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Several people have asked me, why out of hundreds of unsolved murders, I chose the 25 people for my book Cold Case Vancouver.
Mostly, they chose me.
Each person has a compelling story that needed to be told. Some like the Babes in the Woods are well known, but most just received an item or two in the newspaper and then disappeared, consigned to Vancouver’s not-so-nice history.
Muriel Lindsay, for instance, was a 40-year-old Canada Post worker, who had recently beaten cancer, and was about to move into a new apartment when she was beaten to death in her West End boarding house. I contacted her brother Kent, and learned about Muriel’s story—one with many layers and connections to West Vancouver.
Eight decades before Muriel’s murder, her great-grandfather Richard Levis, a 28-year-old Vancouver police officer, was shot and killed while hunting down a criminal known as “Mickey the Dago.” His wife Estelle was left to raise their three children—Cyril, Muriel and Carroll—all under the age of five. Estelle was hired as a matron in the women’s division of the Vancouver Police Department and worked there until 1919.
Cyril became an actor, and he and his brother Carroll Richard Levis, moved their families to England. Carroll became quite famous in the ‘40s and ‘50s hosting his own television program The Carroll Levis Discovery Show, on the BBC.
Muriel (May), Muriel Lindsay’s namesake and grandmother, was a successful businesswoman in the ‘50s, who had the exclusive rights to sell real estate in the British Properties, and was a shareholder of West Vancouver’s Panorama Film Studios (the studio produced movies such as Carnal Knowledge and McCabe and Mrs. Miller). Muriel’s father, Eric Lindsay, was a celebrity photographer and reporter for the Vancouver Sun. Eric took a job with CBC’s the National and the family moved to Toronto. Soon after he split with his wife Marjorie, and young Muriel’s mental health started to unravel.
Muriel eventually followed her mother and brother back to B.C., and in 1983, moved into a room in a heritage house in Mole Hill, where she stayed for the next 13 years. In the months before her death, she received bizarre anonymous letters, and her brother believes she had a stalker.
Muriel died from blows to her head and larynx, just after finishing her shift at Canada Post. Her mother found her body.
In April 2017, I received an email from a man who had heard another man talk about murdering Muriel Lindsay some years ago. I chatted with him, and for a number of reasons, he didn’t want to contact police; so I did it for him. I was told by a VPD sergeant that the “file was solved” and the man my source mentioned, wasn’t the suspect. I’m not sure what this means-that the suspect is dead, or in jail or they just don’t have the evidence to convict him, and I can’t find out, because police won’t talk about unsolved cases.
Find the full story of Muriel Lindsay in Cold Case Vancouver: the city’s most baffling unsolved murders.
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