Salim Jiwa
Staff Reporter

DNA checked for links to three killings

Police say Lisa Gavin, 21, Glenna Sowan and Tracey Chartrand, both 25, worked in Mount Pleasant before their murders in 1988.

RCMP plan to check DNA evidence retrieved from the victims' bodies against a sample from suspect Francis Carl Roy, 38, who moved to Vancouver in July 1988 and stayed until May 1991.

Roy was charged this week with the first-degree murder of 11-year-old Alison parott in Toronto in July 1986.

The young track star was lured from her home by a man claiming to be a photographer. She was raped and strangled.

The partly clad bodies of Gavin and Sowan, who had been sexually assaulted and starnged, were dumped in alleys in Vancouver.

Chartrand's remains were found in the University Endowment Lands in April1989. Polic believe she was murdered in October 1988. Roy, who was on mandatory release after serving time for sex offences committed in Ontario, disappeared from Vancouver shortly after being charged with assault in May 1991. He allegedly beat up a restaurant owner.

He surfaced in Parry Sound in Ontario, where he was charged with an offence in November 1994.

Staff-Sgt. Doug Henderson, in charge of a new Vancouver police and RCMP task force formed to investigate unsolved murders, said police are interested in tracking Roy's movements from the time he left Vancouver to the time he reappeared in Parry Sound.