The Boozing Barber: Canadian Serial Killer Gilbert Paul Jordan

Between 1965 and 1987, Gilbert Paul Jordan killed at least ten women in Vancouver, British Columbia. His first victim was English-born, but most were Native women from the notorious Downtown Eastside.

He paid a woman to drink or have sex with him, and plied her with alcohol in his run-down barber shop, or a cheap hotel room. He offered more money if she could chug straight liquor. When she passed out, he forced alcohol down her throat, and raped her as she died.

“They were all on their last legs,” he said at the trial. “I didn’t give a damn who I was with. I mean, we’re all dying sooner or later.”

Jordan learned the barber’s trade during one of his many stints in jail. He ran the Slocan Barber Shop, on Kingsway Avenue in Vancouver’s seedy Downtown Eastside. When he inherited some money, he invested in the stock market.

The investments paid off. He could afford a good lawyer.

Early Life

Jordan was born Gilbert Paul Elsie in Vancouver, Canada on December 12, 1931. He was an alcoholic and high school dropout at the age of sixteen. By 1952, his criminal record included theft, assault, car theft and heroin possession.

Paul Elsie had a ravenous appetite for booze and drunken sex. Soon he was drinking over fifty ounces of vodka a day. Not surprisingly, his companions were other alcoholics.

“Sober people wouldn’t go out with me, so I didn’t have much option,” he explained during his trial. “I didn’t want to drink in my room all by myself.”

According to his statements, he had sex with over two hundred women a year. He sought out prostitutes in the slums and dive bars of Vancouver.

Paul often ran afoul of the law. In 1961, police found a five-year-old First Nations girl in his car. Although charged with abduction, he was never convicted. The case ended in a stay of proceedings in May 1961.

Shortly after Christmas Day that year, inebriated, he threatened to jump off the Lion’s Gate Bridge. Traffic stopped until he gave up the attempt. Soon afterward, he was found in contempt of court in North Vancouver, for saluting Nazi-style in the courtroom.

In 1963, Paul lured two women into his car with an invitation to drink. Police charged him with rape and theft. He was convicted on the theft charge, but acquitted of rape.

The Boozing Barber soon progressed to murder.

First Victim

In 1965, a switchboard operator named Ivy Rose (Doreen) Oswald accompanied Paul on one of his drinking binges. The next day, her nude body was found in a Vancouver hotel room, with a blood alcohol level of 0.51.