Dead Ends

by Paul Willcocks

  But trouble was brewing. Mulligan’s powerful ally and champion, Mayor Gerry McGeer, died of a heart attack. Opposition on the police force—especially from the union leadership—was growing. The corruption whispers, some from inside the force, grew louder.

  And despite steady increases in the number of officers, crime was getting worse. Gangs were getting more violent, and dumping bodies carelessly.

  Heroin had hit the city, with Mulligan saying Vancouver had more than 1,500 addicts by the end of 1954. They stole to get money for drugs. In one six-week stretch in late 1954, there were seventy-four armed robberies in the city—banks, corner stores, anywhere with money. Mulligan even talked about a machine-gun equipped flying squad to battle the robbers. (Mulligan also proposed dealing with the heroin problem by sending the addicts to an isolated island or, alternately, supplying them with drugs.)

  Still, Mulligan might have been fine, if not for Ray Munro.

  Munro was a thirty-two-year-old reporter who wanted to be a star. Handsome, dashing, a pilot and adventurer, Munro put himself at the centre of every story, the crusading hero who would risk all to reveal the truth. He even talked another reporter into going out with him, the two dressed as women, to try and catch a rapist in Stanley Park. (They succeeded.)

  Munro had stints at the Sun and the Province, leaving the latter when the paper wouldn’t run his stories of police corruption.

  So he hooked up with Lou Ruby, the Toronto publisher of Flash Weekly, a scandal sheet. Munro would head a new Flash west coast bureau, and the paper would publish a Vancouver edition.

  On June 15, 1955, the first issue hit the streets with a screaming headline launching a full attack on Mulligan and police corruption:

  “RAPE OF VANCOUVER! MUNRO TEARS MASK FROM CROOKED LAW IN GANGLAND EDEN.”

  The lead was just as dramatic. “A police chief who took a piggy bank—a deputy chief whose secret activities and fits of rage are the talk of a neighbourhood—crooked detectives and enough intrigue to make the fictitious Mike Hammer look like a Lavender Lad—that’s the talk of this port city today!”

  The prose was over the top, and the tease about revelations still to come—“How the Syndicate Captured City Hall” and “Society Playboy’s Sinister Double Life”—was sensational.

  Munro had good sources. The claim that Mulligan stole a piggy bank came from an ex-cop, who said the two of them were investigating a break-in when Mulligan grabbed a glass piggy bank. They each got eleven dollars, he recalled.

  Mulligan knew he was in trouble. The police commission and politicians were treating the allegations seriously. He took the offensive on June 23, suing Munro and Flash.

  The next day, everything fell apart. Flash had reported that Detective Sergeant Len Cuthbert, a thirty-year veteran of the VPD, collected bribes from gamblers and shared them with Mulligan—and that he “snitched” on fellow officers about corruption.

  Cuthbert, a fifty-four-year-old father of three—including an eighteen-month-old son—was devastated. On June 24, a bright spring day, he reported early to the grim brick police headquarters on Main Street. Supt. Harry Whelan interviewed him about corruption, finishing a little after 8:00 a.m.

  Cuthbert made his way to the detective room and asked other officers to tell his wife he had sold his boat and paid their property tax.

  Then he went into an interview room, pulled out his .38-calibre service revolver, and shot himself in the chest.

  Two detectives rushed into the room, where Cuthbert was muttering, “I’m sorry I missed my heart.” He had missed; his life was saved.

  The suicide attempt made the scandal too big to ignore. The police board suspended Mulligan within hours, and the provincial government announced a royal commission into police corruption.

  The inquiry, headed by lawyer R. H. Tupper, was a sensation. There was testimony of graft and bribes, and a parade of officers who seemed unable to remember anything on the witness stand. Reputations were smeared daily.

  Cuthbert, still recovering, testified that as head of the gambling squad he had split bribes with Mulligan, and shared them with other detectives in on the scam.

  Whelan, the superintendent who questioned Cuthbert before his suicide attempt, had already testified about that interview. He was scheduled to appear again, and warned that Mulligan’s fierce lawyer, Tom Norris, would raise the suicides of his father and daughter.

  He, too, chose to shoot himself in the chest, in his home. Unlike Cuthbert, he succeeded, dying on the way to hospital on August 5.

  In September, the “Mystery Lady” took the witness stand. She testified under her maiden name, Helen Douglas, and wore an obvious, dramatic disguise—floppy blue hat, blonde wig, heavy makeup. She had been Mulligan’s mistress for several years, she said. He had given her jewelry and money to help buy a house, and taken her with him to a police chiefs’ gathering in Montreal. Asked how Mulligan could pay for all this, she said, “I had the impression it didn’t come from his salary.” (Douglas faced a savage examination by Mulligan’s lawyer, who sought to portray her as a vengeful, promiscuous liar.)

  Mulligan saw the writing on the wall. His original lawyer, Tom Norris, had quit the case after what he described as an attempt at blackmail by Munro, still chasing scoops for Flash.

  He was replaced by Jay Gould, who was appalled by the inquiry’s willingness to accept hearsay evidence. Witnesses repeated what someone else had told them, but Gould could not question the original source of the allegations.

