The Windsor Star from Windsor, Ontario, Canada • 92

SDtf'G 9g sebiMk Police Chief William Smith, Strathroy, Ontario By Ruth Ellen Ruston Photography, including cover, by Frank Prazak construction of the Great Western Railway, shows a locomotive and carries the words "We Advance." Drive in now on Highway 81. Churches are seen as frequently as factories. Yellow brick houses with white wood porches and gables intricately carved stand near subdivision split levels. Then well-kept barns stretch out to the township marker. Strathroy population 7,300.

A population that has more than doubled in the last 20 years with the influx of Dutch and Portuguese immigrants. A man passing a lady in the street nods to her. The storekeeper reopens his door smiling at 6:05 for somebody's suddenly remembered provisions. You think, "hey, this is a nice town." "We don't think of ourselves as a rural community," says town clerk Tom Derrick. "We're becoming more and more urban." Saturday, March 2, 1974.

Foggiest night in ages, fog so thick it diffused into haze the disc of the full moon. Judy Barksey ordered a baby with the works down at Mother's Pizza and kidded a bit with the guys while the cook did his thing. Picked out cans of grapefruit and orange pop and, yeah sure, a Coffee Crisp. She paid the tab when the pizza came, boxed and steaming, wrapped herself tightly in her jacket and headed out on Frank Street with her supper tucked under her arm. Hustled past the town hall facing Ferguson groovy gothic script nostalgia barbershop beside the News Depot, then Ms.

Bizz fashions and finally Bailey's Farm Supplies where the Portuguese words Novo Horario are on the door above the New Daily Hours. Had to hustle. Took the short cut by the gray CNR station with bleached out coral-painted doors where the workers play poker on weekdays in gray and red checked flannel shirts. Had to move while the pizza was hot, get home well, back to the house eat and change into her whites for night duty at the Merry Hill Nursing Home. More than four years she'd worked there but in just two weeks she'd complete the course to be a regular nurse's aide.

Judy never made it to 12 Maitland Terrace. She never made it to work. "The Barksey girl" got only as far as the wrong side of the tracks that night when somebody slit her throat. It was a blow to the community. Nothing like that had happened since John Orrange was beaten to death in 1946.

But then, probably another 30 years would pass until murder happened again. Attendance at the funeral was scanty. Judy came from another town and spent her life in foster homes till she moved in to board with the Mussels. Her father, she thought, was "somewhere in Italy." Police located her mother in a village up north. She looked at her 19-year-old daughter in the.

coffin for the first time since she was an infant and the last time before the casket was closed. Time passed, mended. Judy had no local kin. Beyond the gross pathos of it all it seemed an isolated incident, a fragment to be woven into the fabric of local legend. Those who knew her called her Miss Gibbons but hardly anybody knew her.

She was born in Oxbow, Saskatchewan and came to Strathroy in 1953 with her mother, who died two years later. She lived in the town as a recluse. Nervous, shy, she kept the doors locked at her shabby, asphalt tile bungalow, with an old pump in the side-yard. Sometimes she would talk about piants over the fence with her neighbor, but "she was never in my house and I was never in hers," Mina Hawkins remembers. She had only her "skittery" papillon dog Timmy, and two lady friends.

To them she confided she'd been receiving "runny" phone calls for weeks. Thursday morning, July 31, 1975. Miss Gibbons passed Mrs. Hawkins on her way to shop at Foodland. Around four that afternoon her groceries were delivered.

Saturday morning the papergirl noticed the two previous days' newspapers tucked inside the door. The margarine in the grocery box had melted and stained the stoop. Timmy yelped hysterically inside. The girl told her mother who called police. They opened the unlatched door at 131 Keefer Street and found in the bedroom the strangled corpse of Irene Frances Gibbons, 67, wearing a brown polka-dot dress.

As with Judy Barksey there was no evidence of sexual assault. Timmy was the only witness. A current of terror jolted the residents. Locks were sold out at the hardware store. Miss Gibbons was quietly buried.

She had only one surviving relative, a brother in Hamilton who was to have been married that week. Louise Gillan grew up in town and married Denys Jenner. They rented a white and pink shuttered frame house out on Highway 81 near Mount Brydges. Denys returned home October 20th at 6:50 PM as the full moon was rising. He found the body of his wife in the dining room.

She had been strangled and her throat slashed as their six-month-old daughter Rachel Amanda lay upstairs sleeping. No sign of forced entry. No evidence of sexual assault. Wife of, mother of, daughter of, sister of, Strathroy born and raised. The naive insulation was punctured.

It could happen anywhere, to anyone. Anyone could have done it. "What is happening. Here. To us?" If anyone could have done it then everyone is suspect.

Sideways glances at your neighbor. "I trust my dog implicitly." "If a woman in this town isn't afraid," says the police chief, "then there's something the matter with her." Crummy territory for a salesman now. You can knock and knock and the curtains rustle but doors don't open to a stranger. Tidy homes on even streets, like a Pepsodent smile with the teeth firmly clenched. Weeks pass, people forget.

The taxi driver says, "Already the 14-year-old girls are walking the streets alone at night." In Softley's Patricia Beauty Shoppe, Continued LIKE A CHILD, fallen. Or sleeping. Lying on her stomach on the ground, an arm in a plaid jacket crooked by her head, blue-jeaned legs close together. One Adidas running shoe tumbled to the side. He thought she was a kid at first.

They play around the grain elevators sometimes. But approaching he saw the red that streamed from her neck and pooled against the green aluminum siding of the fertilizer shed. His fist tightened involuntarily. "Not even a dog," police chief Smith remembers, shaking his head. "You wouldn't kill a dog that way." It was a village dependent on the land that surrounds it, on lumber and livestock and crops.

Land where summer comes quickly and winter returns just as quickly but stays twice as long. Thrift and hard work were unrivalled virtues. To love God meant to fear Him and hear His wrath and rewards vividly depicted in the grim poetry of Revelations, regularly on Sundays between 10 and one. Folk knew their neighbors, trusted them, and should this intimacy sometimes exceed personal boundaries, well, doesn't familiarity Though, Lord knows, tolerance too. Taverns were closed in 1909 and the town stayed dry up to 1973.

But men doubtless found elsewhere to gather for chuckles and abuse of grammar. A woman's fantasy of ultimate luxury was to sleep between a fresh pair of flannelette sheets everv week; and local giris seldom, it ever, "put out." Strath valley, Roy red. John Stewart Buchanan, first settler, named it after his home in Ireland, not knowing in 1832 that the fertile land along the banks of the Sydenham River would someday be stained with the blood of its citizens. The red valley, according to Clifford Cox's history of the town from 1834-1934, "presents a picture of what a mixed Canadian, Irish, English and Scotch people can accomplish." With a little help from the railway. The town seal, designed in 1860 when the community was incorporated as a village four years after the 4 Weekend Magazine, Mar.

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