, although Olson was considered a possible suspect in the disappearances/murders, a considerable picture of uncertainty existed. It was not clear whether all the children reported missing were, in fact, genuinely missing or whether foul play had been involved. The matter of whether or not the disappearances themselves could be connected or whether they individually or collectively were connected to previous unsolved murders was also open to conjecture, although under active analysis at the time. It should be stressed here that Olson had earlier been considered as a possible suspect in the Christine Ann Weller homicide (body found in Richmond 12-25-80), and that of Mary Ellen (Marney) Jamieson homicide, which occurred in the Sechelt area on 8-7-80. He was later dropped from prominence in the Weller investigation when a stronger suspect surfaced, however Olson remained of interest to our serious crime unit in the Jamieson case.
Thursday, July 23, 1981 Raymond King Jr.
Theres just no way he could have run away, Raymond Kings father had said. He was not a runaway. The slight, sandy haired Ray King Jr. was enjoying his summer holidays and looking for his first real job. He made his routine trip to the Canada Manpower Youth Employment Centre, chaining his bike behind the building. Keen to do any type of work, he had come to the center so often over the summer that the staff was getting to know him.
Young Ray met Olson that day. Lured by a promise of work, Olson drove them along a route he frequently traveled, along Highway No. 7 towards Harrison Mills and Weaver Lake. Turning off the highway, he headed for the popular camping area then took a rough, back-country road that led to a B.C. Forest Service campground beside the Alpine Lake. He staved the boys head with rocks and then dumped the youngsters body off the steep, hillside trail.
The police did not think that the 15-year-old boy would have abandoned his bike. Usually if a kid is going to run, hell do one of three things with his bike; leave it at home, use it to make his getaway, or sell it to a friend for a few bucks, said Ed Cadenhead, deputy police chief of New Westminster.
The night that Olson killed the young boy, he had logged 403 kilometers in the car he rented from Metro in Port Coquitlam. Forever on the lookout for potential victims, he spoke to the Metro rental clerk: He offered me a job shampooing carpets in his apartment complex he said he owned at Lougheed Mall, she said. He only came in to get a car on the days he knew I worked. The job he offered was $16.60-an-hour, more than I get here, and I was supposed to let him know. Thank God I never did.
Just two days later, July 25th, Judy Kozmas body was found near Weaver Lake. Then, the killer struck again.
...
Clifford Robert Olson
Background information
Born January 1, 1940Vancouver, British Columbia,Canada
Died September 30, 2011(aged 71)
Laval, Quebec, Canada
Cause of death Cancer
Conviction Murder
Sentence Life imprisonment
Killings
Number of victims 11Country Canada
Date apprehended August 12, 1981
Monday, November 17th, 1980 Christine Anne Weller
Christine Weller,
victim
It was a murky mid-November afternoon as 12-year-old Christine Weller quickly pedaled the 10-speed, making her way home to the Bonanza Motel in the sprawling, rainy hinterlands of Surrey, B.C., 15 miles from the city of Vancouver. It was not unusual for the blue-eyed, happy-go-lucky tomboy to be playing outside since she loved the wide-open spaces. She also liked going into the shops, especially Surrey Place Mall. A new section of the mall had opened and she was meeting a friend after school on that fateful rainy Monday afternoon.
Bonanza Motel
(Jan Bouchard-Kerr)
She spent a couple of hours chatting with friends and wandering around the mall, something that the kids did for amusement. By 5 p.m., late for supper, Christine borrowed a friends bicycle to quickly make the three-minute, downhill ride to unit No. Two of the motel where she lived with her parents. She never got there.
Her parents assumed that she was staying at a friends house, as she had done several times before. It took the better part of a week before they filed a missing persons report. Even then, Christine was treated as a runaway. When the police found the bicycle behind an animal hospital on King George Highway, just a few blocks from the motel, they knew something was terribly wrong.
On Christmas Day, a man walking his dog along a dike found her ravaged body at the back of a dump, just north of River Road, along the Fraser River in nearby Richmond. Christine had multiple stab wounds in the chest and abdomen, and had been throttled with a belt.
The Fraser River
(Jan Bouchard-Kerr)
Unbeknown to law enforcement, Christines death was the first in a series of brutal murders that would claim the lives of at least 10 more youngsters of both sexes, between the ages nine and 18, from the greater Vancouver area. The police would eventually identify her as the first victim.
Clifford Olson Jr.
Clifford Robert Olson Jr. made it into the newspapers the day he was born, January 1st, 1940. He was one of the celebrated New Years babies at St. Pauls Hospital, Vancouver, B.C. Born at 10:10 p.m. to Clifford and Leona Olson, they missed out on the big New Year baby prizes, a silver spoon and a case of canned milk, receiving instead the consolation prizes, a baby book and a dainty gift from Cunningham Drug Store.
An ordinary couple, Leona grew up in the Prairies before moving to Vancouver, getting work at a local fish cannery while Clifford Sr. delivered milk in one of the last of the areas horse-drawn wagons. They lived in a small house near the Pacific National Exhibition grounds on the East Side when Clifford was born.
