Gunanoot was the obvious suspect. But by the time police showed up at his house in Kispiox, he was gone. Sarah, their three children, his parents, his brother-in-law Peter Himadam—also a suspect—and his wife had all vanished.
The hunt started small, with special constables sworn in to support the local officer. They had no success, at least in part because Gunanoot—a superb shot, hunter, and woodsman—was a formidable presence. It was easy for police to imagine danger or death behind every pine tree or rocky outcrop.
More and more police and special constables were thrown into the hunt through that summer and fall, to no avail. Police, bounty hunters—eventually even detectives from the famed Pinkerton’s agency brought in from the United States—all tried and failed to find Gunanoot and his band. The provincial government posted a $1,000 reward, huge money in 1906. The lack of success was a galling failure for police and the government.
And a worrying one. First Nations in the northwest were locked in disputes with the government about incursions into their lands, including newly constructed canneries that brought pressure on fish stocks, and a need for larger reserves.
Gunanoot’s successful flight made the government look dangerously weak, the Kamloops Standard warned. “Because of the non-capture of the murderers Simon Gunanoot and Peter Himadam, the Indians in this district are becoming very cheeky and defying the law.”
The British Colonist newspaper insisted this “Indian murderer, who is skulking in the wilds of northern British Columbia,” was undermining the principles of British justice.
But the province was hardly Britain. About 290,000 people were spread over 945,000 square kilometres. (Great Britain had 135 times as many people in a little more than one-third the area.) Just getting to Hazelton from Victoria took five days by sternwheeler, much longer in the winter. The mountains and river valleys were wild and unmapped.
Frustrated searchers reported another problem. They had counted on information from people who lived in the area and had seen Gunanoot and his group, especially as the reward climbed.
Instead, they ran into a wall of silence—not just from Natives, but from settlers and the white community. Gunanoot was respected by both groups, and settlers didn’t want trouble with their Native neighbours.
“Everyone in the North sympathizes with Gunanoot,” the Toronto Star’s correspondent reported. “People of Hazelton declare that a white man would have killed the two ruffians who debauched his wife long before Simon did the job.” (The claim that Gunanoot’s wife had been assaulted was widely accepted on little or no evidence.)
Even the Methodist minister in Kispiox decided not to report a visit by Gunanoot to settle some business affairs.
It was an amazing feat. In the time that Gunanoot was eluding justice, the province’s population more than doubled, more than 60,000 Canadians died in the First World War, and the first cars came to Hazelton. The Skeena paddle-wheelers gave up the difficult run, replaced in 1912 by a rail line that brought passengers and freight from Prince Rupert and sparked another boom in the region. Emily Carr visited Kispiox to sketch and paint the totems.
Almost everything in the outside world changed, but Gunanoot and his family survived and prospered, continuing to trap and trade and amassing a fortune estimated at $75,000 by some sources.
But it was a hard life. By 1919, Gunanoot was forty-four. Two more children had been born in the thirteen years in the wilderness, and he wanted all five children to be educated. And the bitterly cold winters were becoming harder to take.
It was time to give up. Gunanoot made careful plans for his surrender. Through intermediaries, he contacted Stuart Henderson, a former MLA and a skilled lawyer trusted by Native communities. The Scottish-born Henderson dressed more like a small-town rancher than the high-powered lawyer that he was, but had defended twenty-eight murder cases. His fee—rumoured at $20,000—was enormous, but worth every penny to Gunanoot if it kept him from hanging or serving a life sentence in a small jail cell. (For him, it was hard to decide which would be a worse fate.)
On June 25, 1919, Henderson arrived in Hazelton around noon. George Beirnes, a rancher, packer, and friend of Gunanoot, went into the woods and came back with the fugitive. Together, the three men strode into the Hazelton police station and jail, a storey-and-a-half wood-sided building with a steep roof to shed the winter snow and piles of firewood along one side.
Gunanoot surrendered to a surprised and puzzled constable.
