Unsolved Murders in Manitoba

[Desespere]

These are cases I know of but recognize this research is not completed. If the murder victim was a known sex trade worker that is indicated by STW at the end of each summary. I have details for these victims and will post as time permits.

Moira Erb
Age:
DOB:
COD: Hit by a train
Date last seen: April 2, 2003
Location last seen: Manitoba
Date found: September 23, 2003
Location found: Manitoba
STW

Velecia Solomon Osborne
Age: 16
Date last seen: March 24th, 2003
Location last seen: Winnipeg, MB
Date found: June 11, 2003
Location found: Winnipeg, MB
Child

Therena Adelin Marsland
Aged 35
DOB:
COD: Beaten to death
Date last seen: April 29, 2002
Location last seen: Manitoba
Date found: : December 15,2002
Location found: Manitoba
STW

Noreen Taylor
Age: 32
DOB:
COD: Pushed from moving vehicle
Date last seen:
Location last seen: Winnipeg, MB
Date found: August 15, 2001
Location found: Winnipeg, MB
STW

Tania Marsden
Age: 18
DOB:
COD: ligature asphyxiation (strangulation
Date last seen: September 9th, 1998
Location last seen: Winnipeg, MB
Date found: September 29th, 1998
Location found: Winnipeg, MB

Evelyn Stewart
Aged 25
DOB:
COD: massive trauma to the head
Date last seen: March 20, 1998
Location last seen: Winnipeg, MB
Date found: March 20, 1998
Location found: Winnipeg, MB
STW

Jamie Mcguire
Age: ?
COD: Trauma
DOB:
Date found: March 17, 1994
Location found: MB
Last seen: January 28, 1994
Location last seen: MB

Glenda Morrisseau
Age: 19
COD: Trauma/blunt object
DOB:
Date found: August 7, 1991
Location found:
Date last seen: July 17, 1991
Location last seen:
Student

Cheryl Duck
Age: 15
COD: Trauman
DOB:
Date found: December 5, 1987
Location found: Winnipeg, MB
Date last seen:
Location last seen:
STW - speculation

Candace Derksen
Age: 13
DOB:
COD: hypothermia
Date last seen: November 30, 1984
Location last seen: Winnipeg, MB
Date found: January 17, 1985
Location found: Winnipeg, MB
Child

Constance Lynne Cameron
Age ?
COD: Strangulation
DOB:
Date found: August 6, 1984
Location found: Fort Garry, MB
Date last seen: Friday, August 3, 1984
Location last seen: Winnipeg, MB
STW

Marie Banks
Age: 18
COD: Strangulation
DOB:
Date found: Monday, August 15, 1983
Location found: Fort Garry, MB
Date last seen:  July 26, 1983
Location last seen: Winnipeg, MB
STW

Barbara Gayle Stoppel
Age: 16
COD: Strangled
DOB:
Date found: December 23, 1981
Location found: Winnipeg, MB
Date last seen: December 23, 1981
Location last seen: Winnipeg, MB

Evelyn Edith Kebalo
Age: 55
DOB:
COD: Stangulation
Date last seen: April 17, 1977
Location last seen: Winnipeg, MB
Date found: April 19, 1977
Location found: Winnipeg, MB

[Desespere]

There are now 17 unsolved homicides involving Winnipeg sex-trade workers or people who may have been mistaken for sex-trade workers.
1. Marie Edith Banks, August 1983: Banks was last seen alive getting into a vehicle near McDermot Avenue and Princess Street in July. The sex worker?s strangled body was found two weeks later in a Fort Garry hydro field.
2. Constance Lynn Cameron, August 1984: Cameron was last seen alive during the early morning hours of Aug. 3, 1984. Her strangled body was found in the same area as Banks.
3. Charlene Orsulak, January 1987: Orsulak was last seen getting into a four-door Buick at MacDonald Avenue and Argyle Street. Her body was left in a remote area of bush south of Matlock.
4. Cheryl Duck, December 1987: The body of 15-year-old Duck was found face down in a field near the outskirts of the city. It?s not known if Duck engaged in sex-trade work.
5. Susan Janine Holens, April 1989: Holens? body was found in a drainage ditch on Loudoun Road, southwest of city limits.
6. Glenda Morrisseau, August 1991: Morrisseau was last seen alive on Logan Avenue in July hitching-hiking a ride downtown from the Stock Exchange Hotel. Her body was discovered in August in a St. Boniface industrial area.
7. Jamie McGuire, March 1994: The woman?s frozen body was found in a drainage ditch west of St. Francois Xavier. It?s not known if she was a sex-trade worker.
8. Evelyn Stewart, March 1998: Stewart, a sex worker, was found in a Point Douglas parking lot with massive head trauma.
9. Tania Marsden, September 1998: Last seen the night of her 18th birthday, the West End sex worker?s body was found three weeks later in the Assiniboine River, weighed down by a cement block.
11. Simon Bloomfield, July 2002: The cross-dressing sex worker died of massive injuries after he was hit by a car driving down Highway 8.
12. Therena Silva, December 2002: Silva?s skeletal remains were found near Templeton Avenue and Ritchie Street. Police believe Silva?s body had been there for several months.
13. Moira Erb, September 2003: Erb was last seen alive by her family in the city in August. Her decomposed body was found between a set of railway tracks in the northwest corner of the city.
14. Velicia Solomon, October 2003: DNA tests verified that body parts later found in the Red River belonged to the teenager. Police have no information to indicate she was involved in prostitution.
15. Divas Boulanger, November 2004: Boulanger, 28, a transgendered street prostitute, was found dead in the bushes at a rest stop east of Portage la Prairie.
16. Tatia Ulm, May 2005: Ulm, 39, was found in a garbage bin in the back lane of Stella Avenue.
17. Crystal Shannon Saunders, April 2007.
http://mikeoncrime.com/article/1737/slain-woman-dreaded-freedom

