Theresa Allore

Theresa Allore
200px Theresa Allore in 1978
Nationality	Canadian
Known for	Unsolved murder for
Height	5 ft 6 in (1.68 m)
Weight	115 lb (52 kg)

Theresa Allore was a 19-year-old Canadian college student who disappeared on Friday, November 3, 1978 from Champlain College Lennoxville in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Five months later on April 13, 1979 her body was discovered in a small body of water approximately one kilometer from her dormitory residence in Compton, Quebec. Upon her disappearance police initially suggested she was a runaway. When her body was discovered police then suggested she was a possible victim of a drug overdose, perhaps at the assistance of fellow college students. In the summer of 2002, the family of Theresa Allore enlisted the support of an investigative reporter and friend, Patricia Pearson who produced a series of articles for Canada's National Post newspaper that gave compelling evidence that Theresa Allore was a victim of murder, and that her death was possibly linked to two other unsolved local cases; the death of 10-year-old Manon Dube in March 1978, and the murder of Louise Camirand in 1977. The theory was supported by geographic profiler and then FBI consultant, Kim Rossmo, who suggested a serial sexual predator may have been operating in the Quebec region in the late 1970s and advised police to investigate the three deaths as a series. Rossmo gained notoriety in 1998 when he suggested the creation of a serial killer task force to Vancouver police in the cases of missing women from the Vancouver's downtown Eastside. Robert Pickton was eventually arrested and found guilty of six murders, though he was accused with, and implicated in an additional 26 murders of Vancouver missing women.

The deaths of Theresa Allore, Manon Dube, and Louise Camirand remain unsolved cold-cases.

Before the disappearance

Theresa Allore was a young, nineteen-year-old college student in just her eighth week at Champlain Regional College. On the morning of Friday, November 3, 1978, she was preparing for the last day of the school week. On that day she was wearing a white t-shirt, blue corduroy pants that she has borrowed from a friend, a beige knee-length sweater, Chinese slippers without socks, and a long, dark green scarf. She left her room in the Gillard House dormitory that morning and crosses the parking lot to the main residence building, King’s Hall to have breakfast. Theresa ate breakfast with her friends Jo-Anne Laurie and Caroline Greenwood.

King’s Hall was a residence used to house some of the students of Champlain Regional College. It is located in the country village of Compton, situated 10 miles from Champlain College’s main academic campus in the town of Lennoxville, Québec. At the beginning of the 1978-79 school year, King’s Hall housed two hundred and forty Champlain students. Approximately one hundred students lived in the main building, the ‘King’s Hall’ building, while the remaining one hundred and forty students were housed in an adjacent, prefab annex building, Gillard House.

At 8:00 am Theresa and her friends took a shuttle bus to the main campus in Lennoxville. The buses ran every hour, between the hours of eight in the morning and six in the evening. Occasionally, if there was a special event on campus, a late bus would run to bring students back to the residence. It is a twenty-minute ride across the isolated Eastern Townships countryside.

Theresa arrived at approximately 8:20 am, with just 10 minutes to deposit some belongings in her locker located in the Nichols Building on campus before attending her first class. Theresa had two classes that morning, Physics and Chemistry. Theresa had lunch in the Dewhurst dining hall where she talked briefly with her brother who was also attending Champlain college. They talk briefly about a pair of blue corduroy pants she is wearing, which she borrowed from a friend.

Theresa also speaks with Caroline Greenwood. Earlier in the week, Greenwood had invited Theresa to spend the weekend at her parents’ place in Hemmingford, a small community south of Montréal. Theresa informed Greenwood that she has too much homework and would not be able to get away for the weekend. According to Greenwood, she never saw Theresa again after lunch.

Theresa is not seen that afternoon. Presumably she spent the remainder of the day attending classes, although no one witnesses this. That evening, two students, Suzanne DeRome and Josie Stepenhorst are having dinner in Dewhurst. DeRome and Stepenhorst are roommates in Gillard House, Compton. They share a room that is three doors down from Theresa’s. At approximately 6:00 pm, Theresa comes over to their table. She asks if they are going home for the weekend. DeRome and Stepenhorst reply that they are not. The girls decide to get together that evening to listen to records. Theresa agrees to stop by their room around 9:00 pm. Theresa leaves. She gives no indication where she may be going, or what she may be doing between 6:00 and 9:00 pm.

