Gilbert Paul Jordan was a barber in Vancouver who was convicted in 1988 of manslaughter in the death of Vanessa Buckner, a 27-year-old woman who died of alcohol poisoning after drinking with him. It is the only death for which he was ever convicted. Evidence in that case linked the alcohol-poisoning deaths of at least six other women to drinking sessions with him, according to CBC News, and the press came to call him the "Boozing Barber." Most of the women whose deaths were linked to him were Indigenous. He was never charged with any of those deaths.
He was sentenced to 15 years. The British Columbia Court of Appeal reduced the term to nine years, and he served six. In the years after his release he was jailed again and again for breaching probation by drinking with women, and he faced new charges in Victoria. He died in 2006. In 2017 the family of one of the women whose deaths were linked to him, Mary Johns, was the first family to testify at the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
The legal record in this case is narrow. A court found Jordan guilty of one offense, manslaughter, for one death. The other deaths that have been connected with him were never the subject of charges.
The accounts that link him to those deaths do not agree on a number. CBC News reported that evidence in the 1988 case linked at least six other women's deaths from alcohol poisoning to drinking sessions with him. The Globe and Mail and CBC both reported that Buckner was one of at least seven women who died of alcohol poisoning after drinking with him over about 20 years. A separate Globe and Mail report described him as linked to the alcohol-poisoning deaths of "as many as 10" women in Vancouver in the 1980s. An APTN news report that was put before the national inquiry in 2017 linked him to eight women who died in similar circumstances, seven of them Indigenous, according to the Whitehorse Daily Star.
Those deaths are linked to him by the evidence, the reports or the families. None of them is a conviction.
By the time of his later court appearances he was described as a retiree and a former barber who had been an alcoholic since he was 16. He told the Vancouver Sun, as The Globe and Mail reported, that he drank two 26-ounce bottles of vodka a day, and CBC reported that he called himself a "chronic alcoholic." A review of a 2000 stage play based on the deaths, written for the Indigenous newspaper Raven's Eye, observed that news coverage of the case had concentrated on Jordan and his lifelong criminal career.
He worked as a barber in Vancouver, and in later years the press described him as retired.
Vanessa Buckner was 27 and lived in Vancouver. She died of alcohol poisoning in Vancouver after drinking with Jordan, according to CBC News and The Globe and Mail. Her blood alcohol level was reported as more than 11 times the legal driving limit. The Canadian Press, reporting on the 2017 inquiry hearings, described her as a non-Indigenous woman.
Jordan was convicted of manslaughter in her death in 1988. The court found that he had supplied her with the liquor. At the trial, as The Globe and Mail later summarized it, he was described as an antisocial man who preyed on vulnerable women, often Indigenous, for sex, gave them lethal amounts of alcohol, and sometimes offered to pay them to drink with him. The judge called him "a predator who used alcohol as his deadly instrument of choice," CBC News reported. The case drew wide attention, CBC said, because the evidence linked the deaths of at least six other women to drinking sessions with him.
Jordan was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The B.C. Court of Appeal reduced the sentence to nine years, according to The Globe and Mail. He served six years, a figure given by The Globe and Mail, by the Raven's Eye review, and by the literary scholar Karen Bamford in a 2010 article in the journal Theatre Research in Canada.
Accounts differ on the year he was released. The Globe and Mail gave it as 1994. CBC News, in a report on new charges against him and in a 2017 report on the national inquiry, gave it as 1997.
Most of the women whose deaths were connected with Jordan were Indigenous women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, according to the trial evidence as reported by The Globe and Mail, the APTN report described at the inquiry, and Bamford's 2010 article. Bamford described most of them as middle-aged Native women who lived in or frequented that part of the city.
The deaths were recorded as alcohol poisoning. According to Bamford, drawing on the playwright Marie Clements's note to her play, several coroner's reports described the deaths as "unnatural and accidental", the phrase that became the play's title.
Two of the women are known by name. One is Mary Johns. The other is Ivy Rose Oswald, an English-born switchboard operator who died in 1965. Bamford, citing a 2007 Globe and Mail obituary of Jordan by the journalist Tom Hawthorn, identifies her as the first known death linked to him. No charge was ever laid in her death.
