Donna Francis and Nancy Simms: the vicious and mystifying 1969 killing of Tawfik Nassim

Nancy Simms and Donna Francis

   Montrealers Donna Francis and Nancy Simms are likely both still alive, as they were born around 1950 and 1946, so Chimples tells us that the arithmetic suggests they'd be in their early 70s.

   The man they visited on the South Shore on 17 April 1969, remains dead.

   The two friends were of the tender young ages of 19 and 24 when they went on a terrifying assault and murder robbery spree in April 1969.   

   That spring the two young women, both Afro-Canadians, developed a hobby of hitchhiking and then beating and robbing motorists or taxi drivers that picked them up.

   Francis was associated with Rockheads Paradise bar at Mountain and St. Antoine, a legendary spot known for black entertainment that included many high-quality dancers and many loitering sex workers overseen by brightly-dressed pimps. 

  On 17 April 1969 a Laval taxi driver complained that he had been beaten and robbed. 

  Police arrested and charged the two women. They were sentenced to two years in Kingston prison for the assault. News reports suggest that they also perpetrated other similar attacks.  

   Prison authorities fingerprinted the women and Montreal-area police checked the prints against a database of other crimes. 

 

206 Dauphine

 The prints proved a match to prints found on glasses at the scene of a grisly murder at 206 Dauphine in the Preville section of St. Lambert, just east of the foot of the Champlain Bridge on the South Shore of Montreal. 

   The two young women had brutally murdered Tawfik Nassim, a 39-year-old federal government architect on 17 April 1969. 

   Nassim, born in Egypt, was found dead at his home at 11:10 p.m. Sunday 20 April 1969 after his brother-in-law worried that Nassim was not answering his phone. Nassim's blinds had remained suspiciously shut and newspapers piled up at his door. 

   Nassim's wife and two sons were abroad in Egypt to bring his mother to Canada at the time of his little party with the murderous guests.

    Surete de Quebec provincial police homicide investigator Richard Masson said that he didn't know the motives for the killing but believed that it was not a political killing, as was the fashion during the separatist-terrorist uprising of that period. 

   A rumour had spread that Nassim, who worked for the federal government, was overseeing secret plans but it did not appear to be a politically-motivated act. 

   Donna Francis and Nancy Simms stabbed Nassim 40 times with three different knives, gashed him with broken bottles and beat him with a blunt instrument at his home. 

   The women trashed his home, breaking glasses and tossing items all over the floor.

   The two left the murder scene and caught a taxi near a hospital in Greenfield Park. The cabbie drove them to St. Antoine and Mountain (the location of  Rockhead's) where Simms got out for a few minutes. They then continued on to Durocher Street where once again Simms made them wait as she changed clothes. The driver then hauled them back to St. Antoine and Mountain where they disembarked.

    The driver later told authorities that one of the two young women was bleeding from a cut and the other had torn pants.

   Simms and Francis had a busy evening, as they also committed their other violent robbery in Laval on the same night, presumably earlier in the evening. 

   SQ police investigators found Donna Francis' fingerprints on a fragment of broken bottle glass and Nancy Simms' prints on a beer bock. 

   Francis had been living with her aunt Edna Bailey at 2266 St. Antoine for six months at the time of the murder. Bailey, from a family of 10 and a mother of 11, told investigators that her blood-stained niece woke her on 18 April in the morning to confess that she had killed a man.  

   The women hired lawyer Frank Shoofey, who managed to get their charges reduced from murder to manslaughter. A judge sentenced the duo to 15 years behind bars.

   In August 1973, Francis, the younger of the two, appeared on a Quebec television show to describe conditions in the prison she was serving time in.  Neither was heard from publicly after that. 

  By some coincidence another woman murderer, Christine Lepage, also pulled off a cold-blooded house invasion-style murder in 1981 less than three kilometers away from the crime.