In the winter of 1970, Jean Way, a 24-year-old woman, was living and working in Montreal, Quebec. She shared an apartment with a friend on Lincoln Street in the downtown area and worked at the Royal Victoria Hospital. Her life was tragically cut short on the evening of January 16, when she became the third victim in a series of brutal killings that had begun to instill fear in the city.
That Friday evening, Jean’s boyfriend, Brian Caulfield, arrived at her apartment to pick her up for
a date. When his knocks went unanswered, he initially thought she might still be getting ready and decided to wait at a nearby bar. When he returned a short time later and still received no response, he tried the doorknob and found the door was unlocked. He entered the apartment, calling her name, and made a devastating discovery. Jean was found naked on her bed, having been sexually assaulted and strangled.
The murder of Jean Way was the latest in a string of similar slayings that terrified Montreal. The previous fall, two other young women, Shirley Audette and Marielle Archambault, had been found raped and strangled. The killer in those cases had left vicious bite marks on his victims' bodies, a detail the police had kept from the public. In Jean's case, however, this gruesome signature was absent, leading police to theorize that the killer may have been interrupted when her boyfriend first knocked on the door. Investigators believed the perpetrator was likely still inside the apartment at that moment.
Despite the lack of the killer's primary hallmark, an autopsy revealed evidence of a struggle. Dr. Jean-Paul Valcourt discovered two small fibers under the fingernails of Jean's left hand, indicating she had fought back against her attacker. The murder sparked widespread fear, but it would be the last of its kind in Montreal. The killer, who had become known to his victims' acquaintances as "Bill," seemingly vanished, leaving a city on edge.
The reign of terror moved west. More than a year later, in May 1971, a high school teacher named Elizabeth Anne Porteous was found murdered in her Calgary, Alberta, apartment. She had been raped, strangled, and her body bore the same savage bite marks seen on the first two Montreal victims. Calgary police found a crucial piece of evidence near her body: a broken cufflink. Witnesses reported seeing Porteous with a man named "Bill" who drove a distinctive blue Mercedes. Patrolmen spotted the car near the crime scene, and on May 19, 1971, they arrested its owner, a former fashion model named Wayne Clifford Boden, as he approached the vehicle.
Faced with the evidence of the cufflink and his resemblance to a police sketch developed during the Montreal investigations, Boden's guilt became clear. The most groundbreaking evidence, however, came from forensic odontology. An orthodontist compared a cast of Boden's teeth to the bite marks on Elizabeth Porteous's body and found 29 points of similarity. This pioneering use of dental evidence in a Canadian trial was enough to convict Boden of her murder, earning him a life sentence. The killer was soon dubbed "The Vampire Rapist" for his horrific signature.
Following his conviction in Calgary, Wayne Clifford Boden was returned to Montreal to face justice for the earlier slayings. He openly confessed to the murders of Shirley Audette, Marielle Archambault, and Jean Way. For these crimes, he received three additional life sentences, to be served concurrently. In total, Boden was convicted of four counts of non-capital murder and given four life sentences. He was never charged in another similar Montreal murder from 1968, and another man was later convicted of that crime.
Wayne Clifford Boden began serving his sentence on February 16, 1972. He died of skin cancer in a Kingston, Ontario, hospital on March 27, 2006, while still incarcerated. His conviction for the murder of Elizabeth Porteous marked a landmark moment in legal history, being the first in North America secured through the use of forensic odontology, a technique that brought an end to his brutal spree and finally delivered answers for the death of Jean Way and his other victims.
