On Sunday, December 17, 1967, Donald Alton was driving a sideroad by Balsam Lake Provincial Park, near Coboconk, when he saw a partridge. He stopped the car, climbed a fence and followed the bird’s tracks through the snow. About 40 feet from the road, on a bare patch of ground, he found bones. A pair of running shoes lay a few feet away, the Toronto Daily Star reported.
The Ontario Provincial Police later described what was found. There was no clothing, only a pair of low-cut white tennis shoes, size 7, made in Czechoslovakia. With the skeleton lay an eleven-foot length of twine. It had a knotted loop next to the bones of the hand and wrist. The skeleton had one unusual feature: an extra rib on the right side.
On December 20, the Star reported that police believed the remains were those of a boy of about 17 who had died in early summer. Initial tests at the Attorney General’s forensic laboratory in Toronto found no skull damage and no broken bones. Investigators were working on the theory that he had been strangled. “A 17-year-old boy is usually a pretty healthy fellow,” an OPP superintendent told the paper.
Police could not say who he was.
He was Eric Jones, born in 1949 and raised in Noelville, a small community about 100 kilometres west of North Bay. He was a middle child in a family of 11. His eldest brother, Oscar, later remembered him as “a very quiet kid,” a loner, and “a really nice kid.” The only trouble Oscar could recall was the time Eric, at about 14, accidentally burned down the family barn. Oscar thought he had been smoking a cigarette.
Early in 1967, Jones moved to Toronto to live with an aunt on Howard Street. His family last saw him in April. In May, police later said, he moved out of his aunt’s home. On the day he went missing, he told his aunt he was looking for a job washing dishes. He was 18.
Police later estimated that his remains had lain at Balsam Lake since the late spring or early summer of 1967.
That summer, police later said, a man was picking up young men in downtown Toronto and driving them to rural areas, where he attacked them.
On July 14, William Howells, 21, was found naked in a ditch on a sideroad north of Barrie. He had been stabbed in the throat and chest, and his hands had been tied behind his back. He survived. The Crown later told the court the two men had met in a Toronto theatre “known as a meeting place for homosexuals.” On July 15, the naked, decomposed body of Robert James Mortimore, 17, was found in a field in Markham Township.
Police arrested James Henry Greenidge, 28, of Cambridge Avenue, on July 16. In January 1968, at Barrie, he was sentenced to ten years for the attempted murder of Howells. That June, in Toronto, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Mortimore’s death and received seven more years.
On May 15, 1968, a second skeleton was found in a hedgerow near Schomberg. Two days later, the Star reported on its front page that police saw “similar sinister circumstances” in the two deaths. Police believed both were teenage boys who had been victims of a “sex deviate.” Neither had been identified.
Jones was reported missing to Toronto police in the late 1960s, CBC News later reported. Sometime in the 1970s his name was taken off the missing persons system, because of confusion over whether he or his brother was named in the file.
His family looked for him for years. “Some of us thought he may have just left,” Oscar Jones told the Star. After 10 or 12 years, Oscar decided his brother must have died.
The bones from Balsam Lake stayed in the morgue on College Street for almost 40 years, Xtra reported.
In July 2006, the OPP reopened the case as part of a review of unsolved files, and new autopsies were done. On November 9, Sgt. Bob Paterson told the Star there was a “gay connection” to the two deaths. Police had new information linking them to attacks in the same period on young men known to frequent the Church and Wellesley area. Asked whether the young men had been victims of sex slayings, Paterson said, “That’s a pretty fair assumption.”
On November 14, at OPP headquarters in Orillia, police showed facial reconstructions of the two unidentified young men. They estimated the one from Balsam Lake had been between 15 and 18. The investigators’ original notes had recorded his extra rib, “a fact which may or may not be known to relatives.”
Det. Insp. Dave Quigley, the lead investigator, said a sexual predator had been working in the area in the summer of 1967. “I think he did have a type — young, petite men,” he said. Police would not name the man convicted of the 1967 attacks. Julian Fantino, the new OPP commissioner, raised the possibility of a serial killer.
Police also showed the reconstructions to Prime Timers, a social group for older gay men, at The 519 community centre. Bob Tivey, who had known Greenidge, asked why he was not considered a suspect, Xtra reported.
