On the morning of May 18, 1971, Elizabeth Anne Porteous, a thirty-three-year-old high school teacher in Calgary, did not arrive for work. The manager of her apartment building let himself in and found her on the bedroom floor. The apartment had been wrecked in a struggle, and she had been raped and strangled; her breasts bore bite marks. Under her body the police found a broken cufflink. Two of her colleagues told them they had seen her the night before at a stoplight, riding in a blue Mercedes-Benz with a bull-shaped advertising decal in the rear window, and a friend said she had lately been seeing a man called Bill, a flashy dresser with short, neat hair.
The next day patrolmen spotted the Mercedes parked near the scene, and half an hour later they arrested the man who came back to it. He was Wayne Clifford Boden, twenty-three, a former fashion model who had moved to Calgary from Montreal about a year before. He admitted that he had been dating Porteous and had been with her that night, and he admitted the cufflink was his. She had been fine when he left, he said. The Calgary police had a copy of a photograph from a Montreal murder file, and Boden looked like the man in it. They held him and turned to the marks on her body.
Boden was born in 1948 in Dundas, Ontario, and went to Glendale Secondary School in Hamilton in the early and middle 1960s, where he was remembered as quiet and muscular and played on the senior football team.
On October 3, 1969, Shirley Audette was found dead behind an apartment complex in downtown Montreal, sexually assaulted and strangled. She had no defensive wounds. A former boyfriend told police she had recently been involved with a man he described as domineering and possibly dangerous, though she had never named him. Her boyfriend had been at work that night, and a neighbor, Boden, was reported to have met her outside the building, where she liked to sit when she felt uneasy.
On November 23, Marielle Archambault, a clerk in a jewelry store, left work at closing time with a young man she introduced to her co-workers as Bill, and they noticed how happy she seemed. When she did not come in the next morning her employer went to her apartment and, with the landlady, found her body on the couch. She was fully clothed and the room was in order, but she had been sexually assaulted. Police found a crumpled photograph in the apartment that her co-workers took to be Bill, and a composite sketch drawn from it went out across the city without result. The photograph turned out to be of Archambault's late father.
On January 17, 1970, Brian Caulfield came to pick up his girlfriend, Jean Way, twenty-four, for a date at her apartment on Lincoln Street. She did not answer his knock, so he left and came back later to find the door unlocked and Way naked and dead on the bed. Boden had most likely been inside when Caulfield first knocked. At the autopsy Dr. Jean-Paul Valcourt found two small fibers under the fingernails of her left hand, which showed that she had fought him. The killings set off a brief panic in Montreal that faded when they stopped and Boden left for the West.
In Calgary the police asked a local orthodontist, Gordon Swann, to compare the marks on Porteous's breasts and neck with Boden's teeth. There was nothing in the Canadian literature on forensic odontology, so Swann wrote to the FBI. The reply came from J. Edgar Hoover himself, who pointed him to England and to a man who had handled twenty or thirty bite-mark cases. From a cast of Boden's teeth Swann demonstrated twenty-nine points of similarity with the bites on her body. On that evidence a Calgary jury convicted Boden of her murder and he was sentenced to life. It was the first murder conviction in North America based on forensic odontology.
He was then taken back to Montreal, where he confessed to the murders of Shirley Audette, Marielle Archambault and Jean Way and received three more life terms. He began serving them at Kingston Penitentiary on February 16, 1972. He had also been suspected in the death of Norma Vaillancourt, a twenty-one-year-old student killed on July 23, 1968, and denied it; in 1994 Raymond Sauve was convicted of killing her and sentenced to ten years.
In 1977, five years into his life sentences, Boden was issued an American Express card. He used it on a day pass from the prison at Laval, over lunch with his social worker at the Kon Tiki restaurant in the Mount Royal Hotel in downtown Montreal, then went to the washroom and climbed out the window. He was caught a few days later in a bar on Mackay Street. Three guards were disciplined, and American Express opened an internal inquiry into how a man serving life for murder had been given a card.
He died of skin cancer at Kingston General Hospital on March 27, 2006, after six weeks there.