Monday, November 17th, 1980 -- Christine Anne Weller

Christine Weller, victim

It was a murky mid-November afternoon as 12-year-old Christine Weller quickly pedaled the 10-speed, making her way home to the Bonanza Motel in the sprawling, rainy hinterlands of Surrey, B.C., 15 miles from the city of Vancouver. It was not unusual for the blue-eyed, happy-go-lucky tomboy to be playing outside since she loved the wide-open spaces. She also liked going into the shops, especially Surrey Place Mall. A new section of the mall had opened and she was meeting a friend after school on that fateful rainy Monday afternoon.

Bonanza Motel (Jan Bouchard-Kerr)

She spent a couple of hours chatting with friends and wandering around the mall, something that the kids did for amusement. By 5 p.m., late for supper, Christine borrowed a friend’s bicycle to quickly make the three-minute, downhill ride to unit No. Two of the motel where she lived with her parents. She never got there.

Her parents assumed that she was staying at a friend’s house, as she had done several times before. It took the better part of a week before they filed a missing person’s report. Even then, Christine was treated as a runaway. When the police found the bicycle behind an animal hospital on King George Highway, just a few blocks from the motel, they knew something was terribly wrong.

On Christmas Day, a man walking his dog along a dike found her ravaged body at the back of a dump, just north of River Road, along the Fraser River in nearby Richmond.  Christine had multiple stab wounds in the chest and abdomen, and had been throttled with a belt.

The Fraser River (Jan Bouchard-Kerr)

Unbeknown to law enforcement, Christine’s death was the first in a series of brutal murders that would claim the lives of at least 10 more youngsters of both sexes, between the ages nine and 18, from the greater Vancouver area.  The police would eventually identify her as the first victim.