Cassandra ‘Tula’ Do – Sex Worker Strangled

Cassandra Do had arranged to meet her brother and sister on the evening of Monday, August 25, 2003. When she did not answer her door or her cellphone, they asked the building superintendent to let them in. The Toronto Star reported in 2006 that she was found face down in a bathtub full of water, strangled. It was 10:30 p.m.

Officers from 52 Division were called to the building at about that time, the Globe and Mail reported. Do was 32. She lived at 60 Gloucester Street, near Church Street. An autopsy the next day concluded she had been manually strangled. Det.-Sgt. Craig Sanson, the lead investigator, said the investigation was in its early stages. The Globe counted her death as the city’s 34th homicide of the year.

Do sold sex from her apartment, Sanson told the Star. She had a website and advertised in the back pages of a Toronto weekly newspaper. Police told the Globe they did not believe she worked the street. Sanson said police had not determined whether she was with a client when she was killed. The Star reported in 2006 that she had a “date” before 7 p.m. on her last day.

The Globe’s first report called her a “preoperative transsexual prostitute” and explained that she lived and answered identification questions as a woman while she waited to complete her transition. Its two October reports repeated that she had not completed it, and so did both of the Star’s August reports. The Star identified one sex worker it interviewed as a “she-male.” Alison Kemper, executive director of the 519 Church Street Community Centre, told the Globe she hoped the killing was not a hate crime and pointed to the killings of six transsexuals in Washington, D.C., in the previous year. Sanson said police had no evidence it was.

Friends described Do to the Star. Her best friend, a fellow sex worker, said Do never used drugs, screened clients before letting them into her home and kept logs of her dealings with them. Monica Forrester, a street outreach worker at the 519 who had known Do for 18 years, said sex workers were being advised to be extremely cautious, even with regulars. The best friend said Do had worked for eight or perhaps ten years, always kept the same routine and was well known in the neighbourhood. She feared that Do’s visibility in the Wellesley Street corridor between Yonge and Church may have exposed her to a stalker. Statistics Canada defines stalking as “repeated and unwanted attention that causes a person to fear for their personal safety.”

Sex workers told the Star they were afraid. One said she had thought of pulling her advertisement from the weekly paper and wondered whether someone out there wanted to kill girls. Calls to some other workers’ numbers reached a message that the number had been disconnected. Another worker, Alicia, said she had to keep working and would be more cautious. Friends and neighbours left candles, plants and roses inside and outside the Gloucester Street building. A neighbour told the Star that residents knew Do sold sex and that she was discreet. He recalled that she once paid for his breakfast after waving to him in a coffee shop. Sanson said a person jailed the week before, after an altercation in which Do was threatened with a beer bottle, was part of the investigation. He could not say whether that person was still in jail when she died. After a gathering of sex workers at the 519, Anastasia Kuzyk of the Sex Workers’ Alliance of Toronto said the alliance would inform police of any assault on prostitutes. Friends planned a candlelight vigil at Allan Gardens for Sunday, August 31, at 9 p.m. Xtra later reported that more than 100 people came.

Two other women died in the same days. A woman in her 30s was found on Tuesday in a seventh-floor apartment on Bay Street, south of Bloor, and a man was being questioned. On Wednesday morning Anne Fernando, 50, who was addicted to crack cocaine and had lived in Parkdale since arriving from Sri Lanka in 1974, was found behind a rooming house on Dowling Avenue. An autopsy did not show how she died. Police said neither death was connected to Do’s.

On October 4 the Star reported that homicide detectives had a description of the man they believed strangled Do: muscular, 30 to 40 years old, about 230 pounds and 6 feet 5 inches tall. Police said all sex trade workers should be extra vigilant. On October 6 the Globe reported that detectives had linked DNA found in Do’s apartment to the 1997 sexual assault of a Toronto sex worker. Citing CFTO, it reported that since police released a description of the 1997 suspect, four sex workers had come forward to say that a man fitting it had beaten and sexually attacked them. The Globe gave his height as 6 feet 2 inches and said he might wear glasses and had close-shaved hair and no facial hair. It later gave October 5 as the date of the police warning. Xtra described the 1997 attacker as a tall Black man.

On Thanksgiving Monday, October 13, a woman was found strangled in an Etobicoke apartment where she worked as an escort. She was Lien Pham, a Vietnamese-born mother who advertised as May-Ling, a “China Barbie Doll,” and who gave a false age and ethnicity in her ads, the Star reported. Police told the Globe they had no suspect and would not say whether they saw a link to the earlier deaths. The Globe added that at a vigil after Do’s death, friends had said she was streetwise and did not take drugs. Kuzyk told the Globe she could not know whether it was the same person but that the killing sounded very similar. Sanson told the Star it was too early to say whether police were looking for one killer. On October 26 the Star reported that detectives had not ruled out a serial killer targeting sex workers, and counted seven unsolved killings of Toronto prostitutes in nine years.

