On May 29, 2010, André Leclair let himself into his mother's apartment in a south Ottawa high-rise with his spare key, because he had not heard from her in days. The rooms were full of someone else's things. As he stood there, the neighbor from down the hall stepped out of the elevator and explained, without any sign of concern, that Paula Leclair had given him the apartment. He asked André to hand over the key. André went to the police instead.
While officers looked into it, Camille Cléroux had a woman he knew write a letter in Paula Leclair's name, saying she had given the apartment to her neighbor of her own free will and asking to be left alone. Then he went to see Detective John Monette of the Ottawa Police Service to put the matter straight. At the end of a two-hour interview he admitted that he had killed her. He was charged with first-degree murder on June 3.
Leclair was sixty-four. Her apartment was bigger than his, with a better view and more room for his belongings, and when he asked her to let him have it she said no. On May 20 he invited her for a walk near Fairlea Park. In the woods he forced her at knifepoint, with a knife stolen from the diner where he worked, to a shallow grave he had already dug, stabbed her in the back and struck her on the head with a rock. He buried her, took her keys, went back to the building and began throwing her belongings into a dumpster. To anyone who asked, she had won the lottery, gone to Walt Disney World, and would be moving in with her son in Gatineau when she got back. From the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre he told the Ottawa Citizen, with no visible emotion, how he had planned it: "I just lost it. I burned a fuse, that's all."
Once detectives began on his past, they found two women who had once lived with him and had not been seen for years. Lise Roy was a divorcée with a young daughter when she married him on July 4, 1987, and they had a son. The marriage was said to be a happy one until April 1990, when she discovered that he had been molesting her daughter. They argued in the backyard of their house in Heron Gate, and he picked up a rock and hit her in the head. She was twenty-seven. He cut up her body, wrapped the pieces in butcher paper, carried some of them in garbage bags to Heatherington Park and buried the rest in the yard. The next day the neighbors noticed a new vegetable garden, planted with tomatoes, over the spot.
He then went to the police himself and said that Roy had assaulted him and left on a bus for Montreal. The police issued a warrant for her arrest. Over the years he mentioned now and then that he had seen her. Nobody reported her missing. He later served a prison term for sexually assaulting a child. When his neighbors from that street were finally asked, they remembered screaming from the house on the day she vanished, and one had watched him drag garbage bags toward the park and thought nothing of it, since he was known as odd. Another had found a large bone in the backyard while helping him with renovations.
Jean Rock met him in June 1992, when he was washing dishes at an Ottawa diner. Their common-law marriage was violent; he abused her physically and emotionally, and they separated several times. One day in the fall of 2003 he took her for a walk in the woods near the Walkley rail yard, beat her to death with a rock and buried her in a shallow grave. She was thirty-two. For the next six years her family received letters from her two or three times a year. He had paid a female acquaintance to write them. Jean had left him, they said, and was living with a truck driver named Pierre. Later letters announced sons and daughters and enclosed photographs of the children. Because of them, no one ever declared her missing.
Her body did not stay where he left it. In 2004 the land around the grave was being cleared for housing, and he dug her up and reburied her on the other side of the rail yard. In 2006, seeing that animals had been at the second grave, he gathered her remains into a produce bag, wheeled them in a shopping cart to the Bronson Bridge over the Rideau Canal, weighted the bag with stones and dropped it in. The remains were found in October 2006, when the canal was drained for the winter, and stayed unidentified until 2012.
Cléroux admitted killing both women but would not say where they were. On June 25, 2010, he was charged with two more counts of first-degree murder. On October 31, 2011, city workers found human remains in the backyard of his former home on Heatherington Road, which led police to the burial site in Heatherington Park, and in April 2012 officers recovered more remains in the woods between Fairlea Park and the Walkley yard.
His hearing opened on March 20, 2012, and he sat through the account of what he had done without expression. When the Crown described the letters, Jean Rock's father, John, collapsed and had to be helped from the courtroom, saying under his breath, "He's an animal" and "I'll kill him." On June 26 Cléroux pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for Paula Leclair and second-degree murder for Lise Roy and Jean Rock. He was sentenced to life with no chance of parole for twenty-five years, and the judge refused the defense request for credit for time already served. Justice Lynn Ratushny told him: "With a mind that has functioned in a way that yours has and does, there's no better place for you than in custody." She said the court could take comfort that he would likely be locked up for the rest of his life, for a plan to kill these cherished women "just to get them out of your way."
She was right. On January 17, 2021, Cléroux died of apparent natural causes at Pacific Institution in Abbotsford, British Columbia, where he was serving the sentence; Correctional Service Canada announced the death two days later. He was sixty-seven, which puts his birth in 1953 or early 1954; published accounts give both years.