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Gilbert Paul
JORDAN
General Criminal Background
Jordan, a former barber, was linked to the deaths of between eight
and ten women between 1965 and 1988; he was the first Canadian to
use alcohol as a murder weapon. Jordan's lengthy criminal record
started in 1952 and includes convictions for rape, indecent
assault, abduction, hit and run, drunk driving and car theft.
In 1976, Jordan was examined by Dr. Tibor
Bezeredi as part of a court proceeding. Dr. Bezeredi diagnosed
Jordan as having an anti-social personality, defined by Dr.
Bezeredi as "a person whose conduct is maladjusted in terms of
social behaviour; disregard for the rights of others which often
results in unlawful activities".
Jordan is considered a serial killer as he was
linked to the deaths of between eight and ten women, but was only
convicted in the manslaughter death of one woman. His victims were
Aboriginal women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Typically he
would find women in bars, and buy them drinks, or pay them for sex
and encourage them to drink with him. When they passed out, he
would pour liquor down their throats. The resulting deaths were
reported as alcohol poisoning and police paid little attention,
because some of his victims were alcoholics. Although the
newspapers often described the women as prostitutes, not all were
involved in prostitution. Jordan was known for drinking more than
50 ounces of vodka each day
Alcohol as a Weapon
The first woman known to have died by alcohol poisoning while in
Jordan's company was in 1965. As would become a pattern, a
switchboard operator named Ivy Rose was found naked and dead in a
Vancouver hotel. Her blood alcohol level was 0.51. No charges were
laid.
Court proceedings show "he sought out
approximately 200 women per year for binge drinking episodes
covering the period from 1980 to 1988. He was also looking for
sexual gratification." Further, the Crown provided evidence that
Jordan was linked to the deaths of six other Aboriginal women.
Similar fact evidence showed Jordan had been with the following
women at the time of their death:
1. Mary Johnson, November 30, 1980, at the
Aylmer Hotel, Blood alcohol level: .34
2. Barbara Paul, September 11, 1981, at the Glenaird Hotel,
Blood alcohol level: .41
3. Mary Johns, July 30, 1982, at 2503 Kingsway (his barbershop)
Blood alcohol level: .76
4. Patricia Thomas, December 15, 1984, at 2503 Kingsway (his
barbershop) Blood alcohol level: .51
5. Patricia Andrew, June 28, 1985, at 2503 Kingsway (his
barbershop) Blood alcohol level: .79
6. Vera Harry, November 19, 1986, at the Clifton Hotel, Blood
alcohol level: .04
On October, 12, 1987, Vanessa Lee Buckner was
found naked on the floor of the Niagara hotel after a night of
drinking with Jordan. There is some debate regarding the victim.
Some sources indicate that she was a white woman, not a heavy
drinker, nor was she a prostitute. However, in official court
records describe Ms. Buckner death as the result of Jordan "...supplying
a lethal amount of liquor to a female alcoholic, who died as a
result." Ms. Buckner had recently lost custody of her newborn baby,
who had been born with a drug dependency. She "was an alcoholic
and a taker of various kinds of drugs." A month after her death,
another woman, Edna Shade, was found dead in another hotel.
Jordan's fingerprints were found and linked to Ms. Buckner's death.
After being questioned, Jordan had not been
charged with any crime related to Ms. Buckner's death. However,
police initiated surveillance on Jordan. Between October 12
November 26, 1987, police watched him "search out native Indian
women in the skid row area of Vancouver. On 4 different occasions
they [the police] rescued the woman involved before she too became
a victim." Those women were:
1. Rosemary Wilson, November 20, 1987, at the
Balmoral Hotel, Blood alcohol level: .52
2. Verna Chartrand, November 21, 1987, at the Pacific Hotel,
Blood alcohol level: .43
3. Sheila Joe, November 25, 1987, at the Rainbow Hotel, Blood
alcohol level: unknown
4. Mabel Olson, November 26, 1987, at the Pacific Hotel, Blood
alcohol level: unknown
According to the court records, police
listening outside the hotel rooms heard Jordan say such things as:
"Have a drink, down the hatch baby, 20 bucks
if you drink it right down; see if you're a real woman; finish
that drink, finish that drink, down the hatch hurry, right down;
you need another drink, I'll give you 50 bucks if you can take
it; I'll give you 10, 20, 50 dollars, whatever you want, come on
I want to see you get it all down; you get it right down, I'll
give you the 50 bucks and the 13 bucks; I'll give you 50 bucks.
I told you that. If you finish that I'll give you $75; finish
your drink, I'll give you $20...
