Between October 12 and November 26, 1987, Vancouver police officers followed a fifty-five-year-old former barber named Gilbert Paul Jordan through the skid row hotels of the Downtown Eastside and listened outside the doors of the rooms he took. Four times they broke in and rescued the woman inside: Rosemary Wilson at the Balmoral Hotel, her blood alcohol at 0.52; Verna Chartrand at the Pacific, at 0.43; Sheila Joe at the Rainbow; Mabel Olson at the Pacific. Through the doors they heard him pressing: "Have a drink, down the hatch baby, 20 bucks if you drink it right down; see if you're a real woman; finish that drink." The surveillance had begun the day Vanessa Lee Buckner was found naked on the floor of the Niagara Hotel after a night of drinking with him, his fingerprints in the room.
Jordan, born Gilbert Paul Elsie on December 12, 1931, had a criminal record running from 1952: rape, indecent assault, abduction, hit and run, drunk driving, car theft. A psychiatrist who examined him for a court in 1976, Dr. Tibor Bezeredi, diagnosed an antisocial personality. He himself drank more than fifty ounces of vodka a day. He found women in bars, bought them drinks or paid them for sex and urged them to drink with him, and when they passed out he poured liquor down their throats. The deaths went down as alcohol poisoning, and because some of the women were alcoholics the police paid little attention. The press often called them prostitutes, though not all were.
The first known death came in 1965: Ivy Rose, a switchboard operator, found naked and dead in a Vancouver hotel with a blood alcohol level of 0.51. No charge was laid. At his trial the Crown put before the court six more First Nations women who had died in his company: Mary Johnson at the Aylmer Hotel in 1980, at 0.34; Barbara Paul at the Glenaird Hotel in 1981, at 0.41; Mary Johns in his barbershop at 2503 Kingsway in 1982, at 0.76; Patricia Thomas there in 1984, at 0.51; Patricia Andrew there in 1985, at 0.79; and Vera Harry at the Clifton Hotel in 1986. The court heard that from 1980 to 1988 he sought out about two hundred women a year for binge drinking. A month after Buckner's death another woman, Edna Shade, was found dead in another hotel.
He was tried before a judge alone in 1988, and Justice Bouck found him guilty of manslaughter in the death of Vanessa Buckner, the only death he was ever convicted of. He was sentenced to fifteen years, reduced to nine on appeal, and served six. On probation afterward, confined to Vancouver Island, he was charged in June 2000 with sexual assault, assault and administering a noxious substance, alcohol, and that year tried to change his name to Paul Pearce until the loophole that allowed it was closed. In 2002 he was jailed for fifteen months for breaching probation by drinking in the company of a woman. On August 11, 2004, he was arrested in Winnipeg over a binge with Barb Burkley at the York Hotel in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and was acquitted in 2005. In February 2005 the Saanich police warned the public that he was living in the Victoria area. He died on July 7, 2006.