[Desespere]

Seventeen unsolved homicides in Winnipeg alone since 1983 - Edith Banks.
these are only unsolved homicides of women who either worked in the sex trade or were mistaken to work in the sex trade.

1983 - July 26 is when Edith Banks was last seen. Her body was found August 15, 1983.
1983 - (date unknown) Gail Cardinal was murdered in Edmonton - on KARE list.

[Alistair]

I put together this Google map of all unsolved Winnipeg STW cases that I could find. (Most are STWs or probable STWs, but some may not be. I only know what I read, and it isn't always clear if they were STWs or not.)

http://tinyurl.com/qcywlc

The red pins represent where they were reported as "last seen". (Sometimes this is very approximate - like within a several block radius of where they were believed to have been working or walking.) The blue teardrops denote approximately where their bodies were found, if they were found. Most of the info is gleaned from the Winnipeg Police Unsolved Murders site. The rest from Google searches of media articles and Missing & Murdered websites. I can't guarantee accuracy. I may have made mistakes, and public info may also be wrong.

I'm not a wannabe geo-profiler or anything. I'm sure the police have better mapping technology than Google Maps, and have already used that to its fullest advantage. I just put this map together to see if I any sort of pattern or cluster would become apparent. After looking at it, I'm quite convinced a SK has been stalking Winnipeg STWs for the past 25 years, possibly more than one SK. These couldn't all have been done by different people.

[Desespere]

Hello Alistair.
Thank you for your map and for coming here.
Your summary is very interesting and personally I agree there is likely a SK in Winnipeg and probably working since 1983.

My other personal opinion is the similarity to dates and the geographical stuff to Edmonton and Vancouver might indicate someone very similar in method and psyche (ie: more stereotypical type SK's) or there is one moving around between the cities since 1983.

Others have the opinion that an SK began in Southern Ontario and maybe moved to the Vancouver/Edmonton and possibly Winnipeg area. At this point I tend to agree. Not that one could do all these murders alone but perhaps some kind of pattern is there to possibly say one could have done so many in Vancouver, so many in Edmonton and so many in Winnipeg.

There's Regina and Saskatoon too that is really beginning to look like, historically, there is an SK or two in those cities.

I hope you'll take the time to comment more through these topics. Each woman you've marked on your map has a record here and it would be great if you could post whatever you know about them through your research.

Thanks for posting!

[Alistair]

Hi Desespere.

Unfortunately I cannot offer much more info on any of the cases because I only learned of most of this while creating the map today. I lived in Winnipeg from 1991 to 2005 (in central MB before that), and vaguely remember some of the murders when they were first in the news.

I had been meaning to do up a map ever since I read the media piece quoting Kim Rossmo a couple years ago when he stated he believed a serial killer was responsible for some Winnipeg STW murders.

I think I may have posted to this forum before on other topics, but if so, I have long forgot my original username & password.

While not all these cases were available on the Winnipeg Police website, the majority were. And I must say the Winnipeg Police have the best Unsolved site. Amongst police forces, their Unsolved/Cold Case site is simply unsurpassed. Every police force should have a site so detailed and thorough. Sadly, they don't.

[Desespere]

I, and many of us, agree on the Winnipeg Police unsolved site, it is the best for police force in Canada and absolutely a model for other cities all over to use.

Thanks again for doing the map. I looked and it appears to be a few clusters but the dates are long between each other. This is interesting because if those sites are common to one or two killers, what kind of pattern is there? It's almost the same kind of map Edmonton has and other cities. The central area where women are taken from and spread out the four corners almost of the city.

In Edmonton, one poster did a map a long way back now, not sure if it's on Unsolved, but it looked as if there was a straight line of nine victims and the dates they were last seen seemed to make a pattern like this: 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
With about 25 years to form the pattern.

