The Stranger

Gladys May Hensley, 62, lived alone in downtown Eugene, Oregon. On June 5, 1986, a welfare check found her dead inside her apartment, where a window screen had been cut. Two weeks later, on June 19, the body of 33-year-old Janice Marie Dickinson was found behind a car dealership on Coburg Road. Both women had been sexually assaulted and killed with extraordinary violence, and detectives could tie neither death to anyone.

In February 1988, 73-year-old Geraldine Spencer Toohey was killed in her home on Franklin Boulevard, where the phone line had been cut and the back door forced. The same unknown man’s DNA turned up at all three scenes. He had been living a few miles away the whole time. John Charles Bolsinger was paroled to Springfield on March 7, 1986, after a 1980 Salt Lake City killing for which his murder conviction was later reduced to manslaughter. A burglary arrest in September 1986 took him off the street; he was released again on December 8, 1987.

Bolsinger died by suicide in Springfield on March 23, 1988, weeks after Toohey’s death, and was never charged with any of the three murders. Detectives sent crime-scene DNA out for phenotyping in 2016 and for genetic genealogy in 2018. Parabon NanoLabs narrowed the field to four men. On February 2, 2022, Eugene police publicly named Bolsinger as the killer of all three women.