Uncover - S15: "The Village 3" E3: Chicken Little

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Montreal, 1991 – Fearing a serial killer, activists decide to take matters into their own hands. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/the-village-the-montreal-murders-transcripts-listen-1.6479960

It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle

and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now. This is a CBC Podcast. There was a nightclub on St. Lawrence called Love. Very original. I think on Tuesday night it was called Love. Very original. I think on Tuesday night, it was gay love. And I went with a couple of friends and, you know, we were dancing and there was this, you know, cute guy across the bar and we kept making eyes at each other. And my friend said to me,

you should go over and talk to him. You should go over and say hi. And I was like, I don't know. What would I say? And my friend said to me, go ask him if he's the murderer. And that was the opening line that I used. Like, hey, here we are at a party. The first thing I'm going to ask you is,

are you the murderer? As a joke, but a joke in quotation marks. And not, are you a murderer? Are you the murderer? For someone like Peter Bolada, a gay guy in his 20s, Montreal was supposed to be a safe haven. A place where he could be himself. But that's not what he felt.

There was that constant sense of fear, right? Like, gay male subculture is very open to meeting strangers, meeting people you don't know, meeting people at the bar, meeting people at the bathhouse, right? Like cruising guys on the street, like there was always some risk involved. But at that point, it felt like the risk was deadly. And you had to be really careful about about who you invited home with you. Remember, Peter had lost his friend, Joe Rose, when Joe was killed on a city bus. And it didn't seem like an isolated incident. Were homophobes just getting more upfront?

There was not a sense of, oh, it's too bad that happened to that gay guy. He made the wrong choice at the bar that night. Like that was not, it was like something is happening here. That sense of not knowing was part of the fear. So were gay men being targeted? Yes.

Were we being targeted by the same person? That was unknown. But it felt like we had a target on our back. The crime seems identical to another vicious killing last month in a Montreal park. I myself even think it's a homophobic maniac, right? But it could be a homosexual homophobic maniac. The gay community says you just have to look at the numbers

to realize a serial or copycat killer is on the loose. They tried to slit your throat. Yeah, their intention was to kill me. Whoever it is, or whoever they are, someone is hunting gay men in Montreal. I'm Francis Plourd. This is The Village, The Montreal Murders. Episode

3, Chicken Little. So in here they are all alphabetized. We have press coupures. And there's also some tabloids here. When my colleague Carrie and I visited Quebec's gay archives to look into the murders of the early 90s, we felt overwhelmed. There were hundreds of boxes on dozens of shelves.

There's a lot. And Joe Rose is here too, right? Several of the boxes were marked with the name Michael Hendricks in red marker. Hendricks' box. Oh! A few of his articles. Clippings, photos, notebooks, lists. Michael had kept detailed records.

That's still unsolved, right? Yeah, that's still unsolved. The first one where the police contributed. Wow, it's got all the bars they hung out at that. Oh, wow. Yeah. I'm beginning to think that Hendricks will have the murder files. As I mentioned in an earlier episode,

after three decades, the province destroys most court records. Which is a bummer, because Kerry and I were really trying to get a handle on how gay murders in the 1990s were being investigated to see what patterns we could find. So given the huge amount of information that Michael Hendricks had donated to the gay archives, we decided it was best to go back to the source. At which point did you realize that gay men were being killed in Montreal? Well, I read the paper every day. Everybody reads in brief. And just to see what gossip is going on.

And these strange murders started showing up. Always male. Michael is not a detective. But he might as well have been one. When we arrived, he was ready for us. He had printed out notes about the murders and stacked them on the kitchen table where we sat down. When I met David Shannon at the first meetings at ACT UP, that would be 1990,

we both mentioned these things. We'd both been collecting the clippings from the newspaper. They were suspect. Why were they suspect? Well, because there was no forced entry. There was little robbery reported. It was symbolic more than anything else. Also, the extreme violence done to the cadaver.

It indicated that somebody really hated the victim. The cadavers were found often three days after the murder. Like, the guy would get killed on Friday night after work, and on Monday, the co-workers would wonder when they'd start looking for him, and somebody would go to the house, and that's what they found. Which is exactly what happened to a doctor in his 20s,

Yangshua Mok. He'd been killed in April of 1990. When Dr. Mok failed to show up to work, a colleague called the police. They found the body several days after the murder. This was not a fun thing, an activity that went wrong. As they claimed with Dr. Mok, that it was just a sexual game that went wrong.