He emerged from the bush a folk hero, “of magnificent physique, one of the finest specimens of the real Indian,” the British Colonist enthused. Gunanoot was a legend—“Many stories are told by his fellow Indians of his prowess, of his ability to fell an ox with a blow of his fist, of his ability as a hunter and trapper and his fidelity to his friends.”
There was celebrating in Native and non-Native communities. The continuing tensions between First Nations and settlers and miners had kept the region on edge and discouraged development. Gunanoot, as an outlaw, was seen as a potential leader of dissatisfied Natives.
This was a chance to bring about better understanding between Natives and whites, said the Colonist: “Much development will take place in the northern country when some troubles are thrashed out.” Tourists, settlers, prospectors would all start coming to the region once they learned that the outlaws were no longer roaming the woods and that relations between Natives and whites were improved.
Gunanoot was a celebrity. He posed for a picture with the three members of the Hazelton police before being sent to New Westminster for trial, all of the men in suits and ties and waistcoats. He looked much like the leader of the group.
Henderson earned his money. He arranged a speedy trial, and easily poked holes in the evidence, helped by the long passage of time and the fact that so many of the witnesses were drunk while events unfolded. On October 8, it took a New Westminster jury less than fifteen minutes to decide on a not-guilty verdict.
Gunanoot lived another fourteen years a free man.
TERROR IN THE SKY
On a June morning in 1985, CSIS anti-terror officers followed two Sikh men travelling from Burnaby to Vancouver Island.
One was Talwinder Singh Parmar, the forty-year-old leader of Babbar Khalsa, a terrorist organization dedicated to creating an autonomous Sikh homeland in the Punjab, avenging attacks on Sikhs in India, and enforcing its conservative version of Sikhism. The agents didn’t know the identity of the other man. They called him Mr. X.
The two drove south from Nanaimo to the Duncan home of Inderjit Singh Reyat, an electrician and auto mechanic who shared their views. He was devout, a temple drummer, and his fiercely conservative religious views and strident efforts to impose his will had made him well-known at the Duncan temple. A month earlier, Parmar had asked Reyat to build a bomb. The Duncan man had found dynamite, bought clocks and batteries and electronic gear.
The next morning, the CSIS agents followed the three men as they drove a few minutes from Duncan and headed into the woods. The agents heard a loud bang.
But they didn’t alert the RCMP, or ask officers to stop the men’s car. They didn’t do a thorough search to look for evidence of explosives.
Seventeen days later, Reyat drove onto a BC Ferry and headed for Vancouver and Parmar’s neighbourhood. He stopped to buy two 12-volt batteries. On that same day, two men who have never been identified checked bags onto flights connecting with Air India flights in Japan and Toronto.
***
The first bomb ripped through Japan’s Narita Airport as baggage was being transferred from the Vancouver flight to an Air India flight to Thailand. Two baggage handlers were killed.
Much worse was ahead. When the first bomb exploded, Air India Flight 182 was already in the air, on its way from Toronto to Delhi via London. It was early morning aboard the 747, and most of the 307 passengers were dozing. The majority were Canadians, including many heading back to visit family in India. It was a quiet time for the twenty-two crew.
>
Less than an hour after the Narita blast, a suitcase bomb exploded in the rear cargo hold of Flight 182. The plane split in two, lengthwise. Wreckage and passengers fell more than nine kilometres into the North Atlantic, about 190 kilometres off the coast of Ireland. There were no survivors.
And for the victims, there would be no justice.
Terrorism and mass murder had come to Canada. The country was hopelessly unprepared, despite at least a decade of warnings that a small group of militants among Canada’s 140,000 Sikhs was becoming more influential, and more violent. Those warnings had included pleas for action from moderate Sikhs who feared, with good reason, the extremists among them. Ujjal Dosanjh, who would go on to become British Columbia’s first Indo-Canadian premier and then an MP, had been attacked four months before the bombings and beaten brutally with an iron bar for speaking out against the militants.
