Clifford Olson — Canada’s national monster — dead
at 71
By Ian Mulgrew - Vancouver Sun
October 3, 2011
Canada's first true bogeyman, Clifford Robert Olson,
is dead.
The country's pioneer serial killer, whose crimes
terrorized the British Columbia's Lower Mainland, died Friday in Quebec.
Olson's death was confirmed by the Correctional
Service of Canada in a release Friday afternoon. He was 71.
It was learned on Sept. 21 that Olson was apparently
dying of cancer with only days or weeks to live, according to families
of Olson's victims.
Maple Ridge resident Ray King, father of slain teen
Ray King Jr. said: "It's over, that's all I can say about it.
"Time to get on with the business of living," King
said. "For 30 years I haven't really had a chance to heal some wounds
because of him. Now it's onwards and upwards."
Olson was a middle-aged habitual criminal and
informant when from January 1980 until August 1981 he stalked, tortured
and killed at least 11 youngsters. He sexually abused scores of others.
The heinous nature of his crimes ensured infamy. But
more than that, Olson is reviled because he blackmailed authorities into
paying his family $100,000 for the return of his victims' remains - a
macabre cash-for-corpses deal that destroyed careers and tormented
survivors.
Before kinky sex killers Paul Bernardo and Karla
Holmolka, before the Pig Farm Butcher, there was the "Beast of B.C."
a.k.a. "the Rent-a-car Killer" because of his penchant for hiring
another new car for each slaying. He savoured kiddy porn, was a
recognized sexual deviant and lived most of his life in a steel and
concrete cage.
Back in 1980, however, Vancouver was a truly
provincial city - Expo 86 was six years away and newspapers from other
provinces or countries still could take days to arrive.
The Lower Mainland was a patchwork quilt of nascent
municipalities and a hodgepodge of police jurisdictions. There was
little coordination among the different RCMP detachments and autonomous
civic police forces, and the computer revolution had yet to occur.
Before he was caught, Olson terrorized the province -
neighbourhoods that once claimed to be so safe you could leave your door
open, locked up; hitchhikers disappeared from the highways, and
telephone poles were emblazoned with posters warning that nearly a dozen
youngsters were missing and a killer was on the loose.
In every real way, his merciless savagery robbed
British Columbians of their innocence and attendant faith that such
monsters only lurked elsewhere.
There were many factors that allowed Olson to prey on
children and adolescents across B.C. and elsewhere in Canada for 19
months before being arrested.
Born on Jan. 1, 1940 - a New Year's Day baby - Olson
was a bad seed.
The eldest child of Clifford and Leona, Clifford Jr.
grew up in a small house near the Pacific National Exhibition grounds.
His dad delivered milk in those days and was one of
the last to drive a horse-drawn cart. Later Clifford Sr. worked in
construction and as an apartment building manager; Leona was a
housekeeper.
After the war, the family moved to the sprouting
suburb of Richmond, into one of the many housing schemes for returning
veterans. A short, stocky kid, Olson was always a problem.
"He was always getting into fights and getting beaten
up," his father Clifford Olson Sr. remembered later. "One day he said,
`Dad, I'm going to learn to be a boxer. As soon as he did, he began
making the rounds of the boys who had beaten him up and started evening
the score. Maybe that's his trouble - that chip on his shoulder."'
He began to skip class when he was only 10 years old,
and after completing Grade 8 quit altogether to embrace a life of crime.
Leona bore two more sons, Richard and Dennis, and a
daughter, Sharon. All grew up to be law-abiding middle-class people.
But if she could boast of their achievements, with
Clifford, she was always making excuses.
He was a loner, a loser and a perennial failure who
was jailed for the first time on July 19, 1957. He was 17.
Over the following 24 years, he chalked up nearly 100
convictions - obstructing justice, possession of stolen property,
possession of firearms, forgery, false pretences, fraud, parole
violation, impaired driving, theft, break and enter and theft, armed
robbery, escape from lawful custody, rape, buggery, gross indecency ...
and finally, first-degree murder.
He escaped from jail seven times.
In 1965, for instance, The Vancouver Sun reported the
search for him on its front page.
Serving 3 1/2 years in the B.C. Penitentiary for
break-and-enter theft, Olson fled three guards who had escorted him to
Shaughnessy Hospital after he feigned illness.
