John Allore, ex-Montrealer who sought for decades to solve sister's murder, dies in bike crash

John Allore, a former Montrealer best known for his true-crime podcast Who Killed Theresa, died Thursday in North Carolina following a cycling accident.

"We are saddened to share that our Budget Director John Allore was tragically killed in a biking accident yesterday in Orange County. John was a dedicated public servant, a loving father of three daughters aNd a loyal friend", the city of Durham, N.C. said on Twitter.

Allore is best known for his relentless pursuit of solving the murder of his sister Theresa, who grew up in the West Island but went missing while attending Champlain College in Lennoxville in November 1978. Her decomposed body was found in April of 1979 near her dormitory. Police could never establish a cause of death, and suggested she might have suffered an overdose, although facts never established that claim, her brother said.

But her case was reignited in 2002 when her brother John Allore decided to follow a reporter friend who tried to connect the disappearance of Theresa with that of other women in the Eastern Townships who were murdered around that time. In CTV News interviews over the years, Allore said he constantly pushed the Quebec provincial police to reopen the investigation into his sister's death. Allore would routinely return to the scene where Theresa's body was found to search for new leads.

"You just kind of have to catch yourself because your heart is reaching a little bit, and your expectations are getting ahead of yourself," Allore told CTV News last year. He eventually wrote a book about his search for the truth with the help of investigative reporter Patricia Pearson.

"His family had long suspected that there was something fundamentally wrong with what the police had said," Pearson told CBC in 2020.

John Allore first launched his podcast, Who Killed Theresa, in 2017. The first few episodes focused on his sister, but it quickly evolved into other cold cases in Quebec and the rest of Canada, leading to new tips sent to police forces across the country.

But Allore constantly criticized the Surete du Quebec for not trying harder to follow new leads.

"The SQ's position is 'call us, email us information,' so it's a very passive approach," he told CTV News. "They're waiting for the phone to ring."

Allore was 60, and passed away before he got the answer he had been looking for his entire life.