Reyat settled back into his life in Duncan, heading to work at Auto-Marine Electric each day and sharing a routine with his wife, son, and three daughters. It was a pleasant town, close to the Strait of Georgia, with a Sikh community of about 2,000.
But he, Parmar, and a group of Babbar Khalsa supporters were emerging as prime suspects. The RCMP were under tremendous pressure to produce results after the terror attacks, and getting little help from CSIS, which had erased more than one-third of the tapes of wiretap evidence from Parmar’s phone.
Evidence linking Reyat to the Narita bomb was building. Fragments showed the bomb was built from components that could only have come from his preparations in Duncan.
Five months after the blast, the RCMP arrested Reyat on his way home from work. They arrested Parmar and searched several other Lower Mainland locations at the same time.
The RCMP said Reyat was suspected of serious offences linked to the bombings. Parmar was just charged with possessing explosives.
If the charges were an attempt to force Reyat to provide information, they failed. Reyat’s long interrogation by the RCMP produced contradictory, vague, and useless answers.
First he denied ever meeting Parmar or having anything to do with bombs. When he was told CSIS agents had witnessed the test bombing, Reyat said Parmar had asked him about making a big bomb, and he assumed it was wanted for some action in India—blowing up a bridge or something. None of the devices worked, he told two RCMP officers. Informed that Japanese investigators confirmed the bomb was housed in a Sanyo stereo tuner identical to the one he had bought at the Duncan Woolworth store, Reyat said he had given the tuner away as a gift to a virtual stranger.
Whether he was loyal, or afraid, Reyat wasn’t going to tell what he knew. He offered nothing useful to police.
Parmar appeared in court dressed in the flowing robes and tall orange turban of a 400-year-old Sikh warrior group. Supporters cheered and chanted when the charge against him was dismissed.
Reyat ended up pleading guilty to minor charges of possessing a handgun and one stick of dynamite and was fined $2,000. It didn’t help that CSIS used a national security provision to prevent even innocuous defence questioning of its agents.
***
The Indian-born Reyat had grown up in England. He knew police pressure would be unrelenting, and the family moved back to Coventry, where he took up his old job at a Jaguar car factory, settled into a modest house, and attended a local temple.
In Canada, the Air India investigation was running into more brick walls. But the evidence linking Reyat to the Narita bombing was becoming stronger.
In February 1988, British police working with Canadian prosecutors swooped in on Reyat as he drove to work. The extradition battle lasted for almost a year due to high-priced British lawyers enlisted in Reyat’s defence. But the British courts eventually ordered his return to Canada to face trial on manslaughter and explosives charges linked to the Narita bombing.
After a sixty-two-day trial, he was found guilty in May 1991. The court found Reyat had aided the actual murderers by building the bomb, although he might not have known how it would be used. Reyat didn’t testify.
His lawyer read supporting statements at the sentencing hearing, including letters from Reyat’s three oldest children. “It’s been 3 1/2 years since I haven’t seen him at home. I love him very much,” ten-year-old Pritpal wrote. “I really, really need my daddy now.”
Reyat was sentenced to ten years in prison.
***
The investigation lagged. Every June 23, families mourned, and wondered how such a terrible crime could be committed with impunity.
Finally, in the fall of 2000, fourteen years after the bombings, prosecutors laid 331 murder charges against two men they say helped plan the terror attack. Ripudaman Singh Malik was a multi-millionaire Vancouver businessman and militant; Ajaib Singh Bagri was a Kamloops sawmill worker who had made speeches calling for Sikhs to kill 50,000 Hindu “dogs” to avenge attacks on Sikhs in India. (Talwinder Parmar was already dead, apparently captured and killed by Indian police in 1992 after he returned to the country.)
Seven months later, they laid similar charges against Reyat, still in jail for the Narita deaths.
Reyat was the key. And in a controversial decision, the Crown agreed to let him plead guilty to manslaughter charges in the Air India bombing, and agreed to a plea bargain that would see him serve just five more years.