The chase involved dozens of police and, at one
point, the armed-and-dangerous Olson slipped through a closing net of
investigators in Vancouver's east end by only seconds. He spent that
night hiding under the Queensborough Bridge in New Westminster.
After a week on the loose, Olson was nabbed in
Blaine, Wash. - sniffed out by Tiger the police dog.
Border patrol officers had called for assistance
after Olson menaced two teens with a gun in a wooded area straddling the
international boundary, about a quarter mile east of the Pacific Highway
Crossing. Officers from four different forces were involved in the final
moments of the chase for the 25-year-old fugitive.
"He must have lain there [in the leaves] three hours
with 50 people crisscrossing right through there," said Chief Border
Inspector A.D. Brandon at the time. "But the dog went straight to him."
It was the second time Olson had been caught by a
police dog.
Roughly a year earlier, he was pinned in a thorny
tangle of Richmond blackberry bushes by a police dog named Rinty.
Olson was freed under mandatory supervision five
times in the 1970s and each time his behaviour landed him back behind
bars.
Released in January of 1980, Olson picked up where he
left off and continued his life-long crime spree. It was all he knew how
to do.
A few months after getting out of prison, Olson
seduced Joan Hale, a locally reared divorcee who had survived a violent,
abusive marriage. They had a son, Stephen, in April 1981, in the midst
of Olson's killing spree, and they married a month later.
Three days after the ceremony, Olson murdered another
teenager.
Hale said she knew nothing of the crimes and
presented herself at the time as "a victim."
Olson lived off her divorce settlement and abused
her, too, she said.
Hale refused to return the money Olson extorted from
then-attorney-general Allan Williams.
His handling of the Faustian pact ended Williams'
career as a provincial politician.
The police investigation of Olson - one of Canada's
first serial killer cases - was heavily criticized because he was able
to kill again and again, even after detectives identified him as the
prime suspect.
Olson was able to initially elude detection in part
because of his reputation as a rat -the cops at first thought of him a
resource, not a suspect. And they had some reason.
In 1976, inside Prince Albert Penitentiary, Olson was
stabbed seven times by a gang of prisoners angry after he betrayed and
identified for authorities prison drug couriers.
While incarcerated, Olson also provided police with
enough information to ensure the conviction of a fellow inmate who
raped, mutilated and strangled a nine-year-old girl.
Olson, who was always revved up on alcohol and pills,
had a standard routine to lure adolescents.
He met them in video parlors and similar youth
hangouts or he advertised for them on the bulletin board of the People's
Full Gospel Church, a Baptist congregation where he and Joan worshipped.
Olson handed out a flashy, 3-D card that identified
him as a construction contractor.
Under the guise of conducting a brief informal job
interview, he identified his potential victims. He sought out the naive.
He'd hold out the prospect of a job, give them a ride
to a fictitious construction site and, along the way, offer them a
celebratory sip of a Mickey Finn - a pop or bottled cocktail spiked with
chloral hydrate, a knock-out drug.
Once he overpowered the youngster, Olson engaged in
sadistic experiments on the children. He drove a three-inch spike into
one child's head, another he injected with an air embolism. He talked
about them as science experiments and fantasized about fame under the
name, "Silver Hammer Man," a reference to the Beatles' song.
Olson scattered their bodies from the bogs and
cranberry fields of the Fraser River delta to the abandoned quarries and
canyons of the Coastal Mountains.
He randomly picked his victims from a similarly large
swath of the Lower Mainland so the lack of coordination among regional
police departments and the RCMP worked to his advantage. The career
criminal had honed his awareness of police procedures.
When distraught parents initially complained about
police inaction and to speculate about the existence of a serial killer,
investigators downplayed such fears. They insisted it was likely the
missing teens had run away.
It took investigators an agonizingly long time to
link disappearances that occurred in different jurisdictions. In the
end, however, even the police were forced to acknowledge the obvious as
the number of disappeared neared double digits.
At the investigation's peak, more than 200 officers
were committed to the case. The pressure on police and politicians to
find the children and the perpetrator was intense. It was fuelled by
frenzied media coverage.
"Cunning killer with blazing eyes!" shouted one
headline.
"Hot summer helps slayer elude police," trumpeted
another.
