Kelly Jane Evelyn Cook was a 15-year-old girl who lived with her family in the small village of Standard, Alberta. Although her remains would eventually be found near Taber, online records place her home in Standard and show that she disappeared on April 22, 1981, rather than October 1. On the morning she vanished, Kelly received a telephone call from a man who identified himself as “Bill Christensen.”
He said he needed someone to babysit that evening, and arrangements were made for him to pick her up at her family's home.
The seemingly ordinary babysitting request had apparently been carefully set up. Investigators later learned that the man calling himself Christensen had first approached another teenage babysitter in the community. When she was unavailable, he asked about other people who might babysit, and Kelly's name was provided to him. That discovery raised the possibility that the caller had deliberately searched for a young person he could lure away from home under a believable pretext.
At about 8:30 that night, a large North American car arrived outside the Cook residence. Kelly left the house and got into the vehicle with the unidentified driver. Her younger sister later recalled watching her leave from a window. Kelly had told her family she would call once she reached the babysitting job, but the call never came. As the evening passed without word from her, her family contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A large search followed, with investigators and local residents checking rural properties, buildings and surrounding areas, but Kelly and the man calling himself Christensen had disappeared without an obvious trace.
More than two months passed before the case took its devastating turn. On June 28, 1981, people exploring the shoreline of the Chin Lake Reservoir south of Taber came across a badly decomposed body near the water. The remains had been bound with rope and weighted with concrete blocks, indicating that whoever disposed of the body had attempted to keep it submerged and concealed. Falling water levels helped expose what had been hidden. Dental records were subsequently used to confirm that the victim was Kelly.
The discovery reinforced investigators' belief that Kelly's disappearance had been planned rather than resulting from a chance encounter. Police developed a composite image of the man they believed was responsible, described in contemporary reporting as being approximately 30 to 40 years old, around five feet ten inches tall and of medium build. Over the decades, investigators examined more than 2,000 possible suspects, but none of those inquiries produced enough evidence for an arrest. RCMP investigators have described the crime as carefully planned.
Another unusual event occurred only days after Kelly's body was recovered. An unidentified man appeared at the Calgary funeral home where her remains were being kept following the examination and claimed to be a friend of the Cook family. He asked to see Kelly's body but was refused and eventually left. The family did not recognize him as a friend, and reports have noted that the location of Kelly's remains at the funeral home was not widely known at the time. Police have never established the man's identity, and investigators have considered the possibility that he may have been connected to the murder.
The name “Bill Christensen” has never led investigators to an identified man who could be charged with Kelly's killing. The caller is generally believed to have used the name as an alias, and he remains the central unidentified figure in the case because he arranged the babysitting job, came to Kelly's home and drove away with her immediately before she disappeared. No arrest, criminal charge, trial or conviction has ever resulted from the investigation.
Decades later, convicted serial killer Gary Srery was publicly raised as a possible connection after Srery's son said he had encountered the name “Bill Christensen” among aliases he believed his father had used. Srery had lived in Alberta during the era in which several young women were killed. The RCMP, however, told Global News that investigators had no evidence connecting Srery to Kelly's death and that there was no record in their Srery file showing he had used the Christensen alias. He therefore has not been established by police as Kelly's killer.
The investigation has remained an unsolved homicide. Reporting as recently as 2025 continued to describe police as waiting for the information necessary to identify Kelly's killer. The Village of Standard has offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction. After thousands of investigative leads and decades of renewed examinations of the evidence, the identity of the man who arrived at the Cook home under the name Bill Christensen—and what happened to Kelly after she entered his vehicle—remain unanswered.
