Tag Archives: Murders

THE CIRCUS TRIAL OF THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY — THE HALL-MILLS MURDERS

On September 14, 1922, illicit lovers Edward Wheeler Hall and Eleanor Reinhardt Mills were murdered near New Brunswick, New Jersey. Hall, age 43, was a married Episcopalian minister. Mills, age 34 and married to a different man, was a soprano in his church choir. Three people—Hall’s legal wife and her two brothers—were charged with the crimes but acquitted. One hundred years later, few alive today have heard of the Hall-Mills murder trial but, back then, it was a media circus on par with the 1990s O.J. Simpson fiasco.

Normally, I write original material for the Dyingwords blog. Today, however, I’m going to plagiarize a bit because this description from The Yale Review says more about the sensational Hall-Mills side show than I can do justice to:

This steaming porridge of lust, murder, and scandal proved irresistible to the tabloids. As one eminent chronicler of the period outs it: “The Hall-Mills case had all the elements needed to satisfy an exacting public taste for the sensational. It was grisly, it was dramatic (the bodies being laid side to side as if to emphasize an unhallowed union), it involved wealth and respectability, it had just the right amount of sex interest–and in addition, it took place close to New York City, the great metropolitan nerve-center of the American press.”

The frenzied coverage turned the old Phillips farm, where the bodies were found, into a major tourist attraction. On weekends, the crime scene became a virtual carnival with vendors hawking popcorn, peanuts, soft drinks, and balloons to the hordes of the morbidly curious who arrived “at the rate of a thousand cars a day.” Within a few weeks, the crabapple tree, under which the bodies were lying, had been completely stripped of every branch and bit of bark by ghoulish souvenir hunters, while one enterprising individual peddled samples of the dirt surrounding the now-infamous tree for twenty-five cents a bag.

Back to the story of what happened, who probably did it, and why. Let’s start with the case facts.

The Reverend Ed Wheeler was born in Brooklyn and received his theology degree in Manhattan. He moved to New Jersey in 1909 and was tenured at the Evangelist Episcopal Church in New Brunswick. Here he met Frances Noel Stevens who was eight years his senior and filthy rich, being an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. They married in 1911 and had no children.

Eleanor Mills did have children. She was married to James E. Mills who was a sexton in Hall’s church and a rather n’er-do-well. Eleanor was an attractive and vivacious lady with an exceptional voice. She was a core member of the church and became Hall’s mistress.

It was no secret in New Brunswick’s society that Mills and Hall were having an affair. In fact, they were quite open about it. Many in the congregation gossiped and disapproved—not just of a clergy-parishioner relationship but the societal misalignment. Hall’s wife and family were upper class while Mills belonged with the working poor.

On September 16, 1922 (two days after Hall and Mills disappeared) a young couple walking through an orchard happened upon the bodies. Mills and Hall were lying side-by-side on their backs with their feet facing a crabapple tree. Hall was to Mill’s left with his arm touching hers while Mill’s arm was stretched, touching his. Hall’s Panama hat covered his face while Mills’ scarf wrapped her neck. Between the two were ripped-up love letters that Mills and Hall had previously passed back and forth. Notably, Reverend Hall’s calling card was set at his feet.

Autopsies showed both had been shot with a .32 caliber handgun. Hall received one gunshot wound to the head with the bullet entering above his right ear and travelling downward, exiting the left rear of his neck. Mills had three gunshot wounds. One was in the center of her forehead two inches above the nose. A second plowed through her right cheek. A third pierced her right temple.

There were minor bruises on Hall but couldn’t be conclusively linked to a struggle. Mills, on the other hand, had her throat slit from ear to ear, practically decapitating her. Her tongue had been extracted and was missing.

The initial investigation was How Not to Process a Crime Scene 101. The police failed to secure the area and a mass of onlookers had access not only to view the bodies but in handling evidence like the love letters and the calling card. The story quickly spread and became the frenzied craze described in the Yale Review excerpt.

From the onset, Hall’s wife—Frances Stevens Hall—was the prime suspect in setting up the murders. Not committing them, though, as that suspicion fell on her two brothers, Henry Hewgill Stevens and William “Willie” Carpender Stevens. The district attorney quickly took the case before a grand jury theorizing that Frances was the jealous mastermind while Henry and Willie were the obliging gunmen.