This similar fact evidence was important in the
1988 trial. Jordan was tried before a judge alone. Justice Bouck
found Jordan guilty of manslaughter in the death of Ms. Buckner.
He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but that was reduced
to nine years on appeal.
Jordan served six years for the manslaughter
conviction. After his release, he was placed on probation which
restricted him to Vancouver Island. In June of 2000, he had been
charged with sexual assault, assault, negligence causing bodily
harm and administering a noxious substance -- alcohol. In 2000,
Jordan attempted to change his name to Paul Pearce. At the time, a
name change in British Columbia did not require fingerprinting or
a criminal check. After the loophole was closed, he dropped the
application.
Jordan was arrested again, in 2002 for breach
of probation because he was found drinking, and in the presence of
a woman while in possession of alcohol. He was found guilty and
sentenced to 15 months in jail, followed by three years probation
and strict conditions.
However, on August 11, 2004, he was arrested in
Winnipeg for violating that probation order for an incident at the
York Hotel in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, August 9, 2004. He had
been identified as being a party to binge drinking with Barb
Burkley. Ms. Burkley was a long term resident of the hotel and had
a serious drinking problem. Ms. Burkley was taken to the hospital
by her friend and hotel employee, Cathy Waddington, after finding
Ms. Burkley in very bad condition. Ms. Waddington identified
Jordan as being there, but he was acquitted of those charges in
2005. Upon his release, police issued a public warning.
Gilbert died in 2006.
Wikipedia.org
The Boozing Barber: Canadian Serial Killer
Gilbert Paul Jordan
By Sylvia Clare - Socyberty.com
Jul 19, 2008
Between 1965 and 1987,
Gilbert Paul Jordan killed at least ten women in Vancouver,
British Columbia. His first victim was English-born, but most
were Native women from the notorious Downtown Eastside.
He paid a woman to drink or
have sex with him, and plied her with alcohol in his run-down
barber shop, or a cheap hotel room. He offered more money if she
could chug straight liquor. When she passed out, he forced alcohol
down her throat, and raped her as she died.
"They were all on their
last legs," he said at the trial. "I didn't give a damn who I was
with. I mean, we're all dying sooner or later."
Jordan learned the barber's
trade during one of his many stints in jail. He ran the Slocan
Barber Shop, on Kingsway Avenue in Vancouver's seedy Downtown
Eastside. When he inherited some money, he invested in the stock
market.
The investments paid off.
He could afford a good lawyer.
Early Life
Jordan was born Gilbert
Paul Elsie in Vancouver, Canada on December 12, 1931. He was an
alcoholic and high school dropout at the age of sixteen. By 1952,
his criminal record included theft, assault, car theft and heroin
possession.
Paul Elsie had a ravenous
appetite for booze and drunken sex. Soon he was drinking over
fifty ounces of vodka a day. Not surprisingly, his companions were
other alcoholics.
"Sober people wouldn't go
out with me, so I didn't have much option," he explained during
his trial. "I didn't want to drink in my room all by myself."
According to his statements,
he had sex with over two hundred women a year. He sought out
prostitutes in the slums and dive bars of Vancouver.
Paul often ran afoul of the
law. In 1961, police found a five-year-old First Nations girl in
his car. Although charged with abduction, he was never convicted.
The case ended in a stay of proceedings in May 1961.
Shortly after Christmas Day
that year, inebriated, he threatened to jump off the Lion's Gate
Bridge. Traffic stopped until he gave up the attempt. Soon
afterward, he was found in contempt of court in North Vancouver,
for saluting Nazi-style in the courtroom.
In 1963, Paul lured two
women into his car with an invitation to drink. Police charged him
with rape and theft. He was convicted on the theft charge, but
acquitted of rape.
The Boozing Barber soon
progressed to murder.
First Victim
In 1965, a switchboard
operator named Ivy Rose (Doreen) Oswald accompanied Paul on one of
his drinking binges. The next day, her nude body was found in a
Vancouver hotel room, with a blood alcohol level of 0.51.
Death by alcohol poisoning
occurs at around 0.4. The legal driving limit is 0.08. Chugging
twelve beer results in a blood alcohol level of about 0.3, the
point when a person usually blacks out. To die of alcohol
poisoning, the victim has to drink a lot of booze, very fast.
Doreen's death was ruled
accidental. Twenty-two years later, her killer would confess.
A few days after her murder,
Paul Elsie applied to change his name to Jordan. The application
was approved.
Charges and convictions for
drunk driving mounted steadily. In 1969 he was charged twice on
the same day. Gilbert Paul Jordan soon amassed other criminal
charges, including:
1971: Vancouver, B.C. -
committing an indecent act in a public place. The charge was
dismissed.
