Lison Blais – June 4, 1978 – Re-post

I am re-posting the information about Lison Blais so that the information falls sequentially / chronologically.

At the end, I will give you an update on that purse: I think you will want to read it.   This is quite a timely matter, given today’s news of the destruction of evidence by the Montreal police in a current case of sexual molestation and attempted murder of a young child.

To orient yourselves, Lison dies in the Summer of 1978 in Montreal: 4 months after the disappearance of Manon Dube in Sherbrooke, and 5 months before the disappearance of Theresa Allore back in the Sherbrooke area:

Blais was found murdered the morning of June 4, 1978 a few feet from the entrance of her home where she lived with her parents at 4685 rue Christophe Colomb in Montreal. The previous evening she had been out with friends, first at a discotheque on Saint Denis, then later at the Philippe Disco Bar on Saint Laurent. She left the bar at about 3:25 am. 

Her body was found at 9:00 am that following morning. She had been struck on the head, and there were choke marks on her neck. She had been raped. The original investigators were Jean Legros and Claude Lecheppelle of Montreal’s municipal police force (MUC).

Police noted that some clothing was missing, including Lison’s black purse.

Writing in Allo Police on June 18, 1978 reporter Jacques Durand noted the similarity with other murders at that time including, Catherine Hawkes (missing purse), Louise Camirand (strangled, missing clothing), Jocelyne Houle, Johanne Dorion (Dorion and Houle were both nursing students), Helene Monast (strangled, missing items), and Lise Labadie (one of the “Plaines of Abraham” murders from 1976 in Quebec City).

(To see how all these cases interconnect, go here to the maps. When you do, you will notice that Blais lived blocks away from another possibly connected victim, Denise Bazinet)

Of particular note was Lison’s missing black purse, shown here:

This is a police composite. You see that the sketch is white to demonstrate some definition, but the article where the drawing was published clearly states that Lison’s missing purse was black:

And here is the statement released by police concerning the black purse:

Police went to some effort to find this purse, enlisting the public for help, but it was never located.

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Now I must ask to anyone who has been on this site for the last 10 years, does this purse look familiar to any of you?

It should.

It is strikingly similar to a purse that was recovered from a site that was searched in 2006, the very site where Louise Camirand’s body was discovered, March 25, 1977:

Further recall that the search in 2006 was lead by Quebec Secours, and assisted by victim survivors and volunteers. The Surete du Quebec refused to participate in the search on the grounds that it was too much work. The purse became a major focal point in a series of articles written by Allison Hanes – then of the National Post – back in July 2006 (you can read here).  

Here is another look at the purse where you can see the broken strap:

So maybe this is a case of, “So what? That was the style of purse all woman had in that era.”. Or maybe it is a case of, “That IS Lison Blais’ purse found at the site where Louise Camirand’s body was dumped”. The same site where hunters claimed to have found clothing matching the description of those worn by Theresa Allore the day she disappeared, November 3rd, 1978. Maybe this is a perpetrator who returns to crime scenes and dumps evidence there (recall that a garbage bag of clothing was found where Theresa Allore’s body was left, but not clothing that belonged to her).

The police have had 10 years to piece this together. They never did. How do I know? If someone was on the ball they would have contacted me the moment they connected the recovered purse to the Blais purse and asked me to send it to them for examination. No one ever did that. No doubt because of some cross jurisdiction turf-war between the Montreal police and the Quebec provincial police, the Surete du Quebec. No communication.  Whoever heard of a serial criminal respecting police boundaries? Police have squandered ten years.

So where is the black purse now? I don’t know. We sent it to a forensics lab in British Columbia because, again, the Surete du Quebec refused to process it. We had to go to a private lab, ACROSS THE COUNTRY WHO AGREED TO DO THE WORK FOR FREE, rather than go to the very agency responsible for processing evidence.

If we are extremely lucky, they may have kept it, but it has been 10 years.

Quebec Police: Please do your job.

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Purse update:

1. It was sent to Simon Fraser University, because I had colleagues there tasked to their forensic lab, and they agreed to test the objects we found at the Camirand site. Simon Fraser is the same place Kim Rossmo studied, but I wasn’t working with Kim at that point. He had already moved on to his university position at a Texas university.
2. All the evidence was tested and came up negative for DNA. This was disappointing, but not surprising: the items were very old and deteriorated. 
3. The person I was working with has since retired from Simon Fraser: we are in contact, and they are trying to locate the items, but it has been 10 years. Simon Fraser were under no mandate to preserve the items. 
4. Since the original post of this information, the family of Lison Blais has seen the photograph of the purse.

That is all I am going to say.