The grand jury didn’t buy it due to a lack of evidence. They rejected an indictment and the case went dormant for four years. In the legal system, that is.

In the news system, the Hall-Mills murder case was far from forgotten. The early 1920s was a vibrant time. Americans were recovering from a war and a pandemic. They wanted a release. The media gave it to them with the birth of American-style tabloids which rejected the stiff-collar, upper-crust reporting style of the New York Times.

William Randolph Hearst began publishing British-like papers targeting sensationalism. Hearst’s New York Daily Mirror competed with the already established tabloids New York Daily News and the New York Graphic. Hearst, being the cunning entrepreneur he was, looked to one-up the competition. He found one story that had it all—love & sex, money, and murder. Throw in a philandering clergyman and he had what Americans of the Roaring Twenties wanted to read.

The NY Daily Mirror resurrected the Hall-Mills murder case in 1925. Investigating reporters dug up “new evidence” which was so publicized that the New Jersey officials couldn’t ignore it. There were a few overlooked items from the 1922 investigation that showed up on the tabloid covers.

One was that Willie Stevens owned a .32 caliber pistol. Two was that Willie Stevens’s fingerprint was on the calling card found at the dead feet of Ed Hall. Three was the “Pig Woman” who claimed to have seen the murders go down.

This time, the New Brunswick grand jury indicted the three original suspects. The trial started on November 3, 1926 in neighboring Somerset, New Jersey. And if the original crime scene was a media gong show, that held nothing compared to the trial. At least three hundred news reporters covered the 33-day debacle.

The Pig Woman was the star prosecution witness. Now, there’s a story behind this pig lady. Her name was Jane Gibson or Jane Easton or Jane Upson, depending on what she wanted for the day. Jane got her pig woman name from being a farmer who kept hogs on the property next door to the orchard where the Hall and Hills bodies were found.

The Pig Woman never surfaced in the 1922 investigation, but she miraculously appeared when the tabloid coverage began. Jane stated that on the evening of September 14, 1922, her dog began barking and indicating toward the orchard. Being curious, Jane rode her mule over to the site and witnessed the three accused Stevens siblings there with the victims. As she was leaving, she heard gunshots, then went back to see Mrs. Frances Hall weeping over her dead husband’s body.

Now credibility is an important issue in witness testimony. It doesn’t help a jury’s impression when the witness’s mother (Jane’s own mom) kept yelling from the back of the courtroom while her daughter was testifying, “She’s a liar. A liar. A liar.” Nor does it create a reassuring picture when the star witness, who’s being called a liar, testifies from a hospital bed that had to be wheeled into the packed-to-over-capacity courtroom.

The three accused, Frances Stevens Hall, Henry Stevens, and Willie Stevens, all took the stand and testified on their own behalf. Frances, the stoic, denied any motivation, means, and opportunity. Henry’s defense was “Prove it. I have nothing to hide”. Willie was a special case. He was known as “Nutty Willie” in the community and probably had high-functioning autism. Apparently, he played the prosecutor like a hooked fish.

To use the cliché “in the end”, the jury acquitted Frances, Henry, and Willie. Their dream team defense counsel turned the trial into a class war where Ed Hall stooped to be with a common cheating wife like Eleanor Mills and they deserved what they got. Here’s a quote from a Rutgers pdf paper titled The Hall-Mills Murder Case: The Most Fascinating Unsolved Murder in America:

Frances Hall was presented as a paragon, along with her two brothers. “Have they been thugs?”, her lawyer asked the jury. ”Have they criminal records? Are they thieves? No. They are refined, genteel, law-abiding people, the very highest type of character, churchgoing Christians, who up to this time enjoyed the perfect admiration and respect of their friends and neighbors.”

When the jury acquitted Frances, Henry, and Willie the media manic trial was over, but the tabloids milked it until another sensational case came about. In 1932, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby was abducted and murdered. The tabloids finally closed the Hall-Mills case.

