The trio fled to Florida, and then California and the West. And they started getting serious about robberies.
Reid and Wright studied the target banks and department stores, the local police patrols, escape routes, and when there was likely to be the most money. They stole getaway cars and used elaborate disguises to distract witnesses, like Richard Nixon masks or dramatic makeup jobs. Wright even tracked garbage pickup schedules and made sure to get rid of evidence just before a truck was due to empty the Dumpsters.
And Reid wore a stopwatch around his neck, a reminder to stay in the bank less than ninety seconds. They became the Stopwatch Gang, high on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
It worked for a while. Reid, Mitchell, and Wright were armed robbery champions, flush with cash, living the high life. They had a hideaway in Sedona, Arizona, amid the stunning red rock towers and the vortexes of spiritual energy that attracted New Age seekers.
But less than two years after they began their U.S. crime wave, the FBI busted Reid and Wright in Sedona in October 1981.
They had made crime pay and stolen millions. And, as much through good luck as good management, they had never shot anyone.
Reid was sentenced to ten years on December 15, 1981, and sent back to a Canadian penitentiary—Millhaven Institute, a violent maximum-security prison—in May 1983. He started writing a novel based on his life in crime, which made its way to poet Susan Musgrave, the writer-in-residence at the University of Waterloo.
She liked the writing; they fell in love and were married inside a maximum security prison outside Vancouver in 1986. Reid’s novel, Jackrabbit Parole, came out the same year and to great reviews.
A year later, Reid was paroled.
It should have been the best of all possible times. Reid was only thirty-six. He was charming, amusing, calming, a brilliant writing instructor and a powerful and witty writer, an effective advocate for prisoners, a champion of restorative justice.
Musgrave was, he says, “one of the most beautiful and interesting women on the planet.” Their children—her daughter from a previous marriage, Charlotte, and the daughter they had together, Sophie—were “two incredible pieces of magic.” He was sought after, embraced by the writing community (though maybe trapped too much in the role of outlaw).
***
But it wasn’t enough. All that light couldn’t penetrate the dark places.
That legend of the young man who went from athlete and student to bank robber in barely a teenage summer left out a chapter. It left out Dr. Paul, the pedophile who introduced Reid to morphine and money and sex and betrayal when he was just eleven.
It left out the dance with the drugs that were always waiting for their time to come again.
In the spring of 1999, the drugs were calling. Reid answered.
And within three months, everything had gone wrong. He owed $90,000 for a stupid, botched cocaine deal, with no way to pay. The bill was due, and the people who fronted the cash didn’t like excuses.
So on June 9, Reid, in a heroin haze, set out to rob a bank in Victoria’s Cook Street Village, a stretch of cute coffee shops and markets a few blocks from the ocean.
It was, Reid says, a crime against crime. No planning. A getaway driver he calls Lintball, a mask that made him look like “bank-robber Barbie,” and four guns, including a Chinese assault rifle. Too long in the bank, no escape route, midmorning traffic.
By the time he left the bank, police were waiting. There was a stupid, dangerous attempt to escape, hanging out the car window, firing at the pursuing police with a shotgun. Pushing into an apartment with two frightened seniors. Falling asleep on a couch while the police waited to come in.
And, after twelve years, back to the penitentiary, this time on an eighteen-year sentence.
Reid wrote an award-winning book of essays, A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden, during this prison term. He served nine years while his daughters grew up, got out on day parole, and was caught with 3,600 contraband cigarettes while driving without a licence. He was sent back to prison.
He was released on day parole again in 2014, a grandfather. Determined, he says, to fall toward grace this time.
THOSE McLEAN BOYS
Maybe Johnny Ussher thought the Wild McLean boys—the youngest just fifteen—weren’t real outlaws.
Or maybe it was foolish to think a Montreal-raised lawyer’s son, an accidental constable in the Canadian West, could deal with the McLeans, products of a hard land and an even harder father.
