Lengthy article.. with lots of pertinent detail regarding this and other likely associated cases.
www.wellandtribune.ca
By Herb Garbutt Burlington Post
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Detective Sergeant Steve Hrab stands in front of a board showing the locations of attacks in the Project Advocate cases. - Ted Brellisford photo
rbbm.
''The first day of August 2002 was a scorcher. The temperature in the late afternoon peaked at about 34 C, though with the humidity, it felt more like 43 C.
By the time the white, two-door sports car came to a stop at the corner of Barton and Wellington streets in Hamilton around 10:30 p.m., the night had not provided much relief. It was still 25 C when the man in his late 20s with short blond hair, wearing a white T-shirt, opened the passenger door. A 43-year-old woman settled into the passenger seat.
Joe, as he identified himself, drove north toward the highway. He continued over the Skyway Bridge into Burlington, turning north onto Kerns Road. The woman became nervous about how far they had driven and even more so when he refused to come to a stop at intersections.
When the car finally did stop, the woman jumped out. ‘Joe’ reassured her and convinced her to get back in the car.
They continued to drive north and pulled into a parking lot at Kerns Park. Suddenly, the calm, composed man turned violent. He sexually assaulted her before she was able to escape.
She called Halton police around 12:30 a.m. She described her attacker as a slim white man, clean shaven, about 5-foot-10.
Four weeks to the day, a city of Burlington employee working in Kerncliff Park, less than two kilometres away, discovered a woman’s naked body in the brush near the Kerns Road entrance. It was later determined that she was killed after being struck on the head with a heavy blunt object.''
''Using fingerprints, the victim was identified as Kimlyn Tolgyes, a 19-year-old from Hamilton who had a three-year-old daughter.
Tolgyes was last seen Aug. 23 around 9 p.m., getting out of a red pickup truck on Grant Avenue near Main Street in Hamilton.
Eighteen years later, her murder remains unsolved.
• • • • •
Kimlyn Judy Tolgyes was a talented runner at Bennetto Elementary School, in the north end of Hamilton, where she ran the 800 metres in a little more than three minutes.
“She was my medley partner and she was pretty fast,” a former teammate, identified only as Mary, said in a Sept. 4, 2002 story in the Hamilton Spectator. “She was good.”
She later went to Cathedral High School, but her former elementary school teammates lost contact with her.''
''Tolgyes' mother told police her daughter was not part of the sex trade, but did some exotic dancing in strip clubs. A woman who said she met Tolgyes at the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre told the Spectator the teenager had become addicted to drugs.
One former elementary school teammate said she saw Tolgyes walking along Barton Street earlier in the year. “She looked pretty rough.”
''Police began assembling a profile of a suspect – a white man in his 20s, between 5-foot-7 and 5-foot-10, slim to medium build, with blond or light brown hair and blue eyes. He smoked du Maurier cigarettes and drove an older, sporty, white two-door car with standard transmission.
They believed he was familiar with both downtown Hamilton and the Kerns Road area in Burlington, and may have lived in either area.''
''The biggest development came in April 2012 when a woman’s body was found in a farmer’s field in Lincoln. It was the body of Floriani, who had gone missing a decade earlier.
“All of these incidents seem to centre in and around the time of early spring, summer and fall of 2002, and it would be obvious to us that there is some sort of link,” Hrab said at the news conference.''
ONTARIO COLD CASE: 200 leads fail to pinpoint Kimlyn Tolgyes' killer
Although Project Advocate, a task force set up to investigate a series of attacks on sex trade workers, resulted in a couple of arrests, the 2002 murder of 19-year-old Kimlyn
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Detective Sergeant Steve Hrab stands in front of a board showing the locations of attacks in the Project Advocate cases. - Ted Brellisford photo
rbbm.
''The first day of August 2002 was a scorcher. The temperature in the late afternoon peaked at about 34 C, though with the humidity, it felt more like 43 C.
By the time the white, two-door sports car came to a stop at the corner of Barton and Wellington streets in Hamilton around 10:30 p.m., the night had not provided much relief. It was still 25 C when the man in his late 20s with short blond hair, wearing a white T-shirt, opened the passenger door. A 43-year-old woman settled into the passenger seat.
Joe, as he identified himself, drove north toward the highway. He continued over the Skyway Bridge into Burlington, turning north onto Kerns Road. The woman became nervous about how far they had driven and even more so when he refused to come to a stop at intersections.
When the car finally did stop, the woman jumped out. ‘Joe’ reassured her and convinced her to get back in the car.
They continued to drive north and pulled into a parking lot at Kerns Park. Suddenly, the calm, composed man turned violent. He sexually assaulted her before she was able to escape.
She called Halton police around 12:30 a.m. She described her attacker as a slim white man, clean shaven, about 5-foot-10.
Four weeks to the day, a city of Burlington employee working in Kerncliff Park, less than two kilometres away, discovered a woman’s naked body in the brush near the Kerns Road entrance. It was later determined that she was killed after being struck on the head with a heavy blunt object.''
''Using fingerprints, the victim was identified as Kimlyn Tolgyes, a 19-year-old from Hamilton who had a three-year-old daughter.
Tolgyes was last seen Aug. 23 around 9 p.m., getting out of a red pickup truck on Grant Avenue near Main Street in Hamilton.
Eighteen years later, her murder remains unsolved.
• • • • •
Kimlyn Judy Tolgyes was a talented runner at Bennetto Elementary School, in the north end of Hamilton, where she ran the 800 metres in a little more than three minutes.
“She was my medley partner and she was pretty fast,” a former teammate, identified only as Mary, said in a Sept. 4, 2002 story in the Hamilton Spectator. “She was good.”
She later went to Cathedral High School, but her former elementary school teammates lost contact with her.''
''Tolgyes' mother told police her daughter was not part of the sex trade, but did some exotic dancing in strip clubs. A woman who said she met Tolgyes at the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre told the Spectator the teenager had become addicted to drugs.
One former elementary school teammate said she saw Tolgyes walking along Barton Street earlier in the year. “She looked pretty rough.”
''Police began assembling a profile of a suspect – a white man in his 20s, between 5-foot-7 and 5-foot-10, slim to medium build, with blond or light brown hair and blue eyes. He smoked du Maurier cigarettes and drove an older, sporty, white two-door car with standard transmission.
They believed he was familiar with both downtown Hamilton and the Kerns Road area in Burlington, and may have lived in either area.''
''The biggest development came in April 2012 when a woman’s body was found in a farmer’s field in Lincoln. It was the body of Floriani, who had gone missing a decade earlier.
“All of these incidents seem to centre in and around the time of early spring, summer and fall of 2002, and it would be obvious to us that there is some sort of link,” Hrab said at the news conference.''
