Original subtitles

[John] For the past 45 years,

I have been investigating the unsolved death

of my sister, Theresa Allore.

Theresa disappeared in Quebec, Canada,

in 1978.

We were being told by the police

that it could've been a drug overdose,

homicide is off the radar.

She was not a drug addict.

To me, her being found in her bra,

in her underwear, in the middle of nowhere,

suggests sexual murder.

I just wanted to know whatever the truth was.

It's decades later.

I wasn't supposed to do my...

whole life doing this.

I know my parents worry about me.

I know my brother worries.

[Andre] I feel very much that this is

a story about two tragedies.

It's important for me to be here today

to be part of the work that John started

on the investigation of my sister, Theresa's, death.

I seriously thought about not doing it,

but I wouldn't be able to live with myself

if I didn't partake in this

and try to complete the story in some way, for John

and for the family, for all of us.

[music]

I ride a bike and I cycle at least 30 miles every day

because I need two hours to myself.

My sister, definitely, I think, found a sense

of escape on the bike.

I even find myself adopting her style,

which was to ride low.

And it's not a heady thing. I don't make too much about it,

but I know what it is.

I know why I do it.

The more I'd investigate the murder of my sister,

the more I'm forced to confront

the horror of Theresa's death

because your whole objective is to know the truth.

So I'm being forced to confront

the place I don't really wanna go

whether I like it or not.

I come from a family of a brother and a sister.

Theresa was my older sister.

I also have an older brother, Andre.

We, all three of us, were born

in Southern Ontario in Canada.

[Andre] It was always a fun time growing up,

and with John and Theresa,

there was always something going on.

There was never a dull moment.

Theresa was fun, adventurous,

caring.

She would stick up for the little guy,

and I definitely looked up to Theresa.

We all did.

By the late summer of 1978,

Theresa had decided on going to Champlain College

in a rural town called Lennoxville,

about 100 miles outside of Montreal.

My brother was also at the same school.

Theresa was last seen around 6:00 in the evening

outside the dining hall

where students traditionally waited for the bus.

Her residence was about 10 kilometers from the campus.

The first realization that something is wrong

is that she had told a couple of friends

that she might stop by their room

to listen to records later,

after she finished her book report,

and she's a no-show.

People are like,

"Well, maybe she decided to go back to Montreal.

We'll see her in class Monday morning."

Monday arrives. There's no sign of Theresa.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

Fellow students notify my brother who was there

and say, "None of us have seen Theresa."

My worry meter at that time was very, very high.

Went to her room.

Things look like they hadn't been touched

and she hadn't been there.

Then, Friday, I called home and I said,

"Theresa has been missing for a week."

[John] My parents come into my bedroom

and they say to me,

"Theresa's missing.

We're gonna drive to Quebec to find out what's going on."

There's meetings between my parents and the police

and school officials.

Some of the theories that the authorities told my parents

were, "Your daughter is a runaway.

Your daughter is a drug dealer

and she's running drugs.

Your daughter is a lesbian.

She's ashamed and she's decided to isolate herself."

None of those theories made sense to my family.

But a missing person investigation was initiated.

There were posters made up with Theresa's photo,

"Have you seen this women?"

And notices in the local newspapers.

[Andre] My parents thought that the local police

who were involved in the investigation

were doing what they needed to do.

But it wasn't really going anywhere.

Now it's Christmas time

and we're all back home,

dealing with Theresa's disappearance.

We all knew something was horribly wrong.

[John] Our Christmases were so full of life.

That was gone.

But there was always that hope

that this would resolve itself.

And she would show up, and it would be

some kind of grandiose misunderstanding.

Good Friday, April 13th, 1979,

it's spring.

Snow is starting to melt.

There's a musk rat trapper

at the side of the road in Compton, Quebec,

which is about a kilometer

from the student residence where Theresa had been living.

And he goes into a small wooded area

to set some traps.

And he sees, in, near some brush,

what he thinks is a mannequin.

And as he gets closer,

he realizes that it's the body of a woman.

Face down, in a small body of water,

in her bra and her underwear.

And he immediately phones the police.

One of the investigators at the scene

knew that Theresa has been missing

for five-and-a-half months,

so he makes the phone call to my father,

and asked him to come and identify the body.

We all got in the car and drove to the headquarters

of the Sûreté du Québec in downtown Montreal

which housed the coroner's office at that time.

And my father walked down a hallway

into the morgue.

[Andre] To this day, I remember him coming back.