Over the last century, there’ve been numerous books written and articles submitted that looked at the Hall-Mills murders. There’s a guy named Julius Bolyog who came out 47 years after the murders stating he was a middle-man between the Frances and Willie connection and the hired killers. I seriously question his credibility. His account doesn’t pass the smell test, but you can listen to a 9-part recording produced in 1970 documenting Bolyog’s claim.

Then there’s the exhaustive work by Gerald Tomlinson titled Fatal Tryst: Who Killed the Minister and the Choir Singer? This author somehow concludes the Ku Klux Klan did it. Whatever.

So, what do I think? What an old murder cop thinks? Someone who’s been there, done that in murders?

The first thing to mind is the body positions. This was ritualistic. Hall and Mills were placed on their backs, touching each other, facing the crabapple tree with their torn love letters between them for a reason. These murders were all about infidelity.

I don’t think they were killed at this site. Rather, they were shot elsewhere and transported to the orchard knowing full well they’d be found, and the statement made. The killers wanted their victims publicly presented and a message sent.

I say killers (plural) because I don’t believe Hall and Mills were done at the dump site. It’d take two people to load, transport, and display the bodies. Handling a limp dead body by yourself is a tough go. Believe me. I was a coroner, and I know about the challenges in handling dead bodies.

I find the gunshot wounds telling. Ed Hall was shot from above and downward. From his upper right to his lower left. Eleanor Mills was shot three times, and it seems to me the shooter had to work on her. I’d say the first shot caught her struggling and zipped through her cheek. The second was more controlled and went through her temple. The third was a finish-off through the forehead after she was face-first controlled.

Control. This crime speaks to a planned control. The killers and plotter had to find the two—Ed Hall and Eleanor Mills—together and take control so they would initially cooperate. This might have been in a vehicle as it’s had to quickly get out of a vehicle when things go deadly fast.

I speculate the killers sucked Hall and Mills into the back seat of a car. Hall was on the rear driver’s side. Mills was on the rear passenger’s side.

By sucking in, I mean blackmailing. Somehow, the killers got Hall and Mills attention to get them controlled. Blackmailing will do that.

The gunshot patterns are telling. I speculate the shooter was in the passenger front position. The other killer was behind the wheel. The shooter first pulled the trigger on Hall which explains the downward, right-to-left trajectory.

I speculate Mills immediately turned left toward Hall when he was shot, exposing the right side of her face to the gunman. The shooter turned the pistol on her and got the first bullet through her cheek as she was moving to her left. The second shot to Mills got her in the right temple which would be a natural trajectory. The third shot was a fate-de-complete in her forehead. Probably this was post mortem in the orchard because the exhibit list records one .32 casing found at the death site.

The throat slit? I speculate this was also symbolic, but I don’t speculate this was done in the car. Too hard to do and too messy—too much blood. I’d say this was done post-mortem, in the orchard after the bodies were placed. The throat-slit and de-tonguing symbolism? Something about a message not to talk, I’d guess.

Who do I speculate were the mastermind, shooter, and wheelman?

I use two homicide investigation principles I’ve known for years. One is Occam’s razor—where when presented with two opposing hypotheses, the simplest answer is usually the correct answer. The Ku Klux Klan? Or within the family?

Two is the time-tested principle that the stranger the case, the closer the answer is to home. The Ku Klux Klan or the family?

So who, in my old murder cop opinion, planned it, carried it out, and why?

Frances Stevens Hall ordered it to send a message to New Brunswick’s society. She’d had enough of her cheating husband embarrassing her with a low-class floozie. She needed to send a strong social statement to maintain her wealth and power status.

I’d say Henry pulled the trigger while Willie was behind the wheel. It’s just a guess. But I’d say Willie, with his autistic creativity, staged the dump scene.

Then, again, who am I to speculate 100 years after the fact.

COLIN PITCHFORK MURDERS — THE BIRTH OF DNA FORENSIC EVIDENCE

Colin Pitchfork. Just the name conjures up a devilish image—an evil monster—a story-villain of homicidal psychopathy. But Colin Pitchfork wasn’t a fictional work, though, like Hannibal Lecter. Pitchfork was a real serial murderer and sexual deviant who raped and strangled at least two teen girls in England in the mid-1980s as well as committing countless sexual offenses. And he was the first killer in the world to be convicted through DNA forensic evidence.

