WHO KILLED THERESA?
Life isn’t fair. Justice is blind… and some cops aren’t smart and dedicated like on television.
Featured
Ripper also-rans
Jack The Peeper peeped. Jack The Hugger groped. Jack The Haircutter: The New York Recorder tells us, “This title explains itself,” but I don’t think it does. Do explain. For over three months, this gentleman “terrorized” the lower east side by snipping hair locks of women as they window-shopped along the streets of New York. Police searched for Jack The Haircutter for months without success, surmising he probably sold the hair to salon wig makers at a good price. It all starts innocent enough with a haircut, but then what?
Who Killed Theresa Turns 20
We’re having a birthday. I launched Who Killed Theresa in early January, 2003. Twenty years is a long time to catalogue unsolved crime.
What’s happening with U.S. homicide clearance rates?
Last summer, President Biden signed into law the Homicide Victims’ Families’ Rights Act, which requires federal agencies to revisit cold case murder files and apply new technologies to aid in potential breakthroughs. U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) who co-sponsored the bill had this to say: “This legislation will help ensure federal law…
Book
WISH YOU WERE HERE
A Murdered Girl, a Brother’s Quest and the Hunt for a Serial Killer
As compelling as Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark or James Ellroy’s My Dark Places, this is the story of a brother’s lifelong determination to find the truth about his sister’s death, a police force that was ignoring the cases of missing and murdered women, and, to the surprise of everyone involved, a previously undiscovered serial killer.
In the fall of 1978 teenager Theresa Allore went missing near Sherbrooke, Quebec. She wasn’t seen again until the spring thaw revealed her body in a creek only a few kilometers away. Shrugging off her death as a result of 1970s drug culture, police didn’t investigate.
Patricia Pearson started dating Theresa’s brother John during the aftermath of Theresa’s death. Though the two teens would go their separate ways, the family’s grief, obsession with justice and desire for the truth never left Patricia. Little did she know, the shockwaves of Theresa’s death would return to her life repeatedly over the next forty years.
In 2001, John had just moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife and young children, when the cops came to the door. They had determined that a young girl had been murdered and buried in the basement. John wondered: If these cops could look for this young girl, why had nobody even tried to find out what happened to Theresa? Unable to rest without closure, he reached out to Patricia, by now an accomplished crime journalist and author, and together they found answers far bigger and more alarming than they could have imagined–and a legacy of violence that refused to end.
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About John Allore
John Allore has worked in victims advocacy since 2002. His website, Who Killed Theresa is one of the first crime blogs on the internet, which began as an investigation into the unsolved murder of his sister, Theresa Allore.
John is a graduate of Trinity College, the University of Toronto. He was the first graduate of North Carolina State University’s Justice Administration program, and holds a Masters in Public Administration.
In 2017 John started the podcast, Who Killed Theresa which focuses on unsolved murders in Quebec, as well as other issues of criminal and social justice. In 2018, John was awarded the Senate of Canada’s Sesquicentennial Medal for his work in victims advocacy. He has written for a variety of publications including Canada’s National Post newspaper, The Montreal Gazette, The Sherbrooke Record, and Quillette.
John currently lives in the United States. Wish You Were Here, about unsolved murders in Canada was published by Penguin Random House in September 2020. He is currently writing his second book, That Case Is Not Here to be published in 2024.