[Alistair]

Agreed. It's difficult to make heads or tails of the Winnipeg map, because the geographical patterns don't mesh well with any sort of timeline, with a few exceptions. However, the Green River Killer taught investigators that SKs can sometimes slow down - or even stop - for years, before resuming their activities again. Or they move to a different jurisdiction only to return years later.

Gary Ridgeway killed approximately 4 dozen women in the Seattle-Tacoma area between 1982 and 1984, then just stopped. Or seemed to. He killed one more in 1986, and another in 1999. The Green River investigators suspected there were others in the interim outside King County, but thus far have been unable to prove it. Who knows who else and where else he might have killed?

Another strange timeline is the BTK killer in Wichita KS. He killed very sporadically. The time periods between his killings got longer and longer. The police never would have suspected BTK in the killings in the 1980s and 90s if he hadn't started taunting the police with clues.

Reading as much as I have about BTK and the Green River Killer, it's difficult to know what to make of timelines.

[Desespere]

I just re-posted these by date last seen which wasn't in the previous post.

1. July 26, 1983 - Marie Edith Banks: Banks was last seen alive getting into a vehicle near McDermot Avenue and Princess Street in July. The sex worker's strangled body was found two weeks later - August 15 - in a Fort Garry hydro field.

2. Aug 3, 1984 - Constance Lynn Cameron: Cameron was last seen alive during the early morning hours of Aug. 3, 1984. Her strangled body was found August 6 100m from where Edith Banks was recovered.

3. Jan ?? 1987 - Charlene Orsulak: Orsulak was last seen getting into a four-door Buick at MacDonald Avenue and Argyle Street sometime in January. Her body was left in a remote area of bush 3km south of Matlock near the Winnipeg Beach on May 23.

4. Dec 4, 1987 - Cheryl Duck: The body of 15-year-old Duck was found face down in a field near the outskirts of the city the next day. It's not known if Duck engaged in sex-trade work but killer may have believed she was. 

5. Apr 12, 1989 - Susan Janine Holens: Susan was recovered the next day in a drainage ditch on Loudoun Road near Headingly, southwest of city limits.

6. Jul 17, 1991 - Glenda Morrisseau: Morrisseau was last seen alive on Logan Avenue in July hitching-hiking a ride downtown from the Stock Exchange Hotel. Her body was discovered August 7 in a St. Boniface industrial area.

7. Jan 28, 1994 - Jamie McGuire: Jamie's frozen body was found in a drainage ditch west of St. Francois Xavier on March 17. It's not known if she was a sex-trade worker but the killer may have believed she was.

8. Mar 20, 1998 - Evelyn Stewart: Stewart, a sex worker, was found in a Point Douglas parking lot the same day with massive head trauma.

9. Sep 9, 1998 - Tania Marsden: Last seen the night of her 18th birthday, the West End sex worker's body was found three weeks later, September 29, in the Assiniboine River, weighed down by a cement block.

11. Jul 22, 2002 - Simon Bloomfield: The cross-dressing sex worker died of massive injuries after he was hit by a car driving down Highway 8.

12. Apr 11, 2002 - Therena Silva: Silva's skeletal remains were found near Templeton Avenue and Ritchie Street December 15. Police believe Silva's body had been there for several months.

13. Aug 2, 2003 - Moira Erb: Moira was last seen alive by her family in the city. Her decomposed body was found between a set of railway tracks in the northwest corner of the city September 23. How did she get there?

14. Mar 25, 2003 - Velicia Solomon Osborne: DNA tests verified that body parts later found in the Red River on June 11 belonged to the teenager. Police have no information to indicate she was involved in prostitution.

15. Dec ?? 2003 - Divas Boulanger: Boulanger, 28, a transgendered street prostitute, was found dead in the bushes at a rest stop east of Portage la Prairie Nov 3, 2004. This is almost a year she was missing before found.

16. May 9, 2005 - Tatia Ulm: Ulm, 39, was found in a garbage bin in the back lane of Stella Avenue the same day.

17. Apr 18, 2007 - Crystal Shannon Saunders; Crystal was recovered in a shallow ditch on the north side of Beach Road near St. Ambroise Situated on Lake Manitoba the next day.

http://mikeoncrime.com/article/1737/slain-woman-dreaded-freedom

[JonnyVan]

Candace Derksen
Age: 13
DOB:
COD: hypothermia
Date last seen: November 30, 1984
Location last seen: Winnipeg, MB
Date found: January 17, 1985
Location found: Winnipeg, MB
Child

A suspect has been arrested for her murder back in 2007 and he has quite the record: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=419_1179341990

[Chris]

Yeah taht was quite a story. Glad he was arrested and i hope if he did more, the police will figure it out.