The Long Road to Justice: How the Brutal Murder of Sixteen-Year-Old Sharron Prior was Solved After Nearly Fifty Years
The Lost Girl
At around 7:00 p.m. on the evening of March 29, 1975, sixteen-year-old Sharron Prior set out for the five-minute walk to her favorite neighborhood pizza shop in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil. Dressed in a sweater, jeans and jacket, she was planning to meet up with her boyfriend, John McAleer, and a few school chums. As her friends waited for her to come walking through the door, they had no way of knowing that she had fallen victim to a predator whose cruelty knew no bounds.
Since it was Saturday night, her curfew had been extended to 1:00 a.m. When she failed to return home at the agreed upon time, her mother, Yvonne, had phoned several of her friends, hoping against hope that she was with them. When she learned that her daughter hadn’t made it to the pizza parlor, she knew something was terribly wrong.
With her heart in her throat, Yvonne had filed a missing person report with the local police. In a misguided attempt to calm the nerves of the clearly distraught woman standing before him, the officer on duty had posed the possibility that Sharron had run away, which he assured her happened all the time.