But when Ussher rode out into the Kamloops country with three other men to arrest the McLean boys on a snowy day in December 1879, he made a fatal mistake.
The McLeans were not ones to go quietly.
While Frank and Jesse James roamed the American midwest, the McLean gang—brothers Allan, Charlie, and Archie, with their friend Alex Hare—were riding British Columbia’s northern interior, taking what they wanted, daring any man to stop them, and growing bolder and more dangerous.
They were young. Allan was twenty-five when the gang killed Ussher. Charlie was seventeen, like Alex Hare. Archie was just fifteen.
But they rode the hills and grasslands around Kamloops and into the Cariboo like outlaw lords. If they were thirsty, they took your whiskey. If they liked your horse, they rode away with it. If they were hungry, or wanted guns, you did not want to get in their way.
It was Archie—fifteen and looking younger, with cropped hair and a boy’s face, baggy pants held high on his waist with a rope, trying to look tough and win his brothers’ respect—who put the bullet into Ussher’s head.
The McLean boys were the sons of Donald McLean, a hard man even by the standards of the frontier.
McLean grew up on the Isle of Mull, a windy, wild island off Scotland’s west coast. He set out at twenty-eight to find a new life with the Hudson’s Bay Company, opening up the Snake River country in Oregon and company outposts in Washington. He was posted to New Caledonia—the British Columbia interior—in 1842. He was thirty-seven.
McLean took to the West. He was a big, handsome, confident red-headed man with a full beard, quick to anger, slow to forgive, and always ready to dispense his own brand of justice. “Club law,” it was called in the Hudson’s Bay Company—an immediate, brutal settling of accounts.
When a company aide was killed in the winter of 1849, allegedly by a young Chilcotin Indian named Tlel, McLean joined the party hunting him down. They found Tlel’s uncle in a Carrier village near Quesnel, but the uncle said he didn’t know where Tlel was.
So McLean shot him dead. Another man, and a baby, died at the hands of the party.
McLean showed no remorse. He wrote to his supervisor about what should be done with Tlel and any accomplices when they were caught: “Hang first, and then call a jury to find them guilty or not guilty.”
But times were changing. McLean’s independence and brutality were going out of fashion as ranchers and railway-men and miners replaced the fur traders. And McLean was a difficult man, reluctant to accept authority, even insubordinate. By 1860, he was called to company regional headquarters in Victoria in an attempt to bring him under control. But he was not a man to be controlled, or to live in a place like Victoria, a hardscrabble outpost with dreams of a civilized future.
Within a year, McLean resigned. He returned to a ranch he had established northwest of Cache Creek, on Bonaparte Creek, prospecting for gold and running a roadhouse for travellers on the new Cariboo Road running to the gold boom town of Barkerville.
McLean already had married once, lived with other women, and fathered at least six children by the time he was posted to New Caledonia.
But in 1854, he had married Sophia Grant, a Native woman from the Colville reservation in Washington, south of the Okanagan. Their first son, Allan, was born a year later. Four other children—two daughters and two sons—followed. McLean was, by all accounts, a loving father to all his children.
But still a hard man. So in 1864, when Tsilhqot’in (Chilcotin) Indians
killed nineteen men on crews pushing a road from Bute Inlet through their territories in a series of clashes, McLean was quick to join the colonial government force charged with putting down the uprising.
McLean was forty-nine. Old at the time. But he was ready for battle, and rode out wearing his trademark iron breastplate, designed to block bullets.
It wasn’t enough. On July 17, scouting alone in defiance of the orders of the expedition’s head, McLean was shot in the back and died.
McLean’s family was left in a bad way. Alex was nine, Charlie was two, and Archie just a baby. The £100 pension for his widow, Sophia, would only be paid for five years.
And McLean’s sister refused to recognize his marriage to an Indian, and claimed the estate.
Sophia and the children stayed on the ranch for three years, then moved to Kamloops in 1867. They were poor, and outsiders. McLean had made no friends in the Native community by killing Tlel and by his general heavy-handedness. The whites wanted nothing to do with Sophia and McLean’s “half-breed” children.