1973: Mackenzie, B.C. -
convicted of indecent exposure
1974: Prince George, B.C. -
convicted of indecent assault, and sentenced to two years less a
day.
The Crown tried to have him
declared a dangerous offender in 1974. Jordan's lawyer intervened,
and the request was denied.
In 1975, the Boozing Barber
was back on the street. This time, he abducted a woman from a
mental institution. Police charged him on several counts,
including kidnapping, and sexual intercourse with a feeble-minded
person. He was sentenced to twenty-six months for assault.
At the Slocan Barber Shop
on Kingsway Avenue, three women died between July 1982 and June
1985. Although Jordan reported the deaths after consulting his
lawyer, he escaped investigation. The coroner ruled all three
accidental by alcohol poisoning. The victims were known alcoholics
and prostitutes, at high risk for such a fate.
Final Victims
Jordan came under suspicion
in 1987. He spent the night of October 11 drinking with a female
companion at the seedy Niagara Hotel in Vancouver. Several times,
Jordan went out to buy booze. At six a.m. on October 12, he left
the hotel for the last time. At 7:40 a.m., police received an
anonymous phone call.
In a room at the Niagara
Hotel, they found the naked body of Vanessa Lee Buckner, 27.
Buckner sometimes worked as a prostitute, but was known as a
moderate drinker. She had a blood-alcohol level of 0.91, more than
twice the amount needed to kill a person.
During trials, court would
hear that Jordan poisoned her, sexually assaulted her, and left
her to die as black fluid oozed out her mouth and nose.
Nick Basaraba, father of
the victim, expressed his outrage when the case went to trial.
"He's a worm," said
Basaraba in an interview with the Toronto Sun. "He's a lowlife. He
should be squashed, just as he squashed a lot of girls' lives."
Arrest and Conviction
Police tracked the
anonymous early-morning call of October 12 to Jordan's room at the
nearby Marble Arch Hotel. When the nude body of Edna Shade turned
up at another hotel a month later, fingerprints matched those of
Gilbert Paul Jordan. Edna Shade had died of alcohol poisoning.
Police placed Jordan under surveillance.
For eleven days, police
watched Jordan. During that time, he took four intended victims to
hotel rooms in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Each time, police
interrupted the drinking binges.
Jordan was heard to say,
"Have a drink, down the
hatch baby, twenty bucks if you drink it right down ... see if
you're a real woman; finish that drink, finish that drink, down
the hatch hurry, right down ... you need another drink, I'll give
you fifty bucks if you can take it... "
Two of the women had blood
alcohol levels of 0.52 and 0.43.
Police arrested the Boozing
Barber as he was poisoning his last attempted victim. She had lost
consciousness. When police entered the room, Jordan was lying on
top of her, forcing the contents of a large bottle of vodka down
her throat.
Investigators linked
Gilbert Paul Jordan to at least ten deaths. He was charged in
seven, but convicted only in the death of Vanessa Lee Buckner. He
received fifteen years for manslaughter.
On appeal, Jordan succeeded
in reducing his sentence to nine years. He served six.
In reducing the sentence,
Justice Sam Toy wrote,
"Although the appellant has
left a trail of seven victims, the last was the first occasion
when persons in authority, in a forceful and realistic manner,
brought to the appellant's attention the fact that supplying
substantial quantities of liquor to women who were prepared to
drink with him was a contributing cause of their deaths, for which
he might be held criminally responsible."
Final Years
In 2000, Jordan tried to
change his name to Paul Pearce. At the time, a name change in
British Columbia didn't require fingerprinting or a criminal
check. Authorities closed the loophole, and Jordan dropped the
application.
In 2004, at the age of
seventy-two, Jordan was once more a free man. He immediately
violated his parole, and was re-arrested at a hotel in Winnipeg,
Manitoba. After spending two more years in and out of jail for
parole violations, the Boozing Barber died on July 7, 2006 in
Victoria, British Columbia.
Media
The murders by Gilbert Paul
Jordan were the basis for the first episodes of the TV crime
drama, Da Vinci's Inquest. A dramatic play by Vancouver playwright
Marie Clements, "The Unnatural and Accidental Women", focused on
the victims. A movie, based on the play, premiered at the Toronto
Film Festival in 2006.
Watching the drunk girls die
By Michele Mandel - Toronto Sun
Fri, August 13, 2004
The Boozing Barber, once alleged to be
Vancouver's most notorious lady killer, is headed back behind
bars after taking a trip to Winnipeg.
Gilbert Paul Jordan, a wealthy 72-year-old
former barber, is headed back behind bars, just days after
violating his probation by leaving Vancouver Island. He was
arrested in Winnipeg on Wednesday night.
