We have decided to make this an international show as we are about to talk about our first story in another country. What country? Well, the lovely country of Canada. Being in a border town it seems fitting to discuss a wild story from a Canadian town as many of the stories we covered on bootlegging and shipwrecks have ties to Canada. This story is something a bit different than what we have done it’s an unsolved mystery case.

The town we are going to talk about in this unsolved mystery case is Blind River in Ontario. Blind River is a town situated on the North Channel of Lake Huron in the Algoma District, Ontario, Canada. The town is named after the nearby Blind River. The population is about 3400 according to a 2016 census. The town made headlines in 1991 when the following unsolved mystery case occurred.

sixty-two-year-old Gordon "Gord" McAllister and his fifty-nine-year-old wife, Jacqueline "Jackie", of Lindsay, Ontario, went on a vacation trip across Canada. They planned to visit her relatives during the trip. They decorated their new camper with family photographs to make it as homey as possible. On June 27, they were on the first leg of their trip when they decided to stop at the Blind River Rest Stop on Highway 17 near River Bend, Ontario, just eighty-five miles from the U.S.-Canadian border. When they arrived there, they walked around and Gord felt that it was a nice, quiet little spot. It was along the Mississagi River which ran next to the picnic area.

On the morning of June 28th, 1991, Gord and Jackie McAllister of Lindsay, Ontario, Canada, were the only two people in the Blind River, Ontario Rest Stop. At 12:55 AM, they were sleeping peacefully when a man identifying himself as a police officer woke them by pounding on their window. He told them they needed to move their RV. When Jackie opened the door, the man barged in and demanded money and valuables. He was armed with a 22-caliber rifle and a 20-gauge shotgun.

He told them, "I'm going to rob you, and then I'm going to kill you."
Gord and Jackie put all of their valuables, including their rings, jewelry, cash, and credit cards, into Jackie's purse. Jackie begged him not to hurt them, promising that they would not tell anyone. As she went to hand him her purse, she dropped it. She picked it up and placed it next to him. The gunman pointed one of the guns at her, as she begged him not to shoot her. Despite her pleas, he did so once in the chest. She fell onto their bed. Gord immediately jumped out of the camper and landed on the ground. The gunman fired at him. He rolled himself underneath the camper to hide.

At that same moment, another car pulled into the rest stop. The driver, twenty-nine-year-old Brian Donald Major, got out to see what was going on. As the gunman approached him, he immediately got back in and tried to start his car. The gunman got in front and shot him through the windshield. Meanwhile, Gord lay underneath the camper, hoping and praying that the gunman would leave. Fortunately, he did so; he got in his own vehicle and fled the scene.

Gord was quoted saying “And I was lying there, just praying to God that he’d keep on running, and he did. As soon as he went by I rolled back out and got up, into our motor home, and drove out onto the highway. I knew I had to get out onto the highway to get some help.”

Immediately after the gunman left, Gord got back into the camper and drove out next to the highway, hoping to get help. He knew that Jackie had been horribly wounded. But only as he stumbled to the road did he realize that he, too, had been shot. He had been done so twice in the back and once in the foot. It was a race against time. He was able to flag down several motorists who went and called for help. Unfortunately, it was far too late. Jackie was already dead. Gord survived his wounds. They would have been married thirty-nine years in September 1991. When he learned that she was dead, he no longer cared whether he lived or died. He felt that his life was over. After being with her for so long, he said it was hard to carry on by himself.