So the boys grew up fast, and hard. As soon as they were able, they signed on as ranch hands, breaking horses, moving cattle—anything to get by. They lived in the saddle, slept where they could.
And, with each year, they shed a few more bonds of civilization. Work was scarce in the Kamloops region by the 1870s, when the gold boom faded. Especially for young men—or boys—like the McLeans.
So the brothers, along with Alex Hare, chose crime—stealing horses and cattle, guns and ammunition, food and anything else they wanted. If you didn’t like it, they would fight you, or beat you.
There is freedom in being an outlaw, and a great sense of power. The McLeans grew bolder, their crimes more blatant.
And why not? The land was vast, and many people made their own rules.
John Ussher was the constable and jailer in Kamloops, as well as a farmer and government agent. The jail was a makeshift building that couldn’t hold anyone who didn’t want to be held. There was no real law.
But the Wild McLeans were going too far—stealing too boldly, challenging anyone in the way. They even threatened the life of John Andrew Mara, the powerful member of the legislative assembly for the region and owner of sprawling ranchland, claiming he had seduced their sister Annie, fathered her child, and abandoned her.
It was just a matter of time before the law could no longer turn a blind eye.
That time came in early December 1879. Rancher William Palmer was riding the hills looking for a big black horse—gelding or stallion, the accounts vary—that had been missing for several days.
Palmer found the horse. But seventeen-year-old Charlie McLean, with his teen’s thin moustache, was riding it, surrounded by his armed brothers and Alex Hare.
Palmer wisely pretended not to recognize his horse, took care to give no offence, and rode to Kamloops to report the theft to Ussher.
Ussher set out to bring the McLean gang in to face the charges. He didn’t expect trouble—just two men came with him on December 7, Amni Shumway, as a guide, and Palmer. John McLeod, a rancher they met on the way, agreed to join them.
Early the next day, the small posse came upon the McLeans’ camp near Long Lake, about twenty-five kilometres south of Kamloops. The boys had been drinking, other people’s alcohol, of course. And not a good thing.
Ussher knew the McLeans. He had dealt with them before and thought they had a relationship. He expected them to come back to Kamloops, not happily, perhaps, but peacefully. For all their threats and brawling, they had never killed anyone.
It wasn’t to be. As the four men approached the camp, someone fired. It was no warning shot. The bullet hit McLeod in the cheek, wounding him. Ussher was either very brave, very foolish, or just very wrong. He walked toward the camp empty-handed, calling on the McLeans to surrender.
Alex Hare attacked him first, rushing forward with gun in one hand, knife in the other, stabbing and slashing Ussher as they struggled. Archie—just fifteen—ended the fight, shooting Ussher in the head at close range. The gunfire continued wildly from both sides for several minutes. Allan McLean was wounded, not seriously, before the three remaining members of the posse retreated, leaving Ussher’s body in the snow.
The Wild McLeans had crossed a line. They took Ussher’s coat and boots and guns and handcuffs and started riding south. They stole guns and food and threatened lives along the way. They killed a shepherd named James Kelly near Stump Lake, for no apparent reason.
You couldn’t say they had a real plan. But Allan had married a Native woman from the Nicola Valley. He hoped that, with their haul of guns and ammunition, the McLeans could encourage the Nicola to rise up against the colonists, providing them with protection at the same time.
It didn’t work. Nicola chiefs weren’t interested. The McLeans were only half Native and had made few friends—Charlie had bitten off the nose of a Native man in a fight.
But back in Kamloops, the threat of an uprising, once again, seemed real. The Colony of British Columbia’s 1870 census only counted non-Natives, and found a total population of 10,580. The Native population was estimated to be at least 25,000.
There were fewer than 500 people in Kamloops, still a village of squat wood-frame buildings along the Thompson River. But a posse of about seventy men quickly formed, armed with rifles and shotguns and revolvers, and set out for the Nicola Valley to bring the McLeans to justice.
