By Alan R Warren
This is a chapter from a book by the author, published here with his own introduction.
This is an excerpt from the recently released best seller ‘Blood Thirst the True Story of Wayne Boden Vampire Rapist & Serial Killer “written by Alan R Warren which is Volume 16 of the Crimes Canada Series true crimes that shocked the nation. Alan R Warren is a True Crime Author for RJ Parker Publishing as well as a contributing writer for True Crime Case Files Magazine with his Master’s Degree in Music, Minor in Criminology from U.W. and Recording & Sound Engineering from Juno award winning Bullfrog Studios in Vancouver. Alan is now the Current host of the ‘House of Mystery’ True Crime History radio show heard in Seattle on KKNW 1150 A.M. Alternative Talk Radio. http://1150kknw.com/coming-up-on-our-new-show-house-of-mystery-fridays-at-4p/
‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce’ – Karl Marx
The boom in the city of Calgary had created a lot of jobs for people, and this drew people like Elizabeth Porteous, who was a 33-year-old school teacher. She moved to town in 1968 and lived alone in a high-rise located in the downtown core. Elizabeth was well respected by her fellow teachers at school she worked in, and really enjoyed being around the children. She often dreamed of the day that she would have a family, with lots of children.
Elizabeth was on the lookout for the right man to start a family with. She was looking for a man that was smart, and able to discuss intelligent things, liked to read and maybe would be a teacher as well. If he had good looks and charm on top of that it was a bonus.
In Calgary, it seemed everyone that she had been introduced to was more into being a rancher or cowboy. It wasn’t that she had anything against that type of career, but it just seemed that they weren’t very interesting to talk to, or they wanted a woman that would just be a wife. Sit pretty and clean house, have some children. She wanted more than to be somebody’s wife, she was looking for a partner. In the 1960’s Elizabeth, though she was good looking and worked an excellent job, was not sought after by too many men, and therefore she seldom dated. In fact, she had not been on a proper date for three years, before she had moved to Calgary. Most of her spare time she would spend with other teachers that she worked with, going on a ski trip to Banff, which was a resort town about one hour west of Calgary. It was on one of those ski trips in 1971 that she would meet a man that caught her eye enough to want to date him.
Sometime during their first day there, they had split up, but planned on meeting at the bar later that afternoon. While waiting for her colleague at a local bar, Elizabeth was approached by a young man. He recognized a sticker on her car which identified her from Hamilton. Elizabeth was relaxed enough to sit and have a conversation with him. It wasn’t long before they were laughing and reminiscing over people that they had both known, and the wonderful place to live in Hamilton it was. They had hit it off so well, they decided to meet up back in Calgary and exchanged phone numbers.
On the way home to Calgary she was so excited that she just couldn’t stop talking about him. Her coworker was very happy for Elizabeth, to finally see her going out on a date with a man that she was excited about.
It was about two weeks later when she was back at work in Calgary that she told some of the other teachers that she was going on a first date with this man that she met in Banff earlier. She needed help going out and buying a new outfit for the date as she felt that she was falling behind on the latest fashions. Her and her friends spent three evenings after work trying to find just the right outfit. Finally, she was ready, it was the night of her first date with the man that had kept her mind occupied for weeks.
The next morning, she didn’t show up for work, so the school tried calling her, but got no answer. Some of the other teachers told the principle about Elizabeth’s big date on the previous night and it must have gone well. As time went on Later that afternoon still nobody heard from her. Some of the other teachers that were friends tried calling and still no answer. One of them used to live in the same building and knew the caretaker quite well and gave the principle her number.
Then the maintenance man Bill Mosley went up to Elizabeth’s apartment. They received no answer when they knocked on her door several times. They tried the door and found it to be unlocked, so when they opened the door, they saw Elizabeth lying semi-nude on the floor in the center of the room. She was right in front of the doorway almost blocking the door as they opened it. Neither of them tried touching or moving her body, so they backed away and called the police right away.
Within the hour, the police were at her apartment. The first detectives were Bill Crabbe forensic photographer and Rick Talbot. It was customary for them to take complete photos of the crime scene, centered around the victim, and her proximity to things in her apartment. Detective Rick Talbot waited patiently as the pictures were being taken. The first thing that Talbot noticed was that Elizabeth was in what he called “the rape position”. Elizabeth was laying in the middle of the room on her back just behind the door with her dress tore open. Her apartment showed considerable signs of struggle. She was raped and strangled and her breasts were mutilated with bite marks. There were buttons that had been tore from the dress on the floor, obviously from an attack where someone had grabbed abruptly.
The cause of death was not known from the site of her body, but like the bodies that were found in Montreal, there were bite marks on her neck and breasts. But in Elizabeth’s case, her right breast had 77 bite marks on the top of her breast, and three on the bottom. But the teeth marks had been made with such force that the teeth marks had punctured from the bottom of the breast up past the oriole and had come out of the top of the breast. This was a far more vicious attack than the ones previously done in Montreal. The body was taken to the morgue for the medical examiner to search for any more evidence that might shed light on the case.
When the police dusted for fingerprints, they noticed that in the kitchen the fridge and stove had both been wiped down, somebody had obviously taken the time to wipe everything down before leaving the apartment. But one thing that the police found curios was that 7 of the 8 buttons that had been ripped off her dress were left in various places through the apartment, and one of them was missing completely.
Back in the morgue, the examiner had lifted Elizabeth’s body into an upright position to remove her clothing, and out came a cuff link. It had been embedded in her shoulder where it left an impression. This cuff link had been left behind during the struggle with Elizabeth Porteous. The examiner also concluded that the cause of death was strangulation. Though they had the cuff link they still had no strategy to finding the owner.
