Alison Parrott - Disappearance

Disappearance

At about 11 o'clock on the morning of July 25, 1986, she received a phone call at her Summerhill Avenue home in midtown Toronto. A male caller, claiming to be a photographer, asked her to meet him at the University of Toronto's Varsity Stadium where, he said, he would be taking publicity photos of her and her teammates. Alison, a member of the Tom Longboat Roadrunners, was to participate in an international track-and-field meet in Plainfield, New Jersey, on 1 August, exactly a week later. She phoned her mother, Lesley, at work and got permission to attend the session (the same man had called 11 days earlier, while Alison had been at summer camp, asking for her). She then left to keep the appointment, leaving word with the family housekeeper. When she failed to return home by six p.m., Peter and Lesley Parrott inquired among their neighbours, none of whom had seen her; they then called police. Alison was found dead two evenings later in a densely-wooded area of Kings Mill Park, on the Humber River just below the Old Mill subway station: she had been raped and strangled.

In May, 1987, Lesley Parrott, aided by colleagues at the advertising agency where she worked, launched the Canada-wide "Stay Alert...Stay Safe" program. Aimed at children aged seven through 10, the program's main objective was to attune children's instincts to dangerous situations, whether at home or elsewhere: eventually it extended even to promoting safety on the Internet.