But in fact, officers had targeted a prime suspect by late February. One who wasn’t going anywhere. Scott MacKay, a twenty-four-year-old roofer, was locked up in the Wilkinson Road provincial jail just five kilometres from the murder scene.
MacKay had been arrested February 18, caught by police in the act of assaulting a young black woman on an Oak Bay beach. He was already facing charges for unlawfully confining a woman in January 1986 and a vicious sexual assault ten months later. But at a November 29 bail hearing on the initial sexual assault charge, Crown prosecutors failed to oppose his release.
Wilkie, as it was known in crime circles, was a foreboding brick building more than seventy years old, with a mix of offenders serving sentences of less than two years and prisoners awaiting trial. It was crowded and noisy and prisoners had little to do. So they talked and gossiped and plotted.
Soon they started to gossip about MacKay. And police got their first break in a case that was increasingly looking impossible to solve.
On February 27, a Crime Stoppers’ staffer called Saanich police. A Wilkie inmate had reported MacKay was involved in Telesford’s murder. The same morning, Oak Bay Police Sgt. Harold McNeill got a call from a guard who said an inmate told him MacKay was talking about the murder and saying he needed to get rid of his truck. MacKay hated blacks, the informant added.
But the police had a problem. The Oak Bay police had already searched the truck, found nothing, and released it. McNeill met with two senior officers at the Saanich Police Department. They agreed they didn’t have enough information to get a legal search warrant. So they decided to gamble, seize the truck anyway, and hope any evidence would be admissible in court.
They towed the truck from MacKay’s girlfriend’s house to the Oak Bay police compound. It sat there for four days, until a corporal from the Saanich crime scene unit searched it. He found a blue pompom, the kind that might come from a ski hat, wedged underneath the truck’s frame. There was a single hair on the pompom, which analysis found was “similar” to hair from Telesford’s comb.
It wasn’t much. Telesford’s foster father, Bill Cowell, said the pompom looked something like one attached to a toque in a box of winter clothes kept in a hallway closet in their home. It was now missing. But he had never seen Marguerite wear it. He hadn’t seen anyone wear it in the last year.
But behind the tall fences and razor wire at the Wilkie jail, developments were unfolding in the favour of the police.
MacKay wasn’t popular. And Danny Cain, a thirty-one-year-old career criminal who headed the inmate committee, had a particular dislike for MacKay, who had viciously raped a friend. Cain had spent most of his life in jail and accepted the code that treated sex offenders as the lowest of the low.
He developed a plan to befriend MacKay, get him to talk about the crime, and then turn him in. Other inmates had similar ideas, some encouraged by Cain.
Their testimony would be critical at the trial to come.
Police could find no more physical evidence. By April 1988, sixteen months after the disappearance, prosecutors decided they were ready to try for a conviction.
On April 20, officers showed up at Kent Maximum Security Penitentiary, where MacKay was serving a twelve-year term for the earlier sexual assault, and told him he was charged with murdering Marguerite Telesford. During the five-hour drive and ferry ride to Victoria, officers questioned him. He denied knowing anything about Telesford’s disappearance.
Crown prosecutor Dennis Murray had a tough case. There was no body. The only physical evidence was the pompom, a hair, a shotgun shell, and a pry bar. No eyewitnesses, just second-hand testimony from other criminals. No DNA results. No fingerprints. No motive.
But on January 18, 1989, two years to the day since Marguerite Telesford had vanished, the Crown set out to create a vivid picture of the crime for the Victoria jury.
The trial unfolded over two weeks. Witnesses told about the pompom with a single hair found trapped on the underside of MacKay’s truck. An expert said the hair was from a black person and “similar” to a hair on Telesford’s brush.
Defence lawyer Gary Kinar established that police had searched the truck previously and found nothing, and that there was no other evidence—no blood, no fibres, no damage—even though the prosecutors claimed MacKay had run Telesford down, shot her, and then driven away with her body.