Four decades later, DNA forensic evidence is commonplace. So commonplace, in fact, that juries expect it. Through a phenomenon called the CSI Effect, clever defense counsels can plant doubtful seeds in jurors’ minds where they’ll wrongfully acquit a perfectly guilty person if there’s no DNA evidence linking the accused to the crime.

That wasn’t the case with Colin Pitchfork. He was perfectly guilty of murder, and DNA evidence proved it. We’ll look at the Pitchfork case facts in a moment and then do a DNA Forensic Evidence 101 crash course, but first let me tell you a bit of my police investigation background and why I have the authority to write this piece on the birth of DNA forensic evidence.

In the 1990s, when DNA evidence was under development, I was an active homicide detective with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Serious Crimes Section. I was peripherally involved in surreptitiously collecting a biological sample from a suspect (later convicted) in the first DNA evidence trial in Canadian courts. Ryan Jason Love was taken down solely through DNA evidence for the 1990 murder of Lucie Turmel, a female cab driver who Love stabbed to death in the resort town of Banff, Alberta.

I was in the right place at the right time (DNA career-wise) in 1995 when Canada passed Bill C-104 Forensic DNA Analysis, a federal law. This legislation authorized search warrants for DNA sample collection on uncooperative suspects. The day the bill passed senate assent, I investigated a violent sexual assault where a police dog tracked and not-so-gently tackled a fleeing suspect. I executed the first DNA search warrant in Canada that resulted in convicting serial rapist Rodney John Camp.

Enough about me and my DNA exploits. Let’s take a quick look at the Colin Pitchfork murders and then try to make simple sense of this complicated business called DNA forensic evidence.

The Colin Pitchfork Murders

In November 1983, 15-year-old Lynda Mann’s body was found in the Narborough area of England, approximately one hundred miles northwest of London. She’d been beaten, raped, and murdered along a deserted pathway known as the Black Pad. Forensic evidence, at that time, determined semen on her was from a relatively common blood type that matched ten percent of males. The case fell cold after months of extensive investigation.

A second girl, 15-year-old Dawn Ashworth was found dead in July 1986. She’d also been beaten, raped, and strangled in a secluded Narborough footpath called Ten Pound Lane. As with Lynda Mann, the same semen type was on and in her body.

The Ashworth investigation revitalized the Mann file and the two cases became the Narborough Enquiry. Famed American crime writer Joseph Wambaugh would later write his book The Blooding about the phenomenal effort British authorities put into the investigations. Homicide detectives knew they had a serial killer—the similar blood types, the locations, and the modus operandis (MOs) were too strikingly similar to suggest otherwise.

The question was who donated the semen and how police could conclusively prove it.

Enter Alec Jefferys and his scientific team at the British Forensic Science Service. They’d been hard at work identifying Deoxyribonucleic Acid—the DNA double-helix molecule that provides a genetic fingerprint that’s unique to an individual except for identical twins. Jefferys & Company knew they were onto a world-changing forensic evidence breakthrough, and they used the Narborough Enquiry as a test case.

Initially in the Ashworth file, a strong suspect developed. He was a developmentally challenged youth named Richard Buckland who confessed under duress to the Dawn Ashworth murder. However, Buckland strongly denied the Lynda Mann slaying.

Alec Jefferys

By late 1986, Alec Jefferys’ team had their DNA identification process to the point where they were confident it could withstand courtroom scrutiny. The police took a blood sample from Richard Buckland and delivered it to the Jefferys lab. Conclusively, the lab results said, Buckland was not the semen donor in either the Mann or Ashworth killings. However, the DNA profile conclusively proved the Narborough killer was the same man.

Richard Buckland was a first—the first wrongfully accused person to be exonerated by DNA forensic evidence. Relying on a false confession is a law enforcement lesson harshly learned by detectives, but the British investigators moved on to find the real killer. The question was how?

The answer was a process of elimination.

The Narborough Enquirers took on the monumental task of getting blood samples for DNA analysis from as many late teen and adult males in the Narborough region as possible. This became known as “blooding” suspects and, after over 4,500 bloodings, it paid off.