There wasn't a sexual game. There were other things going on in those houses. It wasn't just Dr. Muck's case that brought forth the theory that sex play had been taken too far. We've seen it come up a fair bit in these investigations.

BDSM might look scary, but it doesn't kill. With the gut feeling that police were not seeing the whole picture, Michael and his friend David Shannon started to look more closely at the murders. Joe had been murdered, Joe Rose had been murdered in public, and people saw it. It was the only one that was public, and we, of course, knew that was homophobic, and Joe wasn't discreet. He had pink hair. But all the others were discreet, very discreet.

They were murdered in total privacy in their homes. Nobody witnessed the killings or even saw them go from a bar, leave with some stranger or something. None of these people had any kind of a life that you could trace. And it seemed to us weird. It just couldn't be coincidence that there's like these murders happening, but it's not one person.

Puello Deer had grown up with nightmares about a serial killer targeting people like him. These victims are all the same physical type. What about him, Skip? As an impressionable youth of I don't know how old, I saw the movie Cruising. I want to send you out there to see if you can attract this guy. How where? And it marked me for life. The first murder scene, I was like, okay, I'm out.

Al Pacino, Cruising. That 1980 American thriller, in which a cop chases a serial killer targeting gay men, offered enough creepiness to mark the mind of any teenager. So I understood gay men being murdered, and then also on the other side of that, the representation of gay men as murderers. Puello, who'd come to Montreal to work as a sex worker, thought he was a pretty good judge of character.

Detecting a bad apple or detecting, like, a bad seed, you have to come from somewhere dark to recognize that there are bad apples. You've had to have that sixth sense that, like, there's something strange. And if your gut is telling you there's something not good about this, then you should follow that instinct. But at the turn of the 90s, he no longer felt safe. At the height of the murders, I had pretty much stopped doing sex work.

There was fear around AIDS, around the police, and now about a killer on the loose? To Puello, it just wasn't worth it. As somebody who's still going and sleeping around a lot, that's a terrifying thing to think like, oh my God, I might be going with an axe murderer. You're looking for love, you're looking for companionship, you're looking to pay your rent or put food on the table, and you don't know who you're frequenting.

And that there's no one really looking out for your well-being. Whispers about man being killed made their way through the village. The serial killer became something of an urban legend. But it took until the spring of 1991 to get any real answers. In April of 1991, there were three in a row, and we'd been chatting about it, talking about it.

Was there some connection? It certainly seemed like it. They didn't know for sure, but the clues suggested these were gay murders. This speculation was confirmed when Michael ran into Christine, one of his colleagues at the National Film Board.

I was walking down the corridor of the English program and she just blurted that out. One of the men that was murdered, a man named Robert Astley, retired school teacher, he was about 59, 60 years old, was her uncle. Just to be clear, he wasn't her uncle, more of a family acquaintance. He was one of the people that had been attached and were signs of extreme brutality and cruelty. And so our hunch was right, and her uncle was, of course, gay. What was your reaction when she told you? Shock and sympathy.

I mean, I knew something about what had happened, but I didn't know what she knew. And when she told me, I couldn't believe it. You know, it was only later when I'd seen photos of crime scenes that I realized how really brutal these scenes were. We spoke with Christina Sao. She described Robert Asseli as bright, funny, kind, an excellent teacher. She also confirmed that, yeah, he was gay. Nobody cared about those murders. There were no rumors. Nobody cared. There wasn't anything

to do except to, well, racked up, we called a community meeting. Since the sex garage raid, gays and lesbians and queers had built momentum together. They were now a stronger force and would show up in healthy numbers. Activists took out their glue and brushes and plastered the streets of the village with flyers about the recent murders. They wanted everyone to know

and to find out if there were more victims. We invited all the gay community to come to the Gay and Lesbian Community Center, then on St. Catherine Street, and we would talk about the recent string of murders that occurred all in the month of April 1991. And the intention was to teach prevention and to discuss the question of did they know anything?

Had they heard anything? What was the beat in the jungle? And what were people saying? Maybe somebody knew something. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is.