At 6:15 pm, Josie Stepenhorst is on board the bus that will take her back to her residence in Compton. By now it has grown dark. The bus doors close and the vehicle pulls out from the curb. Stepenhorst glances out the window and sees Theresa leaving Dewhurst dining hall. She is walking toward the bus. She has apparently missed the last regularly scheduled bus for that evening. It will be a five-hour wait until a special bus is sent out to retrieve students from the campus pub. Apart from this late-night bus, there is no way for students to get back to their residence. Some students wait, others make the decision to hitchhike.

After 6:15 pm, November 3, 1978, it is difficult to determine what happened next. Theresa may have returned to her locker, retrieved some books and proceeded to the library to work on her homework. This was often her habit. She may have left Dewhurst dining hall and made the half-mile walk up the street to the Lion Pub. Possibly she had some drinks, waiting for the late bus. Or maybe she met someone in the pub. Or perhaps she got tired of waiting, and decided to hitchhike.

Friday evening, November 3 was a quiet night at the King’s Hall residence. Many students went home to their parents’ for the weekend. There were usually parties on Fridays, but there is a big college football game in the morning, and most of the student athletes went to bed early. A Student, Greg Deacon, who is in the same chemistry class as Theresa, drops by her room to see if she has completed her homework. He knocks on her door, but there is no answer. At 9:00 pm, Suzanne DeRome and Josie Stepenhorst are back in their room listening to records. Theresa never shows up to listen to records.

Shortly after 9:00 pm, student Sharon Buzzee is walking through the entranceway of King’s Hall. Buzzee glances over at the main staircase and is surprised to see Theresa standing there as if she’d come in from outside. Buzzee stops to talk with her. She asks why Theresa did not leave to spend the weekend with Caroline Greenwood as she had planned. Theresa replies that she decided not to go as she had too much homework to do. Buzzee asks Theresa what her plans are for that night. She replies that she intends to do her homework. As Buzzee leaves, Theresa appears to be heading up the stairs of King’s Hall toward the second or third floor.

Sharon Buzzee is the only person to report having seen Theresa on the King’s Hall staircase. Around nine-thirty, another student, Tamara Westall says she saw Theresa in the King’s Hall dining room. She is there, according to Westall, grabbing a late night snack prepared for students. No one else witnesses this encounter either. This is the last time anyone claimed to have seen Theresa Allore alive.

Aftermath of the disappearance

It took Champlain college close to a week before they noticed that Theresa Allore had disappeared. On Friday, November 10, Theresa’s brother called home to inform their parents that Theresa was missing.The police were reluctant to expend much effort looking for what they thought was a teenage runaway. Lennoxville Police Chief Leo Hamel did show a picture of Theresa to U.S. immigration officers in Vermont. He also checked with her old roommates in Montréal and took statements from students in Compton. But he did not search the college grounds. Corporal Roch Gaudreault of the Sûreté told Mr. Allore that there was little they could do, and that Theresa’s body would probably turn up when the snow melted.

The Allores hired a private investigator, Robert Beullac of the Bureau D’Investigation Metropol. Beullac arrived at Champlain in late November 1978 and immediately searched for physical evidence at Gillard and King’s Hall. He noted that Theresa’s purse was still in her room, as were her hiking boots, which she invariably took with her when she left the village overnight. Buellac was the one who discovered the fact that Sharon Buzzee had seen Theresa at King’s Hall the night of November 3, thus unraveling the runaway theory. Police and the school suggested Buzzee’s statement wasn’t credible, and continued to speculated in the local press that Theresa may have headed to Vermont. In December, one month after she disappeared, Police Chief Leo Hamel began to speculate in the newspapers that she had been involved in drugs.

By January 1979 officials at Champlain college appeared to be having a hard time coping with the disappearance. Stewart Peacock, the director of residence where Theresa lived, quietly resigned, citing personal reasons. Peacock promptly disappeared. He has never been interviewed by police in this matter. At the same time, the King’s Hall residence was shut down and all the students were moved over to the Gilliard House dorm.