A later inquiry identified many problems with the
police response to the disappearances and killings. It recommended
various independent police departments join in the use of the RCMP
computer, the establishment of a central data bank and a review of RCMP
procedures for handling multi-jurisdictional crimes.
Nevertheless, two decades later, the lack of
integration among Lower Mainland police agencies would remain a problem
and be blamed as a contributing factor in the Downtown Eastside missing
women case.
When Olson was actually arrested in mid-August, 1981,
the Beast turned out to be a banal, beefy rounder with cow orbs. He
stood five-foot-seven, weighed maybe 160 pounds and sported a mop of
brown hair.
Police, though, had scant evidence against him and
only four bodies.
During his interrogation, Olson offered to lead
police to the remains of the children who hadn't been found. He also
said he would return some of their jewelry and clothing, which he had
kept as souvenirs.
Tapes of the interrogation sessions, notes from
investigators and later reminiscences provided a vivid if unsettling
picture of what happened.
"I'll give you 11 bodies for $100,000," Olson told
the interrogators.
"You want a $100,000 for 11 bodies," RCMP Corporal
Fred Maile stammered incredulously.
"Yes," Olson continued, "and you will get statements
with the bodies. I will give you all the evidence, the things only the
killer would know."
"Well, just a minute," said the detective, who later
went on to found one of B.C. most respected private investigation
companies. "We would have to work something out. I wouldn't just pay you
a $100,000. You could rip us off. Also, I have to have something to tell
or show my bosses that, in fact, you are credible."
"Okay," Olson replied. "I'll give you a freebie. I
will give you one body and a statement. You have the $100,000 in cash.
When we are finished at a scene, I will phone or you will phone your man
who will hand the money over to Joan. Then you can talk to your man and
I will talk to Joan to make sure that she has the money. Then we'll go
on to get the rest."
"What if your lawyer doesn't go along with it?" Maile
asked.
"Like I told you before," Olson crowed, "he works for
me."
The killer dictated his proposal and Maile wrote it
down on a single page in a sloppy, longhand scrawl:
"This is an undertaking of an agreement between the
RCMP and Clifford Robert Olson. The following will be paid by the RCMP
to Mrs. Joan Olson for the following information: $10,000 cash for each
body of missing persons up to seven bodies. $30,000 for information of
four bodies which have already been recovered which relate to the above
seven other missing persons. The agreement should be as undertaken shall
be binding in law as to not disclose this information in this agreement
to the Canadian Press. The following missing persons are covered in this
agreement: Judy Kozma, Daryn Johnsrude, Raymond King, Simon Partington,
Ada Court, Louise Chartrand, Christine Weller, Terri-Lyn Carson, Colleen
Daignault and Sandra Wolfsteiner and one unidentified female (Sigrun
Arnd, a German student tourist police weren't aware was missing).
$10,000 will be paid to Mrs. Olson up to a total of the recovery of
seven bodies."
Later, he called his wife Joan: "Honey, you're going
to be rich."
As the minister responsible for the legal system,
Williams was required to approve what most considered a very real deal
with the devil. If Williams didn't agree to the terms, he was told there
was a chance that Olson might slip back onto the street to kill again.
There wasn't a shred of evidence, the investigators
said. The pact was the only way to ensure he was convicted.
It was an excruciating decision.
No one disputes that there is a "secret economy" to
the Canadian judicial system, a subterranean marketplace where lawyers
and prosecutors haggle over charges, plea bargains and guarantees of
immunity. There is a cardinal rule, however, in all such bargains: the
criminal should never be allowed to profit. Crime should not pay.
Williams and the police could not allow Olson to directly receive the
money. That would be too great an outrage.
Within days, Olson was escorted to an office high in
the old verdigris-roofed Sun Tower.
He was not in handcuffs. He strutted around the 17th
floor as if he were a celebrity, smoking a White Owl cigar and
commanding a handful of lawyers, secretaries, his wife and police.
"Does your husband know what he is doing?" asked
Joan's lawyer, Jim McNeney.
She was catatonic and could only nod mutely.
Olson put a hand on her shoulder and muttered: "What
can I say, honey? I did it. It was the booze and the pills."
She wailed.