Colin Pitchfork

In August 1987, police got a tip that one Ian Kelly had fraudulently submitted his blood sample to cover up for a friend, Colin Pitchfork. Both men worked as bakers in Narborough, and the plan backfired. Police took blood from Pitchfork under a court order. It matched the semen DNA profile in the Mann and Ashworth murders.

Colin Pitchfork confessed and got a life sentence. He also admitted to performing around 1,000 indecent exposure acts as well as other violent sexual assaults. Pitchfork’s motive for killing Lynda and Dawn, he said, was not for sexual gratification. He did it because the girls could identify him.

Since the first blooding that led to DNA forensic being soundly based in worldwide courtrooms, and even compounding the frustrating CSI Effect problem, DNA extraction and processing science has advanced leaps and bounds. Today, processing DNA for forensic evidence is mostly routine. Here’s a brief look—call it a crash course—in DNA Forensic Evidence 101.

DNA Forensic Evidence 101

Scientists have studied genetics since the early 1800s when Gregor Mendel suggested his theory that all living organisms had genetic blueprints that described and allowed their physical structure. Mendel also theorized all living organisms shared basic hereditary traits. Mr. Mendel did an interesting experiment with peas and proved that dominant and recessive genes got passed from parent to offspring. It’s a principle applying to peas and humans alike.

In the 1860s, Friedrich Meischer was the first to identify DNA in human blood white cells. (Note: DNA molecules do not appear in red blood cells because red cells are not really cells—they don’t have a nucleus which DNA needs to build a cell—DNA being the building blocks of cells.) By the 1920s, mainstream science widely accepted the DNA theory of genetics and inherited traits. And in the 1950s, famed genetic scientists James Watson and Francis Crick accurately described and isolated chemical structure in the double helix molecule.

Knowledge of this structure, the double helix, allowed Alec Jeffreys and his team to develop extraction, multiplication, and comparison techniques of DNA signatures within all species. DNA blueprints are present in the smallest of life’s creatures like gastropod mollusks to the largest like blue whales and are around 99.9% similar in every living species known to science. It’s that small 0.1% difference that makes species, and specimens within each species, entirely unique.

Your human body produces around 230 billion new cells each day. Nature programmed you for cell division where, uncontrolled by your conscious actions, your cells will divide into two with the new half receiving behavioral instructions from the old half. People being people and nature being nature, there are always small errors or slight changes to the genetic blueprint. Over time and through trillions of cell splits, we all become slightly different. Except, of course, for monozygotic or identical twins. (Science now finds tiny differences in monozygotic DNA structures at the mitochondrial level, but that’s for DNA 301.)

Genetic mistakes, or unintended differences, are where forensic scientists capitalize for evidence. Variances in DNA replication or sequences are called Single Nucleotide Polymorphism or SNPs. These variances normally go unnoticed, health-wise, but they’re the reasons things like hair and eye color vary, metabolisms aren’t the same in family members, and possibly why some seem to have God-given talents.

There really isn’t a lot known about why some relatives have two left feet and why some are Olympic athletes, but one thing that can be taken to the evidentiary bank is each human (save for those pesky twins) have tiny DNA blueprint variances, and that’s where the forensic folks go when examining DNA evidence.

Without stepping into DNA Forensic Evidence 201 or beyond, what’s needed for this crash course is knowing about markers and loci. DNA scientists break down the individual biological sample they’re examining and give it a barcode snapshot similar to a binary code. They have highlights called markers and loci which show unique traits of the sample. Quite simply, they make a graph of the markers and loci then compare the sample they’re questioning against the “known” one. If the markers and loci match, it’s an identification.

Caution! Spoiler Alert: DNA forensic evidence matching isn’t an exact science. It’s a complicated and precise process but, unlike fingerprinting with ridges, valleys, whorls, deltas, and accents which are 100% physically conclusive—to the elimination of all other humans in the world—DNA matches rely on conclusions based on statistical probabilities. However, the statistical matching models return such enormously large matching probabilities of 1:13 billion and such, that this circumstantial opinion or viewpoint is regularly accepted by juries as cold, hard fact.