I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. We invited all the gay community to come to the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. And probably 20 people showed up. And there were about five of us from ACT UP. And then suddenly, bang, bang, bang, and all these people came in. So, bang, bang, bang, who shows up? A motorcycle group called the Barons. Leather Queen, as we called them.

The Barons all showed up in their uniform, in black leather mostly, and with, you know, helmets and stuff like that, accompanied by a whole bunch of policemen in uniform, including the chief of homicide, Pierre Sangallo. That was the last thing we expected. Suddenly, their gathering turned into a chance to hear directly from police about any leads they had on a potential serial killer.

Mr. Sangallo said, there was nobody killing gay men. He was very frank with us. He was very polite, but he just said that we were mistaken and that we were way out of our depth in trying to investigate murders and that he as a professional knew what he was doing

and that they saw no patterns in this at all and it was just luck of the draw those things happened. There was no serial murders in Montreal. It was all in our heads. We were chicken little. We were frightening the population over nothing. He then repeated the reasons the police department gave for the murders in the gay community. And they were very simple. It was because of our lifestyle, that it was exactly the same thing as with

prostitutes. You could never figure out who killed them. What was your reaction? He caught us off guard, for sure. Sangelo did concede that since the murder of Joe Rose, at least six men who were regulars in the village had been murdered.

Robert Asselet was beaten and stabbed to death in his home in early April, and within weeks, two other gay men were murdered in their homes, killed in a similar way. The men were all middle-aged and drank at the same gay bars. Two of those men had even visited the same bar in the hours before they were murdered. But different blood types were discovered on site, and that, according to the authorities, discredited claims of a serial killer.

We don't think that it could be a serial killer, not at this time, because there are some points in the investigation that doesn't lead us to think that it could be only one killer. There's no telling how the police came to this conclusion. The killer could have had an accomplice. There could have been multiple serial killers. Regardless, the problem remained. Here is Michael Hendricks, back in 1991.

Either they are related, or they're not related, but somebody's killing gay men, and we want to know why. Pierre Sangolo declined our request for an interview. But he was not the only cop who was at that community meeting. Razzle. They used to call me Razzle. Razzle. John Dalzell remembers the barons showing up. They were bikers, but they weren't bikers, like they weren't Hells or they weren't Popeye

or Satan's Choice or Outlaws or anything, but they were gay guys that liked to do motorcycling. But 20 years after leaving the force, his memories of that meeting are vague, and he defers to the chain of command. If Sangalo said that there wasn't any quote-unquote serial killer,

then one would assume that he had enough evidence to demonstrate that there's more than one suspect. I would not have been in a position to deny that or say, Pierre, you're wrong, or whatever, because those were components of the investigation that I was not have been in a position to deny that or say, Pierre, you're wrong or whatever, because those were components of the investigation that I was not aware of. Dalzell wasn't a detective.

His job was to act as liaison between the police and the community. The chief wanted to address three fundamental issues at the time. One was the lack of representation within the police force as a whole. So the whole representation of the police service to represent, you know, the changing demography of Montreal was priority number one. And just to clarify, sexual diversity was not part yet

of what was discussed, right? No, not at all, no. You know, it wasn't being thrown at us publicly or otherwise. And I guess it was under the radar maybe from society as a whole, maybe media to a certain extent. But I mean, at the end of the day, you know, a murder is a murder is a murder. Did you get the impression that those cases were taken seriously by police?

Not at all. Not even on the radar. Could this be why the murders of gay men were going unsolved? Peter Bulada thinks so. you know, that's what you get when you invite a stranger home with you. Like, that was kind of the attitude of blaming the victim. Like, if these guys were better behaved, this wouldn't have happened to them. Former CBC reporter Rosemary Thompson covered crime in the city. She could see the double standard at play. Some murders, I mean, I hate to say it,

if you murder a 16 or 17-year-old girl, that case goes sky high, and they will throw everything at it to catch the killer. And the tragedy of the 1990s is that a 17-year-old gay man would not have been treated the same way as a 17-year-old girl. There's no question. Not in the 1990s. Now, because there were so many gay men that were killed in Montreal, they did eventually put a lot of resources on it. But it took many, many, many, many cases.

Remember the context too. The murders happened less than a year after sex garage, after a number of raids targeting gay and lesbian bars. No one in the gay community trusted the Montreal police, for good reason. Like, we were constantly being harassed by them. And so to say, well, you know, if there's something you need to report to us, you should come forward. Well, who wants to come forward when you don't trust the cops, right?