The Crown’s case rested on the testimony of Danny Cain and four other inmates called to testify that MacKay had, in one way or another, admitted killing Telesford. Cain, a career criminal serving a term for armed robbery, testified in handcuffs. He was considered a dangerous man. He acknowledged being a “rat” was frowned on in prison, but said it was the right thing to do in this case.
But the inmate witnesses weren’t just motivated by a sense of right and wrong. The jury heard that prosecutors had agreed to drop drug trafficking and fraud charges against Cain’s wife in return for his testimony.
But the prosecutors failed to disclose that the inmates had all received relocation expenses in return for their testimony, or that they had agreed to Cain’s request to be transferred from Wilkie. Two other inmates testified for the defence, saying Cain had set out to frame MacKay.
And MacKay took the stand, serious in dark-rimmed glasses, grey pants, and a brown tweed jacket. I didn’t do it, MacKay insisted, saying he was being framed.
Prosecutor Dennis Murray painted a vivid picture in his closing address. “What happened here was an execution,” he told the jury. MacKay accosted Telesford. He knocked her down with his truck, then drove over her. She tried to crawl away, and MacKay got out of his truck and hit her with the iron bar found at the scene and shot her twice.
It was vivid, and damning, even if there was no evidence to support the theory. And after fifteen hours of deliberation, the jury found MacKay guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of parole for twenty-five years.
POSTSCRIPT
On appeal, the conviction on first-degree murder was overturned, with the court ruling there was no evidence that showed planning or premeditation as the Crown had claimed. MacKay’s life sentence was unchanged, but the court ruled he could be eligible for parole in fifteen years.
MacKay’s parole applications have been denied. He remains in jail, and maintains his innocence.
Marguerite Telesford’s body has never been found.
MURDER AT SEA
Drugs and sex. Death in a cruise ship penthouse. Mysterious changes to a will. Odd characters. And money—lots and lots of money.
When Robert Frisbee was charged with murder, it was like something out of the movies. In fact, when Frisbee’s defence lawyer (and novelist) William Deverell was asked if he planned to use the case as the basis for a book, he said no. “Fiction has to be believable.”
And Frisbee’s life story was hard to believe.
He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on May 5, 1927, but not as Robert Frisbee. That would come much later. He was Robert Dion. His difficult father eventually left the family.
Young Robert didn’t fit in. He knitted, fanatically. He was bad at sports, effeminate, small—and, unsurprisingly—teased. He wanted to learn shorthand and enrolled in a high school that was almost entirely female. He joined the girls’ choir. He would tell a doctor years later that he had been sexually abused by his older brother.
By his early teens, Robert had embarked on gay relationships with older men. By sixteen, he had hooked up with a New York grifter named Tom Leary, who proposed using Robert as the bait in a scheme to shake down closeted gays.
Luckily, the army came calling. Robert was drafted at age eighteen in August 1945, weeks before the Second World War ended. A short marriage produced a son who died in infancy and Robert’s belated realization—or acceptance—that he was gay.
He was a poor soldier. A girlish underhand attempt at tossing a hand grenade, like a bad softball pitch, produced much screaming from his sergeant. But he was a
n adequate army clerk until his discharge.
Leary was waiting, with a new scam selling fake work papers to jobless naval veterans. He flew Robert to San Francisco to start the business there. But Leary was arrested, and Robert had to make his own way in the city by the bay.
It didn’t take long.
Robert was charming and acquiescent, if a little awkward in social situations. At a party, he met Dwight Frisbee, the rich son of a New England lumber baron with no apparent occupation.
Frisbee’s chauffeur had quit, taking the car with him, and Robert was hired on the spot as a replacement. Charming acquiescence paid off. And perhaps his age helped. Frisbee was forty-eight, Robert just twenty-one.
Robert was happy. He didn’t have to look for work, or reveal just how little he knew of the world.
He had wondered what it would be like to be rich, with no particular ambition. Now he found out, and he enjoyed it very much indeed. Robert and Dwight shared a house in a posh San Francisco neighbourhood. Dwight’s family income allowed servants and days of cocktails and fine food, parties with friends. And more cocktails. Robert discovered how much he enjoyed cocktails.