In April 2004, after a Star report on a betting scandal in the Toronto police service, Lynnette Dubois of Artemis Services wrote to the paper. She wrote that the report described members of the police extorting sexual favours from what the Star termed “transvestite prostitutes,” that the transgender community had long faced marginalization and prejudice from some officers, and asked whether this was the reason Do’s killer had not been brought to justice.

The Star profiled Do again in June 2006, alongside Darlene MacNeill, killed in 1997, and Lien Pham. It described her as a “woman trapped in a man’s body” and referred to her earlier life with male pronouns. It gave her given name as Bi. Her father was an American soldier and her mother was Vietnamese. She and her mother left Vietnam as boat people in 1980 and came to Canada to join a stepfather, a former South Vietnamese soldier. Her brother and sister followed later. A friend told the Star that Do became a sex worker after she was fired from a job as a nurse’s aide at a seniors’ home in Kitchener, around the time she was becoming Cassandra at 18. She spent most of her money on breast implants, a reshaped nose and French antique furniture. She mentored other transgender people and made a documentary, Skin Deep, a year before she died. She told friends she could not leave sex work until she had saved $30,000 for a sex change and for nursing school.

The Star also reported that Do was careful with clients. They phoned her from a phone booth, and she met them at a nearby café before taking them to her apartment. She had once escaped a threatening client by moving from the west end to downtown. In the months before her death she had received unpleasant letters from a jealous transgender sex worker after taking part in a transsexual strip night at a club in Little Italy. Christina Strang, a close friend who became a counsellor at a women’s shelter, said Do was almost notorious for how she screened people, which was why her murder stunned them. Do’s friends told the Star they believed that, because of her lifestyle, society had forgotten her. Strang said that if Do had been somebody else, with this kind of violence done to her, she believed police would have set up a task force.

Xtra listed Do’s killing in May 2008 among unsolved killings of queer and trans people. It reported that Do had been studying nursing at George Brown College and working from her apartment as Tula. Sanson told the paper that the man believed to be her killer had made his date with her by telephone and that every call came from a pay phone. DNA from Do’s body matched, through the national databank, a man who beat and sexually assaulted a female sex worker on Jarvis Street in 1997. Another suspect was cleared when his DNA did not match. Sanson said he also tried American databases because Do had clients from the United States, and that his leads ran out in late 2003. He spoke to as many of her clients as he could identify, he said, though she “kept no records.” Xtra reported that the investigation had been reactivated, and Staff Sgt. Reg Pitt of the Toronto police cold-case squad told the paper police had a new lead and would not describe it. Douglas Janoff, author of Pink Blood, said he doubted many cold cases would be solved where prostitution was involved, because of the steady stream of strangers.

On February 17, 2016, Toronto police launched a website listing more than 500 unsolved homicides back to 1959, and CP24 reported that Do’s case was among them. The report said police had determined that she was sexually assaulted as well as strangled and that the DNA evidence tied her killing to the 1997 assault. The national databank returned no name, and police had a description from the survivor of that attack but had been unable to identify the man.

Vital statistics

Field	Detail
Name	Cassandra Do; working name Tula; the Toronto Star (2006) gave her given name as Bi
Age	32
Gender	Woman (transgender)
Occupation	Sex worker; had worked as a nurse’s aide (Star, 2006); Xtra (2008) reported she was studying nursing at George Brown College
Date of death	August 25, 2003 (body found at about 10:30 p.m.)
Manner of death	Manual strangulation; police later determined she was also sexually assaulted (CP24, 2016)
Location	60 Gloucester Street, Toronto

Sources

• The Globe and Mail, August 27, 2003, p. A15
• Toronto Star, August 28, 2003, p. B3
• Toronto Star, August 29, 2003, p. F3
• Toronto Star, October 4, 2003, p. A30
• The Globe and Mail, October 6, 2003, p. A9
• The Globe and Mail, October 15, 2003, p. A14
• Toronto Star, October 16, 2003, p. B1
• Toronto Star, October 26, 2003, p. A3
• Toronto Star, April 23, 2004, p. A23
• Toronto Star, June 25, 2006, p. A11
• Xtra, “Cold cases,” May 8, 2008
• CP24, “Police hope to generate new clues to unsolved murders with new website,” February 17, 2016
• Marta Burczycka and Shana Conroy, “Family violence in Canada: A statistical profile, 2016,” Juristat, Statistics Canada, January 17, 2018

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