On the night of April 7, 1968, 18-year-old Roberta Lee McEachern and 19-year-old Franklin “Doug” DuVal stopped at the Olympic Drive Inn Restaurant on Highway 59, just outside Winnipeg. At approximately 11:30pm, the two teenagers were seen leaving the restaurant with coffee and an order of french fries.
They didn’t immediately head home. Instead, Roberta and Doug parked on a nearby gravel road, where they apparently intended to sit together, drink their coffee and eat the fries they had taken from the restaurant.
Within hours, both teenagers would be dead.
Approximately twelve hours after they were last seen leaving the drive-in, Roberta and Doug’s bodies were discovered. Doug was found lying in a ditch. He had been shot twice.
What happened to Roberta appears to have been different. Evidence indicated that she had run from the scene, but whoever was responsible pursued her. Roberta was caught and beaten to death.
Investigators believed the firearm used to shoot Doug may have been a Cooey Model 60, a bolt-action repeating rifle. Despite the investigation, the suspected murder weapon was never recovered.
The surviving Winnipeg Tribune archives provide another small glimpse into the case. Photographs of both teenagers were preserved in the newspaper’s collection and are dated April 10, 1968 – only three days after Roberta and Doug were last seen alive. Roberta’s photograph identifies her as “Roberta Lee McEachern, victim,” and another identifies Franklin Douglas DuVal as a victim. The two names were preserved together within the Tribune’s crime and murder-victim records.
What remains unknown is who encountered the teenagers on that gravel road after they left the Olympic Drive Inn.
Someone apparently came upon Roberta and Doug during what should have been an ordinary late-night stop for coffee and fries. Doug was shot twice. Roberta tried to get away. She was pursued and killed. The firearm investigators believed may have been used disappeared and, as far as the available information indicates, was never recovered.
More than half a century later, some important pieces of their story remain difficult to find in publicly accessible records. There is no publicly available police file number that I have been able to locate, and the material currently available to us does not provide enough reliable information to name a suspect or establish a motive.
What remains is a remarkably specific final timeline: two teenagers at a drive-in restaurant at approximately 11:30 on a Sunday night, coffee and fries taken with them, a stop along a gravel road – and twelve hours later, the discovery that both had been murdered.
Roberta Lee McEachern was only 18.
Franklin Douglas “Doug” DuVal was only 19.
Whatever happened on that gravel road involved another person who knew exactly what they had done. The rifle was never found, and Roberta and Doug never made it home.
Their names, however, remain together in the archives more than 58 years later – a surviving record of two young lives that ended violently on an April night outside Winnipeg.
If you have information on Roberta & Franklin’s case(s), please contact any of the following:
Winnipeg Historical Homicide Unit: 204-986-3819
Crime Stoppers: 1-800-222-TIPS(8477)
Online at: https://www.canadiancrimestoppers.org/submit-a-tip/submit-a-tip
Crime Stoppers provides anonymous tipping
Sources: University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections, Winnipeg Tribune Photograph Collection.
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