

What made London such a hotbed for homicidal activity at the time remains unknown, though Arntfield presents a number of theories in his book.
#The tube sock killer series#
The club eventually became the subject of a TV series on the Oprah Winfrey Network called To Catch a Killer, hosted by Arntfield. At the university he is the head of the western cold case society, in which civilians volunteer their time to help unearth new information related to unsolved cases using technology that wasn’t available to the original investigators. “New York and Los Angeles at any given time have had four or five, but London at the time had a mean population of 170,000,” said Arntfield, adding that in megacities like New York and Los Angeles the per-capita equivalent would be about 80 or 90 per city.Īrntfield is no stranger to investigating long-forgotten murder cases.
#The tube sock killer serial#
“So he kept tabs on these people on his own time until they moved from London, and it seems that at least in one case there are other victims in Toronto connected to the same killer.”īased on similarities between crime scenes, and with the help of resources and technologies that were not available to the original investigators, Arntfield concludes that there was at least one and as many as four serial killers operating in London at the time with similar modi operandi who were responsible for the unsolved murders.īut even if all of the remaining cases were found to be the work of a single killer, London would retain the record for having the largest verified concentration of serial killers operating in one place at one time. “Through diary entries, he knew who did it and he was basically stonewalled from making arrests, because they felt he didn’t have enough, they wanted a slam dunk,” said Arntfield. The peer-reviewed conclusions that are presented in his recently published book, Murder City: The Untold Story of Canada’s Serial Killer Capital, identifies two of the killers for the first time, one of whom is believed to have murdered four children in Toronto after eluding police in London. Upon receiving the documents and case files, Arntfield set out to identify the perpetrators of the unsolved murders and sexual homicides of the period, using this rare trove of information while drawing on resources from his work in academia and law enforcement.

Alsop left the cache to his son, who ultimately turned them over to Arntfield.įamily and neighbors of a victim help an artist create a composite drawing of one of the killers.

“It’s unclear when it all came together, but established this compendium of his original diary entries from the 60s and 70s: old documents from a bygone era, Photostats, teletype transcripts and documents created from now extinct technologies that were thought lost to history,” said Mike Arntfield, a local detective with the London police service and professor at the London-based University of Western Ontario. He kept all of his notes and research on the murders hidden until he died in 2012. Sixteen of the murders have remained unsolved, but a new book based on recovered police files offers a new theory on this bloody chapter in the town’s history, unmasking two alleged serial killers in the process.ĭennis Alsop, a detective sergeant with the Ontario provincial police, was based in the London area between 19. Thirteen of those murders were attributed to three killers who were eventually caught and convicted: Gerald Thomas Archer, known as the London Chamber Maid Slayer, Christian McGee, known as the Mad Slasher, and Russell Johnson, known as the Balcony Killer. Over the course of 25 years, the town was shaken by 29 gruesome murders. See Privacy Policy at and California Privacy Notice at. If you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is BELOW THIS POINT:

