Clifford Robert Olson junior was born in Vancouver on January 1, 1940. He had ninety-four convictions and had spent most of his adult life in prison for fraud, theft and sexual offences, and had been released on parole and mandatory supervision repeatedly.
Between November 1980 and July 1981 he killed eleven young people aged nine to eighteen in the Fraser Valley and around Vancouver. He offered them work, or lifts, or drink, and killed them with a hammer or by strangulation. Canadian reporting called him the Beast of British Columbia.
The eleven were Christine Weller, twelve; Colleen Daignault, thirteen; Daryn Johnsrude, sixteen; Sandra Lynn Wolfsteiner, sixteen; Ada Anita Court, thirteen; Simon Patrick James Partington, nine; Judy Kozma, fourteen; Raymond Lawrence King Jr, fifteen; Sigrun Charlotte Elisabeth Arnd, eighteen; Terri Lyn Carson, fifteen; and Louise Chartrand, seventeen.
He was arrested in August 1981. The bodies of most of them had not been found, and the police case was thin on several counts.
The RCMP agreed a deal with his wife: one hundred thousand dollars into a trust for her and their infant son, ten thousand for each body he took them to. He took them to ten, and was paid.
When it became public in January 1982 there was a national outcry that has never entirely subsided, and the affair reached the House of Commons. The government's defence was that the families would otherwise never have recovered their children.
He pleaded guilty in January 1982 to eleven counts of first degree murder and received eleven concurrent life sentences.
He spent thirty years writing to the victims' families and to the press, and was the first prisoner to be denied release under the faint hope clause. He died of cancer at the Archambault Institution in Quebec on September 30, 2011.
The payment is what the case is remembered for, and the argument about it has always been conducted as though the choice were between paying him and leaving ten families with nothing. It was made necessary by a different fact: a man with ninety-four convictions, most of his adult life spent inside, released again and again, was at liberty for eight months while eleven children disappeared from the same valley.