Brian also died at the scene. He was less than half an hour's drive from his home in Elliot Lake. He left behind a wife and a young son. Police officers, tracking dogs, and a helicopter searched the surrounding area but turned up no trace of the killer. Five days after the murders, Ontario papers published a police artist's drawing of him based on Gord's description. Shortly thereafter, a witness came forward. He said that a few minutes after 1 am on the night of the murders, a blue late-model van peeled out of the rest area and headed straight toward his car. He had to maneuver quickly to avoid a collision. The van continued dead east toward Sudbury, Ontario.
The witness' sighting matched up with Gord's account; it led police to believe that the van either belonged to the killer or someone who had seen the carnage at the rest stop. The witness had not seen whether the van had Canadian or U.S. license plates. Police checked out more than 3,500 blue vans on both sides of the border. They came up with nothing.
Police have stated that they are fortunate enough to have a survivor in this case. They hope that Gord will be able to point out the killer someday. After he looked through hundreds of mugshots to no avail, police turned to sophisticated new technology, hoping to improve on the original rough sketch of the killer. For five long hours, he painstakingly matched features from the computer's files against his indelible memories. Slowly but inexorably, the killer's face emerged.
Gord says that he will never forget the killer's face. He does not believe that the crime was a robbery gone bad. There was no resistance to him. Gord believes that he was out there to kill somebody for no reason.

Since the murders, he has believed that the killer was going to come after him since he was the only one who could identify him. He was under police protection for a long time. However, he is at the point now, and was at the point then, where he does not care if the killer came after him. He wonders if the killer kills him, maybe he would get caught this time.
The killer is believed to be approximately thirty years old (in 1991), about 5’10” with a slight build. He has long, stringy blond hair and a receding hairline.

He was driving a blue or brown older-model Chevrolet or General Motors van with white full-size mirrors and white mud flaps. Police suspect that he may have fled to the United States after the murders. They hope that the guns used in the murders may provide a clue to his identity. One was a 20-gauge shotgun firing #3 buckshot. The other was either a .22-caliber semiautomatic Lakefield Mossberg or a Winchester Cooey.

In June 1995, forty-eight-year-old former police officer Ronald Glenn West was arrested and charged in relation to five violent robbery-related crimes that occurred in Sault Ste. Marie earlier in 1995. He pleaded guilty to those charges and was sentenced to eight years in prison. In August 1999, he was charged with the murders of two women in 1970 after DNA connected him to those crimes. Shortly afterward, police identified him as a "person of interest" in the Blind River murders. When he was arrested in 1995, he was living there with his wife and children.
There is some circumstantial evidence that links West to the crime. At the time of the murders, he lived about twelve miles away from the crime scene. He also owned a .22-caliber rifle and a 20-gauge shotgun, the same type of weapons that were used in the murders. His ex-wife also noted that he owned a blue van and looked similar to the composite but with a blonde wig. Finally, he was a former police officer, which would match up with the gunman identifying himself as such.
West was never charged with the Blind River murders. He later pleaded guilty to the 1970 murders and was sentenced to life in prison.
Sadly, on February 14, 2012, Gord passed away at the age of eighty-three, without ever seeing a resolution to Jackie's murder.

The killer still walks free today.

OPP Staff Sgt. Carolle Dionne, the provincial media relations coordinator, says that despite the case going cold, it still remains active and tips are still coming in.

Any person having information regarding the person(s) responsible for the murders of Jacqueline McAllister and Brian Donald Major and the attempted murder of Gordon McAllister can contact the director of the criminal investigation services, Ontario Provincial Police, at 1-888-310-1122 or 705-329-6111. Anyone with information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person(s) responsible is eligible for a total reward of $50,000.

Should you wish to remain anonymous, you may call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS), where you may be eligible to receive a cash reward of up to $2,000.

"I have no illusions of the future. Or maybe it's all an illusion. I don't know. I've always been ready for it." — Gord Downie

We don’t know if in the future they will find the killer and close this case but for all the families involved we sure hope they do

Sources
https://unsolved.com/gallery/gordon-jackie-mcallister/
https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Blind_River_Killer
Wikipedia
https://www.toronto.com/news/cold-case-trans-canada-hwy-double-homicide-still-unsolved-after-26-years/article_c76b3a85-1ffd-5916-880d-dc41558957f9.html?