More from this creator
Other episodes by Kitty Cat.
More like this
If you liked this, try these.
Transcript
The full episode, in writing.
She walked through the quiet streets of Montreal, her coat pulled tightly against the chill, unaware that within minutes she’d vanish into the night—leaving behind a single, neatly folded glove on the blood-slicked snow. That’s the detail that haunted an entire city: one glove, no owner, and no sound but the click of the killer’s boots fading into the alley.
Mary “Marie” Anne Wilson was born in 1932 in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. Her father worked at the local paper mill, and her mother was a seamstress. The family moved to Montreal in 1944 when Mary was twelve, seeking better work and schooling for their children. Mary attended École secondaire Jeanne-Mance, where she became known for her steady grades and her work ethic. She took a job as a secretary at a notary’s office in the city center by the time she was seventeen. In 1951, Mary rented a modest flat on Rue Saint-Denis. She was twenty-three in the spring of 1955.
Montreal in the mid-1950s was a city in flux. The postwar boom had brought construction, American jazz, and a haze of neon lights to the entertainment district. It had also attracted a wave of newcomers: young women from rural Quebec, like Mary, drawn to the city by jobs and the promise of independence. Between 1946 and 1955, the city’s population grew by more than 200,000, with women accounting for nearly half of that increase.
A string of killings began in December 1953. The first victim, Geneviève Leduc, was found on December 12, strangled in her apartment on Rue Sainte-Catherine. She was twenty-six. Over the next eighteen months, five more women were murdered in the same manner, all within a two-mile radius of Montreal’s downtown. Every victim was young, lived alone, and worked clerical or service jobs. All were found either in their homes or nearby alleyways, killed by strangulation, and partially undressed, but with no evidence of sexual assault.
On the evening of March 17, 1955, Mary left work at 6:10 p.m. She told her supervisor, Jean-Paul St-Laurent, she was heading straight home to finish a letter to her younger sister. She picked up bread and canned soup from a grocer on Rue Ontario. Two blocks from her building, the grocer’s clerk, Henri Giroux, watched as Mary paused at a crosswalk, then continued north.
At 6:42 p.m., a neighbor in her apartment building, Lucille Martel, heard footsteps in the hall and the squeak of Mary’s door opening. Ten minutes later, Martel left to walk her dog. The corridor was empty, and Mary’s door was closed.
At 7:25 p.m., a woman’s scream echoed through the alley behind the building. Two teenage boys, Daniel Boucher and Gilles Lamontagne, heard the noise as they returned from a hockey game. They ran toward the source and saw a tall man in a dark overcoat walking quickly away. The boys found nothing in the alley but a dark patch in the snow and a woman’s glove.
At 8:10 p.m., Lucille Martel knocked on Mary’s door to ask about the scream. There was no answer. She tried the knob and found it unlocked. The apartment was empty except for Mary’s coat, purse, and shopping bag on the table. The letter to her sister was half finished on the kitchen counter.
By 10:00 p.m., Mary’s family had been notified. Her father, Georges Wilson, arrived from their home in Rosemont with police in tow. Officers searched the flat and the alley. In the snow, forty yards from the building, they found what looked like drag marks and a single glove—matching the pair Mary had been wearing when she left work. The other glove was later found inside her purse.
The next morning, March 18, 1955, Mary’s body was discovered in a vacant lot on Rue de Bullion, four blocks from her apartment. She was partially clothed, face down, with ligature marks around her neck. The autopsy by Dr. Jean Côté determined death by strangulation, likely between 7:15 and 7:30 p.m. There were no signs of sexual assault, robbery, or defensive wounds. Her watch and jewelry were untouched.
Mary’s killing fit the pattern of the previous five murders. Police investigators, led by Inspector Gérard Pelletier of the Montreal Police, established a task force. The major crimes unit interviewed more than eighty residents in the Saint-Denis neighborhood. Bloodhounds tracked Mary’s scent from the alley to the vacant lot where she was found but lost the trail at the street. Officers canvassed local hotels, taxi companies, and bars for reports of a suspicious man in a dark coat.
Across the six murders, the police documented several commonalities. All the victims had left work or an evening social engagement between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. All had been attacked within two blocks of their homes. Each crime scene contained evidence of the victim being surprised from behind, with no sign of forced entry or prolonged struggle. The killer used a ligature—sometimes a scarf, other times a cord or belt—to strangle his victims. In three cases, including Mary’s, the killer left a glove behind.
