Chantel Gillade, a 28-year-old White/Caucasian transgender woman, was living in Vancouver, British Columbia, when her life ended violently on September 1, 1995. She had been born in 1967 and raised in the Niagara Falls region of Ontario. Vancouver police records indicate that she had moved away from home as a young adult and was living in Vancouver by the late 1980s.
Police first encountered her in January 1988, when she was working in the city’s sex trade and identifying and living as a woman. Over the following years, she lived at several addresses in the West End and around the Granville Mall area. At the time she was killed, she was undergoing gender reassignment surgery.
During the early morning hours of September 1, Chantel was working near Davie and Seymour streets in downtown Vancouver. Another sex worker later told investigators that at approximately 4:00 a.m., Chantel was picked up by a man driving a distinctive black pickup truck. Police believed the vehicle may have been a 1989 Chevrolet equipped with a canopy. The canopy had tinted windows and a noticeable red stripe running along its side, a detail investigators hoped someone in the public would recognize.
The man driving the truck was described by a witness as being in his early 40s, with a stocky or heavyset build and a double chin. He reportedly had dark brown, collar-length hair and a receding hairline. Although he was the last person publicly reported to have driven away with Chantel, police have never publicly identified him by name or announced that he was charged in connection with her killing. The distinctive truck also became one of the most important pieces of information released to the public during later appeals for assistance.
Chantel was last seen wearing a black double-breasted blazer, a black mini-skirt, black stockings and black heels. She stood approximately 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighed about 150 pounds. Roughly three hours after she entered the pickup truck, construction workers arrived at a worksite in an alley behind 826 Homer Street. At about 7:20 a.m., they discovered Chantel’s battered body wrapped in a blue tarp and a maroon-coloured blanket. Vancouver police classified her death as a homicide. Publicly available police information describes the extensive violence evident on her body but does not provide a more detailed official cause of death on the department’s cold-case page.
Investigators believed the circumstances surrounding the pickup were critical to reconstructing Chantel’s final hours. The short period between her being seen entering the truck and the discovery of her body suggested that the killing and disposal of her remains occurred within a relatively limited window during the early morning. Police repeatedly appealed for anyone who remembered the black Chevrolet-style pickup, particularly its tinted canopy and distinctive red stripe, or who had information about the driver, to come forward.
Years later, the Vancouver Police Department renewed public attention on Chantel’s case. In 2016, police and Crime Stoppers again circulated details about the vehicle and its driver. Contemporary reporting stated that no one had been arrested or charged in her death. Despite the passage of decades, the Vancouver Police Department continues to maintain Chantel Gillade’s homicide on its cold-case website as an ongoing investigation. The department’s public case information does not identify a named accused person, and the available online record contains no announced prosecution, trial or conviction for her murder.
The last known encounter remains the central lead publicly disclosed in the case: Chantel entering a distinctive black pickup at Davie and Seymour shortly after 4:00 a.m., followed just over three hours later by the discovery of her body several blocks away. Her killer has not been publicly identified, and the homicide remains unresolved.
