SERIAL KILLER DIES IN PRISON
Cleroux battered three women
An Ottawa serial killer who bludgeoned three women — two exwives and a neighbour — over 20 years has died in a B.C. prison.
Camille Joseph Cleroux was serving a life sentence at the Pacific Institution in Abbotsford, B.C., for one count of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder
Cleroux died Sunday “of apparent natural causes” while in custody, the Correctional Service of Canada said Tuesday.
In 2012, Cleroux, then 58, admitted to killing ex-wives Lise Roy and Jean Rock and neighbour Paula Leclair over a two-decade period beginning in 1990.
Cleroux bludgeoned all three women and buried them in shallow graves. He was a former dishwasher at now closed Mellos restaurant.
Cleroux married Roy in 1987 and killed her in 1990 after an argument, striking her with a rock and burying her in their backyard. He told people she had left him. In 2011, city work crews found leg and other bones buried in the backyard of their former home. The bones were wrapped in butcher's paper and appeared to have been moved to the garden from another spot.
Rock, who was last seen at a doctor's appointment, went missing in 2003. Family members received handwritten letters seeming to be signed by her every year between 2004 and 2010. Cleroux had paid a friend with similar handwriting to write the letters for $10 each.
The letters told a familiar story — that she had left Cleroux. More haunting still, the letters concocted a new life with a trucker named Pierre and fabricated three children born to them and included photos of the children.
Cleroux buried her in a wooded area in Fairlea Park, but twice dug up her bones.
He eventually put the bones in
a mesh produce bag and pushed them in a shopping cart over a bridge into the Rideau Canal.
The bones were discovered in the water in October 2006, but Rock's remains went unidentified until 2012.
Leclair was found in a wooded area near Walkley Road in June 2010. She had lived in the same apartment building as Cleroux and he killed her after coveting her apartment, which was bigger and had a better view.
Leclair refused to share her apartment with him, so in May 2010 he took her to Fairlea woods, where he forced her into a shallow grave he had dug ahead of time, stabbed her and bashed her in the head with a rock.
Her son, concerned that he hadn't heard from her, went to the apartment and saw her things and furniture missing. Cleroux told the son that his mother had gone on a trip and left the apartment to him.
Correctional services said it “will review the circumstances” of Cleroux's death and that “policy requires that the police and the coroner be notified.”