Police, government, society didn’t really care if they were killed. Pickton could have been stopped years earlier.
The pictures of Marnie Frey should break your heart.
OFFICERS DOWN
George Booth was odd.
But no one expected that in less than an hour he would turn a hot, dry coulee in Kamloops into a killing field. And that three young Mounties would be killed on a June morning in 1962.
Booth was thirty-one. He lived in a two-room shack in Knutsford, a hamlet about seven kilometres from Kamloops, with his father, John Wilkes Booth. His being named for the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln suggests an odd quality in the family.
George Booth was a throwback, a man who might have been more comfortable in Kamloops in 1862 than in 1962, happier alone in the woods than with people. He got by on a meagre welfare payment and his skills as a woodsman.
He was a crack shot—his father boasted his son could split a match at fifty metres—and a master at making his own way in the rolling hills around Kamloops. He had built a fortified log cabin he planned to use as a retreat from civilization.
And he was a loner, suspicious of strangers, anyone in authority and, especially, police officers.
Five years earlier, his father had Booth committed to Essondale, a mental institution outside Vancouver. George kept claiming someone was poisoning his morning coffee. It was unnerving.
The four months of noisy, crowded confinement were nightmarish for a young man who cherished solitude and the outdoors.
RCMP officers took Booth to the institution. His father lied and told him the police had wanted him committed.
Still, there was nothing to suggest trouble on June 18, a hot and sunny Monday, when Booth set out for town. He wanted to find out why his welfare payments were getting smaller and renew the licence for a .303-calibre rifle, his father said.
Neighbour Anthony Parrott didn’t think anything was unusual. He saw Booth walking and gave him a ride into town. George looked terrible. He was dressed for the bush, in a dirty jacket and brown cotton pants and a red-and-black checked flannel shirt, his black, curly hair wild, as always. His rifle was tucked into a buckskin sheath.
But he always looked terrible, Parrott said, and he seemed in good spirits.
Parrott dropped him near the provincial government buildings on the edge of Kamloops’ small downtown.
And then things began to go bad.
Around nine o’clock, two conservation officers, George Ferguson and Frank Richter, saw Booth leaving the provincial building with a rifle. He seemed edgy. Ferguson asked where he was going.
Booth pushed the rifle barrel against Ferguson’s stomach. “Get the hell out of here or I kill you.”
They did. The wardens retreated to their office and called the RCMP.
Kamloops was a plum posting for young RCMP officers. With about 10,000 people, it was a comfortable size. The Thompson River runs through the heart of the city, and the hills and lakes provide the kind of recreation popular with the active young men from small towns who joined the RCMP in those days.
In the detachment, officers were getting ready for the day shift. They were hoping for a quiet time. The Indian Days weekend, with rodeos, sporting events, food and—inevitably—some drunkenness and brawling, had kept members busy breaking up fights and taking in drunks.
Monday was the voting day for the federal election, so bars were closed. Things should be peaceful.
Cst. Joe Keck took the call from the game wardens. He and Cst. Gord Pederson were assigned to investigate.
Keck was twenty-five and had grown up on a family grain farm in southern Saskatchewan. He was already a father, with another child on the way. He was good-looking, with a slender face and warm smile and wavy hair that drew movie star comparisons.
Pederson, from Milk River, Alberta, was two years younger, and barely back from his honeymoon. He didn’t know it, but his wife was already pregnant.
Donald Weisgerber was on his day off. He had stopped in the detachment to do a few chores before heading to the golf course to try out the new clubs his wife had given him for his twenty-third birthday.
He was in casual clothes, and unarmed. But the call sounded interesting. He hopped in the cruiser with his friends.
It wasn’t hard to find Booth. He was pacing outside the Motor Vehicle Office. The visit to town had not gone well.
He saw the three Mounties, and he brandished his rifle, still in its sheath. Everyone was immediately on edge.
Booth walked away from the building, and the officers followed, calling on him to stop and drop the gun—instructions he ignored.
With each step, the three young Mounties were heading toward disaster.
