Eve Lazarus: Retired cops know who's behind Vancouver's "Alley Murders" cold case

Written for Daily Hive by Eve Lazarus — an author, reporter and the host and producer of Cold Case Canada, a true crime podcast. Her bestselling books include Cold Case BC, Vancouver Exposed; Murder by Milkshake; and Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance. Eve blogs at Every Place Has a Story and administers the Facebook group page Cold Case Canada.

When the Vancouver Police Department posted the unsolved murders of Lisa Gavin and Glenna Sowan to its cold case website last year, it took retired detective Brian Ball by surprise.

Ball was the original investigator on the Sowan case in 1988, and much later he and retired detective Alex Clarke were part of a joint RCMP/VPD taskforce called E-Alley that investigated the murders of sex trade workers in the late 1980s. As far as Ball and Clarke were concerned, they found Gavin and Sowan’s serial killer, and he died in 2009.

Lisa Marie Gavin, 21, was found in an alley behind Knight Street and East 49th Avenue on August 13, 1988. She had been strangled. Gavin was born in a prison hospital and addicted to heroin. When she was a few months old, she was placed with the Tuerlings, a family with four kids that lived on a farm in Richmond.

“I just want to know what happened. I want the whole story. I want people to know that she was more than a prostitute, she was more than a dancer, she was our little sister and we loved her with our whole heart,” says Sharon Tuerlings.

Lisa Gavin, as a baby, with the Tuerlings family (Tuerlings family)

Gavin stayed with the Tuerlings until just after her ninth birthday, when the Ministry of Social Services awarded custody back to Lisa’s biological mother, a drug dealer and user. By her early teens, Lisa was once again addicted, this time to cocaine.

Lisa Gavin, with her stepfather (Tuerlings family)

Just over six weeks after Lisa was murdered, the body of her best friend, 25-year-old Glenna Sowan, was found strangled, beaten and left behind a house on West 24th Avenue and Willow Street. Slowan was from High Prairie, Alberta, and at the time of her death, had a baby daughter who lived with her grandmother.

Alley near where Glenna Sowan was found/VPD

The last known sighting of Tracey Leigh Chartrand, 25, was in early October 1988, just days after Sowan’s body was found. Like her friends, Lisa and Glenna, Chartrand was a habitual cocaine user and worked Mount Pleasant’s Broadway stroll to pay for drugs. Her remains were found six months after her murder, in a shallow grave at the UBC Endowment lands. Originally from North Vancouver, Chartrand was separated from her husband and had a four-year-old son.

“As soon as Tracey’s missing person report came up to our office, right away we were thinking there’s a strong possibility that Tracey is tied in with the murders of Lisa Gavin and Glenna Sowan,” says Ball. “The three women were very close friends and they usually lived together, shared clothing and things like that, so it seemed that there had to be a connection.” While Chartrand was not found in an alley, Ball believes that the killer just went a bit further out of Vancouver into a more isolated area.

Like Chartrand, Frances “Annie” Grant, 33, grew up in North Vancouver, was married and began using cocaine. She had been off the streets for about a year but was back about a month before her death, working the Broadway stroll. Her body was found in a shed behind a Mount Pleasant rooming house by a man looking for recyclables on June 4, 1989.

The proximity of Grant’s body to the house gave police their first big lead, and it led them to one of the residents, a local cocaine dealer who we’ll call Dan. “I believe she was killed somewhere close by, moved to the shed, and killed within a few hours of this fellow finding her,” says Ball, adding that her killer likely stashed her body in the shed until he could move her later.

Investigation stalls for decades

The investigation into the sex trade worker murders stalled until 2000, when Clarke searched for DNA recovered from crime scenes of unsolved homicides. She found suspect DNA on Gavin and Sowan’s bodies.

Because Dan was a tenant in the Mount Pleasant rooming house and had refused to answer questions at the time of Grant’s murder, his name was near the top of the suspect list. And, when Project E-Alley took another look at the murders, a surveillance team followed Dan and gathered his castoff DNA from a cigarette and drink container. His DNA matched that found on Gavin and Sowan’s bodies.

Ball felt they had a solid case to take to Crown Counsel and charge Dan with the murders. Counsel disagreed — they wanted a confession. But Dan, who was already in poor health, died without confessing.

“I’m absolutely certain that he was our murderer. There is no doubt in my mind,” says Ball. “Dan had left his DNA on two of the victims, there’s a third victim who was found at the back of his house, and there is the fourth victim, Tracey Chartrand. She was taken from the area and killed right at the timeframe of Lisa Gavin and Glenna Sowan.”

Clarke and Ball say it’s time to close these cold cases. They want the VPD to issue a news release with the details of the investigation along with Dan’s full name and photo. “It’s clear to everybody that’s worked on the murders that he’s the person responsible. There’s nothing more to investigate,” says Ball. “The families have a right to know all of the details about the case and why this is the guy who was responsible for the murder of their loved ones.”