DNA Forensic Evidence 101 isn’t the place to examine specific processing techniques like Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP), Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), Short Tandem Repeats (STR), or Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (ALFP). It’s not the place to touch on Touch DNA (Low Level DNA), Mixtures, Rapid DNA, CODIS, or Southern Blot analysis. But it’s worthwhile knowing the DNA evidentiary processing chain from crime scene to courtroom. It goes like this:

Collection — where a biological sample is found at a crime scene.

Extraction — where DNA is released from the cell at the lab.

Quantification — where the lab determines how much DNA they have to work with.

Amplification — where the lab copies the DNA to characterize it.

Separation — where the lab separates amplified DNA for identification.

Analysis and Interpretation — where the lab compares DNA to other known profiles.

Statistical Computation — where the lab calculates a match’s probability.

Quality Assurance — where the lab triple checks process accuracy.

Evidence Delivery — where the lab testifies about their conclusion(s).

In 1987, the birth of Colin Pitchfork’s DNA evidence process was slow, labor extensive, and extremely expensive. It might have even been painful. That’s no longer the case, as four decades has taken this science—originally deemed pseudoscience—and molded it into fast, economical, and highly reliable forensic evidence used around the world. Now, if science could find a permanent remedy for the CSI Effect, that’d be a real breakthrough.

So, you’ve graduated from the DyingWords crash course in DNA Forensic Evidence 101 and your certificate is in the mail. If there’s enough interest, I may run crash courses 201 and 301 where I’ll invite some expert DNA guest lecturers to explain the differences between loci and markers and why the Southern Blot is so slow compared to Rapid and maybe talk fun stuff like Touch DNA, Mixtures, CODIS, and Dirty. In the meantime, if you’d like to continue with this third-degree program, here are five Forensic DNA websites well worth checking out:

http://www.forensicsciencesimplified.org/dna/DNA.pdf

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/bc000657.pdf

https://wyndhamforensic.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/WyndhamForensic_Presentation_DNAAnalysis.pdf

https://www.fbi.gov/services/laboratory

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3561883/

THE MANIAC MURDERS AT LOVERS LANE

You’d think you’d know all the best crime stories of your hometown, especially when you were a police officer there and spent most of your service on the Serious Crimes Section—being a murder cop. Specifically, true crime stories of this magnitude which turned out to be one of the most complex double homicide investigations in your city’s history. But, no, I’d never heard of this case until I was sitting in my barber’s chair the other day and Dave told me about the maniac murders at Lovers Lane.

Dave Lawrence is Nanaimo’s downtown barber. Dave runs a one-man show at That 50s Barber Shop on Victoria Crescent where multi-millionaires push past shopping cart vagrants to get the best haircut in town. Also to find out what’s going on in town because, if you want to know, Dave’s the go-to guy for knowing what’s going on around town.

Nanaimo, by the way, is a city of 100,000 on the southeast side of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. It’s right across the water from the City of Vancouver which is one of the most exotic, erotic, and expensive places on our planet. Nanaimo is laid back in many ways, but it has an abnormally high per capita murder rate. And it’s been my home for the past thirty-four years.

I went into Dave’s shop last Saturday to get all four sides trimmed. We got talking, as we always do, and he goes, “Garry, you were a cop for a lot of years here in Nanaimo. Ever hear about the maniac murders at Lovers Lane?” I says, “No, Dave. You been smoking crack again like that guy who just tweaked by your window?” So Dave goes, “Seriously, dude. This really happened, and it’s the best true crime story I ever heard of.” Then Dave tells me about the maniac murders at Lovers Lane.

This true crime story doesn’t start with the cold-blooded executions of two young lovers. It starts fourteen years earlier on May 31, 1948, with a railroad washout near Kamloops in British Columbia’s interior. That spring, flooding was intense and the rushing water undermined a trestle pier holding up a bridge section where the Canadian National Railroad crossed the Thompson River. The bridge collapse took with it the telegraph lines connecting communications between western Canada and the east.

Losing a bridge section was one thing. Destroying communications was another. The only thing holding the main telegraph line from snapping under the weight of a sagging bridge was a small wooden bracket holding a glass insulator that the wire held fast to.