First thing the detectives decided to do was to talk with her family, friends and coworkers to find out what she had been doing the previous 24 hours.
It was when the police were talking with Elizabeth’s coworkers that they learned of her first date with an unknown man that she had met earlier in Banff. Although few could provide any details of the man, one teacher, Harry Robinson, and his wife by chance had driven up beside Elizabeth on a busy road and was stopped beside her at a stop light on the night that she had her date.
They could describe the man as a 24-25-year-old, good looking man, sharp dresser with neat short hair. Robinson also noticed that the couple were very caught up in talking and laughing, so they decided not to interfere by honking while sitting in the car at the stop light, and didn’t bother to try and say hi.
They were also able to describe the clothing that Elizabeth was wearing, and they sounded like the same clothes that she was wearing when found dead in her apartment, or at least the same colors.
Also, Robinson, could describe the car as a Mercedes that was a powder blue color and roughly what year it was, as well as having a strange bobble headed toy of some sort of bull or horse on the rear window sill.
Police ran a scan for cars that matched the description and so happened to find one that was registered to a man living only one block away from Elizabeth’s apartment, the same one that she was murdered in.
The police then decided to put a surveillance team on the possible suspect, and waited outside of his apartment. It wasn’t long before Boden drove up and parked out front on the street, and went into his apartment building. It was then that one of the detectives approached the car, and looked it over. After seeing the bobble headed doll on the back-window sill, he decided to call it into the detective’s office. On hearing of this discovery, Detective Ed Madsen told the police officers to bring the owner of the Mercedes in for questioning.
The police knocked on the door of the registered owner of the Mercedes, Wayne Boden, a 24-year-old mild mannered salesman with no previous criminal record. Wayne answered the door, and though he was not told the nature of the investigation, agreed to come along with the police to the station for questioning.
When the detectives came into the room, the first questioned they asked Wayne was if he knew Elizabeth Porteous. Boden responded by telling them that he did, and been out together on a date, and he seemed very calm, not upset at all about the question. He also claimed that after the date finished, he had left her at her apartment alone. Detective Marsden decided to take a chance.
The detective then asked Boden if he had lost anything, and not expecting it, he responded, as a matter of fact I lost my cuff link. Then Marsden showed Boden the cuff link that they had found earlier in her apartment, and he said it was his, in fact it was given to him by his mother, who had passed it down from her grandmother.
Shortly after that the detectives arrested Boden and put him into custody. Even though he had been arrested he claimed that he was innocent and just lost the cuff link at her place before she was murdered. The police feared that they would not be able to convict him with such limited evidence. They needed to strengthen their case with more evidence.
Detective Marsden just happened to be reading about the British police were involved in a case where bite marks had been identified and clearly established the identity of the person responsible for the crime. Only in Canada such evidence had never been used in court before. So, Marsden went to their lead pathologist dr. Reynolds, who in turn recommended a qualified orthodontist Dr. Gordon Swann. After finding Dr. Swann, they asked Wayne Boden if he would submit to a dental impression. He agreed without hesitation, still claiming his innocence. Marsden couldn’t figure out exactly why Boden would so easily let them take the impressions, except for maybe he thought that it wouldn’t be able to prove anything. After all this was not the kind of thing the public had ever heard about, not even in the crime shows of the day like Hawaii Five-0.
Gordon Swann then wrote to the FBI, who was led by J. Edgar Hoover back then, who said that they had never done any kind of procedure with dental impressions. Swann then turned his attention to England, where detective Marsden had read about them using such evidence. Swann was very pleased when the British cops had already had convictions in using dental impressions.
While waiting for the results of the detailed dental impression, the police then discovered that Boden was relatively new to Calgary, and was previously in Montreal. When they contacted the Montreal police they explained to them of their recent homicide and about the bite marks found on the body. That’s when they first learned about the cases that were similar in Montreal the years before. They now felt that they were dealing with a serial killer.
If Wayne Boden’s dental impressions matched the marks that were left on Elizabeth Porteous body, they may finally bring this vampire killer to justice, only if they did not match, then a killer of five women would remained unsolved.
Editor's note: this is Chapter Nine of Alan R Warren's Blood Thirst: The True Story of Wayne Boden, Vampire Rapist and Serial Killer, Volume 16 of the Crimes Canada series, reproduced with the author's own introduction, which he supplied and which is set at the head of the page. It is a book excerpt rather than an article written for the magazine, which is why it ends on a cliffhanger: the dental impressions did match.
What happened next. Gordon Swann's comparison of Boden's dental impressions with the bite marks on Elizabeth Porteous became the first use of bite mark evidence to secure a murder conviction in Canada. Boden was convicted in 1972 of Porteous's murder in Calgary and of three of the Montreal killings, and received four life sentences. He died of skin cancer at Kingston on March 27, 2006. This archive's roster carries four victims against him.
One number in the chapter does not match the roster. Its closing line refers to a killer of five women. Boden was convicted of four, and a fifth Montreal death has been attributed to him without ever being tried. Bite mark comparison, which this chapter treats as the breakthrough it was in 1971, has since been heavily criticised as a forensic discipline, and several American convictions resting on it have been overturned; nothing of that kind has happened in Boden's case, and the cuff link found embedded in the victim's shoulder was evidence of a different order.
The archive already carries two other articles on this case, ‘Wayne Boden Vampire Rapist Serial Killer’ and Aaron Kirkland's ‘Wayne Clifford Boden the Vampire Rapist’, and this chapter is neither of them.