The Boozing Barber: Canadian Serial Killer Gilbert Paul Jordan

Arrest and Conviction

Police tracked the anonymous early-morning call of October 12 to Jordan’s room at the nearby Marble Arch Hotel. When the nude body of Edna Shade turned up at another hotel a month later, fingerprints matched those of Gilbert Paul Jordan. Edna Shade had died of alcohol poisoning. Police placed Jordan under surveillance.

For eleven days, police watched Jordan. During that time, he took four intended victims to hotel rooms in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Each time, police interrupted the drinking binges.

Jordan was heard to say,

“Have a drink, down the hatch baby, twenty bucks if you drink it right down … see if you’re a real woman; finish that drink, finish that drink, down the hatch hurry, right down … you need another drink, I’ll give you fifty bucks if you can take it… “

Two of the women had blood alcohol levels of 0.52 and 0.43.

Police arrested the Boozing Barber as he was poisoning his last attempted victim. She had lost consciousness. When police entered the room, Jordan was lying on top of her, forcing the contents of a large bottle of vodka down her throat.

Investigators linked Gilbert Paul Jordan to at least ten deaths. He was charged in seven, but convicted only in the death of Vanessa Lee Buckner. He received fifteen years for manslaughter.

On appeal, Jordan succeeded in reducing his sentence to nine years. He served six.

In reducing the sentence, Justice Sam Toy wrote,

“Although the appellant has left a trail of seven victims, the last was the first occasion when persons in authority, in a forceful and realistic manner, brought to the appellant’s attention the fact that supplying substantial quantities of liquor to women who were prepared to drink with him was a contributing cause of their deaths, for which he might be held criminally responsible.”

Final Years

In 2000, Jordan tried to change his name to Paul Pearce. At the time, a name change in British Columbia didn’t require fingerprinting or a criminal check. Authorities closed the loophole, and Jordan dropped the application.

In 2004, at the age of seventy-two, Jordan was once more a free man. He immediately violated his parole, and was re-arrested at a hotel in Winnipeg, Manitoba. After spending two more years in and out of jail for parole violations, the Boozing Barber died on July 7, 2006 in Victoria, British Columbia.

Media

The murders by Gilbert Paul Jordan were the basis for the first episodes of the TV crime drama, Da Vinci’s Inquest. A dramatic play by Vancouver playwright Marie Clements, “The Unnatural and Accidental Women”, focused on the victims. A movie, based on the play, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2006.