The Olson family moved to Edmonton, Alberta, returning to the West Coast after the war when Clifford Jr. was five years old. Olson Sr. settled the family in a modest one-story house on Gilmore Crescent in the sprouting suburb of Richmond in an 80-home community built by the government for its servicemen after World War II. Little Clifford started school at Bridgeport Elementary.
Early on, Olson earned a reputation as a show-off. When I taught him, declared a former teacher, he deliberately misbehaved to be the center of attention. Sometimes it was almost as if he wanted to be caught. He was also skipping classes by the time he was 10 years old and by age 15 had failed his grade several times. He was jailed for the first time just after finishing Grade 8.
It was hard for anyone to get a word in edgewise when Olson was around. His compulsive talking was just one of the ways in which he controlled people. Forever the smart-alec, a loner, and a bully at heart, he never did have any close friends. Always in trouble, it was a lark for him to sell out-of-date lottery tickets door to door, steal milk money left on porches, and torment the local dogs and cats. It was rumored that he had smothered two local pet rabbits.
In 1956, he left Cambie Junior High School to work at the Landsdown Racetrack and by age 17, Olsons criminal career went into high gear. Over the next 24 years, he chalked up 83 convictions: obstructing justice; possession of stolen property; possession of firearms; forgery; false pretenses; fraud; parole violation; impaired driving; theft; break, enter and theft; armed robbery; escape from lawful custody.
Mugshot of Clifford
Olson as a young
criminal
He was sentenced to the New Haven Borstal Correctional Center in Burnaby in July, 1957, for B&E and theft. He escaped just long enough to go back to Richmond and steal a power boat, get caught, and be sent to Haney Correctional Centre. In fact, while continually involved in burglary, fraud, and theft during his youth and into his adulthood, he managed to stay out of prison only a few months at a stretch.
By the time Olson was 41 years old, he had spent only four years of his adult life as a free man. A petty but chronic offender, prison became a revolving door for him. The Lower Mainland Regional Correctional Institute in Burnaby, known locally as Oakalla, was just one of the many prisons in which Olson spent a lot of time.
He escaped seven times between 1957 and 1968. When granted parole in 1959 and 1972, it would be continually revoked due to Olsons incessant criminal conduct.
Olson was stabbed seven times by a gang of prisoners while in Prince Albert Penitentiary for informing on two convicts planning to smuggle drugs, and managed to persuade the Saskatchewan Criminal Compensation Board to award him $3,500 because of his unusual degree of moral and physical courage.
Olsons siblings, two younger brothers and a sister, grew up to be law biding, middle-class citizens, but Clifford was always in some type of trouble with the law. No one could explain why Olson was the way he was, explains Ian Mulgrew in Final Payoff. Like many psychopaths, there was virtually no traumatic event in his childhood that could be identified as the trigger of his homicidal rage. His parents had simply become inured to the regular visits from police officers, the shame of the newspaper reports and the continued disruptions their sons behavior caused in their lives. They tried to help him out when they could, but they had long since given up hope of rehabilitating him. They aimed only to limit the damage he did to their lives.
Spring Break
The police probe of Christine Wellers murder continued when another young Surrey girl disappeared.
Thursday, April 16, 1981 Colleen Marian Daignault
Colleen Daignault,
victim
Colleen Daignault wouldnt talk to just anybody, shy as she was. A shade over 5 feet, the 13-year-old girl, with her lovely long brown hair and fresh face, smiled sweetly in her missing persons photo. She had told her granny that she would be home about 4 oclock in the afternoon, returning from a girlfriends house after spending the night.
Dressed for a fine spring day, she wore a colorful red and white jacket, blue jeans, and white running shoes. Two buses would take her home to Old Yale Road in Surrey, near the Scott Road exit on the Surrey side of the Patullo Bridge that spanned the Fraser River.
Patullo Bridge was a frequent Olson
travel route
(Jan Bouchard-Kerr)
Around 1 oclock, while waiting at the bus stop in nearby North Delta, a car pulled up. Clifford Olson called to her from the car window, catching her attention.
Three days later, Colleen was reported missing. The Mounties treated her case as a runaway. With about 300 missing persons reports filed in the Vancouver area every month, Colleen was just another statistic.
It wasnt until September 17th that the skull and skeletal remains of Colleen were found in an isolated Surrey forest, east of 144th Street near 26th Avenue, not far from the American border.
Years later, Colleens sister, Coreen, remembers her as always doing her homework and getting good grades. Just three days before Colleens birthday, Coreen was called to identify her clothes. There was only half a bra, but I recognized the red Adidas T-shirt that she borrowed from me.
Only five days after Colleens disappearance, a 16-year-old boy went missing.
Wednesday, April 22, 1981 Daryn Todd Johnsrude
Daryn Johnsrude,
victim
Also on Easter school break 16-year-old, Daryn Johnsrude vanished. He had been in Vancouver for only two days. His mother flew him to the West Coast as a birthday gift. It was a much-anticipated visit to Coquitlam with her and his 9-year-old sister and 12-year-old brother. The easy going, 5-foot-5-inch, 90-pound boy had traveled from Saskatchewan where he lived with his father. He planned to finish his school year, and then come back to live with his mother and find work. Their home was only a half-block away from the Coquitlam housing complex where Olson moved.
