Jordan was born in Vancouver on December 12, 1931, and had a criminal record from the early 1950s: indecent assault, abduction, rape, and the abduction of a child from a hospital. He ran a barber shop on Granville Street and drank in the hotel bars of the Downtown Eastside. The Vancouver press called him the Boozing Barber.
Between 1965 and 1988 ten women he had been drinking with were found dead of acute alcohol poisoning, in his shop, in his flat, in hotel rooms he had rented. The first was Ivy Rose Oswald in 1965. Nine of the ten were Indigenous women. The pattern was always the same: he bought them large quantities of hard liquor and pressed them to keep drinking, and their blood alcohol readings at death were extraordinary, in several cases above 0.4.
He was charged only once. In November 1987 Vanessa Lee Buckner, twenty-seven, was found dead in a Vancouver hotel room, and after a further death in 1988 police put him under surveillance. Officers listening at the door of a hotel room recorded him urging a woman to drink, in the words used at trial, until she was helpless. He was convicted of manslaughter in 1988 and sentenced to fifteen years, reduced to nine on appeal. He served six and was released in 1994. He was convicted of further offences afterwards and died on July 7, 2006.
The case is remembered in British Columbia as a failure of the police and the coroner's service rather than as a mystery. Nine deaths of Indigenous women, all with the same cause and the same man present, were recorded over more than two decades without a charge. It is cited in submissions to the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women, and it is the reason the count of ten stands in the record while the convictions stand at one.