In October 1994 a farmer came upon the remains of three young women in heavy brush outside Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. They were Eva Taysup, thirty, Shelley Napope, sixteen, and Calinda Waterhen, twenty-two, Indigenous women who had died in 1992. The man convicted of killing them, John Martin Crawford, had killed before.
In 1981, in Lethbridge, Alberta, Crawford killed Mary Jane Serloin, a thirty-five-year-old Blood woman, and was sentenced to ten years for manslaughter. He served about seven and was released in 1989. Later, while he was under police surveillance, he sexually assaulted a woman named Theresa Kematch; it was she who was arrested, not Crawford.
He was born in Steinbach, Manitoba, to a single mother, on March 29, 1962, by one account, or in 1961 by another. His mother remarried in 1964 and the family moved to Vancouver, where his sister was born. He ran away from home from the age of three, a kindergarten teacher called him stupid, and he failed the first grade. Both his parents were addicted to gambling and his stepfather was an alcoholic. He began sniffing glue at twelve and moved on as a teenager to marijuana, LSD, hallucinogenic mushrooms and prescription drugs.
In 1996 he was convicted of first-degree murder in one of the Saskatoon deaths and of second-degree murder in the other two, and sentenced to three concurrent life terms with no parole eligibility for twenty-five years. The sentencing judge likened him to a wild animal preying on vulnerable women. Terry Hinz, who prosecuted him, said years later that of everything he did in twenty-five years as a Crown prosecutor, taking Crawford off the street was what he was proudest of.
The trial drew little attention outside Saskatchewan. Warren Goulding, a Saskatoon journalist, wrote a book about the case, Just Another Indian: A Serial Killer and Canada's Indifference, arguing that the case was played down because the victims were Aboriginal women and that crimes against marginalized people go unheeded. Crawford, Goulding said, "should have been a known commodity, should have been on the radar." The three Saskatoon victims, under pseudonyms, were the subject of an episode of the television series Exhibit A.
Crawford died in custody on December 16, 2020, at the Regional Psychiatric Centre in Saskatoon, where he was serving his sentence. Correctional Service Canada notified his next of kin and said the death would be reviewed, as every death in custody is. The cause was not made public. He was never released.