Daryn was last seen in a drug store at the bustling Burquitlam Plaza buying a package of cigarettes. As his luck would have it that day, it was also one of the two shopping malls used as a hang out by several children living at Olsons complex.
Burquitlam Plaza
(Jan Bouchard-Kerr)
There were many other younger boys and girls in the complex who didnt like Olson very much either, writes Jon Ferry and Damian Inwood in The Olson Murders. Behind his back, they called him `the creepy bogey man or `candy man. The tragedy was that there were so many more that could be taken in by him. With his easy smile and fierce brown eyes, no one would deny he had a certain animal magnetism. When he wasnt cruising around in his car for pickups, Olson hung around with the kids at the Burquitlam or Lougheed Mall shopping centers. He seemed to have a huge emotional and physical need for young children.
On May 2nd, Daryns bludgeoned body was found lying beside a lonely dike at Deroche, a small rural community east of Vancouver, seven miles east of Mission on the north bank of the Fraser River. His body lay crumpled at the bottom of a rocky embankment. The coroner said the boy died from repeated hammer blows to the head.
It was a confusing case. Olson varied both the sex and the age of his victims. This was one of the problems for investigators, given what was known about sex offenders in the 80s. Experts believed that predators targeted victims of one sex and age bracket. Consequently, the Mounties did not link Daryns case to the murdered girls.
Gotcha!
�I can well understand why those kids got into a car with him; he really had the gift of the gab.
An RCMP officer.
Hey lemme buy ya a beer after work, Olson would say to a youngster. It was just one of the verbal traps he used to get potential victims to a secluded location or talk them into going to a motel room. He plied them with alcohol and drugs, making them virtually helpless. Some he raped, and then released, but many of the victims he killed.
Even with Olsons small frame, at 5 feet 7 inches, 169 pounds, he would have found it easy to overpower the younger boys and girls. Posing as a construction contractor and handing out a Hale & Olson Construction business card, he impressed the youngsters, especially with the promise of work.
A compelling, anonymous story on the Internet, entitled I Survived Clifford Olson, reveals some of the other ways that Olson enticed the young people to trust him:
On a promise of $5.00 per hour for landscaping labor he hired several of us skinny kids while turning away what I thought to be stronger more suitable workers. Olson raped some of the boys by first singling out a person for special duties...and slowly gaining the confidence and respect of each individual by bragging about how bad he was and how he used to be. He used money or recreational rewards as bribes, even before the sexual activities occurred. Gift giving was one way of courting a child.
He would pick up victims at bus stops, walking on the street, riding a bicycle, or hitchhiking - often with promises of work, enticing the youngsters into his car. According to Dr. Kim Rossmo, geographical programming expert, Some he would drive home, some he would sexually assault, others he would murder. Olson himself doesnt seem to know why he killed those he did; on some occasions he has stated they were murdered so they would not report the assault to the police, and on others he has blamed his use of alcohol and pills.
Ted Bundy And I
Hunt For The Green
River Killer
Olson describes how a serial killer selects his victims and crime sites. By doing this in the third person, profilers contend that the information will be more substantial and will reflect their crimes, as did serial killer Ted Bundy in his collaboration with profiler Dr. Robert Keppel Ted Bundy And I Hunt For The Green River Killer, published in 1995 with William Birnes.
In an unpublished manuscript that Olson wrote on serial killers, with numerous misspellings and grammatical errors, Olson talks in the third person about selecting victims:
�In cases a lot are just encountered by the serial killer who is hunting for the victim he needs. As for how are they stalked, approached, attacked, and trapped, each serial killers has his own personal mode and manner or form of current style and fashion ...the serial killer kills strangers 95 percent of the time because as the safest target in terms of avoiding detection.... Children: young boys and girls are frequently desirable victims by the serial killer for sex.... Most serial killers have selected there murder scenes by the place they take there victims to: as for the relevant geographic areas selected by the offender (serial killer) this depends on the seasons, and were the serial killer is killing. In fact, most of their victims are strangers although at times family members and acquaintances are slain.
Serial killer John Wayne Gacy killed young boys, claiming that he too found it easy to find victims anywhere: motels, clubs, parking lots, grocery stores, and if kids are the target, in schools, shopping malls, arcades or on the streets. He believed that he could drive anywhere, see what he wanted, and just get it.
Shadow Victims
Clifford Olson set his sights on Joan Hale at the popular Cariboo Hotel Lougheed Village pub, known locally as the Cariboo. In 1980, the Cariboos country and western d�cor, complete with wagon wheels mounted on the wall, muted lighting, and smoke-filled lounge atmosphere, attracted the locals from various middle class professions.
Joan did not know at first that Olson was just out of prison, but when she found out, it didnt bother her. She thought him charming and loved his beautiful brown eyes. Within an hour, she was smitten. Olson moved in with Joan three days later.
