(Ontario Provincial Police)
The skeleton of the Balsam Lake victim, estimated to be about fifteen to twenty-two years of age at the time of death. For years, police hoped the remains would be identified due to some unusual physical anomalies, such as an additional thoracic vertebrae and a thirteenth rib on the right side.
Since reopening the cases of Hovey and Jones, the OPP have aggressively investigated leads in the decades-old cases. A $50,000 reward has been announced for information leading to an arrest of the person or persons who murdered Jones and Hovey. Police believe the dead teenagers are only two of five young men who were abducted, bound, sexually assaulted, and slaughtered.
Back in 2006, OPP investigators spoke to Prime Timers — a gay social seniors group — at a special meeting in Toronto. Displaying Thompson’s forensic reconstructions of the two then-unidentified young men, police hoped viewing the faces might help someone remember who they were, and where and when they were last seen. Since that time, police have determined that Richard Hovey — whose remains were found near Schomberg — was last seen alive in Yorkville, in 1967, getting into a light blue Corvair driven by “a muscular black man.” It is believed Jones also got a ride with the man in the same model car.
Convicted sex killer James Henry Greenidge drove a light-coloured Corvair, which was used to identify him by a surviving victim, the twenty-one-year-old who Greenidge beat, stabbed, and left for dead in a farmer’s field north of Barrie. Ironically, the car driven by Greenidge was deadly in more ways than one. The Corvair remains one of the most dangerous vehicles ever made, with a tendency to oversteer, overheat, skid wildly out of control, lift, or worse, flip over. The car was so dangerous it became the first chapter of the book by lawyer and consumer advocate Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed. More than merely hazardous, driving the car could be fatal, leading Nader to call its design, “One of the greatest acts of industrial irresponsibility in the present century.”3 For Greenidge, the car suited his personality: fast, powerful, unstable, and potentially deadly.
The similarities between the murders and Greenidge’s modus operandi are too many to ignore. The FBI classifies three types of serial killers: organized, disorganized, and mixed. Organized killers are methodical, and often have an above average IQ. Disorganized killers have a lower than average IQ, and rarely take the time to cover their tracks or dispose of a body. The disorganized killer is unlikely to have his own vehicle, usually relying on other forms to transportation, like public transit or walking. If he does have a car it is likely to be messy and not in good working order. Organized offenders usually have their own means of transportation, keeping it in top condition. Perhaps most telling is the way organized killers operate. Unlike the disorganized offender, the organized killer takes along their own restraints, such as a rope and handcuffs, during their hunt for their next victim.
In many ways, criminologist and noted FBI serial killer tracker, Robert K. Ressler, might have been writing about the killer of Hovey and Jones when he wrote his book, Whoever Fights Monsters:
Taking one’s own car, or a victim’s car, is part of a conscious attempt to obliterate evidence of the crime. Similarly, too, the organized offender brings his own weapon to the crime and takes it away once he is finished. He knows that there are fingerprints on the weapon, or the ballistic evidence may connect him to the murder, so he takes it away from the scene. He may wipe away fingerprints from the entire scene of the crime, wash away blood, and do many other things to prevent identification either of the victim or of himself. The longer a victim remains unidentified, of course, the greater the likelihood that the crime will not be tracked back to its perpetrator. Usually the police find the victims of an organized killer to be nude; without clothing, they are less easily identified.4
Police are investigating Greenidge in connection to yet another unsolved murder of a victim who has yet to be named. On July 16, 1980, a motorist pulled his car off the side of a rural road in the town of Markham, Ontario, ostensibly to relieve himself. It was around 8:30 p.m. and getting dark. The area around the Eleventh Concession north of Steeles Avenue was much like it is today, semi-rural, full of woods and dense brush, and sparsely populated with farms and houses. The man walked about seventy-five feet from the road into the woods when he made an unnerving discovery. On the ground were the skeletal remains of a human body. Unlike the bodies of Hovey and Jones, found decades earlier, this time police found a significant amount of clothing lying on the earth next to the skeleton. But considering that the bones turned out to be those of a male, the items were not quite what police expected to uncover.
All the garments and accessories were women’s clothing. Police discovered a red blouse, a pair of size thirty women’s blue jeans, a pair of red and pink high-heeled shoes, short white frilly socks, and a woman’s powder compact complete with a mirror. All the items led investigators to believe that the remains were those of a transgendered male or a cross-dresser, someone who likes to wear clothing from members of the opposite sex.
Although the body had been reduced to a skeleton and disturbed, likely by animals, forensic examiners were soon able to determine that they belonged to a small male about five feet three inches to five feet five inches tall. Even without flesh a great deal can be revealed about someone from their skeletal remains, such as approximate age, sex, physical stature, and race, known as “the big four” to forensic anthropologists. Our bones and teeth reveal vast amounts of information about our age through the epiphysis, caps on the ends of long bones that fuse completely once we leave our teens. Epiphysis on bones in other parts of the body, such as the clavicle, fuse later in life, around age thirty. From then on, signs of bone loss, deterioration, and work-related injuries become more evident. Someone who lays bricks or pours concrete for a living will have a much different bone structure and density than another person who works as a personal assistant in an office.
Tests of the bones revealed that the Markham victim was white, and about twenty-five to forty years of age. In life, the man would have been small with an extremely light build — somewhere between one hundred and 120 pounds at the most — and a thin, even gaunt, face. Considering the weathered condition of the boney remains, the body and clothing would likely have been in the woods for about two years by the time they were found, placing the time of the man’s death at around 1978. The time frame coincided with a period when Greenidge was out of jail.
It is believed the victim wore the items found around him at one point, but was not wearing them at the time he died. Later testing revealed there were no signs of decay inside the clothes, such as the socks and pants, which meant the man was left to die naked in the woods, women’s clothing on the ground beside his body. Since the body had been reduced to a skeleton, investigators at the time were unable to determine an exact cause of death. Police say the remains did not reveal any signs of edged weapons being used or blunt force trauma. Could the Markham victim have been strangled, as was the case with many of Greenidge’s other victims? Police aren’t saying.
(York Regional Police)
A museum quality facial reconstruction of the face of the Markham victim, unveiled in December 2009. Found off the side of a rural road in the Town of Markham, Ontario, on July 16, 1980, it is estimated that the body remained undiscovered for two to three years. The victim, a male twenty-five to forty years old, is believed to have been transgendered or a cross-dresser and has yet to be identified.
Adding to the mystery is the question of what became of the remains of the Markham victim? Unlike the bodies of Richard “Dickie” Hovey and Eric Jones, which sat properly stored in numbered boxes at the office of the coroner in Toronto for decades, the unidentified male discovered in the woods was, for some unknown reason, buried in a pauper’s grave at Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Christmas Eve 1983, along with the clothes. The reasons for interring the remains and the female garments found near the body have not been revealed.
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