Writers who studied the case later took a stronger line than the courts did. Bamford referred to Jordan as the murderer and wrote that he induced the women to drink fatal amounts of alcohol, while noting that he was never convicted of murder. The sociologist Sharon Sullivan, writing in the journal Atlantis in 2013, described him as a man who killed at least ten Indigenous women in Vancouver. Those are the authors' own conclusions. The courts found him guilty of manslaughter in one death.
Mary Johns was a Northern Tutchone woman from Yukon. CBC News reported that she was 29 when she was found dead in Vancouver in 1982. Her sister-in-law remembered her as lively, funny and a loving mother who loved the outdoors. She was married to the sister-in-law's eldest brother. As a girl she had attended Yukon Hall, a residential school, and she never spoke about it to her family or friends.
After her second child died of sudden infant death, she left Yukon for Vancouver in her grief. She came home briefly in 1980 with a new baby, looking worn and older than her years, and that was the last time her family heard from her, according to CBC News. Her sister-in-law and a brother searched the streets of Metro Vancouver for her for years. The Whitehorse Daily Star reported that her sister-in-law went through the run-down hotels and rooming houses of the Downtown Eastside looking for her.
She had died of alcohol poisoning in July 1982, the Canadian Press reported. Her sister-in-law found out in 1988, from a newspaper article, and used family photographs to help police confirm that the woman in the article was Mary. The brother who had searched with her sister-in-law, by then terminally ill with cancer, died about a year after the family learned what had happened.
Her eldest son was four when she left, and he was raised by his grandmother. CBC reported that after his grandmother died he struggled, went looking for answers about his mother's death, and ended up in the Downtown Eastside himself. He died in 1994, aged 22. A younger son has never been found by the family, which believes he may have been placed in the child welfare system.
Mary had been with Jordan, the Canadian Press reported. Her family says he was responsible for her death and never answered for it. He was never charged in connection with it.
After his release Jordan remained under court supervision. Bamford, citing reporting in the Times Colonist and the Vancouver Sun, wrote that he was released from prison in February 2000 and began a three-year probation term in Victoria, and that he was then charged with sexual assault, assault and negligence causing bodily harm. Those charges were dropped that October, she wrote, because the Crown could not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
CBC News and The Globe and Mail reported on his court appearances in Victoria when he was 68. CBC reported that he had been charged in June of that year with two counts of assault, one count of sexual assault and one count of administering a noxious substance, alcohol, to a woman in Victoria. He was released on bail on condition that he stay out of liquor stores and not drink. Earlier in the month of the report, he bought a bottle of wine, and Provincial Court Judge Michael Hubbard ordered him held, finding that drinking had played a central part in his criminal history.
The Globe and Mail described a later stage. Jordan, who had moved from Abbotsford to Victoria in February, was back in custody a month after his release from jail, charged with breaching a court order by drinking in a Victoria bar and by drinking with a woman in Port Renfrew, on Vancouver Island, about 100 kilometres northwest of the capital. Each charge carried a maximum of two years in jail. The court order barred him from drinking with women and from bars in downtown Victoria. Prosecutor Tim Stokes told reporters the Crown would seek to keep him in custody on public safety grounds. "He's obviously a concern," Stokes said, adding that Jordan was not following court orders. Jordan appeared before Judge Alan Filmer and thanked him politely when the bail hearing was put off until later in the week.
The same report said that the charges over the June incident, in which he was accused of sexually assaulting a woman he had been drinking with, had been dropped for lack of evidence, and that Jordan had instead agreed to a year of court-ordered conditions under a section of the Criminal Code that allows a court to impose conditions on a person who has not been convicted of a new offense.
In an interview with the Vancouver Sun published the month before, as The Globe and Mail reported, Jordan described the women who had died in Vancouver as down-and-out drinkers who were "on their last legs" and said he did not care whom he drank with.
According to CBC News, he was jailed more than a dozen times after his manslaughter conviction for breaching probation by drinking with women.
At 72, Jordan was again under supervision on Vancouver Island. Earlier that year he had been sent back to prison for six months for violating probation, The Globe and Mail reported. He was released from a Vancouver Island jail on a Friday, and he allegedly failed to report to his probation officer that weekend. A condition of his release was that he stay on the island. He disappeared, and a Canada-wide warrant was issued.