�It was something I thought I needed, Joan explained later in a courtroom defending a lawsuit against her. I needed that companionship, I thought, and I needed someone to protect me from my husband because he was coming around and bothering me. And Clifford seemed the perfect solution.
Joan became pregnant and they planned to marry. A month before the wedding, they had a son, Clifford Olson III. As his father before him, Olson also caused a ruckus just before his sons birth, getting into a shouting match at the Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster. It was already a pattern. Early on, he bilked Joan of her $43,000 divorce settlement, and went on a two-month spending spree. He became violent, and even more so after the news of her pregnancy. He got drunk more often and began to beat her. In a dramatic escalation of violence, Olson had already killed three children, one five days after the birth of his son.
Incredibly, the night before the wedding, Olson babysat several children while his fianc�e went out to celebrate with her girlfriends. He sent the older ones to the store to buy bubble gum while he allegedly assaulted a 5-year-old girl. Olson was asked to go to the Coquitlam RCMP detachment because the mother had complained. He went to the station and denied the incident. The child was too young to testify and the police did not have enough evidence to charge him.
The couple was married on May 15, 1981, at the Peoples Full Gospel Church in Surrey. They had regularly attended a fundamentalist church, but changed to another branch when word got out that Olson had sexually abused several of the children. He had been caught sodomizing a young boy in a sauna. No complaints were filed.
North Road & Cottonwood,
around Burquitlam Plaza
where Olson lived and
abducted children
(Jan Bouchard-Kerr)
The Mounties would eventually find out how he was incapacitating the youngsters. Late in May, Olson was arrested for impaired driving and for contributing to juvenile delinquency. He crashed his car with his 16-year-old female passenger in Agassiz, a farming hamlet in the Valley about an hour from Vancouver. Olson had picked her up in the Cottonwood Avenue and North Road area of Coquitlam, Daryn Johnsrude and Olsons neighborhood. Although the young girl could not be convinced that Olson was a sex offender, she did tell the police that he had offered her a job, had bought her drinks and given her pills. She palmed one of the tiny emerald knock-out pills, later giving it to the police. The laboratory identified it as chloral hydrate, commonly known as knock-out drops or a Mickey Finn.
Tuesday, May 19, 1981 Sandra Lynn Wolfsteiner
Sandra Wolfsteiner,
victim
Already on the hunt a mere four days after his wedding day, Olson picked up 16-year-old Sandra Wolfsteiner, who lived with her sister in Langley. The pretty, hazel-eyed brunette went to visit her boyfriend to take him to lunch on the Fraser Highway in Surrey. After visiting with his mother for a while, around 11:30 a.m., she made her way to the highway to hitchhike to the auto body shop up the road.
A mere 50 yards from the farmhouse, the boyfriends mother watched Sandy get picked up by a man in a silver-gray, two-door medium-sized car, probably one of Olsons rental cars. He may have offered a job to her because Sandra was seen by a friend as she closed her account at the Royal Bank in Langley. She reportedly said that she had a good job cleaning windows for $13 an hour and that she would get to drive a Trans Am.
Olson persuaded Sandy to go to his cabin in the woods, up the Valley. He drove into the dense bush just off Chilliwack Lake Road. While walking into the woods, he smashed her head from behind. Olson later said he was enraged to find that she had less than $10 in her pockets. She told me she had $100.
The police considered her to be just another runaway. At the early stage, said an RCMP briefing document, it was felt she was simply a missing youth and there was no suspicion of foul play.
They couldnt have been further from the truth.
'I Drive 'em Nuts!'
�It was top of the line for Clifford Robert Olson when it came to office stationery and business cards. When he ordered, he ordered nothing but the best; trouble is, he never paid for them.
In his own words.
The B.C. Penitentiary, an imposing granite fortress along the main thoroughfare between Coquitlam and New Westminster, loomed over the industrial area of the Fraser River and the Patullo Bridge that crosses over to Surrey. The system provided a second home for Olson.
When the B.C. Pen was scheduled to be torn down in 1981, the draconian buildings were opened to the public, simply for curiosity. In Profile of a Serial Killer The Clifford Robert Olson Story, an unpublished manuscript written by Olson, he explained, taking third person perspective, why he too decided to take a last look:
Olson, in spite of his many years in prison, paid a sentimental visit to the Old B.C. Penitentiary when it was opened to the public before closing down in 1981. Unfortunately for Olson this one last look at one of his old homes cost him his freedom. Olson trooped into the 102-year-old building with thousands of other sightseers for a prison tour, unaware there was a Canada-wide warrant out for his arrest. So when he peeked into the cell which had been his home for several years, he was recognized by one of these former guards and was quickly arrested by the New Westminster city police. Olson had last been in the B.C. Pen serving four years and nine months for a variety of offenses including theft, forgery and false pretences. His nostalgic return to the Old B.C. Pen cost Olson another month in the Matsqui before his sentence finally expired.