But his personality never changed as he drank. He was always quiet, agreeable Robert, shying away from unpleasantness or confrontation. Wanting everyone to be happy.
The two became lovers, for a time. (Frisbee, like Robert, had been married, but found it did not suit him.)
But Frisbee, nearing fifty, had always wanted a son. After two years together, he adopted his twenty-three-year-old partner and chauffeur. Robert Dion became Robert Frisbee. The adoption also ensured Robert would be looked after when Dwight died.
Dwight took the new relationship seriously. It would be wrong to keep having sex with a son, he told Robert. That was over.
But Robert had a new, odd love interest. Daniel Kazakes was a failed developer, with a mail-order certificate saying he was a reverend and claimed psychic powers, who sometimes ran struggling little import shops. Kazakes and Robert became lovers, with the approval of Dwight Frisbee and Kazakes’s wife, Irene.
Robert continued to care for his increasingly unwell adoptive father. When Dwight died at fifty-eight, in part because of his drinking, he left Robert a house and $160,000—real money then, when the average income was $3,700. Enough to last a lifetime.
But Robert wasn’t good with money. The inheritance was mostly gone—“squandered,” a court decision sniffed—within a few years. Robert’s prospects diminished. He found himself a man of limited means and no real occupation, living with the Kazakeses. It was discouraging.
But around 1964, Dwight Frisbee’s ex-wife came to the rescue. She introduced Robert to her older friends Phillip and Muriel Barnett. Phillip was a successful attorney with investments and business interests, Muriel at the centre of society life. Together, the couple floated through San Francisco society, eating at the right restaurants and showing up at the charity balls and symphonies.
Robert just drifted into the Barnetts’ employ. He was a charming, unobtrusive guest when Muriel needed an extra man to fill out the table at a dinner party, always ready to run errands or drive them somewhere. He became sort of a secretary-assistant at first, but was soon doing everything—driving them, planning parties, pouring drinks, joining them for breakfasts and dinner parties.
Having sex with Phillip.
Part staff. Part friend. Part pet.
Robert was charming. Odd, with his habit of referring to himself in the third person, and his determined desire to please. Passive, agreeable, never arguing. A gentle soul, everyone agreed. Perhaps too accommodating and easily taken advantage of, some thought quietly.
And he was good looking, with swept-back hair and smiling eyes, although a bit the worse for the drink. With an expression, often, that made it appear he feared he would be hit if he wasn’t useful or amusing, or both.
When Phillip Barnett died at eighty-five in 1984, Robert believed he would be looked after in the will, and that Barnett had promised a bequest that would give him independence.
Instead, he was sentenced to more servitude. Phillip left his millions to his wife, stipulating only that when she died, Frisbee should get $250,000. Most of the estate, Phillip directed, should then go to fund a chair at the University of San Francisco Law School. Muriel had her lawyer draft her own will, incorporating Phillip’s requests.
Robert was fifty-seven. He had become used to a luxurious lifestyle, had no money or skills, and was an alcoholic. So he continued as Muriel’s factotum, dinner date, and drinking companion, living in a nearby apartment with Kazakes. He had power over bank accounts and paid her bills. They started each day with a cocktail, and generally never stopped drinking.
It was no surprise that in October, seven months after Phillip’s death, Muriel had a drunken fall in her bedroom and injured her neck. In hospital, Robert said later, she decided to change her will and had him draft an amendment. Two-thirds of her estate—probably $2 million—would go to him. Her signature on the handwritten codicil was witnessed by Kazakes and one of their friends.
Their lives of socializing, spending, alcohol, and misadventure rolled on. A grand tour of Europe ended abruptly when Robert’s ill-considered attempt to quit drinking cold turkey left him unconscious in a posh London hotel. They returned to San Francisco.
But once Robert recovered—he tried not drinking for a while, but it didn’t stick—Muriel booked an Alaska cruise for August 1985.