He was as white as a ghost.

And he just told us that it was Theresa.

[John] The guy who went down that hallway

was not the guy who came out the other side

and he was never quite the same again.

When they actually do the autopsy,

the coroner says, "My conclusion is violent death...

of undetermined means."

Well, what does that mean?

Violent death caused by her, caused by someone else?

What is it?

[Andre] "Undetermined violent means,"

those words alone...

Don't provide you with any closure,

at all, on Theresa's death.

[John] My parents were being told by the police,

essentially, that this was her fault,

that it could've been a variety of options

that all blamed her.

"It was a drug overdose and she wandered there.

Some students found her dead in her bed

and panicked,

so decided to wrap her in a blanket

and dump her there."

The message going out to the press is the same message.

There's an article that's published

very prominently, and the headline is,

"Theresa Allore, a history of drugs

or a drug story?"

It was a very intense few days.

Overwhelming.

For five-and-a-half months,

we all questioned what was going on here.

[Andre] I returned to Champlain College

and I was asked to attend a meeting

with the head investigator on the case.

And he presented me with two of Theresa's personal items.

Number one was her wallet.

And number two was her gray scarf.

And he said, "We found the scarf

in the field by the bridge in Compton

and the wallet over on McDonald Road,"

which was miles away.

[John] Theresa's red wallet

had been found at the side of a back road

as if it had been tossed from a moving vehicle,

which was inconsistent and bizarre.

I don't think we ever really made sense of it.

My parents seemed to think

that something happened at the residence,

something must've happened.

Of course, to a certain extent,

you do put that on yourself

because I was at that residence, okay?

Everybody knew one another.

We were all living somewhat together.

How could I not know something?

[John] Right around the one-year anniversary

of her disappearance,

my father was at a crossroads.

"Were they going to take legal action

against the police force or against the school?"

What was the next step?

And I think he just made the decision,

"I need to live now

with my two surviving children and my wife

'cause that's the priority,

and leave matters inconclusive

in regard to the death of Theresa."

At various points,

I think we all blamed ourselves for this

because we were unable to do anything to stop it.

But we all decided it was best to move on.

By 2002, I'm no longer living in Canada

and I had a family of my own.

I had a five-year-old daughter

and I began to question the legacy

of my elder sibling dying,

and what was the message in that entire horrible event?

What was I going to tell my children?

I didn't have a good answer.

So I realized that I needed

to learn about everything to do with my sister's death.

But I'm living in North Carolina,

so I had to very quickly become a cyber detective

to do the majority of my investigation online.

[Andre] John was determined

to investigate Theresa's case

and get to the bottom of what exactly happened.

I was probably a little more apprehensive

about jumping right into this.

[John] The initial step was looking through

libraries of newspaper digests and things like that.

And I phoned the Quebec police.

And I said,

"Can I see my sister's case file?"

They said, yes, I can.

So the next step

was to fly to Quebec and visit the police headquarters

where the case file was.

And it all just cascaded from there.

An investigator brought a box

and I methodically went through

papers and testimonies,

and translating, what does this mean?

At the conclusion of that day,

as I left, I asked,

"What about the physical evidence?

What about the bra and underwear?"

And he said,

"It's been destroyed. It's been disposed of."

And I said, "It's been-- It's been what?"

Well, when did that happen?"

He said, "Well, that happened about five years

after she was found."

And he said it in a manner

that was like, "Well, we do this all the time."

I was shocked. This was another aha moment.

While in Quebec, it was very important for me

to see physical places.

I wanted to see where Theresa was found,

where the wallet was found.

I wanted to see where she was last seen.

And I'm right at the site where her body was found,

trying to reconcile these theories

of she might've overdosed in the residence

or she might've been a runaway.

With how she was found, how she was dressed,

what was missing,

what was found further away,

I came to a conclusion

that this was not a drug overdose.

This was a murder.

This is a panorama of the dump site.

At a certain point, I wanted for the public,

particularly the residence of Sherbrooke,

Eastern Townships, Lennoxville,

to know what I was learning.

And so I had a friend, Patrician Pearson,

who was a crime writer for Toronto newspapers,

and in the summer of 2002,

the two of us, together, wrote a series of three articles.

And I started a website called Who Killed Theresa?

Which investigated the unsolved murder of my sister.

The whole purpose of it was for people to come forward

and contribute information.

After the articles, a reporter contacted me

for a follow-up interview

and then, rather nonchalantly, he told me

that he had a document that he had retrieved.