He loved to play the system maintaining, I drive em nuts! In the words of several of his custodians, they couldnt agree more. He demanded constant attention and made life tough for everyone. He was universally loathed but somehow managed to survive. Some of the law officers at Matsqui Institution characterized him as a con man, not as a killer. He was seen as a thief, a false-pretense artist, a garrulous, extroverted, egotistical kind of person, but not as a sexual offender, said a former parole worker.
Olson was adept at playing the con game, knowing his way through the system. For many years, Olson reveled in petty crime. Initially, his record showed him to be a thief and fraud artist. His early years, 1957 to 1974, from the time he was an adolescent, were riddled with break-ins, escapes, and robberies. But, it did not stop there. Olsons deviant sexual side was also developing.
Olson started exhibiting more violent behavior in and out of the penitentiary. While in B.C. Pen in 1974, he repeatedly and persistently sexually attacked a 17-year-old fellow inmate. And in 1978, while on the outside, he indecently assaulted a seven-year-old girl in Sydney, Nova Scotia. When he actually began his murderous rampage, he was on bail for sex and firearms charges with pending child abuse charges in Nova Scotia, although the warrant could not be enforced outside of the province.
Back in prison once again in 1978, a deviant sexual side started to show while serving a two-year sentence for fraud, possession of stolen property, and possession of housebreaking instruments.The Olson Murders mention his reputation while incarcerated:
During those seven years Olsons prison style changed. To some he was known as Bobo, a man who viciously muscled or buggered young inmates. To others he became knows as The Senator. This was because he honed his cell-room lawyers skills, by writing incessantly to both federal and provincial politicians with a barrage of complaints about prison conditions. He was also a `stoolie, a person who would inform on anyone for any reason. This trait made him unpopular with both inmates and guards and he eventually needed protective custody.
Olson was moved to the Super Maximum Unit (SMU), commonly known as the Penthouse, the rat and rapo unit, where the most despised cons were housed. It was here that he met accused child-killer Gary Francis Marcoux.
The 'Penthouse'
Olson was an informer on the outside of the prison walls and a snitch on the inside. While in the Penthouse, he enticed rapist-murderer Gary Francis Marcoux to discuss the murder of a little girl, in written form, and eventually used it as evidence against him in a court of law. These letters and maps that were passed between Olson and Marcoux not only helped convict Marcoux, but taught Olson his own future method of operation.
Marcoux dumped the body of nine-year-old Jeanna Doove at Weaver Lake, a popular camping area in the coastal mountains overlooking the valley east of Vancouver. The letters between them described in graphic detail how Marcoux lured the little girl to his car from her trailer court in Mission, some 50 yards from the Genesis Halfway House where he was living, bought her ice cream, then raped, strangled, and mutilated her, leaving her tied to a large tree near Weaver Lake. He also described a nearby back road that connected to Pemberton and Whistler. He even provided maps on how to drive to the murder site. She was found on the July 1 Canadian holiday.
By January 1981, especially since Olsons release on mandatory supervision, a more sinister and frightening persona had emerged. He had charges in different jurisdictions. The Squamish charges included rape, buggery, and gross indecency; the Richmond charges consisted of buggery and indecent assault on a male; a May incident at Agassiz with a young girl; and a July indecent assault of another young girl.
Early in Olsons criminal career, after he had escaped from Shaughnessy Hospital, his parents made an appeal to the media: Id like him to give himself up, said Olson Sr., But he knows what hes facing. He might have to serve 10 years. If he doesnt give himself up, I hope they get him before he does something really bad. Hes done bad enough now.
�Hes a coward by himself, said his mother, knowing her Clifford to be a show off. Hes got to have a partner. Clifford never does anything alone.
In retrospect, Olsons mother was partially right. Olson in his prison partnership with Marcoux had developed a taste and a methodology for killing. Olson bragged in his unpublished manuscript that he started as a petty thief and graduated from the Canadian prison system as a prolific killer.
Ada Court
5th Sunday, June 21, 1981 Ada Court
Ada Court, victim
Thirteen-year-old Ada Court of Burnaby had spent an uneventful Saturday night, babysitting at her brother and sister-in-laws Coquitlam apartment, the same family apartment complex where the Olsons lived and where Olson Sr. and Leona worked as caretakers. She babysat her brothers two toddlers so often that others often referred to the little ones as Adas babies.On a sunny Sunday morning, Ada caught a bus to meet her boyfriend. Then, she simply vanished. Burnaby police were baffled. Nothing was missing from her locker at Cascade Heights Elementary School and there was no evidence that she packed any belongings from home.
Fifty-two-year-old Jim Parranto, a White Rock resident, believed he saw Olson disposing of Adas body. Interestingly, this was not the first time that someone saw Olson as he disposed of a body, but the people involved did not understand what they were witnessing. It would later be discovered that Olsons vehicle had been stuck in the mud at least twice while disposing of two bodies. In one case, he even called a tow truck.
The Olson Murders relates the events with Parranto: It was at about 8 p.m. on June 21 when the logging camp chef was driving through Weaver Lake, a popular picnic area. He turned a corner and saw a man beside a black pick-up truck, bending over the body of a young girl in a multi-colored sweater.