Leave it to railroader ingenuity. One sectionman got the idea to shoot the wire free. He borrowed the station agent’s .22 rifle, lay on the bank, and plinked away until he broke the bracket and saved the day. The rifle went back to the station agent’s house and was forgotten.

Until October 16, 1962. That’s when pretty nineteen-year-old Diane Phipps went on a date with her handsome boyfriend of six months, nineteen-year-old Leslie Dixon. That evening, the pair drove about downtown Nanaimo—then a city of around 20,000—stopping at the drive-in, gabbing with friends, and generally being young people in love. After dark, Diane and Leslie drove way out to Pipers Lagoon which the youths of Nanaimo called Lovers Lane. They parked and began to make out and were never seen alive again.

Pipers Lagoon is about eight miles from downtown Nanaimo. It’s in the Hammond Bay area which is now full of upscale homes but, thankfully, the city wisdom at the time foresaw the value of Pipers Lagoon and preserved it as parkland. It’s a strikingly beautiful spot, even though it has this history.

Diane Phipps and Leslie Dixon’s families became concerned—very concerned—when the two lovers didn’t come home by morning. Friends knew they’d likely gone to Lovers Lane, so that was the first place they searched. They found Leslie’s car. It was parked in the lane. He was slumped inside behind the wheel, dead, with two .22 bullets to the back of his head. Dianne was nowhere in sight.

This started the biggest criminal investigation in Nanaimo’s history. How I never heard about it, I don’t know, but Dave steered me to a website that documented the case as well as archives in the Vancouver Sun that covered the story. Here’s what happened.

Crime scene investigators found Leslie had been shot at close range. They surmised that the killer surprised the pair and shot him through an open driver’s side window, leaving his body in place. Leslie’s wallet with money was still in his pocket which indicated robbery was not a motive. There was no blood or evidence of Dianne being shot while sitting on the front passenger side seat, so the police officers surmised she’d been abducted at gunpoint.

The Nanaimo detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) called in extra resources. A large search of the surrounding area found no trace of anything connected with the crime, including Dianne Phipps. Officers went door to door and investigated the pair’s trail the previous evening. They were baffled and quickly involved the media, asking for public help.

At 2:00 p.m. on the day after Leslie Dixon was found murdered, a Nanaimo resident was rummaging through a rural garbage dump five miles south of Nanaimo in a semi-rural area called Harewood. He saw a pair of feet sticking out from under some old car parts. It was Dianne Phipps. She’d been shot once between the eyes and her head had been bashed-in with a rock. Her time of death was consistent with the early morning hours of October 17.

Dianne wasn’t sexually assaulted. She was fully clothed and her purse, containing money, was beside her. With robbery and sexual overtones ruled out, and no one in the couple’s entire history posing a threat, the RCMP suspected they had a murderous maniac on their hands.

More public appeals went out. Police got a call from a woman who lived on Harewood Road, not far from where Dianne’s body was found. She related that at 1:00 a.m. on the night of the murders she got a knock on her door. A very strange man was there and said his car was stuck in a nearby ditch. He asked if she would take her pickup and pull him out.

She did so. He posed no threat to her, but she found his actions so bizarre that she thought he’d done something else. Now hearing of Dianne’s body being found close to where she towed this stranger, she suspected the incidents were related.

The witness lady gave the police an excellent description of the man and his sedan. She did not get a name, nor did she record the license number. This suspect and vehicle information was widely broadcast and developed hundreds of tips.

Week by week and month by month, the police investigation team put their hearts into the case of the Lovers Lane murders. The City of Nanaimo posted a $5,000 reward which was equivalent to a year’s wages back then. More tips came in, but not the right ones.

The weather turned as cold as the case. Vancouver Island is normally Canada’s winter hot spot. It rarely freezes on the south island and only snows occasionally. The winter of 1962/1963 was far colder than normal. The local lakes froze to the point where people could walk on the ice which is what a young boy did on Long Lake which is in north Nanaimo miles away from Lovers Lane and the Harewood dump.

The boy saw something through the ice. It was a rifle—a rather unusual rifle. The boy called his father, and they smashed through the ice and retrieved a Winchester Model 63 semi-automatic .22 with serial number 41649A stamped on it.

