Ontario Hansard - 18-June 1991
Last week was a week of mourning in Burlington. Last Tuesday, Christopher Evans, John Newby, Jodi Robins and Scott Grenier were all killed when their car went out of control on 1 Side road between Guelph Line and Walker's Line. Two days later, Carly MacNeil was killed and four others injured in a similar accident near Milton.
The road was a popular spot for “joy riding,” said residents and friends of the teens.
Regional police Staff Sg Peter Whittaker said police have never tagged the strip as a problem area for drag racing or speeding.
"Everybody's afraid they're going to lose their best friend next," says Paul Bernier, 17, who knew all five of the deceased. "It keeps going through your mind: 'Who's next?'
Leslie Mahaffy told Karla Homolka her name, and she said she wanted to leave so she could attend her friend Chris Evans’ funeral. They discussed his death, and Karla seemed interested. She asked for more details about the accident, having read some of it in the papers.
(Source: A Marriage Made For Murder by author Brian O’ Neill)
(Bernardo may have been hanging around the 'memorial service' that Mahaffy was attending, knowing that there would be young girls in attendance. He might have even been stalking the funeral home where the dead teens were.)
As the news from St. Catherines filtered down to the general public, tipsters called police with reports of suspicious vehicles. Apparently a brown van had slowly followed a girl on Cecil Drive; its driver had been looking at the girl the entire time. Police were most interested in reports of a blue van with white wing mirrors that had been spotted three times that afternoon, once at Holy Cross High School, once at Orchard Park School, and another time between the two schools. Other rumors had been linked the unsolved Terri Anderson's disappearance with a blue van as well.
Some schools in north St. Catherines recently sent home a note to parents warning them that a blue van or car might be cruising the area. The note stated that occupants of this vehicle may be trying to entice children inside, said Terry Robins, who received one of the notes.
Leslie Mahaffy was from Burlington and was last seen in that city, her concrete-encased body parts were found in Lake Gibson on the outskirts of St. Catharines, just a few miles from where Kristen was apparently abducted.
Kristen French's nude body was found on April 30 (Walpurgisnacht/Beltane), 1992, in a ditch several kilometres away on Side Road 1 in Burlington, about 45 minutes from St. Catharines and a short distance from the cemetery where Mahaffy is buried.
Other strange incidents on #1 Side Road:
Another man driving his pick-up truck down the street exactly one year to the date (June 11th) at night, when his truck burst into flames, he swerved off the road into the ditch and was killed as he hit a tree and was thrown through the windshield. The father of the one teenager who died in the burning car committed suicide in the same spot his son died 5 years to the date.
Another odd thing about the road is that all the trees along the road seem to be dead, all the trees in the nearby forests are alive and healthy.
One old blog, which I can’t find anymore, found out the street was originally a driveway for a farmer who owned all the property in the 1800's. The farmer was accused of killing his wife and daughter, they found the body of his wife but still to this day never found the body of the daughter. The farmer was convicted and was hung in the nearby town of Milton. Many people later claimed that the body of the daughter was buried under the road.
Could this be the work of an ancient cult in the area?
Be aware that Terri Anderson's missing case was also long-rumored to be linked to the Bernardo/Homolka killings as was Nina Devillier.
https://murderpedia.org/male.Y/y/yeo-jonathan.htm
Denizens of doughnut shops and bars couldn't resist the temptation to link the Kristen French case with a dozen other cases of missing girls or unsolved murders. One unsolved murder stood out in particular: University of Western Ontario student Lynda Shaw, twenty-one, was bludgeoned to death and her body set on fire after she was abducted late at night on Highway 401 while returning from her home in Brampton to her student residence. Her abandoned car was found on the highway shoulder with an emergency tire. One theory was that someone had tampered with the tires's air valve when Lynda stopped at a service center just west of the town of Woodstock.
The date was startling: Lynda Shaw was killed on April 16, 1990.
The_Sun_Times_Sat__Dec_7__1991
The_Whig_Standard_Mon__Sep_23__1991
The_Windsor_Star_Sat__Jun_20__1992
The police determined what kind of cement had been used—Kwik- Mix—and that it likely had been purchased at a Beaver Lumber outlet.
All they really had to go on at that point was the paint on the cement blocks and the cement itself—crushed and sifted for hair and other debris.
The paint was unusual. It was industrial, generally applied to engines and motors. Vince Bevan motivated the troops to pursue the paint—what exactly it was, who manufactured it. The next step was to interview all those who might have had an opportunity to obtain the paint at the factory level.
Among the hundreds of people they interviewed, they identified a strange thirty-two-year-old factory worker named Jonathan Yeo, who had a history of aggressive, sexually deviant behavior. Yeo worked at Dofasco, a steel mill in Hamilton.
The paint was not inconsistent with the black paint used in the Dofasco plant. Yeo lived with his wife outside the nearby town of Grimbsy, about ten minutes from Lake Gibson.
Bizarrely, Yeo was living next door to another diabolical figure named John Peter Stark. Stark was the object of a massive, ongoing Metropolitan Toronto Police investigation into the disappearance and suspected murder of his teenage daughter's best friend, Julie Stanton. Stark lived with his wife, Alison. Shortly after the police began to investigate him. Stark picked up and moved way up north to Napanee. Bevan was highly suspicious of Stark because whoever killed Leslie Mahaffy had gone to a great deal of trouble to try and conceal her body. Julie Stanton's body had not yet been found, and wasn't until June of 1996.
There was a Canada-wide warrant out for Jonathan Yeo with respect to the murder of a woman in Moncton, New Brunswick. But before the police could move, another Burlington teenager, Nina deVilliers. would vanish on Saturday, August 10. On August 14, Bevan would discover that Yeo had disappeared from his house on August 9. On August 17, the body of Nina deVilliers would be pulled from a creek in Napanee, very close to where John Peter Stark was now living.
During the Leslie Mahaffy investigation in July 1991, it appeared that there might be a connection between her death and the disappearance of Julie Stanton from Durham Region. Peter Stark, then suspected and later convicted of Julie Stanton's death, had lived in the Niagara area and hair recovered from the cement in Lake Gibson was similar to his. Although later work, including DNA comparison and alibi investigations all cleared Stark of any involvement in Leslie Mahaffy's murder, this became apparent only after the dedication of significant resources to this lead.
Yeo had killed deVilliers, but Bevan was too slow and Yeo too fast. A few days later, Jonathan Yeo blew his brains out after American Customs prevented him from entering the United States at Niagara Falls.
The search of his farm involved 27 officers and a number of samples were removed from the premises but forensic examination disclosed no links to the Mahaffy investigation. Although Yeo turned out to be uninvolved in Leslie Mahaffy's murder, it took a significant diversion of investigative attention and resources to establish this.
Stark continued to hold the interest of the police, but they had also been very interested in Yeo—because of the black paint—in relation to the Mahaffy case. Unless they got something from the crushed cement that linked Jonathan Yeo to Leslie Mahaffy, they might never resolve the case.
(Source: Invisible Darkness: The Strange Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka by author Stephen Williams)
(I remembered seeing an old documentary on YouTube way back about Satanic cults. It stated that disposing a victim encased in cement is also a method used in cult sacrifices. And it is also done by organized crime members.)