And it was a second coroner's report,

not the one that said,

"Violent death of undetermined means."

This document was from the day

of the discovery of the body, April 13th, 1979.

The new document was faxed over to me,

so I'm reading along and it says,

"Strangulation marks around the neck."

And I'm like, "What?

How does this piece of evidence

reconcile with a drug overdose?"

To me, it points to homicide.

But what you read on paper

is only leading you to more questions

for which you want more information,

which leads to more questions.

So one of the things I wanted to do

was to verify if there was drugs in her system

when she died.

And I was trying to find the toxicological report.

And lo and behold,

it was in my father's pile of documents.

But it was kinda hidden,

and it seems to me that he hadn't looked at it either.

When I looked at the toxicological report,

it stated undeniably

that there were no evidence of drugs in her system.

None. Nothing.

This was a huge eye-opener

to hear something that was determined

years ago but was kept from the family.

[John] You have another document

that flies in the face of the police's theory.

They say drugs, this document says no drugs.

I began to realize that, "Wait a minute,

the police are an inhibitor to the process."

Why didn't they fully investigate my sister's case?

The realization that my sister, Theresa, was murdered

naturally led to "By who?"

So I began to look at the public record

about what else was going on at that time

in the area around the college campus

and came to find

that not only was it a time

of intensely clustered sexual assaults against women,

but also there were an awful lot of murders happening

that I felt were related or informative

to Theresa's murder.

The earliest case at 17 months

before Theresa's incident,

a woman in her 20s named Louise Camirand

is last seen at a corner store

in downtown Sherbrooke.

Her body is found in the woods just outside of Sherbrooke.

She was raped and there was a boot lace around her neck.

In January 1978,

10-year-old Manon Dubé

goes missing in downtown Sherbrooke.

Her body is found in a creek

not far from where Theresa's body was found.

In June, 18-year-old Carole Fecteau

is found naked in a stream.

Her wallet is found deposited by the side of the road.

None of the cases,

Dubé, Louise Camirand, Carole Fecteau,

were ever solved.

One of the things that just seemed logical to me to do,

"Why don't we document where they were found

and see if there is some kind of association

with the geographic plot points?"

The most striking thing about the map, initially,

is somebody is committing a crime

in the cluster around downtown Sherbrooke

and then disposing of the evidence.

What I suspected was that one offender

was responsible for these murders.

[Andre] John was developing

more of a serial killer type of theory

around what had happened to Theresa.

This wasn't just an isolated case anymore.

There were other women in the area

that died in similar situation.

I needed the muscle of a professional

and that muscle was Kim Rossmo.

He's a Canadian who was trained

as a behavioral profilest by the FBI in Quantico.

And we went to him and said,

"Well, I have a map where I plotted all these points."

He said, "That's geographic profiling."

Through the data points,

what you wanna arrive at

is a probable location

of where the offender lived or habituated,

and ultimately who that offender was.

And I asked him, "Based on what we know,

can you suggest an offender

who would most likely be responsible for these murders?"

And he said, "Yes, I can,

and his name is Luc Gregoire."

Kim Rossmo told me

Luc Gregoire had a rap sheet in the area

for numerous sexual assaults and rapes.

And in 1993,

he committed the murder of a convenient store clerk,

and for that, he was convicted and given a life sentence.

[Andre] I thought that Luc Gregoire

could have been the person

who is responsible for Theresa's death

and other women who died of a similar nature

in the area.

[John] So Kim Rossmo contacted the Sûreté du Québec,

saying that it's highly probable

that these unsolved murders

were committed by one person

and the cases need to be looked at together.

So that was the lever that was pulled to say,

"Okay, police, you have your professional verdict.

Investigate these crimes

as the possible work of a serial sexual offender."

The evidence was stacking up against Gregoire.

It felt I was moving in the right direction.

[music]

The pursuit of Luc Gregoire

was done in conjunction with the Sûreté du Québec.

I have had helpful investigators

and not so helpful investigators.

And for a time, I had a very helpful investigator

who planted a mole in Gregoire's cell

to see if they could get Gregoire to admit something

and he never did.

And then in 2015, he died in prison.

There was no follow-up from the police.

I wanted justice for my sister and my family,

so I partnered again with Patricia Pearson

to write a book.

It was called Wish You Were Here.

And it laid out the case against Luc Gregoire.

One of the points of the book

was for people to respond to it

and say, "You're right" or "You're wrong."

The book comes out in the fall of 2020.