Within two minutes, the little group had covered 200 metres. Booth had walked along a dirt road that led to a mostly dry creek and a grassy, arid coulee. He took the rifle from its cover and dropped the sheath. Weisgerber, in his golf clothes, followed closely enough to pick it up and urge Booth to come back and get it.
Instead, Booth scrambled across the dry creek bed and waved the officers away. He pointed his rifle at them and yelled at them to leave him alone.
It was a surreal moment. Seniors from a nearby residence watched the standoff.
An angry man with a history of mental illness, armed with a rifle, faced three young, inexperienced Mounties—one of them unarmed, and the other two with revolvers.
In movies, shootouts unfold with some order, some logic. In real life, they are chaotic, noisy, and deadly.
Booth headed for a rough timber bridge over the creek. From there, he had a chance to disappear into scrub brush on the rising coulee sides.
Pedersen tried to cut off the escape. He closed the distance to twenty-five metres, as Keck and Weisgerber moved closer to the bridge.
But Booth had an overwhelming advantage.
He raised his rifle and aimed at Pederson, an easy target for an expert marksmen with a .303. The first bullet ripped across his back, the second missed, and amazingly Pederson snapped off one shot before dying instantly from a third bullet to the head.
Weisgerber, unarmed, ran for his life and dived behind a gravel skid box at the side of the dirt road, protection at least for the moment.
Keck rushed the bridge and made it underneath. He was shielded from a direct shot from Booth, desperately hoping for a chance to bring him down.
Incredibly, Keck managed to shoot Booth in the stomach, and he fell, dropping his rifle.
Weisgerber saw his chance and bolted from his hiding place, unarmed, to try and get the gun. He didn’t make it. Booth picked up the rifle and shot him three times in the chest.
Keck edged out from under the bridge to see if Booth was wounded, leaning a little farther because he was still wearing his RCMP-issue brown stetson.
Booth shot him in the head and walked into the steep, bush-covered hill.
Three Mounties were dead. And Booth was wondering how his simple trip to town to complain about his welfare payments had gone so wrong.
Back at the detachment, Staff Sgt. Bernard d’Easum started to wonder the same thing. The phone lines were buzzing with reports of the shootings, and he couldn’t reach the three officers on the car radio.
Siren screaming, he rushed to the scene. Every officer in the division scrambled to take part in the manhunt. The detachment didn’t have enough rifles, so officers stopped by their homes or borrowed rifles from civilians keen to help. A helicopter hunted from the sky and dogs scoured the hillsides.
Booth’s reputation as a ghost in the bush was deserved.
But no one could escape the dragnet.
Cpl. Jack White had stopped at home to get his own hunting rifle and, with two other officers, driven up into the hills to outflank Booth.
For two hours, they crept slowly down the hills. Just before noon, Booth suddenly appeared, standing in front of them. Everyone dove for cover, squeezing behind trees, pressing into the dirt.
“He
was so close I could hear the action of his rifle as he worked the bolt to reload it,” White said. They exchanged shots. When Booth rolled onto his side to reload, White shot him in the head.
But the story doesn’t end with the shooting.
Cst. Pedersen’s wife, Betty, was working in her new job in a Scotiabank branch when she saw Carole Finch, another RCMP wife, go into the manager’s office.
Betty was called to the manager’s office minutes later.
You need to come with me, Finch said. Gordon had “received an injury.” But a bulletin on the car radio said there had been shooting and officers were dead. After a month of marriage, Pederson knew she was a widow.
Joan Weisgerber, working at her switchboard in the British Columbia Telephone building, was told by a supervisor there had been a “very bad accident” and Donald was dead.
And poor Ann Keck, pregnant with her second child, strolled into the RCMP detachment to remind Joe to vote before the end of the day. An officer had to tell her that Joe was dead.
More than 1,500 people attended the joint funeral service at the Kamloops arena. Thousands more lined the streets for the procession. Three flag-draped coffins.