He was remorseful, he told the court. In return for the light sentence, he promised to testify truthfully in the trial of Malik and Bagri. A deal with the devil, some said.
When the time came to fulfil the bargain and tell the truth in court during the trial of Malik and Bagri, Reyat simply refused. He lied, dodged questions, claimed not to remember events that had cost him years behind bars. He kept dynamite around in case he might want to dislodge a stump someday, he said. He let “Mr. X,” the man who came to watch the bomb test, stay in his house, with his family, for several days but never knew his first or last names.
It was transparently corrupt. The trial judge called him an “unmitigated liar.”
“His evidence was patently and pathetically fabricated in an attempt to minimize his involvement in his crime to an extreme degree, while refusing to reveal relevant information he clearly possesses,” the judge said. “His hollow expression of remorse was a bitter pill for the families of the victims. If he harboured even the slightest degree of genuine remorse, he would have been more forthcoming.”
But without evidence from Reyat, Malik and Bagri were acquitted. The fifteen-year investigation had cost some $130 million.
Reyat was charged with perjury as a result of his bizarre testimony and sentenced to nine years. And the worst mass murderers in Canada’s history went unpunished.
GANGLAND EDEN
Police Chief Walter Mulligan looked like the man to clean up Vancouver’s sinful ways when he stepped up to the department’s top job on January 24, 1947.
Six foot two and 220 pounds. Handsome and always sharply dressed, in uniform or a suit. Streetwise, after a stint keeping the peace on Broadway between Granville and Main.
And, based on his rapid twenty-year rise through the ranks to become the Vancouver department’s youngest chief at forty-two, smart and politically savvy, with all the right connections.
The Liverpool-born Mulligan faced a tough task. Vancouver was a wide open town.
The laws, especially around vices, reflected the 1930s views of conservative politicians from small towns and rural communities.
But the war had changed everything. Vancouver was booming, and young men and women just out of the service wanted to have some fun. They were through being ordered around. They had fought for their country—and gambled and drank. They weren’t going to be told what to do once they were home and had some money to spend.
It was time for fun. For nightclubs. Parties. But in Vancouver, grim beer halls were the only legal places to buy drinks. They could only serve beer, and only one brand. They had to be attached to a hotel and couldn’t sell food or non-alcoholic drinks, and women
were barred from the large men-only sections. No drinking in restaurants or nightclubs, unless they were members-only “private clubs,” where patrons were supposed to bring their own bottles.
But people wanted a drink with their dinner or while they danced. The dry laws were ignored or ridiculed.
Any time the law and social values are wildly out of sync, there is money to be made. Speakeasies and bootleggers flourished, and illegal profits soared.
That meant corruption. Police couldn’t stop the booze trade—it was too big. And they couldn’t ignore it. So they had to make some arrests. A bribe could encourage police to shut down a rival, and not your blind pig.
It wasn’t just alcohol. Gambling, prostitution and, increasingly, drugs were all booming in the postwar years. So was police corruption.
Mulligan came in as a reformer. He complained publicly that officers on the vice squad had let gambling dens operate. “These places could not operate without police knowledge and sanction,” he told city council. That didn’t win him friends on the force.
He had played rough and stepped on a lot of toes on his way to the top job. Once he got it, he made unpopular changes—putting detectives back into uniform and limiting stints on the detective and vice squads to two years to prevent cops and crooks becoming too cozy.
And Mulligan promoted his own people into top jobs, and pushed out others. He angered the powerful police union—a formidable enemy—by ignoring seniority.
Which all might have been okay. If he had got results.
But Vancouver was still a wide open city under Mulligan, legendary British Columbia broadcaster Jack Webster recalled. “Gambling, prostitution and bootlegging were rampant.”
“The police force was something else again—rotten at the top.”
Reporters talked about police corruption, but they didn’t write about it.
Still, Mulligan’s rule was unthreatened. He cut a fine figure riding a horse in the annual PNE parade, or dressed in a tam and Highland garb for a Scottish festival.
Dead Ends Page 15