A man arrested 26 years after killing a Vancouver sex worker has died in prison.

Steven Frank Laroche, 58, died in custody on Sept. 11 at Mission Institution, a federal prison in B.C.’s Fraser Valley with medium- and minimum-security units. The Correctional Service of Canada said he was serving a life sentence that began Dec. 19, 1997. It did not disclose his cause of death or details of the offences behind his sentence. The agency said the coroner is notified in every inmate death.

A November 2020 B.C. Supreme Court sentencing decision says Laroche pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the cold-case death of Vicki Black, a 23-year-old mother who worked in the sex trade in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Black was killed on March 4, 1993. Her body was found behind a restaurant on Hastings Street; the decision says she was wrapped in a bedsheet, bound with electrical cord and died by strangulation. The initial investigation ended after two years without a suspect, but DNA evidence linked Laroche to the killing in 2013.

Laroche, then 24, lived two blocks from where Black was last seen. He moved to Winnipeg for work in 1994 and killed another woman there, receiving a life sentence for second-degree murder. The court decision gives no further details of that killing. He received day parole in 2005 and full parole in 2008, which was suspended in September 2009 amid another decline in his mental health and serious suicide concerns. After treatment and assistance in custody, he was granted full parole again in early January 2014.

Police began an undercover operation in 2019 while Laroche was living in Hamilton, Ont. After nearly 90 undercover scenarios, he confessed to killing Black following a dispute over payment for sex in his apartment, according to the decision. He said he became angry after Black tried to sell his VCR for payment and threatened to have friends assault him and damage his car. Laroche was arrested and charged with second-degree murder, later pleading guilty to the lesser offence of manslaughter. His parole on the Manitoba conviction was revoked after his arrest. CSC confirmed he received an additional eight years and 10 months for Black’s death on Nov. 17, 2020.