John Martin Crawford was born in Ontario in 1962 and grew up in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In 1981 he was convicted of the manslaughter of Mary Jane Serloin, a thirty-five-year-old Blood woman in Lethbridge, and served four years of a ten-year sentence.
Between 1992 and 1994 he killed Shelley Napope, sixteen, Eva Taysup, thirty-one, and Calinda Waterhen, twenty-two, in and around Saskatoon. All three were Cree women, and all three were poor. Their remains were found in bush outside the city in 1994 after an associate of Crawford's, Bill Corrigan, went to the police. Canadian reporting called him the Lady Killer.
He was convicted of the three murders in 1996 and given life with no parole for twenty-five years, on top of the earlier manslaughter conviction.
The case is remembered as much for its absence from the record as for itself. It was tried in the same period in which Paul Bernardo's trial dominated the Canadian media, and Crawford's received almost none. Warren Goulding, a Saskatoon journalist, wrote a book about it, Just Another Indian, whose argument was that four Indigenous women had been murdered by a repeat killer and the country had not looked up. It is now a standard reference in the Canadian inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.