Just a half-hour later, her 1972 blue Plymouth Cricket was found on Range Road 244 by Murray Kitsch, who reported it to RCMP. The car was still running with the headlights on, the driver’s-side door was wide open and the window partially rolled down. Her purse, containing $20, was still in the car along with her jacket, but she had vanished without a trace.<\/p>\n
She routinely drove the secondary road home from her Woodward’s job in the city.<\/p>\n
Two days later, two children found Goudreau’s body lying face down in a watery ditch about six kilometres north of Devon near Highway 60, about 26 kilometres away from where her car was discovered. Her clothing had been completely removed and most of it was discovered nearby, though her navy-blue ankle socks and brown Montero Fashion Ind. Ltd. of Montreal slacks were never recovered. An autopsy found she was strangled to death.<\/p>\n
Fifty years later, her murder remains unsolved. No charges have ever been laid and the killer, or killers, continue to be at large.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/https:\/\/media.zenfs.com\/en\/edmonton_journal_articles_165\/0f28e0b56185d824c7168848a0f59fcc.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
A crime scene photo shows inside the blue Plymouth Cricket that Marie Judy Goudreau was driving on Aug. 2, 1976.<\/p>\n
“The witnesses are aging, the perpetrator is aging \u2014 if not dead,” Marie’s sister Monique said Saturday in an interview with Postmedia. “We don’t know if we’ll ever get closure, but I guess there’s always a little hope.<\/p>\n
“This kind of a last-ditch effort to try and solve this.”<\/p>\n
At the time of her death, Goudreau had just graduated from St. Joseph’s Composite High School in Edmonton and had been accepted to Grant MacEwan College to pursue a career in law enforcement.<\/p>\n
“She was vibrant, liked music and sports. Her family values were such that if someone is in need of help, you help them,” said Monique. “It’s a heartache \u2014 it never goes away.”<\/p>\n
![\"Marie](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/https:\/\/media.zenfs.com\/en\/edmonton_journal_articles_165\/d0b6fbd50b74647074978f217169da82.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Marie Judy Goudreau, 17, was last seen alive 50 years ago.<\/p>\n
Mistaken identity?<\/p>\n
At one point, 45 police officers were working on the case to no avail, despite more than 500 tips, several persons and vehicles of interest, a $20,000 reward and a number of suspicious incidents around the same time.<\/p>\n
Two weeks before Goudreau’s murder, her cousin \u2014 who also is named Marie Goudreau but went by her middle name Louise \u2014 received a threatening phone call, which she said police at the time dismissed as a prank call even though the caller specifically said it wasn’t.<\/p>\n
The call came in around 9:30 p.m. one night from an unidentified male asking for Marie Goudreau. Louise thought he was referring to her cousin and gave him her phone number. Some time later that evening the male called Louise back.<\/p>\n
“This isn’t a prank call. If you hang up on us, we’re going to find you and kill you,” Louise reported the man as saying. “We’ll take you to an old shack. If you don’t take your pants off, we’re going to take a knife and see what we can do.”<\/p>\n
Louise told the Edmonton Journal in 1977 the caller had told her he was coming to her place in a half-hour and wanted her to come out to his car. She hung up the phone and fled to her neighbour’s place.<\/p>\n
“The police kind of laughed at me,” she said in 1977. “They said the guy who called probably had a good laugh over it.”<\/p>\n
There was another suspicious incident in Beaumont two weeks after Goudreau’s murder, Louise had said.<\/p>\n
A friend of hers was driving home at 1 a.m. when a vehicle started to follow her. Despite her efforts to speed away, the vehicle tailed her to her home’s driveway. A man with mud on his face walked up to her car, identified himself as a cop and demanded she open the door, trying to pull it open himself. The girl’s father came out of the house to see what the commotion was and the man drove away.<\/p>\n
Other reports of police impersonators popped up during the investigation.<\/p>\n
In the months following the murder, at least six people in the area reported being approached or stopped by men who claimed to be police officers. In one incident, a male wearing a T-shirt, jeans and bare feet stopped a car and inspected the driver’s licence and registration. Louise also was approached by an unknown man three weeks after her cousin’s murder, who asked her if she was Marie’s sister.<\/p>\n
No evidence connecting any of these incidents to Goudreau’s murder was ever released, though RCMP told the Journal in 1988 there was “enough evidence” to identify the murderer(s) if they were ever found.<\/p>\n
RCMP are asking for the public’s help, noting that details that may have seemed insignificant in 1976 could be seen differently today, Anyone with information about any of these incidents is asked to contact the K Division Historical Homicide Unit at RCMP.KHHU-KHHU.GRC@rcmp-grc.gc.ca<\/a> or their local police service.<\/p>\n Tips can also be submitted anonymously through Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or online at www.p3tips.com\/250<\/a>.<\/p>\n ebowling@postmedia.com<\/a><\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don’t miss the news you need to know \u2014 add EdmontonJournal.com<\/a> and EdmontonSun.com<\/a> to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters here.<\/a><\/p>\n You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber. Subscribers gain unlimited access to The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, National Post and 13 other Canadian news sites. Support us by subscribing today: The Edmonton Journal<\/a> | The Edmonton Sun.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marie Judy Goudreau, 17, was driving back to her family’s Beaumont-area farm after visiting friends in Edmonton when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152625,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[52,49255,49254,1275],"class_list":["post-152624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-edmonton","tag-edmonton","tag-marie-goudreau","tag-plymouth-cricket","tag-rcmp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}