I thought he was in trouble and I pulled up. I got out of the car and spoke to him and he turned around and looked at me. He wouldnt answer me when I talked to him. He just stared at me and I could see something wasnt right. I got back in the car. I thought, `hey, Im getting out of here. After a harrowing chase by Olson, Parranto swerved onto a logging road leading to the Eagle River forestry camp where he worked, losing Olson on the road. A month or two later he reported what he saw to the White Rock RCMP.
Entrance ot the White Rock RCMP
Detachment
(Jan Bouchard-Kerr)
Two months later, after Olsons arrest, dental charts confirmed that a skull and upper jawbone found by searchers near Weaver Lake in the Agassiz area belonged to Ada Court.
Parranto was asked if he was sure that he was looking at the serial murderer.
�It was Olson, he replied. I was staring him right in the face.
By the end of June, Olson had murdered five children but only two bodies had been recovered: Christine Weller in Richmond and Daryn Johnsrude at Deroche, near Mission. But Christine Wellers murder had not been connected to Daryn Johnsrudes and Olsons other victims had not yet been found.
Suspected
The Mounties already had Olson in their sights in early July as a prime suspect while they were probing the Ada Court disappearance. He was a suspect of the basis of his previous record of assaults and sex crimes, said Det. Dennis Tarr, Delta municipal police fraud investigator. He was a good suspect. The probabilities were certainly there.
6th Thursday, July 2, 1981 Simon Partington
Simon Partington,
victim
It was the disappearance of a nine-year-old Surrey boy, Simon Partington that was the turning point in The Case of the Missing Lower Mainland Children. The police could hardly list him as a runaway, given his young age and angelic-looking face. Police were sure that the slight, 4-foot-2-inch, 80-pound boy had been abducted.
At about 10:30 a.m., after Simons usual big breakfast of cornflakes, he dressed in blue jeans and a blue T-shirt, hopped on his bike, with his brand new orange Snoopy book in the bikes basket, and headed for a friends house. He never arrived. He disappeared only a few blocks from where Christine Weller was last seen alive. One of his school projects, a story he wrote called The Hungry Tiger and the Gullible Duck, foreshadowed his untimely death.
An emotional public outcry spurred the police into high gear. The Mounties launched the biggest manhunt in Canadian history. At its height, as many as 200 officers worked on the case. The police had to admit that Simon was the victim of foul play, and the media began to note that news editors had underplayed the spate of earlier disappearances in Vancouvers suburbs. It was the tragic disappearance of this charming child that ultimately symbolized the horror of the series of child slayings.
Olson did not appear phased by all the media attention. Five days after killing the nine-year-old, he picked up a 16-year-old girl and her friend. After the usual offer of a window-washing job at $10 an hour, he persuaded one of the girls to go with him alone. Olson plied her with liquor and fondled her. When the girl resisted, Olson stopped. Later, when he was charged with indecent assault on this girl, the police still did not tie him to Partingtons disappearance or the murders of Johnsrude and Weller.
Still, the death of Simon Partington just didnt seem to fit a pattern. Crown prosecutor John Hall later remarked: It just doesnt fit, it doesnt fit still. I never could figure that one out.
The reticence of police departments to link cases of serial murder is very common. Several reasons are generally offered for this linkage blindness: over dependence on generalized patterns and profiles provided by experts, the tendency to assume that most missing children are runaways, and concern that recognizing that a serial killer is at work in the community will have serious negative affects on police department resources, budgets and media scrutiny. Linkage blindness has allowed serial killers to go on murdering months and sometimes years longer because it has delayed alerting the public to the danger of an active serial predator and the mobilization of police resources to catch the murderer.
The Beast of B.C.
�The beast can take over to complete an identity if you leave a hole in yourself. In other words, it seeks a vacuum. In a healthy person the vacuum doesnt exist. Theres a sense of identity that prevents a need for the dark awareness.
A homicide offender describes his experience of the development of this dark side of the human psyche
Children are easy prey. Well aware of this, Clifford Olson took advantage of their innocence. He later told police that he quickly figured out that teenagers were alike, that they will tell you just about anything if you look and talk like you were interested in hiring them. Most were eager to get a job. Being the classic hardened con enabled him to control many situations. The confidence game gave him the opportunity to shield his real motives. He was used to getting his way, one way or another.
He appeared pleasant, friendly, even charming, openly approaching the children. However, his goal, far from friendly, was to gain their confidence until he was in a position to overcome any resistance.
Olson picks up the kids and offers them a job, said Cpl. Les Forsythe, Burnaby RCMP. He tells them hes a construction contractor and takes them to building sites to show them the jobs. Thats the line. He gets their confidenceand remember hes good at that. Hes shrewd. Hes not dumb. Hes not a bad-looking individual. He could be somebodys dad. These kids would follow along and hed offer them drugs, or a drink, or a beer. This is after hes felt them out and knows that he can probably do it with a degree of safety.
Robert Shantz, who would serve as Olsons defense lawyer for the child slayings, intended to show that his client had adopted Marcoux personality. Some evidence supported this theory:
��������������������� Olson left five children in the same Weaver Lake-Mission area that Marcoux used for his victim.