The sixty-kilometre ride was hard in the December snow, but by December 9, the posse had trapped the Wild McLeans in a rough cabin at Douglas Lake. The standoff lasted four days, with occasional shots fired on both sides.
The McLeans refused to surrender, vowed to die first. The posse camped in the snow and cold, determined to wait them out.
But their patience wore thin. The posse tried to burn the McLeans out, piling oil-soaked hay bales around the cabin, but the sodden bales wouldn’t light.
What threats couldn’t accomplish, hunger and thirst did. On December 13, after four days, the McLeans and Hare surrendered and were taken to Kamloops, then on to the British Columbia Penitentiary in New Westminster, a grim stone structure barely a year old.
On March 13, 1880, judge Henry Crease began their trial. Crease reminded the jury that the McLeans had a hard life, young men of mixed race with no father, cast out by both Native and white societies.
None of that mattered. A week later they were sentenced to hang. An appeal brought a second trial, and the same verdict.
The McLeans lived through one more Christmas—by all accounts troublesome and rebellious prisoners to the end, plotting escapes up to the last moment.
But in the last week of January, 1881, prison workers began building the gallows. On January 31, the three brothers and Alex Hare were hung together.
POSTSCRIPT
Allan McLean’s son, George, was left to live with his mother and the Nicola Valley Natives, fatherless like Allan before him. He chose the discipline of a military life.
George was at Vimy Ridge in 1917. He captured nineteen German soldiers and killed five more who were trying to reach a machine gun, winning the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
George returned to a hero’s welcome in Kamloops that October, with cheering crowds greeting his train. He stepped down from the railcar just a few hundred yards from where the posse rallied to hunt down his father.
VANISHED
It was a Sunday morning in January, still dark at 7:00 a.m.
Marguerite Telesford pulled on a pair of red sweatpants, black leg warmers, and a baggy sweatshirt. She grabbed her earmuffs—it was cold and drizzling—and went out for her regular run.
And vanished.
Telesford was athletic, tall, and slender, a twenty-year-old former track athlete and gymnast. She ran every other day, despite her busy life—studying to be a teacher, working part-time in a greeting card store, volunteering to help handicapped children.
She lived in Saanich, the largest of Greater Victoria’s patchwork of
municipalities. Her regular route offered a beautiful run along a quiet road through the rural Blenkinsop Valley, then back through Mount Douglas Park under towering trees.
But on January 18, 1987, she never came home.
Telesford still lived with Norma and Bill Cowell, the foster parents who took her in at fifteen. Telesford’s family had migrated from Tobago; when her parents’ marriage split up, she and her mother moved to Victoria. But her mother, poor and unwell, had to give up custody. The Cowells had become family.
Norma Cowell heard Telesford set out on her run, and kept listening for her return. As time passed, she grew more concerned. She called Saanich police.
She was right to be worried. Two other joggers had already spotted what looked like blood and a pair of broken earmuffs on a quiet stretch of Telesford’s route. Houses there were set back from the road, which was lined with trees and brush.
Police confirmed that the stains were blood. Their search of the area found a shotgun shell and a pry bar. A hair on the earmuffs appeared to be from a black person. Marguerite was black. Neighbours reported hearing shots that morning—not uncommon as hunters targeted deer in the valley. But ominous that day.
Police and friends searched the route. A helicopter hunted from the air, while police went door-to-door, and dogs and officers with thermal-imaging scanners hunted for any sign of Telesford. At dawn Wednesday, 250 volunteers turned up to do a shoulder-to-shoulder search of rugged Mount Douglas Park—and found nothing.
As winter turned into spring, the trail appeared to have gone cold. Rewards for information climbed to more than $10,000. Police conducted more than 2,500 interviews. Desperate, they even brought in a seventy-four-year-old man who had used his “dowsing stick” to find a missing hunter in the Kootenay region. Saanich police periodically appealed for help through the spring and early summer.
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