He has been linked to the deaths of 10 women
who have died suddenly of alcohol poisoning. Jordan would prey
on the vulnerable in Vancouver's seedy Downtown Eastside, ply
them with dangerous amounts of booze, have sex with them and
then watch them die. Three of the women were found in his
barbershop; four died in flop hotel rooms he had rented.
At the time, most of the deaths were declared
accidental overdoses of alcohol, even though Jordan was involved
in reporting many of them -- after consulting his lawyer. But
almost all his victims were native alcoholics, and authorities
seemed to care as little as he did.
"They were all on their last legs," he coolly
told a Vancouver reporter in 2000. "I didn't give a damn who I
was (drinking) with. I mean, we're all dying sooner or later."
Jordan has been convicted of manslaughter
just once, in the 1987 death of Vanessa Lee Buckner, 27, who was
found naked on a hotel room floor after a heavy drinking binge
with Jordan.
Her blood alcohol level was more than 11
times the legal limit for driving. Court heard that, as black
liquid oozed from her mouth and nose, Jordan fled their hotel
room and left her alone to die.
"He poisons them first and then has sex with
them," Buckner's angry father, Nick Basaraba, said yesterday.
"No parent should have to go through this."
A month after her death, police found
Jordan's fingerprints in another Skid Row hotel where Edna
Shade's nude body was discovered. Police had him under
surveillance 11 days later when they rescued another woman from
his hotel room.
"Down the hatch, baby. Twenty bucks if you
drink it right down," police overheard Jordan telling her.
"You want another drink? I'll give you 50
bucks if you can take it."
Jordan was arrested, but charged only with
Buckner's death.
An alcoholic who consumes more than 50 ounces
of vodka a day, Jordan has a criminal record dating back to 1952
that includes convictions for rape, indecent assault, abduction,
hit and run, drunk driving and car theft. He has been in and out
of jail countless times for breaching his probation after being
found drinking in the company of women -- usually native
alcoholics.
"Sober people wouldn't go out with me so I
didn't have much option," he explained during his 1988 trial. "I
didn't want to drink in my room all by myself."
His quest for drunken sex was insatiable. By
his own estimation, he was with 200 women a year, hunting for
his prey in the city's seediest dives.
In 2000, he was acquitted of sexual assault.
A few months later, he was charged again in Victoria with sexual
assault and administering a noxious substance -- alcohol. Those
charges were eventually stayed.
The savvy predator came close to disappearing
completely.
In December, 2000, an innocuous legal notice
appeared in the classified pages of a Victoria magazine.
Jordan was quietly serving legal notice that
he was changing his name to Paul Pearce. At the time, unlike in
Ontario, a B.C. name change application did not require
fingerprinting or a criminal background check.
An unsuspecting police officer checking on
Paul Pearce would not pick up his history of manslaughter or
rape. There would have been nothing to stop him from luring more
women into his web.
But once Jordan's bid to change his name
became known, authorities moved quickly to close the loophole.
He abruptly dropped his bid to change his name.
So the Boozing Barber goes back to jail once
more. But only for a short time.
He has admitted that a sizeable inheritance,
wise investments and playing the stock market has ensured that
he can hire the best lawyers and ensure that he's not declared a
dangerous offender.
While his victim's father wonders how many
chances a killer should receive.
"He's a worm; he's a lowlife," Basaraba says
bitterly over the long distance line from Abbotsford. "He should
be squashed, just as he squashed a lot of girls' lives."
'Boozing Barber' caught in Winnipeg
CBC News
Thursday, August 12, 2004
After a two-day search through Western Canada,
police arrested a 72-year-old convicted killer nicknamed the
Boozing Barber at a Winnipeg hotel on Wednesday night.
A spokesperson for the force said officers
took Gilbert Paul Jordan into custody without incident.
Authorities issued a Canada-wide warrant for
Jordan this week. He had been ordered to stay on Vancouver
Island as part of the terms of his release from jail in Victoria
last week, but disappeared.
Jordan is known for plying women with alcohol
until they succumb to alcohol poisoning.
In 1988, he was convicted of manslaughter in
the death of Vancouver resident Vanessa Buckner, who died in a
Downtown Eastside hotel room after drinking with him.
The judge in the case described Jordan as "a
predator who used alcohol as his deadly instrument of choice."
Buckner was one of seven women who died of
alcohol poisoning while drinking with Jordan over the course of 20
years.
The retired barber has been in and out of jail
more than a dozen times since his original manslaughter conviction,
for breaching his probation by drinking in the company of women.