7 Cold Cases = 1 Serial Killer

I’m trying to make some sense of the recent news that seven unsolved cases from the 1980s and 90s have been handed over by the Montreal Police to the Surete du Quebec’s Cold Case unit.

What does this mean? Did the Montreal Police finally give up? Also this is the first instance I can ever remember of a Quebec police force actually acknowledging that a serial killer was responsible for crimes.

A lot of what was revealed yesterday is hardly new, or even surprising. In 1984-85 the disappearances of Wilton Lubin, Sebastien Metivier, Maurice Viens, and Denis Roux Bergervin sent the Montreal community into shock and panic. All but Metivier (who was never found) were sexually assaulted and severely beaten; the bodies dumped in the St Lawrence river, a vacant house in St Antoine sur Richelieu and a wooded area in Brossard respectively.  Almost immediately the Montreal community screamed “Serial Killer”, but the police did their usual job of pacification claiming “they wouldn’t rule out any possibilities”.

What IS interesting is that now cases from the early 90s have been added, and the original young, male cluster of victims is now book-ended  with two young female cases; Tammy Leakey who was beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled on March 12, 1981 and the 1992 murder of Marie-Eve Lariviere.

So according to the police,  they are hunting a  serial predator who was active for over a decade, and who appeared to have had no visible preference for race, young age (victims range from 4 to 12), culture (French and English victims) or gender.

The most common connectors were that the victims were young, were sexually assaulted and beaten severely on all parts of their bodies.