You go fishing and you wait to see what you're gonna catch.

After the book was published, it took a while,

but, eventually, people started to come forward

with potential suspects.

And in the fall of 2021,

I received an email from a person

living in the Eastern Townships and Sherbrooke

who I will call Alex,

who wanted to report to me

a deathbed confession by a relative

named Gerald Lachance.

And it was about an episode

where he was involved in the abduction

and murder of a young woman

in the fall of 1978.

So the story is this.

Gerald Lachance was out joyriding

with his older brother, Regis Lachance

and a third person who was described

as younger in the driver's seat.

And they picked up a young female hitchhiker

in Lennoxville, Quebec where my sister was last seen.

They proceeded to drive.

Somewhere along the way,

they pulled over at the side of the road,

and Regis got out of the passenger seat

and dragged the young woman out of the car

down an embankment,

and disappeared into the darkness in the night.

After a period of time,

Gerald gets out of the car to see what's happened.

He walks down the embankment

and discovers his older brother

holding the hitchhiker underwater

as if to drown or choke them.

He says, "What's going on?"

Regis bursts out and says, "Get back in the car."

And they drive off in the night,

leaving this young female victim dead or near death.

The description of the event eerily matched

what could've happened to my sister, Theresa.

Alex said, also, that the older brother, Regis,

was already deceased by this point.

And that not only was he responsible

for other crimes in the area,

he may have been responsible for other murders.

Alex cited the '77 murder of Louise Camirand.

They cited the murder of Carole Fecteau in 1978.

They also mentioned that the police

possibly knew of him

and that he was a protected member

of organized crime.

Protected means he was a police informant,

meaning the lead suspect in your sister's murder

is protected by the police.

It is, "Holy [bleep]."

Takes your breath away, yeah.

I wanna introduce a piece of evidence here,

the red wallet, belonging to my sister

which she had in her possession the day she died.

The moment that Regis Lachance

was profiled as a suspect,

there was this realization

that the wallet may hold a DNA sample

that would match Regis Lachance.

And I took the wallet and the Lachance DNA swab

to a local lab.

They test them and what came back

is frustratingly the worst possible result.

It was inconclusive.

The wallet contained male DNA.

We didn't know who it belonged to.

That was disappointing, very frustrating,

another dead end in so many dead ends.

But you pick up and you try something else.

I don't go there.

I can't go there.

The idea of holding the wallet

and it holding some powerful connection

with Theresa,

all of that is true.

But none of that is very useful to me

as an investigator

because you're trying not to mourn the victim.

You're trying to solve their murder.

So now I wanna go to Canada

for the specific purpose

of finding even more supporting evidence

that is compelling to say

that this is the right suspect, Regis Lachance.

[music]

[Andre] It's gonna be hard to say what I wanna say.

It's really gonna be hard.

I don't know if I can do it.

[bleep]

March 30th was a devastating day.

My phone rang and it was a state trooper.

"John has been involved in an accident."

"Okay, what kind of an accident has John been involved in?"

There's silence.

"Where is John? Is he in the hospital?"

"No, he died in the accident.

He was struck by a car on his bike."

I broke down and cried.

I couldn't talk to him anymore.

I had to hand the phone to my wife.

We just couldn't believe it, that this had happened.

Both John and Theresa died tragic deaths.

It's really difficult to deal with,

to get your head around. Why?

What did we do wrong to deserve something like this?

Where do you go from here?

Where do you go from here?

John has done so much on his own

over the last 35 years

with all of this investigative work.

This case continues forward

even without John being here.

And I think that's very important

to continue to do.

[John] There is a journalist, Nicolas Bérubé,

who we're going to meet with in Montreal

and discuss the potential of publishing a new article.

When I learned that John was killed riding his bike,

doing what he loved,

it was such a shock.

Two days after his passing,

he was supposed to fly to Montreal.

We were supposed to meet

and discuss the way the story could move forward.

John learned that Gerald and Regis Lachance

were two brothers who lived in the Sherbrooke area

at the time Theresa was found.

They were very violent men.

John believed that Regis Lachance

was the best candidate for being his sister's killer.

We got this information

through a deathbed confession from his brother.

I think Theresa was hitchhiking from Lennoxville to Compton

and she thought that she was going to get a ride

back to the Compton residence.

And she got in the car with the wrong people.

It's a hard thing to really process in your head,

the way that she died.

Probably 'cause, to a certain extent, I don't want to.

