Brenda Stinson

In the spring of 1984, Brenda Stinson was a 23-year-old woman focused on her son. She was a mother to five-year-old Johnny, and the two of them lived with her parents in Peterborough, Ontario. Brenda, a former student at Kenner Collegiate Vocational Institute, was navigating young adulthood and motherhood. Her life, however, was stolen in an act of shocking violence that has left her family and community searching for answers for decades.

In the first minutes of Saturday, May 12, 1984, Brenda was seen at the Trent Inn, a local bar in Peterborough. The last confirmed sighting of her was at approximately 12:15 a.m. What happened in the hours that followed remains a mystery. No one has ever come forward to say they saw who she left with or where she went after leaving the establishment. The hours of silence were broken later that same day by a grim discovery in a rural area just outside the city.

Brenda’s body was found in a ditch along Sawyers Creek Road, a quiet, isolated route south of the village of Lakefield. The scene told a story of a brutal and final encounter; she had been severely beaten, and her body was left naked. Investigators quickly classified her death as a homicide and believed that the remote roadside was not where she was killed. The lack of evidence at the scene suggested her attacker had murdered her elsewhere before transporting her to the ditch, a final, dehumanizing act meant to conceal the crime.

The homicide investigation was met with significant challenges from the very beginning. In 1984, the forensic tools that solve many modern cases, such as DNA databases and widespread digital surveillance, did not exist. Detectives had to rely on traditional police work, witness statements, and the limited physical evidence they could gather. With no witnesses to her abduction and a crime scene exposed to the elements, leads were difficult to generate. Despite public appeals for information, no suspect was ever publicly identified, and no arrests were made. Over time, with no new information coming in, Brenda Stinson’s case went cold.

Decades of silence have not erased the crime. Investigators have long considered the possibility that Brenda’s murder could be connected to other violent crimes against women in the Peterborough area. Her case has been examined alongside the 1973 murder of Karen Woodcock, a 33-year-old mother of seven who was also found beaten and left nude on a rural road, and the 1985 disappearance of 18-year-old Michelle Bigras, who was last seen hitchhiking. The striking similarities in the murders of Brenda and Karen, in particular, have raised the question of whether a serial predator was active in the region.

More than four decades have passed, and the case officially remains an unsolved homicide. For Brenda’s family, the passage of time has provided no resolution. A five-year-old boy grew up without his mother, and her parents were left with only questions and grief. As of May 2024, her murder was the subject of an episode of the "Ontario Cold Cases" podcast, bringing renewed attention to a crime that has haunted the community for a generation. Investigators and family members hope that someone, somewhere, still holds the small detail that could finally bring the truth to light. Anyone with information related to the murder of Brenda Stinson is encouraged to contact their local police service or Crime Stoppers.