But before leaving, she instructed her lawyer to draw up a revised will that she could sign on her return from the cruise. It added a few small bequests—and restored the $250,000 bequest to Robert, not the $2 million he had been counting on.
Robert and Muriel shared a $2,000-a-day penthouse on the Royal Viking Star, a cruise ship targeting the luxury market. (Separate beds, of course.) A butler was at their service, and Muriel was chuffed to learn Elizabeth Taylor had recently slept in the same bed.
On August 19, the ship docked in Victoria. Muriel, Robert, and two friends hired a limousine and driver to see Craigdarroch Castle and Butchart Gardens. Robert helped Muriel back on board around 4:30 p.m., and they arranged to meet the other couple for pre-dinner drinks before the captain’s farewell dinner.
In the cabin, Robert mixed drinks to prepare them for the evening. French 75s, a potent combination of gin and champagne. (The cocktail, invented in Paris in 1915, got its name because it packed the kick of the French army’s 75-mm field gun.) He took a couple of Librium, a sedative, had a bath, drank another French 75, and fell asleep, he said.
At 6:45 p.m., Michael Michael, the improbably named butler, arrived as usual with caviar. Frisbee heard the knock, he said, went to wake Muriel, and found her in a kneeling position beside her blood-soaked bed, her head battered at least four times. “She is dead,” he told Michael.
Frisbee was distraught, and somewhat drunk. “I don’t know what happened, I was asleep,” he told the ship’s doctor.
The ship sailed on to San Francisco. Police were waiting for Robert.
He was a good suspect. He had a motive, if he believed Barnett planned to sign a new will that would cut his $2-million inheritance to $250,000.
And it seemed impossible that a stranger had decided to kill Barnett on a cruise ship. Especially with Robert sleeping in a bed less than one metre away.
Murder on the high seas is complicated. The FBI and U.S. authorities spent months working on the case before they decided the Royal Viking Star had still been in Canadian waters when Barnett was bludgeoned.
Finally, on December 2, 1986, Frisbee’s murder trial began in front of a jury in British Columbia Supreme Court.
Deverell and the defence team faced an enormous challenge. A Victoria jury would be confounded by the whole story, entirely foreign to their experience. Frisbee had a motive, a history of small thefts from Muriel, and was the only logical killer. He was there.
And Frisbee could not deny killing her, because he said he remembered nothing of th
e critical hours.
The defence argued the prosecutors hadn’t proved Frisbee was the killer. But if the jury decided he had killed her, then the defence maintained he was in a state of “non-insane automatism.” He did not know what he was doing.
There was a rather large problem—Robert Frisbee. He had, foolishly, written what he called notes for a novel based on his case while locked up in San Francisco. They were seized by the police and, at least, raised doubts about his innocence.
It took the jury ten hours to find Robert Frisbee guilty of first-degree murder on January 10, 1987. An appeal reduced that to second-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the chance of parole for ten years.
But Frisbee never made a parole hearing. Less than four years later, on July 25, 1991, Frisbee died of liver cancer in the Matsqui Institution prison hospital. He was sixty-four.
THE BOOGEYMAN
It was hard not to expect the worst when the Amber Alert went out at suppertime on a warm September evening in 2011.
Three-year-old Kienan Hebert had vanished from his home in Sparwood, a quiet coal-mining town in eastern British Columbia, almost at the Alberta border.
His parents had tucked the cute redhead into bed Tuesday night wearing his blue Scooby Doo boxer shorts. He shared his room with his six-year-old brother.
In the morning, Kienan was gone.
When police identified a suspect, things looked even worse.
Randall Hopley was a scrawny, forty-six-year-old loner, with a long criminal record—including sexual assault—who lived in a ratty trailer. For decades, a succession of doctors and counsellors had warned that Hopley was a threat and needed treatment. Nothing was ever done.
Police released photos showing an unshaven boy-man, with puffy face, high forehead, bad bowl haircut, and blotchy skin. The expression in his green eyes was at once puzzled and a bit angry.
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