Victoria police told Winnipeg police that he was believed to have arrived in that city on a Tuesday night. Because he had no known family in Winnipeg, officers checked the downtown hotels. Within about three hours he was in custody at a downtown hotel, arrested without incident. Sergeant Devon Clunis of the Winnipeg police called it "really good police work." The Globe and Mail described Jordan at the time as a high-risk sex offender wanted by Victoria police.
Jordan died in 2006, according to CBC News and the Canadian Press.
In May 2017, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls opened its first public hearings in Whitehorse. The first family to testify was Mary Johns's. Her sister-in-law and her niece spoke, and the sister-in-law presented three photographs of Mary.
They described the injustice the family still felt 35 years after her death. Her niece told the inquiry that Jordan never answered for Mary's death. Her sister-in-law said the inquiry was bringing such stories into the open after years of waiting, and she remembered Mary as "a young mother, full of life and full of promise," the Whitehorse Daily Star reported. The APTN report submitted to the inquiry, linking Jordan to eight women's deaths, was played at the hearing, the Canadian Press said.
The niece said she wanted the commissioners to understand how the trauma of residential schools and violence against Indigenous women had passed down through her family's generations. The family also asked the Yukon government for help in finding Mary's youngest son.
The deaths inspired a play, The Unnatural and Accidental Women, by the playwright Marie Clements. Its Vancouver production at the Firehall Arts Centre ran in November 2000, and the Raven's Eye review noted that Jordan was free at the time after serving six years for manslaughter. Bamford wrote that he was living on probation when the play premiered.
The play does not use the real women's names. Sullivan's 2013 article describes ten women characters and a coroner-style slide that quotes an inquiry finding of "unnatural and accidental." Bamford noted that Clements chose not to stage the women's deaths, and that the only death shown is that of the character based on Jordan, as the women return to confront him. The Raven's Eye review observed that news coverage usually described the victims only as "Native, alcoholics and lived on skid row," and Sullivan wrote that the play gives the women a presence denied to them in news and coroners' reports.
The Globe and Mail reported that the case also inspired an episode of the Canadian television crime drama Da Vinci's Inquest.
How many deaths. The number of deaths linked to Jordan differs by source: at least six others beyond Buckner (CBC), at least seven in all (Globe and Mail; CBC), eight (the APTN report, as described by the Whitehorse Daily Star), and up to ten (Globe and Mail; Raven's Eye; Sullivan). None of these deaths other than Buckner's led to a charge.
Coroner's findings. Bamford, relying on the playwright, wrote that several coroner's reports called the deaths "unnatural and accidental."
Release year. The Globe and Mail gave 1994; CBC News gave 1997; Bamford wrote that he was released in February 2000 and began probation in Victoria. The difference has never been explained.
Mary Johns's name. CBC News calls her Mary Johns; the Whitehorse Daily Star calls her Mary Smith Johns; the Canadian Press calls her Mary Smith John.
The Victoria charges. The sexual assault and related charges reported by Bamford, and those laid over a June incident in Victoria reported by CBC News and The Globe and Mail, were dropped for lack of evidence. They were never proven. It is not clear whether Bamford and the two newspapers describe the same case.
1965: Ivy Rose Oswald, a switchboard operator, dies; Bamford (2010), citing a 2007 obituary, identifies her as the first known death linked to Jordan. No charge.
1980: Mary Johns visits her family in Yukon for the last time.
July 1982: Mary Johns dies of alcohol poisoning in Vancouver.
1988: Jordan is convicted of manslaughter in the death of Vanessa Buckner, 27, and sentenced to 15 years; Mary Johns's family learns of her death from a newspaper article.
After 1988: the B.C. Court of Appeal reduces the sentence to nine years; he serves six.
1994 or 1997: released from prison (accounts differ).
February 2000: released and begins probation in Victoria, according to Bamford.
February 2000 to October 2000: according to Bamford, charged in Victoria with sexual assault, assault and negligence causing bodily harm; charges dropped that October.
Age 68: held in Victoria after buying wine in breach of bail on charges over a June incident (later dropped for lack of evidence); held again over alleged breaches of a court order in Victoria and Port Renfrew.
November 2000: The Unnatural and Accidental Women is staged at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver.
Age 72: arrested at a Winnipeg hotel on a Canada-wide warrant after leaving Vancouver Island.
2006: Jordan dies.
May 2017: Mary Johns's family is the first to testify at the national inquiry in Whitehorse.