��������������������� One of the children was found close to where Marcouxs victim, Jeanna Doove, died.
��������������������� Olson used the same type of ruse to pick up some of his victims.
��������������������� Olson killed one of the victims at Whistler, connected to Weaver Lake by the back road Marcoux had mapped.
��������������������� Like Marcoux, Olson used strangulation to dispatch some of his victims.
��������������������� After Olsons sessions with Marcoux, Olson showed an insatiable appetite for child pornography.
More likely, Olson wanted to experience what Marcoux did. He has gone from being essentially a nobody to being a somebody now, said forensic psychiatrist Dr. Stanley Semrau. In his own eyes, he has celebrity status. He sees himself as the ultimate serial killer.
Peter Worthington, founding editor and a columnist of The Toronto Sun asked Olson after he was convicted how he compared himself with the famed fictional Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic killer of The Silence of the Lambs.
�Peter, there is no comparison, Olson replied. Hannibal Lecter is fiction, I'm real.
Addicted to Murder
�Clifford Olson some say had a Jekyll and Hyde personality who posed as a happy family man and a devout church goer, but in reality no one could see the monster ready to be let loose once he started drinking.
In his own words.
Thursday, July 9, 1981 Judy Kozma
Clifford Olson drove up North Road toward downtown New Westminster, passing the looming B.C. Penitentiary on the way, as he did many times before on this main thoroughfare through the quiet residential streets of Coquitlam. It also accessed one of his favorite haunts, the Cariboo, where he often purchased off-sale beer. He liked to drink and drive, and have his passengers drink as well.
It was not unusual to be traveling with younger people in the car as he cruised the streets. This time, 18-year-old Randy Ludlow was with him. Little did Ludlow know that only a week ago, Olson killed Simon Partington and two days before was charged with indecent assault on a 16-year-old girl. Ludlow rendered an eye-witness account of the last few hours of Judy Kozmas life.
�Between eleven and noon on July 9th I was with Olson, Ludlow confirmed. We were driving toward downtown New Westminster. Olson spotted a girl leaving a phone booth on Columbia Street in front of the Royal Columbian Hospital. He obviously knew her because he waved to her. She smiled and seemed to be happy to see him. He pulled over. She came across the street and talked with him.
Phone Booth that Judy Kozma left
to join Olson
(Jan Bouchard-Kerr)
Judy Kozma was on her way to Richmond to see a friend and to apply for a job at Wendys restaurant. A shy, pretty brunette, she was desperately looking for a second job. She had met Olson at McDonalds where she already worked as a part-time cashier.
Judy Kozma, victim
Hop in, Olson said. Well take you there.Once in the car, Judy exclaimed, This is good. This will be faster than the bus. I would have had to go all through Vancouver to get there.
Olson offered the two youths the ever-present beer in his car as he drove to Richmond. They arrived long before it was time for Judys job interview and too early for her to meet her friend, so they stopped at the Richmond Inn to buy some more beer. At one point Olson handed Ludlow a big wad of money to impress Kozma, only to take it back while getting more liquor.
�When we returned to the car, Ludlow would later explain, Judy sat in the front passenger seat. I sat in back. Olson offered Judy a job cleaning windows at ten dollars an hour.
Leslie Holmes and Bruce Northorp in Where Shadows Linger tell what happened next: They returned to New Westminster where Olson bought a bottle of rum at the liquor store near the foot of 10th Street. He returned to the car with the rum, coke, and plastic glasses. On Olsons instructions, Randy mixed drinks for all three.
Olson encouraged Judy to have another drink, related Ludlow. She didnt want more.
Olson persisted. Give her another drink, give her another drink, he ordered.
Eventually Judy agreed to take a light one. Olson told me to mix it, said Randy. I gave her a glass of coke with no rum. I caught Judys eye and signaled it was only coke.
Judy took a sip and said, This is really strong.
Olson looked at me and nodded, indicating I had done well by giving her a stiff drink, Ludlow continued.
Olson then gave Judy some tiny green pills, saying, Here, take these, theyll straighten you out. They keep you from getting drunk. She took the pills.
Olson parked in the underground garage at the complex where he lived. Ludlow and Judy stayed in the car while he went to his apartment. Ludlow reflected, This was the only time I detected any anxiety on her part. She was nervous and upset. I put it down to the fact she was fifteen years old, she had been drinking, and she was going to miss her job interview. She was crying and I wiped the tears from her eyes. Olson returned shortly and she seemed her old self again.
Olson then dropped Ludlow off at the Lougheed Mall.
The next time I saw Olson he said he dropped her off at Richmond. I learned much later he killed Judy, then went on vacation the next day. Olson took Joan and little Clifford to Knotts Berry Farm near Los Angeles in the U.S. until July 21.
