Jane Wooley was a dedicated and hardworking 62-year-old woman living in London, Ontario. She spent her days as a chambermaid at the London House, a hotel on Dundas Street, a job she took pride in. After her shifts, she would return to the quiet solitude of her apartment on York Street, a place that should have been her sanctuary. But on the last day of January 1969, this sense of security was violently shattered, and Jane became the first victim of a man who would come to be known as "The
London Chambermaid Slayer."
On January 31, Jane finished her work and was last seen leaving the hotel. When she did not show up for her shifts and could not be reached, concern grew. A friend went to check on her, leading to a grim discovery on February 3. Police were called to the apartment and found Jane’s body; she had been brutally beaten and stabbed to death. The scene suggested a robbery, as money was missing from her purse, and the state of her clothing led investigators to believe the attack may have begun as a sexual assault.
The city of London was entering a dark period, one that would eventually earn it the grim moniker of Canada's serial killer capital. Jane's murder was the first in a series of similar slayings that terrorized the community. Over the next two years, two other women, both hotel employees in their 50s, were killed in a similarly brutal fashion. Edith Authier, 57, was beaten and stabbed in her Merlin home in September 1970. Four months later, in January 1971, 57-year-old Belva Russell was beaten to death in her Chatham apartment. The pattern was terrifyingly clear: the killer was targeting middle-aged chambermaids.
The investigation into Belva Russell's death quickly led to a suspect. Her common-law husband had bumped into a man fleeing their apartment building just moments after the murder and was able to provide a description. In February 1971, police arrested Gerald Thomas Archer, a man with a prior criminal record dating back to the 1950s. Archer was charged and stood trial for the murder of Belva Russell. In June 1971, a jury found him guilty of non-capital murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Upon hearing the sentence, Archer reportedly shouted, "That's only the first strike against me. The ball game isn't over yet!"
While Archer was imprisoned for one murder, police suspected him in the deaths of Jane Wooley and Edith Authier, but he was never tried for those crimes during his lifetime. In a shocking turn, Archer was granted parole in 1985 after serving only 14 years of his life sentence. He lived as a drifter until his death from a heart attack in 1995. His body went unclaimed and was buried in a potter's field.
The story, however, was not over. Following his death, Archer's estranged wife and daughter came forward with a crucial piece of information. They informed police that Archer had once drunkenly confessed to killing Edith Authier. This confession provided the impetus for investigators to take a new look at the cold cases. In February 2000, authorities received permission to exhume Archer's remains to obtain a DNA sample.
The results of the DNA testing provided the final, definitive link investigators had sought for decades. The DNA profile extracted from Archer's remains was a perfect match to genetic material recovered from cigarette butts that had been collected as evidence at Jane Wooley's apartment back in 1969. More than 30 years after her death, technology had confirmed what police had long suspected. Jane Wooley, a quiet chambermaid, was the first victim of serial killer Gerald Thomas Archer.