Olson told the lawyers how he wanted the money
distributed - some would pay their fees, some would go to his parents
and he wanted to ensure Joan and their baby son were looked after. He
suggested his lawyer, Robert Shantz, write a book about the case called,
"Kiss Daddy Goodbye."
After the legal paperwork was signed, RCMP Sergeant
Jack Randall unzipped a black, softsided under-arm briefcase. He
withdrew several bundles of wrinkled, old-issue bills bound with elastic
bands. He handed them to McNeney's partner, lawyer Kevin Morrison, who
counted the money onto the coffee table.
"One thousand, two thousand, three thousand..."
Olson, the ever-present stogie clamped between his
teeth, could barely contain himself. His eyes gleamed. He jiggled
Shantz's elbow.
"...Eight thousand, nine thousand, 10 thousand,
11..."
There were 99 rose-colored $1,000 bills and 10 maroon
hundreds.
McNeney later said the scene was so bizarre he half
expected a sulphurous explosion and Satan himself to appear. Imagine an
honest-to-goodness blood-money deal for bodies.
Olson's family received the cash. In exchange,
Williams was able to guarantee a first-degree murder conviction, ease
the anxiety of the parents whose children remained officially "missing,"
dispel the terror that gripped British Columbia and end an enormously
expensive police investigation.
If the deal-making scene had been surreal, the grisly
caravan to recover the remains was something from the Twilight Zone.
Olson travelled in a car with four detectives
followed by a dog car. Behind, there were usually three or four other
vehicles carrying forensic specialists to handle the crime scenes.
Corporal Maile, holding a large tape-recorder, sat in
the back seat with Olson, who held a microphone.
The killer wore a regulation RCMP hat as a disguise
and dictated as they went, describing the locale and circumstances of
each murder with the panache of a sports announcer. The hourly radio
broadcasts about the search for more bodies provided a ghastly
play-by-play.
Television newscasts featured scenes of excavation
teams draining suburban wetlands.
Olson liked the forest-cloaked hills around Weaver
Lake and the peaty bottomland north of River Road for disposing of his
victims. One body was mummified by the time it was found. Others were so
badly decomposed only pathologists could identify them.
He pantomimed a re-enactment of each murder, and then
police would call McNeney and release the required amount of money. The
lawyer deposited it first in the Bank of Montreal at Homer and Hastings
in downtown Vancouver but later transferred it offshore to protect it
from police seizure.
In between recovering his victims, Olson and the
police dined at local steakhouses, where the murderer wolfed down thick
sirloins and baked potatoes.
He kept scores of mementoes to remind himself of each
child's suffering and death throes - trophies to validate his kills.
While he awaited trial, Olson was the topic of
conversation in every courthouse, police station, jail and legal
kaffeeklatsch in the province. He even called reporters to brag about
the deal he struck and bitch about jail conditions.
"I can't stand the treatment," he complained.
The other prisoners tossed trash and lighted
cigarettes at him. They shoved him when he passed. While his clothes
were in storage, someone ripped the buttons off his suit and scrawled "babyf…er"
on his shirt.
"That suit cost $200," he whined. "The shirt $60. I
don't have to put up with that kind of s---. I think one should have
fair treatment from the press. I want to be segregated from other
inmates. I have to sleep on the floor. I have to live like a dog. I've
got no running water. I've got no light in my cell. I'm locked up 22
hours a day. I get one hour exercise in the morning."
Olson's whinging generated front-page news, but no
one in the B.C. media reported the deal.
The attorney-general had personally wooed publishers
and broadcast executives not to reveal the pact. Even when questions
about the payoff were raised in the House of Commons, they censored the
information. What was front-page news in Edmonton, in B.C. was an
enigmatic brief.
No one in B.C. wanted to be blamed for violating the
serial killer's right to be presumed innocent before the verdict was
pronounced.
In the end, the trial was aborted by Olson's guilty
pleas. He dabbed away tears as he confessed publicly for the first time.
After the court clerk read each charge of
first-degree murder, Olson replied hoarsely: "Guilty."
Tears streamed down his cheeks after the 11th and
final first-degree murder charge was read.
Justice Harry McKay said no punishment a civilized
country could impose was adequate.
"You should never be granted parole for the
remainders of your days. It would be foolhardy to let you at large."
