On a summer day in 1981, 13-year-old Ada Anita Court vanished from Burnaby, British Columbia, becoming one of the last victims of a man who terrorized the province. Ada, a female, was last seen on Sunday, June 21, 1981. She had been babysitting at her brother's apartment in Coquitlam and was on her way to meet a friend when she disappeared. Tragically, the apartment complex where she was last seen was the same one where her killer, Clifford Robert Olson Jr., and his family resided.
For
two months, Ada's fate remained unknown. In August 1981, her skull and upper jawbone were discovered in an isolated area, confirming the worst fears of her loved ones. Her murder was part of a horrific nine-month killing spree by Olson, later dubbed "The Beast of British Columbia," who murdered at least 11 children and teenagers between November 1980 and July 1981. His victims, three boys and eight girls, ranged in age from nine to 18.
The investigation into the string of disappearances across the Lower Mainland culminated in Olson's arrest on August 12, 1981, after he attempted to abduct two female hitchhikers. Olson, who had a long and violent criminal history with more than 90 prior convictions, was already a person of interest to police. Facing a charge for the murder of another victim, Judy Kozma, Olson struck a controversial deal with prosecutors. In exchange for $100,000 to be paid to his wife and son, he agreed to confess to the 11 murders and lead investigators to the remains of his undiscovered victims.
This "cash-for-bodies" deal, approved by the B.C. Attorney General, sparked public outrage but resulted in the recovery of the missing children, including Ada. Olson led police from one burial site to another, callously detailing his crimes, which included strangulation, stabbing, and bludgeoning his victims with a hammer or rocks. In January 1982, Olson pleaded guilty to 11 counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to 11 concurrent life sentences, with no possibility of parole for 25 years.
Olson remained imprisoned until his death from cancer on September 30, 2011, at the age of 71. He never showed remorse, taunting his victims' families from behind bars with poetry and outlandish claims at his parole hearings. At his first hearing in 1997, his application was dismissed within 15 minutes.
Years after the tragedy, Ada's family remembered her as a wonderful person. Her sister, Trudy Court, expressed her sorrow at not being able to see the woman her sister would have become. "She was just a wonderful person and I just wish that I could have had the opportunity to watcher her grow and see what kind of a woman she would have grown into," she said. The pain of her loss was a wound that never fully healed for her family and the community she was taken from.
