Three days after Clifford Olson pleaded guilty to eleven murders, the country learned what his confession had cost. On January 14, 1982, the press reported that $100,000 had been placed in trust for his wife, Joan, and their infant son in return for his help finding the bodies of the children he had killed. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia's account of the case, the British Columbia attorney general had agreed to Olson's own proposal: the money would pay for his help locating six bodies that had never been found and for information on four that already had. Olson liked to say the eleventh had been a freebie. The victims' families learned of the payment from the news, and many of them never stopped regarding it as a killer paid for his work.
The deal made sense only against the state of the investigation in August 1981. Olson had been arrested on August 12 for trying to pick up two hitchhikers, and six days later he was charged with the murder of fourteen-year-old Judy Kozma. For most of the other children the police had either no body or no evidence tying him to one. The arrangement bought what the case lacked: remains for families who were still searching, and proof for a prosecution that might otherwise have rested on a single count.
Olson had been in and out of custody since 1957, when he served nine months for burglary. Born in Vancouver on January 1, 1940, he escaped and was recaptured at least six times over the next two decades, seven by some counts, and by one count he was arrested ninety-four times between 1957 and 1981 on charges that ran from fraud and burglary to armed robbery and sexual assault. He spent most of his adult life in prison. On September 7, 1980, he was released for the last time, on mandatory supervision.
Ten weeks later, on November 17, twelve-year-old Christine Weller disappeared from Surrey. Police did not treat her absence as suspicious. Her body was found on Christmas Day with stab wounds and signs of strangulation. It was five months before the next child vanished, and when the killings resumed they came quickly.
Colleen Daignault, thirteen, of Surrey, was taken on April 16, 1981, and her body was not found for five months. Six days later Daryn Johnsrude disappeared from a mall. He had been living in the Vancouver area for two days; his age is given as fifteen in a Canadian Press timeline and sixteen by CBC. He was found beaten to death less than two weeks later. On May 15 Olson married Joan Hale, the mother of his son. Four days after the wedding he picked up sixteen-year-old Sandra Wolfsteiner as she tried to hitch a ride home from her boyfriend's house, and killed her in the woods nearby. Ada Court, thirteen, disappeared on June 21 on her way to see a friend.
Only on July 2, when nine-year-old Simon Partington vanished while riding his bicycle to a friend's house in Surrey, did the police concede that a child had been the victim of foul play. They had classified the earlier disappearances as runaways. Five days later Olson was charged with the sexual assault of a teenage girl, and no one connected him to the missing children.
Nothing in that charge slowed him. On July 9 he gave Judy Kozma liquor and drugs and killed her, then left the next day on a family vacation of nearly two weeks. Her body was found on July 25. By then he was back. On July 23 he lured Raymond King, fifteen, from a youth employment center with the promise of a job, beat him and left his body at a remote campground. On July 25 he killed Sigrun Arnd, a German student visiting Canada, whose age appears as fourteen in the Canadian Press timeline and eighteen in other accounts. On July 27 he strangled Terri Lyn Carson, fifteen, and left her in the woods along the Fraser River. On July 30 he picked up Louise Chartrand, seventeen, drove her toward the Whistler ski resort, killed her and buried her in a shallow grave.
Eleven children in eight and a half months, three boys and eight girls between nine and eighteen, from towns and suburbs within a short drive of Vancouver. Several of them were hitchhiking or looking for work, and Olson offered what they needed: a ride, a job, a drink. The record on their lives is thinner than it should be. What survives is mostly where each was going when a stranger stopped for them.
His trial opened in New Westminster on January 11, 1982, on a not-guilty plea. Within three days he had changed it and pleaded guilty to eleven counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to eleven concurrent terms of life imprisonment with no chance of parole for twenty-five years, the maximum the law allowed. With no trial, the deal reached the public through reporters rather than through testimony.
The argument that followed was about more than one man. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes a national dispute over whether a criminal could profit from his crimes and whether the police should pay for information at all, which widened into questions about every kind of bargain the state strikes with offenders. The families of seven of the victims went to the Supreme Court of British Columbia in October 1984, asking it to declare the trust fraudulent and hand the remaining money to them as compensation.
Prison gave Olson an audience, and he used it. He wrote letters, courted publicity, and made each of his legal rights an occasion for the families to relive the killings. Gary Rosenfeldt, Daryn Johnsrude's stepfather, who died in 2009, described prison as no barrier at all to Olson's power to terrorize the families.
In August 1997 Olson applied for early parole under the so-called faint hope clause, which let prisoners serving life seek a reduction after fifteen years. The application was dismissed within minutes. He went before the National Parole Board on July 18, 2006, after twenty-five years inside, and was refused in half an hour. He applied again in November 2010 and was denied.
His last public controversy was a pension check. In March 2010 it emerged that since turning sixty-five he had been collecting more than $1,100 a month in Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement payments. On June 1, 2010, the federal government introduced legislation to suspend those benefits for prisoners until their release.
On September 20, 2011, Don Head, the commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada, called Sharon Rosenfeldt to tell her that Olson had cancer that had spread and was expected to die within days; she was told he had been moved from a maximum-security prison in Quebec to a hospital in Laval. Raymond King, whose fifteen-year-old son had been killed on July 23, 1981, heard the same day. "It will give us a chance to heal," he said, "which we haven't in the past 30 years." Olson died of cancer on September 30, 2011, at seventy-one, in the health care center attached to the Archambault complex at Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec, where he had been held. The prison service said he would be buried at an undisclosed location. "He's never going to open those wounds again," King said. "It's done."