Réal Doré

In the autumn of 1982, the quiet, rural landscape of Ormstown, a small community in the Montérégie region of southwestern Quebec, became the setting for a grim discovery. More than four decades later, the homicide of Réal Doré remains a haunting local mystery, a case file that has grown cold but has never been closed by provincial police. The few known facts of the 58-year-old man's final days leave a trail of unanswered questions that stretch from his home in Châteauguay to a shopping center parking lot in LaSalle.

The timeline of events began on Friday, October 8, 1982, the day Réal Doré left his residence in Châteauguay, a suburb south of Montreal. For nine days, his whereabouts were unknown. Then, on Sunday, October 17, a group of hunters walking through a wooded area along chemin Du Rocher in Ormstown stumbled upon a disturbing scene. They found the body of a man, later identified as Réal Doré. An investigation by the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force, quickly determined that he had been the victim of a homicide.

Police reported that Doré had been killed by a single gunshot wound to his head. The state in which his body was discovered added a perplexing layer to the crime. According to police information reported at the time, his pants had been pulled down to his knees, while his windbreaker and vest were pushed up around his chest. This detail has remained a stark and unsettling element of the case, though its ultimate significance to the motive or the sequence of events has never been publicly clarified by investigators.

The investigation continued to unfold days after the discovery. On October 22, 1982, five days after Doré’s body was found, his vehicle was located. It had been abandoned in the parking lot of the K-Mart shopping center in the Montreal borough of LaSalle, roughly 50 kilometers northeast of where his body was discovered. The car offered a new piece to the puzzle, but it did not lead investigators to a suspect or provide the answers needed to solve the crime.

In the years and decades that followed, the case of Réal Doré faded from public view, becoming one of the many unsolved homicides in the province's history. No suspects or persons of interest have ever been publicly named, and the motive behind the killing remains a subject of speculation. Without a clear understanding of Doré's movements after leaving his home on October 8th, investigators were left with a fractured timeline and a crime scene that held its secrets close.

As of May 2026, more than 40 years after the hunters made their tragic find, the murder of Réal Doré is still an active cold case. The Sûreté du Québec's Centrale de l'information criminelle continues to seek any information that might shed new light on the events of October 1982. Investigators and the community are left to hope that a new tip, a change of heart, or a long-held secret might finally emerge from the silence and provide the answers that have been missing for a generation. Anyone with information that could help solve this crime is asked to contact the Sûreté du Québec at 1-800-659-4264.