Evelyn Roche is one of the reasons that I wanted to write Cold Case Vancouver. The mother of two teenagers was stabbed to death on April 3, 1958 two blocks from her home in the Hastings/Sunrise area of Vancouver. Her crime scene is the photo on the cover of my book. This is a short excerpt from that chapter, 58 years after her murder.
Evelyn, 39, had caught the bus downtown to post a present off to her husband Richard, a logger who worked at Seymour Inlet about 340 km north of Vancouver. She got off at the bus stop at Broadway and Penticton around 10:30 p.m. and was grabbed and dragged into a lane just two blocks from her house.
Evelyn’s murder terrorized the city. Police Chief George Archer warned that a “sex fiend” was on the loose, that he believed that he would murder again, and that women should travel in pairs or be met by a male escort if they were coming home after dark.
Reporters tried to vilify her. She had a couple of drinks before she left. They were celebratory drinks with the realtor—she and Richard, whom she had married in 1955, had moved into their new house on East 6th just days before she was murdered. Reporters said she left her two children alone in the house. The implication was that she went off to party, that somehow she had invited her own murder.
It took me quite a while, but eventually I tracked down Evelyn’s two children, Sharon who was 16 and Frank, 14 at the time of their mother’s murder. I wanted to know what happened to them, how had they got along with their step-father; who exactly was their mother and how had they coped with the loss.
Not surprisingly, Sharon remembers the night clearly—it was the night before Good Friday. Evelyn had invited the kids to go on the bus downtown with her, but they wanted to watch a television show called Oh! Susanna and declined. Sharon’s last words to her mother were, “Mum, please don’t forget the grapes.”
Evelyn had been stabbed in the neck, chest and back, each wound delivered with such force that the blade had entered her body to the hilt. She had been dragged by the legs, and her underwear was ripped and smeared with blood. Two brown paper bags were found near her body. One contained the grapes, the other, a bottle of Canadian Club Rye with a receipt from the liquor store on West Pender Street.
“She didn’t come home, and I was up all night. I had this awful, awful feeling,” Sharon told me. “Then I heard on the radio that a body had been found, and I phoned the police station, and I said, ‘I think that’s my mum’.”
Reporters hounded the family. “They would sit outside our house and try to take our pictures,” said Sharon. “People would drive by our house.”
Shortly after his wife’s murder, Richard adopted Frank and Sharon. He kept the family in the house and hired a housekeeper to take care of the kids while he was away at work. Frank eventually joined his father as a logger, and Sharon married in 1961.
Evelyn’s case has not been reinvestigated to Sharon and Frank’s knowledge. But in 2008—50 years after their mother’s murder—Sharon received a phone call from the Vancouver Police Department. They told her that they wanted to return her mother’s wedding ring found on her body the night of her death, and the bottle of Irish whiskey.
I filed a freedom of information request in 2014 to find out more about the murder. It was rejected. I appealed the decision. That was also rejected.
Please check out the FB group page Cold Case Canada for a discussion about this and other unsolved murders and missing persons cases.
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