●At about 11:15 p.m. on Tuesday, May 15th, 1973, 26-year-old Adele Komorowski, a graduate student at McMaster University in Hamilton, 60 km southwest of Toronto, was grabbed at the front door of her campus residence and dragged 450 feet into a nearby ravine in Hamilton Botanical Gardens. A fellow female student who lived on the third floor of the same complex heard screams and looked out her window to witness a man dragging a woman toward the ravine. Police were called, arrived promptly, and found Komorowski's body mere minutes after her murder. She had been strangled with a piece of rope. Though the victim had been stripped to the waist, she had not been raped, likely because her killer was scared off before he could effect his sexual designs. Police with tracking dogs immediately began combing the secluded trails of Coote's Paradise marsh, which borders the university campus.
No further information, but the murder remained unsolved in the middle of September, when it was last written about in the paper.
●When firefighters responded to a call at 7089 Yonge St., just north of Toronto city limits, at 5 a.m. on Monday, September 21st, 1987, they found the body of 58-year-old Francesco Califano in the second-floor office of his business, Compupronto Mortgage Services. Califano, who was married and resided on Beecroft Rd., had been stabbed seven times and then his body and part of his office had been set aflame with an accelerant.
No additional information.
●At 4:25 a.m. on Sunday, March 19th, 1961, two young men driving along 9th Concession (Hwy 5) west of Myrtle, 40 km northeast of Toronto, found the body of 24-year-old Alice Margaret McCausland lying beside the road. She had been strangled. The woman's fur coat, shoes, and scarf, which witnesses later attested to having seen her wearing, had been removed from her body and were missing. Police were confronted with difficulties from the start, because it was not known exactly who the woman was, whether her name was actually Alice Margaret McCausland, and where she lived, though they quickly learned she rented a room on Berkeley St. Fingerprints revealed that the dead woman was convicted a month before her death of minor theft and given a suspended sentence. Records from her court appearance indicated she was born in Timmins, Ontario. Alice's mother came forward in short order and revealed that, sadly, her daughter suffered from Huntington's disease, a degenerative illness that causes the sufferer to lose control of movement and bodily functions. Alice had married five years earlier, but was now separated, and she and her husband had two daughters.
The pathologist found substantial bruising and fingernail marks and scratches on McCausland's neck, and he concluded she had eaten about half-an-hour before her death. The victim's body had been dumped on the secluded road within an hour before it was discovered, and the killer was fortunate to avoid being spotted by a patrolling Ontario Provincial Police constable and two men, all three of whom drove past the crime scene shortly before and after the dumping.
Further investigation led police to search for a man driving a red and white car. The victim was last seen getting into the man's car outside a Parliament St. restaurant around 1:30 a.m., three hours before her body was found.
No further information available.
●On Sunday, November 15th, 1981, Metro taxi driver Peter Gamoulakos, 37, was found strangled to death in his cab, which was parked near Miranda and Schell Aves in the vicinity of Dufferin St. and Eglinton Ave. W. Police were led to believe he had been murdered Saturday morning. A passerby on Sunday noticed Gamoulakos's body slumped over in the car and called police. The car was parked inconspicuously, which may explain why Gamoulakos wasn't found earlier. The keys were in the ignition but the engine was off. The deceased had close to $200 in his pocket, meaning either the killer panicked and fled or harboured a motive other than robbery.
●Shortly before noon on Wednesday, July 30th, 1982: An unnamed 23-year-old woman was sunbathing on a grassy hill in the northwest corner of High Park, just across from her apartment building on Bloor St. W., when she was dragged into some nearby shrubbery, bludgeoned with a brick and a fist-sized rock, and raped. The area would have been fairly busy, and police speculated that either the victim's cries were ignored by passersby or they blended in with the joyous screams of children playing in a nearby playground. After the attack, the woman stumbled wounded along Bloor St. W. where, by happenstance, she ran into a friend who was on her way to joining her sunbathing.
The victim was taken to Toronto General Hospital where she lapsed into a coma. Doctors were unsure she would recover from the severe head wounds. The victim remained comatose for more than two weeks before slowly beginning to recover. She was able to describe her attacker as a light-skinned black man with dreadlocks, mid-to late-20s, 5'5" - 5'7", medium build with muscular shoulders, dark eyes, a thin nose and lips, a very clear complexion, even, white teeth, and wearing light-coloured clothing that smelled of smoke. A composite sketch was drawn and circulated.
lease: