Fourteen-year-old Teresa Martin was a bright but shy girl, a student at a convent school called Regina Assumpta College in Montréal, Quebec, Canada. She lived with her parents, a school principal and a private investigator, and spent weekends riding horses at a nearby ranch.
On September 12th, 1969, Teresa had gone to the movies with some friends and caught the number 41 bus home at around eleven p.m. At some point after getting off the bus, it’s believed, she was attacked by an unknown perpetrator.
At around three in the morning, a passerby found her body, propped into a sitting position against an exterior wall in the parking lot of the Vieux Cypres tavern, approximately one mile from her home. She was fully dressed, though barefoot, and had not been raped. An autopsy revealed that she had died from asphyxiation, most likely when her killer had placed a hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming.
Most chillingly, the assailant had also carved a message into the girl’s stomach after her death, reading, “F.V. Frenchy I Love You.” This mystifying detail suggested that perhaps the slaying was undertaken as some type of revenge or political message; this motive was further bolstered by the fact that it was clear her attacker had posed the girl deliberately so she would be seen as soon as possible.
Though more than two dozen persons of interest were questioned following the perplexing crime, no solid leads emerged, and the case very quickly went cold. In 2018, nearly fifty years after Teresa Martin was killed, the Quebec provincial police announced that they would be expanding their cold case squad to try and clear the almost three hundred unsolved murders in the area since the 1960s. The murder of Teresa Martin is one of the crimes on their list, and it’s hoped that new advances in DNA technology will help bring the case to a close once and for all.
Crime Immemorial 