Perhaps because of its unique social geography, the degradation of mid-sized city economies, or the silo effect of the city's makeup, London seemed the perfect place for sex traffickers, drug dealers, and serial killers. They stopped here on their way through, as Ontario's superhighway 401 connects us easily with Detroit and Toronto. The Forest City was made a safe haven for the worst criminals by the covered eyes and ears of our citizens. Londoners can be remarkably incurious people.
\My husband was born and raised in London, Ontario, apparently at the same time that that small, conservative city was unofficially known as the serial killer capital of Canada (and perhaps even of the world), and while reading Vanessa Brown's account of those still unsolved murders, The Forest City Killer, I couldn't help but wonder what those years must have been like for my inlaws: bringing children into a world where the daily headlines warned of young people being found raped, murdered, and left, half-naked and bloodied, exposed to the elements. When I asked Dave about this, he said he had never heard of any connection between London and supposed serial killers while growing up (giving credence to Brown's assertion that Londoners are particularly good at ignoring their city's unseemlier side), and it seems outrageous that fifty years later, these victims' families are still awaiting justice. As Michelle McNamara did for the Golden State Killer in I'll Be Gone in the Dark (who was eventually found as a result of the attention McNamara brought back to those murders now attributed to him), Brown's primary purpose seems to be to revive these cold cases and put pressure on the various police departments to retest evidence, follow up on new connections, and get the public talking again, perhaps prompting people to finally reveal what they know. With a respectful discussion of the various crime scenes and an always empathetic narrative around these victims and their families, Brown strikes just the right balance between relaying information and maintaining dignity for those involved; a worthwhile project, done well. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Someday, someone is going to write a book about the English case, as we are dealing with some of the wackiest people that existed. Mrs. Harrison and Glen Fryer were both insane. Even a TV drama could not come up with weirder people. – Dennis Alsop JrAs an amateur historian, journalist, and trained antiquarian who runs an independent used bookstore in London, Ontario, Brown has both officially and informally spent her life collecting the stories of the locals she meets and talks to every day. After learning about London's history with serial killers from Michael Arntfield's Murder City, Brown eventually arranged a meeting with Dennis Alsop Jr: the son of a detective with the Ontario Provincial Police who investigated many of London's murders in the late 60s/early 70s, and who is now in possession of his deceased father's personal archives. With the aid of this new information (including Alsop Sr's personal theories; those things the police know but can't prove in court), Brown develops and relates her own theories, apparently unique in the online sleuthing community, and if any of this can catch a killer while he may still be alive, it seems a worthy project. What I might object to is the middle chunk of the book – focused on the strange and coincidence-laden story of “the wackiest people that existed” – that makes for interesting reading, but may only be tangentially related to the case that Brown is building.
And while I appreciate the frustration that the victims' families and modern researchers might feel towards what they now regard as shoddy police work at the time, Brown spends a lot of ink editorialising about those investigations when she could just let the facts speak for themselves. It would seem that at the height of the runaway hippie days, the police were unwilling to search for missing young women until weeks passed (assuring a family that their long-missing daughter “is probably off somewhere married by now”, or in the aftermath of a church group needing to organise its own search party when the police refused, officially commenting, “If three hundred men couldn't find her, I doubt three hundred and six could have either”). There's no arguing that victim shaming and moral relativism were prevalent in those chauvinistic days: A coroner sneers that a teenaged murder victim hadn't been a virgin, a divorcee probably wasn't the victim of rape because people knew she liked to sleep around, it's implied that a sex predator could have been contained if his wife had met his needs, a judge cautions a jury that they couldn't add rape to a murder charge if it's found that the body had only been violated after death. Weird and nasty stuff to the modern reader. When an adolescent is found dead, bloody and bruised, her genitals exposed and her mouth stuffed with pink tissue, the police reaction is incredible, but I didn't need Brown to spell it out for me:
Detective Herb Jeffrey said, “We feel the victim knew the person who picked her up.” When asked about the type of person who would commit such a disgusting, violent act, Jeffrey ruled out an abnormal mind. He said, “Perverts destroy. This was more like the work of a healthy male.” The implication was that a man had been overcome with lust and arousal, that this kind of behaviour – kidnap, murder, and sexual assault – was just a natural offshoot of a healthy man's desires.Inserting herself into the narrative did add interest for me – learning the history of Brown's research made the subject matter more relatable, as did the local colour she could provide as a resident of the setting – so it's not that I wanted Just the facts ma'am, I just found the running commentary about the state of police work back in the day to be too often snide. I was fascinated to learn that the first detective to respond to a murder case back then would write his name on the victim's hand before anything else to claim the case (talk about corrupting a crime scene!), and I agree with Alsop Jr's assertion that the police often forget that investigations belong equally to victims' families and information and evidence shouldn't be so jealously guarded from them (nor, for that matter, should the victims' non-evidentiary belongings be held indefinitely as their families plead for their return). Brown quotes often from Murder City, makes reference to coverage of some of these murders on the television show To Catch a Killer, and discusses the online sleuthing devoted to London's serial killers on the website Unsolved Canada: it would seem that even if people can live their entire lives in London without knowing it had been the serial killer capital of Canada, there are still many people committed to solving these decades-old cold cases. If, as with the Golden State Killer, the Forest City Killer is caught as a result of this fresh focus on the facts, any narrative quibbles I might have would be moot. I hope that is the case.
