Babes in the Woods Murder Case!

vexacon · #1 ● 01-05-2012, 12:26 AM

Babes in the Woods haunt retired cop
1953 murder of two boys is subject of book and renewed police investigation on its 50th anniversary

Kerry Gold
Vancouver Sun

Monday, August 11, 2003

CREDIT: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun

Retired Vancouver Police sergeant Brian Honeybourn reopened Babes in the Woods.

The Jan. 15, 1953, edition of The Vancouver Sun carried a front page story on the grisly discovery of two children's skeletons in Stanley Park.

A parks board gardener had been digging in leaves around Beaver Lake when he came across the cheap fur coat under which the boys were buried.

One of the two boys found murdered in Stanley Park in 1953 was wearing this shoe. Initially, investigators wrongly believed the bodies were those of a boy and a girl.

Model of murder victim wearing a red tartan jacket, leather helmet and cream or fawn corduroy slacks.

It is the 50th anniversary of one of Vancouver's most famous unsolved murders, and a Vancouver cop refuses to retire from the case because he believes that somebody will still come forward.

Former Vancouver Police sergeant Brian Honeybourn retired three years ago, but the unsolved murders of two children whose mutilated bodies were found in Stanley Park haunted him enough that he's come out of retirement to re-open his files on the case.

The intrepid cop just won't let go of the 1953 crime that was dubbed the Babes in the Woods Murders by the media of the day. For longtime Vancouverites, it is a story so often told and re-told it has taken on the mythic, sepia-toned qualities of Hansel and Gretel and the horror of the forbidden forest.

But for Honeybourn, who began working on the case in 1996, and an officer named Bill Lindsay who was called to the scene that winter day 50 years ago, the murders were always a heinous fact. Honeybourn and retired RCMP officer Lindsay, the only surviving officer who was at the murder scene, speak about the case at the Vancouver Central Library Thursday night, with author Timothy Taylor, whose novel, Stanley Park features the secret, fictional lives of homeless people in Stanley Park, and alludes to the murders.

"I am not a police officer now, I am retired," says Honeybourn, who has just returned to the Lower Mainland following a failed attempt at conventional retirement. "But I can definitely make some inquiries, not as an authority, of course. But if anything looks predominant in the file, I will immediately get hold of the Unsolved Homicide Unit."

Honeybourn started as a traffic cop on Granville Street's theatre row in 1966 and ended his career on assignment in Kosovo in 2001 where he was one of a nine-member Canadian forensics team investigating war crimes. Retiring early, he says now, was a mistake. Instead of sailing and golfing, Honeybourn found himself obsessing about the cold case file of the Babes in the Woods.

"I retired up to Peachland at 53, and we lived right on the lake. I hated retirement. I was sitting up there, staring at that stupid lake, wondering about it all the time," he says. "So we did three years up there and moved back down recently."

One day in 1947, the story goes, someone took two small children wearing leather aviator caps deep into Stanley Park. The children were murdered with a hatchet, their bodies placed together and covered with a cheap fur coat. Six years later, a parks board gardener named Mr. Tong was digging around in the leaves near Beaver Lake when he came across the fur coat, and underneath it, the two small skeletons. The heel of a woman's shoe that was found underneath one of the bones led investigators to believe the murderer had most probably been a woman. A medical examiner at the time also reported the two skeletons were that of a five-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl -- a mistaken identification that Honeybourn believes prevented the case being solved. The dogged investigator who'd been originally assigned to it, Don MacKay, died never knowing of the error.

As Honeybourn would discover decades later, the children had both been male.

In 1996, Honeybourn was one of 20 members assigned to the B.C. Unsolved Homicide Unit, comprising Vancouver police and RCMP officers. As a supervisor, he had the freedom of choosing his own cold files, and being a Vancouver native, he chose the Babes in the Woods case.

"I was a supervisor, but I wanted to carry my own case load as well, and I was always fascinated by the Babes in the Woods," he says.

He soon discovered the little bones were on display at the Vancouver Police Museum, so he decided to have them cremated and given a proper burial at sea, off Kitsilano Point, with the police chaplain present.

"I am not an overly religious person, but I thought, 'If I don't do this, then someone will have them on display somewhere else.

"People have said to me, 'Why didn't you put their ashes in Stanley Park?' Well, that was where they were murdered, I wasn't going to do that."

But before their burial, he took them to his friend, UBC forensic dentist Dr. David Sweet, who extracted the teeth, froze them, and determined from the DNA inside the pulp that the teeth had in fact belonged to two boys.

"I shouldn't say this, but I hazard a guess that Don MacKay would have solved this with the work he put into it, if he had known it was two boys," says Honeybourn. "Because in the files there was the odd tip phoned in where somebody was reporting two boys missing."

