London was once hub for serial killers
At least three were caught after nine-year-old Frankie Jensen’s murder. Was he killed by a fourth?
Life was good for nine-year-old Frankie Jensen. He had a strong, loving, prosperous family, and lived in a family-centred, leafy part of London, Ont. His Grade 4 classmates at Westdale Public School liked him, too — apart from a few bullies who took advantage of his gentle nature.
“In class, I sat in front of Frankie and I remember a soft-spoken, kind, sweet little boy,” Janice Sumpton wrote in a letter to her hometown London Free Press in May 2013.
Sumpton wrote that she thinks of Frankie often, especially when she drives on Hyde Park Road, where he was last seen after waving goodbye to his parents, who watched him through the window as he headed off to school.
Frankie vanished shortly after 8 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 9, 1968, carrying his lunch pail with 40 cents in his pocket.
When Frankie failed to show up for class, hundreds of local residents joined the search for him in the bitter cold, along with police and members of the military.
There were border alerts and other police forces were notified.
Frankie wasn’t the type of kid to run away, and residents felt queasy when weeks passed with no news of even a ransom demand.
Two months after he vanished, canoeists found his body face-down in the Thames River near Thorndale, just to the northeast of the city.
Frankie was clad in only an undershirt and shirt. His pants were found near the body.
A tissue was stuffed in his mouth. Some locals instantly thought of 16-year-old Jacqueline (Jackie) Dunleavy, who had vanished exactly a month before Frankie, after leaving her part-time job at a London variety store.
Her partially clad body was found within hours of her disappearance. It had been posed by her killer, with school books placed around her.
Jackie, the daughter of a London police officer, had been strangled with her own scarf; a wad of facial tissue also shoved down her throat.
Western University criminologist Michael Arntfield said in an interview that he doesn’t think the same person killed Frankie and Dunleavy, even though they both had tissue in their throats.
Arntfield, 45, adds that Frankie’s story had a very personal feeling for him — he also grew up in London, in the same neighbourhood where Frankie lived his short life.
“I walked the same route he was abducted on,” Arntfield said.
Arntfield, the author of “Murder City: The Untold Story of Canada’s Serial Murder Capital, 1959-1984,” thinks that Frankie’s killer copied Dunleavy’s killer in an attempt to confuse investigators.
The tissue detail had been publicized after Dunleavy’s murder.
Arntfield, a former police investigator, does think that Frankie’s killer also murdered Scott Leishman, who lived about 15 minutes east of London.
Leishman was 16 but looked much younger, and a lot like Frankie Jensen. His body was found in the waters of nearby Big Otter Creek on March 21, 1968.
Frankie and Scott had both been strangled and then thrown into the water.
Among those haunted by Frankie’s murder was a veteran cop who investigated it.
Det.-Supt. Dennis Alsop Sr. also probed a string of other unsolved murders of young people in London and the surrounding area in the 1960s and 1970s.
Those cases included the death of 15-year-old Jackie English, who was abducted and murdered after leaving work in 1969, and Priscilla Merle, 21, who was slain and dismembered in 1972.
English’s body was found in Big Otter Creek outside the city, while Merle’s torso was discovered in Kettle Creek near London.
(“Even by 1960s standards, it was understood that water destroys evidence,” Arntfield said.)
Alsop feared serial killers had preyed upon London in the 1960s.
He left detailed records in the basement of his London home after his death in 2011, including his thoughts on Frankie’s case and several others.
Arntfield poured through those records for his book, and speaks of Alsop with extreme respect, as someone with a strong conscience, work ethic and intelligence.
“He was a trailblazer,” Arntfield said.
Arntfield also notes that Alsop worked before investigators were aided by DNA profiling and sophisticated computer software that helps modern investigators link crimes.
Alsop didn’t have access to DNA data banks — or even an investigative partner — as he probed the multiple deaths, Arntfield noted.
Still, his conclusions are impressive — and chilling.
“He was able to see linkages between cases based on informed analysis,” Arntfield said, noting there was little study of serial killers back in Alsop’s time.
Dealing with his suspicions and the grief of the victims’ families clearly was personally painful for Alsop.
“There were some cases that clearly remained with him until his death,” Arntfield said.
Like Alsop, Arntfield concluded there were several serial killers in London in the ’60s and ’70s.
Three of them have since been either convicted or held in psychiatric care after being found not guilty by reason of insanity: Russell Johnson, “The Balcony Strangler”; Gerald Thomas Archer, “The Chambermaid Slayer”; and Christian Magee “The Mad Slasher.”
All three were caught after Jensen’s murder. Between them, Johnson, Archer and Magee killed at least 10 people in the area, which still leaves 15 unsolved murders of women and children between 1959 and 1983.
Part of the reason for the concentration of multiple killers was that London was a transportation hub for southwestern Ontario, with the newly built Highway 401 making it easy to enter and exit the city.
Arntfield notes that killers could scoop up victims inside London, which was policed by a local force, and dump them outside the city, where the OPP had jurisdiction.
In Alsop’s files, there’s the conclusion that Frankie’s killer was a neighbour of Frankie’s family, who could see Frankie from his house.
The neighbour worked as a travelling salesman and had convictions for exposing himself to children.
Inside the neighbour’s car, Alsop found fine blond hair, like that on Frankie’s head, and inside his house, the detective found doctored work records relating to the day Jensen disappeared.
The suspect dodged Alsop repeatedly by either leaving town or temporarily committing himself to a local psychiatric hospital.
Alsop’s files provided a unique foundation for Arntfield’s book on London’s serial killers.
Arntfield agrees with Alsop that Frankie Jensen was abducted and killed by the neighbour who had dodged the detective.
Arntfield writes that a white sedan was reported idling along Frankie’s route to school around 8:30 a.m. the day he disappeared — just before a spot where kids took a shortcut through a wooded area.
He notes, too, that Scott Leishman was last seen getting into a white sedan.
According to Arntfield, the neighbour died several years ago. He added: “We know very little about his background.”
In the decades since his murder, Frankie’s family struggled to stay strong.
“We speak of him often, remembering his antics and the laughter we shared as a family,” big sister Bente said in a letter to the editor in the London Free Press in 2012. “We do not dwell on his tragic death.”
“I am grateful for the strength of family that carried us through this dark period and, in fact, made us stronger as a unit,” Bente Jensen wrote.
“We are not the norm,” she wrote. “So many London and area families who lived our particular hell have been destroyed. We were lucky to have been raised by parents who led by example in a positive manner. They encouraged us to always look for the good in any situation and we’ve done our best to follow their lead.”
They could at least draw some comfort from the work of the London Council of Jewish Women, who launched the first Block Parent Program in Canada.
It was modelled on an American program that offered temporary safe havens to children who felt threatened or lost.
Homes approved by the Block Parent program displayed an instantly recognizable red and white sign in the window, telling children they would be safe inside.
The program lasted until 2016 — almost a half-century after Frankie’s death.
By then, kids often had cellphones, fewer people were at home during the day, and fewer kids walked home from school. More people also apparently didn’t want to be screened by police.
The murders of Frankie Jensen and Scott Leishman remain officially unsolved.
Part of the reason for the concentration of multiple killers was that London was a transportation hub for southwestern Ontario, with the newly built Highway 401 making it easy to enter and exit the city