Indeed, as he was driven away to serve his sentence,
Olson confided to the accompanying officer that if he ever regained his
freedom, "I'd take up where I left off."
News of the pernicious cash-for-bodies deal broke
like an angry squall over Williams.
Even Olson's lawyer, Shantz, denounced the
unprecedented agreement as improper.
"I think it was politically insane and I do not
approve of it.... We all know police pay informants, but I don't think
they should pay the culprit."
Columnists and talk-show hosts condemned the police
and vilified the attorney-general.
"I consider this case unique," Williams offered by
way of explanation. "I do not expect it to occur again."
He could not backpedal fast enough.
"The decision was not an easy one for me or the RCMP
to make," Williams said. "It is the practice for monies to be extended
in a variety of ways to obtain information, to protect witnesses,
sometimes to protect others who may be associated with crimes. This
matter is an extension of that principle, one that I don't expect to see
repeated. The crimes were so horrible they should not be revealed. It
adds nothing to dwell on details of that kind."
Words could not disguise the reality - the government
had paid for Olson's conviction. There was revulsion across Canada and
the families of the victims were outraged.
Most never got over the shock that such an unseemly
bargain had been struck on their behalf.
"There shouldn't be any money paid to that creep,"
fumed Siegmund Wolfsteiner. "The guy who killed my daughter takes
$100,000 from the government. It's ridiculous. You call that justice?"
"That's salt in the wounds for us," said Raymond
King, who lost his son.
Montreal criminal lawyer Frank Shoofey summed up the
reaction of many in the legal community: "The biggest judicial scandal
in years."
"Presumptively repugnant," sniffed Alan Borovoy, of
the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
NDP MP Svend Robinson called for a public inquiry.
Williams' career was finished. Police tried unsuccessfully to recover
the money.
The families pleaded for redress in the courts, but
were rebuffed.
"It floors me that anyone would think that I had
anything to do with it," Joan Hale emphatically testified when the
families attempted to legally compel her to return the money.
"I cried, I cried a lot at first. I don't know how to
explain it.... I really don't think too much about them now. I'm glad
the children are buried. Oh, I hate him. I hated him for the night he
held a knife to my throat. He terrorized me, scared me, beat me. There
was no one I could turn to."
The court let her keep the money.
"I think that money was given to me in good faith,"
Hale said afterward. "I don't have a guilty conscience. I can look
myself in the mirror and say, `You're a good person - don't be
ashamed."'
When she looked back on why she got involved with
Olson, she said: "He's a real charmer.
"He has a way with words and I've yet to see a woman
that hasn't been attracted to him. I don't know what it is, really. I
like to say it was his brown eyes, but it couldn't have been that. It
was something I thought I needed. I needed that companionship, I
thought, and I needed someone to protect me from my husband because he
was coming around and bothering me. And Clifford seemed the perfect
solution."
Of her then-three-year-old son, named after his
father, she said: "It's really strange. He knows who his father is. He
picked it on from the TV. I just can't believe it. I just explained it
to him that his dad was a bad person and he has to spend the rest of his
life in jail and that we are never going to see him and he accepted
that. Whether he will later on - I don't know."
Five-and-a-half years after Olson picked up Christine
Weller and drove her to a dump by the Fraser River in Richmond, the
Supreme Court of Canada refused an appeal from the parents to examine
the deal.
Even after he was locked away for the rest of his
days, Olson continued to plague police, his victims' families and the
public.
He claimed to have murdered as many as 30 others, but
he was never able to substantiate these boasts, despite leading
investigators on an embarrassing wildgoose chase.
Olson sent venomous, vulgar greeting cards to parents
crowing about his brutality to their children. He sent pornographic
letters to members of Parliament.
No one has managed to explain why Olson was the way
he was. And no matter how ill he might have been, he never turned
himself in.
The man with the best insight was probably Stanley
Semrau, a top forensic psychiatrist who interviewed Olson at length in
prison.
"He can kill, not out of anger or bitterness, but in
a light-hearted way, as a sport," Semrau testified at a judicial review
when Olson applied for early parole.
"He doesn't even grasp the enormity or the horror of
what he has done. His is a personality which is devoted to exploiting
and harming other people in his own interests."