With the newfound evidence, Honeybourn re-examined old witness reports and found one that sticks with him to this day. It is the account of a man who'd worked in a logging camp, who was with his buddy in his car and who'd picked up a woman and two boys hitchhiking from Mission to Vancouver. The woman had told him during the ride that she had been in repeated trouble with the police in Mission, on vagrancy charges. Either both or one of her sons had attended Cedar Valley school, and she told the driver she lived on Cherry Street in Mission. Honeybourn believes that based on the criminal code, her vagrancy charge would most likely have involved prostitution. He has a nickname for the unknown lady: Lipstick Liz.

"Now I assume that that is what this gal was talking about, that she was the party gal of Mission. I don't know for sure, but that was probably the only vagrancy section that would apply in Mission in those days."

He scoured old school records for two boys who had failed to return to class at Cedar Valley, but to no avail. It is possible, however, that only one of the boys had attended the school. And he tracked down a man who remembered a couple on Cherry Street who had two sons, and it led him to a family named Grant. That tip proved to be a dead end after Honeybourn tracked down surviving members.

Other odd details surrounding the case have surfaced over the years. The most ominous has to be the connection with infamous child murderer Clifford Olson. Olson was seven years old at the time of the murders and living on Lulu Island in New Westminster. His mother was one of the tipsters who'd come forward after the bodies had been discovered. Honeybourn has a copy of the report in which she told police that her neighbour's children had gone missing.

Author Timothy Taylor is also aware of that morbid detail. He picked up on the case half-way through the writing of his 2001 book, Stanley Park. His sub-theme of two children murdered in the park was already on the page when he remembered the Babes in the Woods.

"It was only after I came across the Babes in the Woods case I realized I was writing about something that already happened," says Taylor.

"I must have heard about it when I was a kid, because I was raised here, and had long forgotten about it. It is a weird story that way. It is kind of mythic."

He contacted Honeybourn for research into the case, and even added to the book the new information about the bodies being those of two boys. He felt that it was important to update the facts since he was writing about an actual case, even though it was contained within fiction.

Taylor has optioned the rights to his book to Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood, who plans on bringing the story to the big screen. Taylor has just finished writing the screenplay.

The Vancouver Public Library is holding a trivia contest about Taylor's book. The prize is a sleep-over in the park, which involves sleeping overnight inside a tent in the park later this month. The contest closed yesterday. Just don't expect Taylor to be at the sleep-over.

"I have done extensive walking into the evening, but I have not stayed overnight, nor would I," he says, laughing. "My whole discovery of the park was that the further I went into it and the deeper I looked at it, it became a darker place. I developed a healthy respect for the park. The more time I spent tromping around in it, the more weird, strange stuff I found way off the beaten track. There is lots of evidence of people living in there.

"If you want to go far enough off the trails you will find evidence. Fire pits. I found an altar with melted purple candles and pentagrams and stuff. It was pretty creepy.

"I think there is all sorts of creepy stuff that goes down there."

Besides, Taylor does not plan a second book on the subject, so his days of researching the park's depths are over.

Honeybourn's search, however, is just beginning. Again.

Although he is no longer a police officer, he still owns this case. The goal for Honeybourn is closure, and you get the feeling it's for himself as much as for the boys. His drive redefines the cliché of the intrepid investigator, so consumed by an unsolved murder that he's willing to give up the leisurely life of Peachland.

He's trading life in the sun for darkness in the woods, and he's not even getting paid to do it.

"I've got no doubt in my mind that probably the old lady is dead," he says, referring to the boys' mother. "But if we could get a name, if she died in the Vancouver area, the mortuary records are fairly accurate, it would be a matter of just digging her up and getting a DNA sample.

"You know there is maybe even somebody from Mission back in the late '40s who can remember who this lady was, who was in frequent contact with Mission police and had two little boys. You can get some people in their 90s who are still pretty cognizant of what is going on," he adds hopefully.

"And you know, it is not beyond the realm that we couldn't give these kids their names, eh? That could happen."

(A few of the articles found at the murder site!)

BlueNosePit · #2 ● 01-05-2012, 08:19 AM

thats interesting.
50 year anniversary though? it should be almost 60 years now. anything new?

Kyle416 · #3 ● 01-05-2012, 03:09 PM

According to the article, just a bunch of dead ends. I doubt they ever solve this. This is a fairly popular case in Canada. I remember seeing a show on this case years ago and it closing about how the bones were now in a museum on display, like it says in the article.

And LOL at someone getting to stay in the park overnight in a tent if they win a trivia contest about the case. I can't think of anything more fun and rewarding from winning a trivia game then sleeping in a former murder scene, and from I understand, a pretty scummy park all around.