John Wilkes Booth said the Mounties should have just let his boy walk away. He created a shrine in his tiny house, with George’s blood-stained clothing on the wall. Built a concrete memorial on a mountaintop.
It was vandalized as fast as he could clean it up.
KIDNAPPED
Shayne Mulvahill was no one’s idea of a criminal mastermind. He was definitely not a likely candidate to orchestrate the kidnapping of the daughter of Jimmy Pattison, one of Canada’s richest men.
He had a tough childhood. His parents abused him, and he bounced through a series of foster homes. His behaviour landed him in a mental hospital for a year as a thirteen-year-old. A poor student, he made it through grade twelve in 1988 and headed straight into a series of unskilled jobs.
When he discovered that crime paid better, Mulvahill took to it with more enthusiasm than success.
The low point came in June 1989, when staff at a Vancouver McDonald’s spotted him heading into the washroom at closing time. They called police, who found Mulvahill weeping in a toilet stall. He had a loaded shotgun and a balaclava, but told officers he hadn’t been able to decide whether to rob the place or kill himself.
By the beginning of 1990, Mulvahill was a twenty-year-old with no skills, big dreams, and a willingness to break the law. He just didn’t know what crime to choose.
As winter turned to spring, Mulvahill and a friend spent afternoons in the Vancouver Public Library, where he read up on kidnappings. Easy money, he decided.
Once he had the crime, he began to research potential victims, and Jimmy Pattison topped the list.
Not surprisingly. Pattison was a British Columbia legend. He started as a champion car salesman, talked his way into a loan to buy his own dealership, and motivated staff by firing the salesman who sold the fewest cars every month.
By 1990, he had built the largest private business in the province, capturing a major grocery chain, an airline, radio stations, and more. And the sixty-two-year-old Pattison had a big public profile, the man who made Expo 86 a success.
Mulvahill read Pattison’s recent autobiography. He learned about Cynthia Kilburn, his thirty-year-old daughter, and found her address in a city directory in the library’s reference section.
He worked on his plan. But Mulvahill was not good on details and had a problem with impulse control. His scheme was both bold and inept, a terrible combination. He didn’t have a gang.
He pitched the idea to friend Jason Manchester, who said no.
So Manchester was surprised when Mulvahill asked him again, with a ransom note already typed. Manchester still said no, but, a week before the planned kidnapping, he introduced Mulvahill to nineteen-year-old Christian Snelgrove, a community college student with a full-time job and a stable family.
“I’m in,” Snelgrove instantly said.
His job was to recruit three helpers to grab Cynthia Kilburn and hold her until the ransom was paid. He asked Nanami Kataoka to recruit the kidnappers from gang kids in North Vancouver, toughish teens with no real criminal experience.
Within days they were ready. A twenty-year-old mastermind. A nineteen-year-old second-in-command. Two armed teens—sixteen and seventeen—to do the kidnapping. A sixteen-year-old in charge of holding the hostage. No real plan.
It seemed more like the plot for a comedy movie than a serious crime.
But there was nothing funny about it for Cynthia Kilburn. Kilburn, her four-year-old twins, and the entire family were all about to face fourteen hours of terror.
Kilburn and her husband, Allan, lived a normal life, despite the family wealth, in a quiet North Vancouver neighbourhood. Neighbours had no idea she was rich enough to be a potential kidnap target.
Until December 21, 1990. Vancouver was suffering through a record cold snap, and Kilburn was fighting an illness, hoping to be better for a family Christmas. She had stayed in bed in the morning gloom, resting while keeping an ear out for her four-year-old twins, a boy and a girl.
The boy first noticed the two strangers coming up the front walk.
Kilburn answered the door. As soon as she saw the two young men standing there, clothes arranged to hide their faces, she tried to slam it closed.
But they pushed in, brandishing handguns. Kilburn was knocked down. The second man in pointed his gun at her and told her to co-operate or be shot. They bound her with tape, hands behind her back, ankles together, mouth and eyes covered. She struggled to breathe.
She heard her daughter calling for daddy. Then the children were dragged to an upstairs bathroom, bound hand and foot, and left alone. The phones were left off the hook.