Sadly, that distrust was not entirely misplaced. The makeup of the police force in the 1990s wasn't what it is today. And Dalzell is surprisingly candid about that. The critical mass of the police officer was 99% white, 95% French-Canadian, 15% maybe female, and 85% male. A good percentage of them were not even urbanites. They're not even from the city itself. So their interaction with people of colour,

with gay and lesbians, and other nationalities that we have in the city was practically nil. But I never really had any interaction whatsoever with any representatives, economic or otherwise, of the gay community. Short of periodically partaking in a raid. And even then, none of those raids seemed to have left a lasting impression. I mean, my only recollection of those raids is going in there and getting my ass grabbed, you know.

And at one point you had to be comfortable with it because that's what it was all about, right? I mean, it didn't bother me necessarily. It may have bothered some others, but that goes with the turf. If you're not comfortable in uniform, people saying nice things to you, whether they be gay or otherwise, then maybe you got to check another profession. I don't know. otherwise, then maybe you've got to check another profession. I don't know. At the meeting, though, Dalzell decided to engage with the community in a meaningful way.

Mr. Dalzell, he said he would form a committee composed of gay men to discuss future murders, that we were not to have any more public meetings, not to upset the public with our silly stories of possible serial murders in the gay community, in the village, and all that stuff, and that he would investigate them and be responsible. And he did. He formed something called the Dalzell Committee. And then there was total silence.

No more murders. And then there was total silence. No more murders. Nothing happened until September, when a guy was found murdered in Parc Maisonneuve. And then, two weeks later, in October 1991, another man, gay man, was found murdered in Parc Jarry. The scenarios in the photos are identical. The bicycle was still in front of the bench. Nothing was stolen.

The obvious scenario of cruising. So at that point, we knew we were in for something, and we had serious questions about where we were going to go now. But it looked to us like this was a serial killer. Good God, it was exactly the same scenario in two different places. Once again, Michael and his friends raise the alarm. This time, the community, the media, even the police are paying attention. I was a very young reporter. I was in my 20s.

I had just started in Montreal, and I think that one of the first stories was a gay bashing in a park in Montreal. And I remember feeling shocked by it because it was the first time I'd been confronted with the idea that somebody could be beaten up in the wide open where anybody could see something like this happening. And I found it very shocking and upsetting that somebody could be beaten up in broad daylight because of their sexual orientation. Rosemary Thompson got to work. She started talking to witnesses and activists, the police as well. And then I remember going up to the Montreal police station into the homicide unit and interviewing Pierre Sangalo, who was the head of the homicide unit. And he said to me, we think that there may be a serial killer. They could be like two or three people that know each other, that used a pickup truck together to commit murders. And that was the first time that the police had put that on the record as a possible theory.

And when he said that to me, I thought, wow, like this is a big story. And it was shocking because it's one thing to have individual incidents. It's quite a different thing when you may have a serial killer or killers on the loose. So, yeah, it was like a crisis and they knew they had to do something. And they did. Finally, the Montreal murders became a priority. Sangolo assigned new investigators to go over the cases again. And within weeks, they tracked down a key suspect in one of the murders.

We accused him with the evidence that we had, which we knew of the screwdriver. He was close to the breaking point, but we had no admission. But an accomplice stepped up, so we tracked him down. Do you think he has any reason to want to talk? No. I don't know. I don't know that he would have any reason.

A murder is a murder is a murder. That's coming up in the next episode of The Village. in the next episode of The Village. This series is produced by Kerry Haber, Michel Gagnon, and me, Francis Plourde. Original concept by Justin Ling,

and I highly recommend you check out the previous two seasons of The Village. And if you're interested in hearing what our colleagues at Radio-Canada are doing with this story, you'll find the French-language production over at audio.ca. It's called Le Village, Meurtre, Combat, Fierté. Special thanks to Alex Laplante and Dave Downing.

Also to the Quebec Gay Archives. Our story editor is Chris Oak. Our digital producer is Eski Robert. Editing, mixing, and sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonic and Julia Whitman. Kerry Haber is the series showrunner. Our senior producer is Cecil Fernandez. The director of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani. Thanks for listening.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.