Donna was supposed to be squaring up. Those were her plans; that weekend was going to be her last working the streets.
On Monday, she was booked on a flight back to Vancouver and her love, Leon, and their son, Mason, with their growing baby – hopefully a daughter – swelling inside her.
She would never make it.
That was the lead on my column back in March 1998 after Donna Oglive’s splayed body was discovered in a wind-blown gravel parking lot at Jarvis and Carlton Sts. – about five blocks from her favourite pickup corner at Gerrard and Church Sts.
She had been strangled and posed, a friend said, with her skirt pulled over her head.
Her murder came at a frightening time for those who worked the downtown track. The 24-year-old was the fifth sex worker murdered in Toronto in 14 months – and her friends lamented that no one cared.
Fast forward more than a quarter of a century and the announcement of a cold case arrest in her murder is such surprising and welcome news.
“When we say that we don’t give up on victims of homicide, we mean it,” Chief Myron Demkiw said on X. “We hope this brings some sense of closure and justice to her family.”
It’s been a long time coming.
Donna was 5-foot-5, beautiful with her Filipino heritage and black shoulder-length hair. That early morning, when she set out about 1 a.m., she was a striking figure in her long, light gray fur coat, black miniskirt and high-heeled white boots.
And her grieving friends at the time were eager to tell me that she was far from the stereotyped drug-addled prostitute.
She didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs. She’d been with the same guy for more than six years. They had moved to Vancouver some time ago, but Donna had come back for a few weeks to settle an insurance claim. Two weeks became five, and she worked the street to pay her bills. Her friends teased her, though, that with her pregnancy she was sleeping her working hours away.
Her best friend Robin was also working the track that night and they’d met up at about 3 a.m. at their favorite coffee shop at Church and McGill Sts. where they warmed up, complained about the slow night and talked about the settlement cheque Donna was finally going to pick up Monday from the lawyer before heading home to her family in Vancouver.
“She was getting out, squaring up,” Robin told me all those years ago. “It was the white picket fence dream. She kept saying, ‘Just two days to paradise.’”
I met up with Robin again in 2000 to mark the second anniversary of Donna’s slaying. Too afraid to continue working the streets, she was now seeing dates inside in an apartment.
“We have the highest unsolved murder rate,” she complained. “If we were the local Joe, they’d have found who it was by now.“
Many of her colleagues believed the police and the public had forgotten about Donna because of her line of work.
“Yes, she was a prostitute,” Gypsy wrote in a poem for the anniversary. “Do you think that matters to me? Do you think it matters to her mother and father? What about her son?
“We the people who love her demand that Toronto remember her, the public remember that there was a double murder committed and two years later, no one has any answers.”
Now those answers have finally come.
At the time, we had no idea of investigative genetic genealogy, a magic tool of the future that would use the DNA sample seized at the time and lead dogged Toronto Police to a murder suspect.
Proving Donna was never forgotten after all and her accused killer will face justice at last.