The Star’s columnist Rosie DiManno wrote that the young men may have gone with their killer willingly at first, “perhaps offering their fine young bodies for pleasure.” She also wrote that the newspaper stories of 1967 had never mentioned where the victims came from or who was being stalked. City councillor Kyle Rae told her the community had been very closeted at the time.
Later in 2006, the young man from Schomberg was identified as Richard Hovey, 17, of New Brunswick. The young man from Balsam Lake stayed nameless.
In February 2007, DiManno reported that Quigley had interviewed Greenidge, who now went by James Gordon Henry and was serving a life sentence for the 1981 murder of a young woman in Vancouver. What was said had not been disclosed.
On February 14, 2009, CTV’s W-Five aired a special on unsolved cases. One of Jones’s sisters was watching. When the reconstruction came on screen, she phoned Oscar. He watched it the next morning. “It wasn’t exact, but with the circumstances and everything, well, we were 95 per cent sure it was him,” he told the Star. His sister called police that morning.
On March 9, 2009, the OPP announced in Orillia that DNA testing and the facial reconstruction had identified the remains as Eric Jones.
Det. Insp. Ian Maule, head of the OPP cold case squad, said the family had “always feared the worst.” Oscar Jones, then 66, put it his own way. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s like he died yesterday,” he told the Star.
Deputy Commissioner Vince Hawkes asked anyone who had known Jones in Toronto in early 1967 to come forward. “We’ve spoken to the family, but you can only get so much from them,” he said. Police wanted to know where he had lived and worked, and who he had spent his time with.
Quigley told the Star police had a person of interest. “We’re interested in the activities of Mr. Greenidge,” he said. The OPP told Xtra they had no forensic evidence linking Greenidge to the deaths of Jones or Hovey. In its release that day, the OPP said the Jones and Hovey cases, and that of an unidentified body found near Markham in 1980, were almost certainly connected to the two solved cases from 1967, Xtra reported. The province offered a $50,000 reward.
In 2011, Xtra described the deaths as queer-related murders. In 2017, the Toronto Sun wrote that Jones, like Hovey, had last been seen with a muscular Black man in a Corvair. Police had said that only of Hovey.
By 2009, no one had been charged with killing Eric Jones. Police never determined how he died.
The record disagrees with itself. The OPP said his family last saw him in April 1967. CBC reported that he moved out of his aunt’s home in May, and Xtra that he was last seen in April, when he moved out. In 1967 the Star reported a pair of running shoes lying a few feet from the bones; in 2006 DiManno wrote that he was wearing one shoe. Police put his age at about 17 in 1967 and at 15 to 18 in 2006. Greenidge appears as Greenridge, and as James Henry and James Gordon Henry. Howells appears as Howell, and as 21 or 25. Mortimore’s body was found on July 15 or July 17. The 2006 coverage reported Greenidge’s sentences as concurrent; the Globe and Mail in 1968 reported them as consecutive.
Most of what is known of Eric Jones as a person comes from a few sentences his brother gave the Star, 42 years after he left his aunt’s home.
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Eric Jones |
| Born | 1949 |
| Age | 18 |
| Gender | Male |
| Date of death | Late spring or early summer 1967 (police estimate); remains found December 17, 1967 |
| Manner of death | Undetermined |
| Location | Wooded area of Balsam Lake Provincial Park, south of Highway 48, near Coboconk |
| Person of interest | James Henry Greenidge, later James Gordon Henry (named by police, 2009); never charged in Jones’s death as of 2009 |
Sources
- Toronto Daily Star, July 17, 1967, p. 46
- Toronto Daily Star, December 20, 1967, p. 42
- Winnipeg Free Press, January 11, 1968, p. 47 (Canadian Press)
- The Globe and Mail, June 26, 1968, p. 2
- Toronto Star, November 10, 2006, p. B4
- Toronto Star, November 15, 2006, p. A2
- Toronto Star, February 5, 2007, p. A2
- Ontario Provincial Police, GHQ Special Circular 09-03, March 9, 2009
- CBC News, March 9, 2009
- Xtra, March 9, 2009
- Toronto Star, March 10, 2009, p. GT4
- Xtra, October 10, 2011
- Toronto Sun, December 16, 2017
- Photographs: Bill Sandford for the Toronto Star (facial reconstructions with Master Cpl. Peter Thompson); Eric Jones, family photograph released by the Ontario Provincial Police; James Henry Greenidge, as published in the Toronto Star, March 10, 2009; map, Toronto Star graphic, March 10, 2009
Murder Village Map