The Boozing Barber: Gilbert Paul Jordan and the Making of a Serial Killer

Between 1965 and 1987, a Vancouver barber murdered an untold number of women using a weapon no forensic textbook had ever named: alcohol, poured down the throats of victims already unconscious, in a method so quietly effective that coroners closed file after file as accidental death. Gilbert Paul Jordan targeted Indigenous women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, a population that decades of residential schools, forced removals, and economic dispossession had already left exposed, and that a police department and coroner's office trained by generations of press coverage and prejudice had already learned not to look at too closely. The Boozing Barber traces his five-decade criminal career from his earliest convictions through the surveillance operation and landmark trial that finally convicted him, and into the years of recidivism that followed his premature release. Drawing on trial transcripts, surveillance recordings, and the accumulating scholarship on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, this book asks not only how one man got away with murder for over twenty years, but what a society's institutions reveal about themselves in deciding which deaths are worth investigating — and which victims are worth remembering. A rigorous, unflinching work of Canadian true crime history.