The kidnappers dragged Kilburn to a stolen car, leaving a ransom note stuck to the front door. They wanted $200,000 right away, and $8.5 million for her return.
“If you call the police, she dies. If any media reports, she dies. Any slowdown in delivering the money, she dies. She is buried seven feet down in a wooden crate. She has three days’ supply of bread and water.”
The two kidnappers delivered Kilburn, still bound and blindfolded, to the sixteen-year-old accomplice. Kilburn struggled to breathe in the darkness, fearing she would die in the car.
The sixteen-year-old, not knowing what else to do, drove her to Manchester’s parents’ house, where he lived with his mom and dad.
Manchester had never agreed to be part of the kidnapping. He let them in, half-dragging Kilburn, who was bound and wrapped in a sleeping bag. But he was furious, calling Mulvahill and demanding to know “What the hell is going on.”
Mulvahill and Snelgrove came and moved Kilburn—“the bundle,” they called her—to the basement of another North Vancouver house.
By then, Kilburn’s mother, Mary Pattison, had grown concerned because she couldn’t reach her daughter. She sent an employee to check the house. The note was discovered on the door.
And things began to move quickly, strangely—and terrifyingly.
The Pattison family called police and gathered together. They feared Cynthia was buried alive. Jimmy Pattison arranged to get $200,000 from his bank.
Meanwhile, Mulvahill made calls to Pattison’s direct line, Allan Kilburn’s office, then his cellphone. He said the gang had Cynthia Kilburn, and threatened to kill her unless his instructions were followed. Around 8:15 p.m., he called Allan Kilburn’s cellphone—the calls now being recorded by police—and gave instructions for the drop of the first $200,000.
The ransom drop is critical, the chance for police to grab the kidnapper and find out where the victim is being held.
Mulvahill told Kilburn to put the money in a red sports bag and take it to a specific entrance in the giant Hudson’s Bay store downtown. There would be a note under a red tablecloth just inside the door, Mulvahill said. Kilburn had thirty seconds to follow the instructions and drop off the money
.
It worked. Kilburn left the bag under a table, as the note demanded. Mulvahill watched him leave, stuffed the red bag full of money in a backpack, and ran into the attached mall.
Mulvahill imagined plainclothes police everywhere in the crowds of Christmas shoppers. He ducked into a washroom, then the posh Four Seasons Hotel. He called Kilburn repeatedly, telling him to call the police off or else.
In fact, police staking out the drop had already lost Mulvahill.
In North Vancouver, Snelgrove and Kataoka, watching Kilburn, were getting edgy because they hadn’t heard from Mulvahill. The pair became convinced they had been double-crossed.
So they decided to let Cynthia Kilburn go, alternately apologizing to her and threatening and making excuses. Kataoka told her the original plan had been to take her on a plane and administer a heroin overdose.
The two teens argued about where to drop Kilburn, and then agreed to leave her near one of her friends’ houses in North Vancouver. The van stopped, and Kilburn had one more moment of terror as she waited to be shot. Instead, Snelgrove apologized and said he got greedy. Kataoka walked her a short distance, then told her to run.
Barefoot, still in the housecoat she was wearing fourteen hours earlier, Kilburn clawed the tape from her eyes and ran toward the front door of her friend’s house.
The prospects of an $8.5 million total ransom vanished.
But incredibly, a band of hapless amateurs had scored $200,000, and got away with it.
Not for long though. There is a sequence in the mob movie Goodfellas in which Robert De Niro kills his accomplices in a big heist because they ignore his order not to go out and show off their new money.
Mulvahill, Snelgrove, and the rest—together happily, despite their earlier rifts—must not have seen the movie. On Saturday, they hired a white stretch limousine and headed out to spend some of their newfound wealth.
Amazingly, they made the downtown Hudson’s Bay store one of their first stops. Security staff had all been given a description of Mulvahill based on the police surveillance when he picked up the ransom. An alert guard did a double take when he saw Mulvahill, then called police with a description of the limo.
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