[Nicolas] Prior to his death, John gave me

the contact information of this person,

the family member who got the deathbed confession.

And I contacted this family member,

interviewed them to write a story about the confession.

But a few days before the article was to publish,

this family member contacted me

and basically they had cold feet.

If the story comes out, it might upset some people

who are still alive today.

Even if it's a story that happened many decades ago,

they have people that could basically hurt you

if you cross them,

and so I decided with my editors

to not publish this story

because it would put this person in danger.

And I know John was upset about that.

He was not happy but he understood.

I feel that my duty now

is to publish his best theory that we have

and to do it in a way

that wouldn't jeopardize the safety of this person.

And now I feel that it's upon me to do it.

Hello, Mr. Nicolas.

Hi, Stéphane, how are you?

Pretty good. Yourself? Come on in.

I'm good, I'm good, thank you.

Stéphane Luce worked with John for many years.

He's met with that person

who's part of the Lachance family

and got a deathbed confession.

What brought me and John together

was the fact that I was seeking people

that have lived the same thing that I lived.

We both lost a loved one.

He lost a sister and I lost my mother.

She was murdered back in 1981.

We became good friends.

Once the first or second beer was taken,

we would talk about cases

and it would last for a few hours.

I'm writing this story around the idea

that John had contact with Regis Lachance's family member.

[Stéphane] I heard lots of things.

The most interesting element was that Regis Lachance theory.

There were three persons in the car.

[Nicolas] I got the same story you had.

Regis Lachance reportedly was in the back

with Theresa

and there was Gerald Lachance, Regis' brother.

And there was a third person

who apparently was the driver.

[Stéphane] That's what I wanted to talk about with John.

Who's that third person? Who's that driver?

And I said it to the police first

and I don't think they took me seriously.

Finding out who that person is

I think would be the key to the answer

of this investigation.

[music]

The point to all of this is there is still the potential

that the young man who was driving the car that night

is still alive

and therefore is a potential witness

to the murder of my sister.

The driver, that person might still be alive today.

What sense do you have of who that person might be?

It must be somebody very, very close

to the Lachances, most probably a friend

or maybe someone part of the family.

[John] At one point, I was corresponding

with a defense attorney who had worked in that area,

and he had told me about a case

that he had worked on

that had been really screwed up

as consequence to the police's actions

and, in particularly, the testimony

of a police informant.

The police informant's name was Regis Lachance

We were shocked because, did that status protect him

from scrutiny?

Did the investigators have an incentive

to do dig in too deep into who killed Theresa?

Did they explore every avenue

or it was more convenient not to do that?

Did they ask

and they didn't like the answer they were given?

This article can keep the ball rolling.

- True. - Maybe a person

who was afraid to talk

40 years ago or even 20 years ago,

maybe now they have something they wanna get off their chest.

Yeah, exactly. At least answers will be given to the family.

You know? I mean, John's parents

and then John's brother still need answers.

[Nicolas] If that person is still alive today,

the hope was that they can come forward

and they can be contacted by the police

or it was at least a possibility

that they could help solve this.

Well, I hope that someone will come forward

and say what happened that night.

I count on that article to get more answers.

[Andre] John's legacy is, of course,

the investigation work that he's done

around my sister's death.

He worked so hard on Theresa's case.

It's also more than that.

John had many different facets of his life.

He was a stage actor,

budget director for the town of Durum.

He was a family man.

He loved his three daughters.

I will definitely miss John.

No.

My daughter is gonna be so happy that you did.

Whether it makes the final cut or not,

she's just gonna be happy.

I wish Theresa could've known my kids.

I see so much of her in them,

in all of them.

That's really the problem when somebody dies.

It's less about the tragedy

that they didn't fulfill their life.

Although, that is sorrowful.

It's more about how they left you

to fulfill your life without them.

On a very real level,

I never feel that I don't have my sister.

Spiritually, or whatever you believe,

their wisdom carries on and informs you,

or becomes your wisdom or your sixth sense.

I'm not alone on this quest.

I'm not alone. I've never felt that way.

All we do on this earth

ultimately, is we move through space

and it's just not the kick

that it was, moving through space, without her.

[music]

[music]

What happened to my mom wasn't suicide.

On the next episode of "True Crime Story:

Citizen Detective"...

Woman: Her hand could not have been on the gun

at the time it was fired.

I thought I should go ahead and do some actual investigation.

They just covered it up.

I'm not the only one who believes that he killed her.

"True Crime Story: Citizen Detective."