The city’s French-language newspapers dubbed the unknown assailant “Le Tueur à la Cravate”—the Necktie Killer—because one victim was strangled with her own scarf tied in a tight knot resembling a man’s necktie. The English press called him “the Montreal Strangler.” By April 1955, the murders dominated front pages, prompting city officials to deploy plainclothes officers in the entertainment district and issue curfews for women living alone.
Police interviewed hundreds of men who fit the witnesses’ description of a tall figure in a dark overcoat. They checked local psychiatric records for anyone previously institutionalized for violent behavior. They also questioned known sex offenders and burglars. At the time, the Montreal police had no central database for cross-referencing suspects, so investigators relied on handwritten files and personal recollection.
One lead came from a tram conductor, Maurice Dufresne, who reported seeing a disheveled man boarding a streetcar near Rue de Bullion around 8:30 p.m. on the night of Mary’s murder. The man’s hands were red and flecked with what looked like dried blood, but he paid his fare and sat silently in the back until disembarking in Mile End. Dufresne described the man as about six feet tall, with dark hair and a limp in his left leg. Police circulated this description to hospitals and clinics.
A crucial piece of evidence was a partial fingerprint found on the latch of Mary’s window. Investigators compared it to prints from suspects, but the quality was too poor for a positive match using 1950s technology. The glove recovered from the alley had a small tear with traces of the killer’s skin cells beneath Mary’s fingernail, but DNA analysis was decades away.
By the summer of 1955, pressure mounted on Inspector Pelletier and his team. Montreal’s mayor, Jean Drapeau, called for the Sûreté du Québec to assist in the investigation. The provincial police brought in handwriting analysts and criminal profilers, who suggested the killer was a local man, likely with knowledge of the victims’ routines and the surrounding streets.
In September 1955, there was a break in the case when police received an anonymous letter claiming responsibility for the six murders. The letter, written in careful block letters, taunted police for their failure to stop him: “You walk past me every day and don’t know I’m here.” Handwriting analysis linked the letter to three earlier taunts received after the previous killings. Investigators analyzed the postmark, which led them to a mailbox in Outremont, but no witnesses recalled seeing anyone unusual.
The investigation continued for two more years with periodic spikes in activity whenever a new lead emerged. By 1958, three more women had been killed in similar circumstances in Montreal, but police could not definitively link these cases to the earlier murders.
The lack of physical evidence and the killer’s ability to blend into the city’s crowded streets frustrated authorities. The glove, the partial fingerprint, and the anonymous letters remained the only tangible clues. Police continued to question and surveil known offenders. They also conducted midnight raids on boarding houses and hotels frequented by transient workers. None of these efforts led to an arrest.
Over time, the murders faded from daily headlines, but the fear lingered. Women continued to avoid walking alone at night. The police circulated personal safety leaflets warning of “an unknown man who preys on women in the city’s darkest corners.” In 1962, the Montreal Police established a new crime records center, allowing for fingerprint cross-referencing and the storage of physical evidence, but by then, the Necktie Killer’s trail had gone cold.
The case remains unsolved. The files on the six murders, along with the glove, the partial fingerprint, and the anonymous letters, are stored in the Montreal Police archives. In the decades since, various suspects have been named, including a former hospital orderly with a history of violence and a dockworker who left the city in 1956. None have ever been charged. No new forensic evidence has emerged that could tie any individual to the crimes.
The murders of Mary Wilson and the other five victims exposed major gaps in mid-century Canadian policing. At the time, there was little cooperation between the Montreal Police and the Sûreté du Québec, and no centralized method for sharing suspect lists or forensic evidence. The absence of DNA analysis, combined with poorly preserved crime scenes, left investigators reliant on witness statements and intuition. The city’s rapid postwar growth, with its influx of new residents and workers, made it easy for the killer to remain anonymous.
The Necktie Killer case is credited with accelerating the modernization of police work in Quebec. In 1964, Montreal became one of the first Canadian cities to adopt a computerized system for cataloging fingerprints and criminal records. By 1970, the city had instituted new protocols for collecting and preserving physical evidence, influenced in part by the failures of the 1950s investigations.
The pattern of young women arriving in the city alone, seeking work and independence, also changed. Employers began offering shuttle services for late-shift workers, and apartment buildings installed improved locks and lighting. The case became a cautionary tale for new arrivals, shaping behavior and policy for years.
The Montreal Necktie Killer was never identified. The neatly folded glove found in the alley on March 17, 1955, remains the most concrete trace of the person who took Mary Wilson’s life. To this day, the Montreal Police archives hold the glove in a labeled envelope—case number 55297. The last page of the file is dated August 9, 1963: a single sheet recording an anonymous phone call, received at 2:32 a.m., in which the caller whispered, “You will never catch me. No one ever will.”