Started thread.
CANADA - Helga Beer, 31, London, Ontario, 6 August 1968
Who killed Helga Beer? Time is running out to find her murderer
Aug 6 2018
"Michael Arntfield, an ex-city cop and cold case expert, recently dug into past homicides in the city using the case files of deceased OPP investigator Dennis Alsop. Alsop had investigated or amassed files on the investigations of many young victims killed the same year as Helga: 16-year-old Jacqueline Dunleavy, 9-year-old Frankie Jensen, 16-year-old Scott Leishman, 19-year-old Lynda White.
One of his thinner files was about Helga, even though her murder was being handled by the London police.
“What we see is a city that was fatigued, quite frankly,” says Arntfield, “terrified of the violence that was overcoming it.”
But where Dunleavy, Jensen, Leishman and White were “the city’s young, innocent … from good families, from good neighbourhoods,” he notes that Helga — “a swinging young divorcée” — was an outlier whose death generated little public sympathy.
Five decades later, her case is added to the stacks of others whose leads have gone cold.
“What was once front page news is long since forgotten,” Arntfield says, and “people’s names and their murders risk being lost to history.”
The National Institute of Justice’s working definition of a cold case is one in which “probative investigative leads have been exhausted.” By that definition, murder cases as fresh as two months can be lumped together with murder cases as old as Helga’s."
"Why downtown London in her own Volkswagen? Why Helga?"
rbbm.
CANADA - Helga Beer, 31, London, Ontario, 6 August 1968
Who killed Helga Beer? Time is running out to find her murderer
Aug 6 2018
"Michael Arntfield, an ex-city cop and cold case expert, recently dug into past homicides in the city using the case files of deceased OPP investigator Dennis Alsop. Alsop had investigated or amassed files on the investigations of many young victims killed the same year as Helga: 16-year-old Jacqueline Dunleavy, 9-year-old Frankie Jensen, 16-year-old Scott Leishman, 19-year-old Lynda White.
One of his thinner files was about Helga, even though her murder was being handled by the London police.
“What we see is a city that was fatigued, quite frankly,” says Arntfield, “terrified of the violence that was overcoming it.”
But where Dunleavy, Jensen, Leishman and White were “the city’s young, innocent … from good families, from good neighbourhoods,” he notes that Helga — “a swinging young divorcée” — was an outlier whose death generated little public sympathy.
Five decades later, her case is added to the stacks of others whose leads have gone cold.
“What was once front page news is long since forgotten,” Arntfield says, and “people’s names and their murders risk being lost to history.”
The National Institute of Justice’s working definition of a cold case is one in which “probative investigative leads have been exhausted.” By that definition, murder cases as fresh as two months can be lumped together with murder cases as old as Helga’s."
"Why downtown London in her own Volkswagen? Why Helga?"
rbbm.
I'm Vanessa Brown, the author of The Forest City Killer. Those investigating these crimes had been using UnsolvedCanada.ca as a main forum, but it 1. broke and 2. is down. If you are looking for threads that were lost, I have uploaded pdfs of some of the complete threads and you can access them at forestcitykiller dot com. I thought I'd post here and see if we can reactivate the conversation, because a lot of readers have been approaching me with questions and theories, and I thought we needed a place to talk about it. This old thread seemed like a good place to start, but if someone with more experience on Websleuths wants to set up threads for each of the unsolved cases, that would work too.