Semrau described Olson as an anti-social,
narcissistic psychopath who boasted about his murders. He called him a
"master manipulator" who exhibited homo- and heterosexual pedophilia,
sexual necrophilia and sexual sadism.
Olson described with delight his sexual assaults of
30 to 40 children of both sexes aged five to 10, as well as up to 100
young people aged 16 to 18. Olson said he became "addicted" to murder
and had an "incredibly morbid fascination" with how children went
through the process of dying.
"Seeing the death process was something he took
substantial pleasure in," said Semrau. "His claims of remorse are
completely hollow. In fact, he says he deserves substantial credit from
the families because of the fact he so magnanimously helped to locate
bodies. He used World War II as an analogy. He said, `We're friendly
with the Germans and the Japanese now. Let's get over this, too. Let's
not make such a big deal out of this.'
"The killings have, in fact, been a plus in his life.
He went, essentially, from a nobody to, in his own eyes, a somebody. It
put him on the map. In his own eyes he has a celebrity status."
Olson scored 38 out of 40 on the Hare checklist, a
clinical scale that rates psychopaths. It was the highest score Semrau
had ever given any of the hundreds of murderers, psychopaths and sexual
offenders he had studied: "I found his descriptions to be quite
nauseating compared to other cases I've been involved in."
Semrau concluded Olson was untreatable: "He's very
pleased with the way he is right now."
The jury at the judicial review took only 15 minutes
to order Olson kept in jail.
As with many psychopaths, there was virtually no
traumatic event in his childhood that could be identified as the trigger
of Olson's homicidal rage.
His parents became inured to the regular visits from
police, the shame of the newspaper reports and the continued disruptions
their son's behaviour caused in their life.
They tried to help when they could, but had long
given up hope of rehabilitating him. They only aimed to limit the damage
he did in their lives.
Both his father and his mother remained supportive
until they died in 1988 and 1989 respectively. His sister and two
brothers said they cut off all contact with him in 1989, too.
"We were like moths around a flame," said McNeney,
Joan's lawyer. "If there's an afterlife, I hope Olson's confined to the
seventh level of hell. He could pick up every vibe, every tick and feed
it back to you. Mirror you, exactly. The press has this image of Olson
as dishevelled with beastly eyes. A monster. He was a personable,
charming guy. When he walked into my office, it was the cops that looked
bad."
Thankfully, he will do no more damage.
"Olson very fully appreciated the nature and quality
of what he was doing," said his former lawyer Shantz. "That probably was
the engine that drove him in terms of doing these murders."
He had been free exactly 1,501 days from the time he
was 17.
Educated people have pored over his letters, analyzed
his utterances and scrutinized his speech. Unlike other mental
illnesses, his aberration does not manifest itself in his manipulation
of language or information.
His reasoning was impeccable. There were no clues to
indicate madness, as people understand it either in a legal or a normal
medical sense of the word.
Olson could quote at length from ecclesiastical
texts, engage in sophisticated verbal debates and cite chapter and verse
of the Criminal Code.
But when you contemplate his actions instead of his
rhetoric, when you review his deeds instead of his eloquence, he quite
clearly appears mad.
Moral imperatives were devoid of meaning for him but
he could perfectly enunciate them. He was aware of the rules, could
repeat them parrot-like, but he held them in contempt.
No one can say what creates or motivates such people.
He seemed to suffer more from a condition akin to
moral scurvy - it's what he didn't have, a conscience, that caused his
pathology as near as the specialists can tell.
He may even have been born with a biological defect
that left him unable to feel or appreciate what is truly important in
life. He mimicked emotion as if he were a human chameleon.
The root of the trouble wasn't heredity, nor does it
appear linked to upbringing. It remains an enigma.
Sharon Rosenfeldt, a prominent victims' rights
advocate in the years following the tragedy of losing her son Daryn,
lamented along with many of the other families that Canada had abandoned
capital punishment and spared Olson execution.
She had one wish: "Let me pull the switch."
On his death, it is appalling we are reminded of him
rather than those whose lives he stole - Judy Kozma (14), Daryn
Johnsrude (16), Raymond King (15), Simon Partington (9), Ada Court (13),
Louise Chartrand (17), Christine Weller (12), Terri-Lyn Carson (15),
Colleen Daignault (13), Sandra Wolfsteiner (16) and Sigrun Arnd (18).