More Disappearances
A serial killer was on the loose and the people in the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley region of British Columbia were gripped with fear. In the short time span, from November 1980 to July 1981, a number of children had gone missing, and were later found dead. Parents in suburban Vancouver complained that the police were not treating reports of the missing youths seriously enough. The 200 Mounties in the Surrey detachment processed roughly 2000 missing-person cases and investigated some 18,000 criminal code offenses in those two years. Many of the juveniles turned out to be runaways, congregating on the Granville Street area downtown, while some stayed with friends or out partying past their curfew, without informing their parents. The police figured, Theyd turn up and for the most part they did.
Surrey RCMP Detachment building
(Jan Bouchard-Kerr)
When a child of ten or less is missing for more than a day, writes Derrick Murdoch inDisappearances, it is unlikely to be from the childs own choice. In the second half of childhood the reverse is true, particularly between the ages of eleven and fourteen when the child is dealing with emerging sexuality.... The combined totals for the next age group from fifteen up are not so high.... For the police, runaways who are over the age at which they are considered juveniles in their province (sixteen, seventeen or eighteen, as the case may be) must be treated as free agents.
The book Final Payoff explains what the policing was like then: There were roughly six thousand traffic cops, fraud investigators, homicide detectives, Indian special constables, political bodyguards, analysts and administrators in the provinces law enforcement system. Each force and detachment was a separate and distinct entity with its own internal bureaucracy, but they were expected to act in concert. That rarely happened and the problems of inter-detachment and inter-force communication was one of the reasons Cpl. Les Forsythe wanted everyone who had dealt with Olson or who might have an active missing-person file at a meeting.
Unfortunately the RCMP chain of command was undergoing dramatic upheaval in the spring and summer of 1981. The West Coast ranks were experiencing widespread staff shortages and low morale, which affected daily operations that coincided with Olsons killing spree.
July 15, 1981 Olsons name was first mentioned at a law enforcement conference
As the person responsible for Ada Courts case, Forsythe continued to build a case against Olson. In a more coordinated effort, a meeting was scheduled for RCMP officers and local police departments from Vancouver and the Lower Mainland communities of Richmond, New Westminster, Surrey, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Mission, Langley, Agassiz, and Maple Ridge. He prepared a five-page profile on Olson for the July 15 meeting with the Mission Detachment investigators: It outlined Olsons known and suspected recent criminal activities, his trait of offering his intended victims a job for ten dollars per hour, his penchant for borrowed or rented cars, and his known recent addresses in Surrey and Coquitlam.
This meeting, Les explained, is simply a brainstorming session of investigators from around the Lower Mainland who have a common interest in missing persons investigations. When the story aired, viewers took note of the polices growing concern about the missing children in the Greater Vancouver area.
The police decided to consider Olson as a suspect in The Case of the Missing Lower Mainland Children. An RCMP police-briefing document took up the story of the crucial July 15 meeting. It is stressed that at this juncture, although Olson was considered a possible suspect in the disappearances/murders, a considerable picture of uncertainty existed. It was not clear whether all the children reported missing were, in fact, genuinely missing or whether foul play had been involved. The matter of whether or not the disappearances themselves could be connected or whether they individually or collectively were connected to previous unsolved murders was also open to conjecture, although under active analysis at the time. It should be stressed here that Olson had earlier been considered as a possible suspect in the Christine Ann Weller homicide (body found in Richmond 12-25-80), and that of Mary Ellen (Marney) Jamieson homicide, which occurred in the Sechelt area on 8-7-80. He was later dropped from prominence in the Weller investigation when a stronger suspect surfaced, however Olson remained of interest to our serious crime unit in the Jamieson case.
Thursday, July 23, 1981 Raymond King Jr.
Raymond King Jr.,
victim
Theres just no way he could have run away, Raymond Kings father had said. He was not a runaway. The slight, sandy haired Ray King Jr. was enjoying his summer holidays and looking for his first real job. He made his routine trip to the Canada Manpower Youth Employment Centre, chaining his bike behind the building. Keen to do any type of work, he had come to the center so often over the summer that the staff was getting to know him.
Young Ray met Olson that day. Lured by a promise of work, Olson drove them along a route he frequently traveled, along Highway No. 7 towards Harrison Mills and Weaver Lake. Turning off the highway, he headed for the popular camping area then took a rough, back-country road that led to a B.C. Forest Service campground beside the Alpine Lake. He staved the boys head with rocks and then dumped the youngsters body off the steep, hillside trail.
The police did not think that the 15-year-old boy would have abandoned his bike. Usually if a kid is going to run, hell do one of three things with his bike; leave it at home, use it to make his getaway, or sell it to a friend for a few bucks, said Ed Cadenhead, deputy police chief of New Westminster.
The night that Olson killed the young boy, he had logged 403 kilometers in the car he rented from Metro in Port Coquitlam. Forever on the lookout for potential victims, he spoke to the Metro rental clerk: He offered me a job shampooing carpets in his apartment complex he said he owned at Lougheed Mall, she said. He only came in to get a car on the days he knew I worked. The job he offered was $16.60-an-hour, more than I get here, and I was supposed to let him know. Thank God I never did.
Just two days later, July 25th, Judy Kozmas body was found near Weaver Lake. Then, the killer struck again.
...