Discovery of the body

Theresa Allore’s body was found at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, April 13, 1979 by a muskrat trapper named Robert Ride. Ride parked his pickup truck along a steep embankment just outside the village of Compton. He was setting wire traps in the mud along the edge of a pond when he saw something tangled in the underbrush that he later described as looking like a mannequin. As he got closer, he realized it was the body of a woman, face down in the water at the pond’s edge. The skin was gray, the hair matted. She was naked except for a bra and underpants.

Surete du Quebec investigators Roch Gaudreault and Jacques Lessard arrived at the scene just after 11:00 a.m. The coroner, Michel Durand, and a mobile crime unit were there soon after. By noon the area was crowded with investigators and news photographers. Detectives broke into teams and began to search the area. In a green garbage bag, by the ditch at the entrance to a farmhouse, they discovered some women’s clothing, including a pink sweater. In the cornfield they found two pieces of the green scarf.

Corporal Gaudreault examined the body. The corpse was lying face down in 8 to 10 inches of water. There was a watch on the left wrist, a ring on the left forefinger, and earrings on both ears. Gaudreault observed what appeared to be strangulation marks around the neck. This observation is documented in the coroner’s report, but was later omitted from the police case file.

On Saturday, April 14, 1979, Theresa’s body was taken to the chief coroner’s office, the Laboratoire de médicine légale in Montreal. Theresa’s former roommate from Pointe-Claire, Joey Nice, was brought to the lab to see if she could make a positive identification of the body. She was unable to determine whether or not the body was Theresa. Later, Corporal Gaudreault showed Nice the green garbage bag of clothing that was found at the crime scene. Nice stated that the women’s clothing did not belong to Theresa. Later that morning Theresa’s father would identify the body.

Corporal Gaudreault, Coroner Durand, and Mr. Allore met to discuss the case. Gaudreault assured the family that, despite the decomposition, the autopsy would determine what happened to Theresa. But Gaudreault was already favoring a theory of possible suicide, perhaps a drowning or possible drug overdose. Durand mentioned the bruise marks found under Theresa’s armpits. What had caused those? While Gaudreault gave no explanation, he doubted that Theresa was the victim of a sexual predator. Neither Gaudreault nor Durand mentioned to Mr. Allore the strangulation marks observed on the neck of Theresa Allore. The first that Mr. Allore heard of those marks was when a reporter for the Montreal Gazette found the document in a public records search in 2002.

The missing clothing

At approximately 6 a.m., Sunday, November 5, 1978, two hunters, Steve Mandigo and Samuel Burnham found women’s clothing resting neatly on a tree log in a forest near Austin, Quebec. They later describe the clothing to police as being a woman’s shirt and a pair of blue pants. Lennoxville Police Chief Leo Hamel claimed to have visited the site, but stated that he was unable to find the clothing. It was later revealed that Hamel attempted to enter the wooded area from the wrong direction and wound up getting lost. The place where the clothing was discovered is within a ½ mile of where the body of Louise Camirand was found on March 25, 1977.

The wallet

Theresa’s wallet was found one week after her body was found, on April 20, 1979. A farmer was riding his tractor down McDonald road just West of Lennoxville, and noticed the red wallet at the side of the road. McDonald is a service road that runs between Lennoxville and Sherbrooke, Quebec.

Physical evidence

In 2001, the Surete du Quebec confirmed that all physical evidence from the case was destroyed, including Theresa's scarf and undergarments. Police confirmed that the physical evidence in the Manon Dube case had also been destroyed.

Significance

Since the original National Post articles from 2002, the investigation into Theresa Allore's death has been continued by her brother, John Allore who maintains the website, Who Killed Theresa?. Allore has geographically identified an additional 14 unsolved murders from the same era. There is some evidence to suggest that some of these murders may be related, including the cases of Helene Monast, Denise Bazinet, Jocelyne Houle, Johanne Dorion, Tammy Leakey, and Sharron Prior. Allore is currently working on a project with the Quebec documentary filmmaker, Stephan Parent about these cold cases.

External links

• Who Killed Theresa?
• Amateur sleuthing reveals a likely murder that remains unsolved
• Quebec 1977: Who Was The Bootlace Killer?