John Allore

Wish You Were Here is, in part, the story of the murder of Theresa Allure, a college student in Quebec's Eastern Townships in 1978. The happy, hard-working 19-year old student was picked up while hitchhiking, raped, strangled, and her body left facedown in a creek for five months until her body was found. To the fury of her family and friends, the local and provincial police force viewed her death as drug-related, and didn't look hard for her killer; in reality the coroner's toxicology reports showed that she had no drugs in her system.

Fast-forward twenty years and the book finds Theresa's younger brother, John, who has been obsessed for years about the death of his older sister, and who can blame him? He travelled frequently from his North Carolina home to Quebec to look for clues, to question the police force, to take the advice of experts on homicide. He is assisted by a friend, writer Patricia Pearson, whom he has known for decades, and whom he dated for a couple of years long ago. Between them they search for answers, and in so doing uncover other murders of young women in the Eastern Township in the 1970s, and believe that they were committed by the same person: a serial killer.

The book is chock-full of interviews with criminologists, psychologists, and police agents of many different types, most of whom agree that there is a link between the murders in the Townships. It details John's psychological breakdown, and his relentless search for answers. If you are a fan of true crime, this book is a must-read.… (meer)

this was so much more than an attempt to figure out who killed this young woman in quebec in 1978. this was about the incompetence of the police force, who didn't care what happened to these girls and women, because girls and women didn't matter; it's about the callousness of the school theresa went to, who took literal decades to apologize for their lack of even searching for her body, and for their untruthful characterization of her, which affected how seriously the police took her disappearance. it's about this man, likely her killer, who was allowed to torture, assault (physically and sexually), kidnap, and often murder dozens of women over the span of years. he was never followed up on, even when girls escaped and said where he was living, described his car, his face. it's an incredible travesty of justice that was allowed to happen because the autonomy of women's bodies was never taken seriously.

so while this is about theresa and how she and her family only found a tiny semblance of justice on their own, really it's about a broken criminal justice system and societal system that just doesn't take women seriously, and how that has resulted in serial killers who have killed, raped, assaulted women with impugnity. it's a powerful statement.

"The preferential focus on robbers stems back to the very origin of modern policing, which evolved in England and France in the 18th century as a response to the merchant class's need to protect wealth, goods, and slaves without benefit of an aristocracy's livery guard. It was never a human right's frame around police work. Safeguarding vulnerable people was the purview of religious orders, patriarchs, and social justice crusaders."… (meer)