Helen’s Light still shines
Helen Gillings was murdered 23 years ago. Her homicide remains unsolved.
It is Hamilton Police Service case No. 95030477. Unsolved. A homicide from 23 years ago. Few people remember the victim attached to that case file. Fewer still actually knew her. So let me tell you her story. Her name was Helen Gillings. She was killed long before we began talking about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, but she is now part of that long and terrible list of names that varies in length from 1,200 (according to the RCMP) to 4,000 (according to Indigenous groups) going back to 1980. Helen was 19 when she died. Her life was never easy. She was born in Kenora and adopted by the Gillings family when she was four, along with her younger sister. (Their birth parents died soon after.) The siblings were raised, along with the Gillings own son, in the small farm town of Sundre, Alta., 100 km north of Calgary.
The Gillings once told me they suspected Helen had been sexually abused before they met her. She was bright and loved animals and drawing, but not school. By 12, she was rebelling and frequently running away from home. By 14 she lived on the street.
The Gillings were not Indigenous and there wasn’t much of an Indigenous com- munity where they lived, but they loved Helen and tried their best. At 16, Helen fled to Toronto. There she met Jerry, who was five years older. They moved to Hamilton together in 1994, into a place on Wilson Street, just before their first daughter was born.
Neighbours said when Helen arrived, she was petite and pretty, with long, shiny hair and big dark eyes. She usually wore a sweatsuit and was pleasant to talk to. But life wore her down quickly and she aged before their eyes.
Jerry once told The Spectator that Helen had turned her life around. However police and neighbours saw she was doing sex work.
The couple was evicted from their apartment for not paying the rent. A neighbour saw a man throw Helen out of an apartment lobby where she had gone to get warm. “She landed face down in the gutter and the guy just walked around her,” the neighbour said.
On Jan. 26, 1995, Helen had a second daughter. She was born prematurely, weighing just three and a half pounds. St. Joseph’s Hospital kept her there.
At 1:30 a.m. on Feb. 16, Helen was seen playing pool with a “clean-cut young man” at the now defunct Straw Hat bar at the corner of King and Emerald streets.
At about 5 p.m., Feb. 17, another man found Helen’s body.
She was naked and stuffed beneath an overturned couch in the dark and dirty alley behind a King Street East apartment building, a short walk from the bar. She had been strangled.
It is unclear if she was killed in the alley or if her body was dumped there.
Helen’s family didn’t come to Hamilton for her funeral. Her newborn baby was still in the hospital. Her first born child was just two. Both were eventually adopted.
So it was left to the Lansdale neigh- bourhood to honour Helen. The people there — led at the time by community activist Stella Woock — held candlelight vigils, successfully lobbied for a light (Helen’s Light) to be installed in the alley and raised funds to have a proper pink granite headstone placed on Helen’s grave at Woodland Cemetery in Burlington. “Heaven’s Rose” it says, with two white angels on either side, as though her children watch over her. The headstone fund was topped up by a donation from police officers touched by Helen’s tragedy.
For a while there was a Helen Gillings Society, with members distributing food, blankets and clothing to sex workers in the area. A community police office opened a few feet from where Helen was found, part of an effort to clean up the neighbourhood. The office has since closed.
A few years ago, Helen’s nieces came by the alley to pay their respects and cry a little.
Helen’s case may be cold, but it is not closed. Staff Sgt. Dave Oleniuk of the homicide unit has inherited it and says it is still under investigation. There is a $10,000 reward for information leading to a conviction.
“Sometimes, years later, people feel more free to come forward with what they know,” Oleniuk says.
Helen is also remembered by Sisters in Spirit Hamilton, a committee dedicated to advocating for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. They are planning a vigil to honour Helen.
The alley lamp went dark for a while. Paul Glendenning, a Sisters in Spirit member, says the committee worked to get it fixed.
Helen’s Light shines. Susan Clairmont’s commentary appears regularly in The Spectator. sclairmont@thespec.com 905-526-3539 | @susanclairmont