Camille Cléroux was born about 1953 and lived in south Ottawa. Neighbours later described a loner who was aggressive towards women.
He married Lise Roy in 1987. She already had a daughter, and the couple had a son. In 1990, after an argument, he killed her with a rock and buried her in the back garden of their home on Heatherington Road. She was twenty-seven. Her two young children were left without a mother.
His second wife, Jean Rock, was last seen in 2003, at thirty-two. Murderpedia gives 2001 for that killing. Her remains were recovered from the Rideau Canal in 2006 but were not identified until 2012.
Neither woman was ever reported missing, and that is the part of this case worth pausing on. Cléroux forged letters in their names so that relatives would believe they were alive and had simply gone. Twenty years passed. When the Crown described the letter-forging scheme in court, Jean Rock's father collapsed and had to be helped out of the room.
The last killing had a motive of a smallness that the court found hard to take. Paula Leclair, sixty-four, lived in the same apartment building as Cléroux, on the ninth floor. Her flat was bigger than his, with a better view and more room for his things. He asked to move in and she refused. On May 20, 2010 he invited her for a walk in Fairlea woods, forced her at knifepoint to a grave he had already dug, stabbed her repeatedly in the back with a knife taken from the restaurant where he worked, and beat her head in with a rock. He then went back to her apartment and put her belongings in a dumpster.
He moved in and told the neighbours she had won the lottery and gone. She had not. Her son came to the building, found a stranger living in his mother's flat and her furniture gone, and went to the police. That is what began the investigation.
Cléroux was arrested in June 2010 and charged with first-degree murder on June 3. Leclair's body was found that month. About three weeks later he was charged with the two cold cases. Interviewed at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre, he described planning and carrying out the killing without visible emotion, and said he had lost it and burned a fuse, that was all.
Searches ran for two years: remains at his former home on Heatherington Road, more in the woods off Albion Road in April 2012, and the search of Fairlea woods.
He agreed in March 2012 to end his preliminary hearing and go to trial, and on June 26 he pleaded guilty to all three killings, sitting expressionless through the account of them. The judge told him that with a mind that had functioned as his had, there was no better place for him than custody, and that after the details heard in court everyone could take some comfort from knowing he would probably be locked up for the rest of his life.