The father was suspicious as to why someone would throw a valuable firearm in the lake. He took it to the police who sent it to the crime lab. This firearm found in Long Lake matched the .22 bullets taken from Dianne Phipps and Leslie Dixon at their autopsies. It was the murder weapon.

The police held back this information while they pursued other leads. They traced the .22 as being manufactured on October 5, 1940, and was sold by a Kamloops sporting goods store in 1942. However, back then in the Second World War years, purchaser records weren’t kept. The trail again grew cold.

On Saturday, April 18, 1964—almost a year and a half after the murder weapon was found—the Vancouver Sun ran a front-page story and, with police permission, released the holdback information on the unusual firearm along with its photo. This started the tips again.

The sectionman who shot the telegraph bracket and saved the communication day back in 1948 saw the rifle’s photo and strongly suspected it was the one he used that belonged to the station agent, one Robert Ralph Dillabough of Kamloops. There was a problem with that. Mr. Dillabough had died ten years earlier. However, his estate had recorded the rifle as an asset, including it having the serial number 41649A. It was the same piece, for sure.

Diligent detective work took place. Police tracked Dillabough’s estate through a law firm of Mr. D.T. Rogers of Kamloops. They recorded that the murderous .22 was sold at an auction in Kamloops on February 19, 1955. The auctioneer was named George Shelline who they found had been killed in an automobile accident a year earlier. Shelline’s estate had no records of who purchased this puzzling and deadly firearm. Once again, the case went cold.

Over time, the police followed over five thousand tips taking hundreds and hundreds of statements. They checked 60,000 vehicle registrations for the suspicious car that was towed from the ditch along Harewood Road and they checked over 2,000 firearms sales invoices. The RCMP got help from the FBI and from Scotland Yard and from Interpol. They amassed what was the largest murder file in the history of British Columbia and they got nowhere.

Not until the Vancouver Sun ran another front-page story, again displaying the .22’s photo. On August 7, 1965—pushing three years after Dianne and Leslie’s murders—a tipster who requested confidentiality came forward and fingered Ronald Eugene Ingram as the owner of Winchester Model 63 .22 with serial number 41649A.

Ronald Ingram was now living in North Vancouver and worked as a baker. The police learned that in October of 1962, Ingram had resided in Nanaimo along with his wife and three children where he co-owned the Parklane Bakery on Harewood Road. He moved from Nanaimo to North Vancouver shortly after the Lovers Lane murders occurred.

Ingram and his vehicle were dead ringers for the strange man who got his auto stuck on Harewood Road. The police seized his vehicle. Even though a lot of time had passed, they found dried bloodstains in it that matched Dianne Phipps’s blood type.

The police also got information that Ronald Ingram had used the now-notorious .22 to shoot rats in his bakery’s storeroom. Armed with a warrant and a chainsaw, the police recovered bullets from the storeroom wall that matched the .22’s unique firing signature and the ones that killed Dianne and Leslie.

They arrested Ronald Ingram and charged him with capital murder. To this point, no one in the legal circles ever heard of him. He had no criminal record and his name never surfaced in the intense investigation—until he was linked to the murder weapon.

The medical and psychiatric circles had certainly heard of Ronald Ingram, though. He had a lengthy history of mental illness including having maniacal episodes. Ingram confessed to murdering Dianne Phipps and Leslie Dixon, claiming he was in a maniacal state at the time. In one of the speediest trials I’ve ever heard of, Ingram was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was ordered locked up under the authority of Section 545 of the Canadian Criminal Code and held “until the pleasure of the Lieutenant Governor was known“.

Ronald Ingram was incarcerated at the maximum-security Forensic Psychiatric Institute at Riverview Hospital in the Greater Vancouver area. Over time, Ingram’s classification was lowered to medium-security and he was consecutively placed in a less restrictive psychiatric environments. In 1976—fourteen years after these truly horrific crimes by a homicidal maniac—Ronald Eugene Ingram simply walked out the front door of his mental hospital. He was never heard of again.

And that’s the true story Dave told me about the maniac murders at Lovers Lane.