  On October 12, Gould denounced the process as an “inquisition” that wrongly smeared his client. They would no longer participate, he said. Mulligan would answer any charges in court, he said, where the process was fair.

  Mulligan then went to the police commission. Fire me, he said. I can longer do the job. The commission obliged, and he simply pulled up stakes and left the country. He headed to Los Angeles, and landed a job as an airport limousine dispatcher.

  The inquiry continued, but the drama was over. Tupper’s final report found Mulligan and Cuthbert had committed criminal offences, but that he had been unable to identify anyone else involved. The police commission and politicians shared the blame for shoddy oversight.

  No one was charged. No one was fired. “A whitewash,” Webster tersely summarized the entire process.

  The city hired George Archer, a thirty-five-year veteran of the RCMP, to replace Mulligan. He was a strict disciplinarian, and credited with bringing order to the force.

  After eight years in California, Mulligan retired to Oak Bay, a quiet municipality that’s part of Greater Victoria, living in part on his Vancouver police pension.

  Mulligan had grown prize-winning flowers while chief. Oak Bay was a perfect place for his hobby. He died March 27, 1987.

  THE FALLEN BISHOP

  Long before seventy-one-year-old Bishop Hubert O’Connor showed up on a June day in 1998 for a healing circle, the Esk’etemc people of Alkali Lake knew all about pain and redemption.

  The reserve, home to about 400 people, is in a beautiful but harsh near-desert east of the Fraser River and south of Williams Lake. For decades, the reserve had been defined by deprivation, drinking, violence, and poverty. “Alcohol Lake,” people had called it, until an extraordinary effort by community leaders brought transformation and hope in the 1970s.

  For the people of Alkali Lake, the abandoned St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School was a symbol of suffering. For ninety years, children had been taken away to the school outside Williams Lake. Too many came back broken.

  O’Connor ran the school for years in the 1960s. In 1996, he was convicted of raping a young Native woman during his time at the school and then freed on appeal. O’Connor had become the face of a system that took children from their families, punished them for speaking their language, and subjected them to privation and abuse.

  And his case had come to symbolize the failure of the Canadian justice system in dealing with crimes against First Nations people.

&nb
sp; O’Connor, born in Quebec on February 17, 1928, didn’t become a Roman Catholic priest until he was twenty-seven. He joined a missionary order and was sent west in 1961 to become principal of St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School in Williams Lake.

  It was a powerful position in a formidable institution. The school was already seventy-five years old, part of a network of eighty residential schools across Canada. The Indian Affairs Department made attendance mandatory for children, who were taken from their families by force if necessary. They were allowed to go home for one month a year, and were cut off from family and community.

  The goal was to solve “the Indian problem” by stripping the children of all traces of their culture. As Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a 2008 apology, “to kill the Indian in the child.”

  There were, defenders point out, caring teachers and students who thrived. But the overall legacy was darker. O’Connor and those running the schools had near-absolute authority over powerless children and families. More than 4,000 children died across Canada. Government researchers used malnourished children as guinea pigs in nutrition studies. Sexual and physical abuse were rampant.

  And thousands of children grew up disconnected from family and community, without the knowledge or experience to parent their own children. For survivors of abuse, the trauma devastated their lives. Guilt and shame led to silence.

  O’Connor ran St. Joseph’s for seven years, a position of great power and little accountability. The church leadership regarded him so highly that in 1971 he was appointed bishop of Whitehorse, then bishop of Prince George in 1986.

  But across Canada, residential school survivors were beginning to move beyond shame to tell their stories of abuse.

  A tall, soft-spoken RCMP constable, Bob Grinstead, started hearing about cases of sexual and physical abuse at St. Joseph’s. He was originally from Toronto, and didn’t even know residential schools existed until he joined the force. The investigation was painful for him and the victims. Many had become abusers themselves, or fallen into addictions or killed themselves. “It struck me that an awful lot of the people I was looking for weren’t around anymore.”

  When he dropped in to visit Marilyn Belleau in Alkali Lake, she broke two decades of silence. O’Connor had raped her, she said.

  Belleau was still hesitant to talk about it. She had a daughter. The memories were dark and painful. But once she had told Grinstead, she sought counselling and shared more of the past.

  She was nineteen, a devout, shy former student who worked at the school as a seamstress and helped with its bagpipe band, which travelled and gave concerts. O’Connor had taken her alone to a drive-in movie and tried to grab her and kiss her. When O’Connor asked her to his room a few days later, she thought he wanted to apologize.

  Instead, he had turned down his bed and placed a towel in the middle of the sheet. He told her to take off her clothes and lie down.

  Belleau froze for what seemed an eternity. “I was so scared. I felt like I didn’t have any choice. He was my boss and he was a priest.”

  “I had never ever let a man see my body, naked. I felt I didn’t have any choice but to do as he said. So I took all my clothes off. I was feeling ashamed and shy.”

  O’Connor raped her. She lay there, separated her mind from her body, and pretended she was somewhere else. “Like at home walking around in the tall grass, in our meadow. With the wind blowing in my face.”

  The rapes would be repeated more than ten times over the next few years. When she became pregnant, O’Connor gave her a choice: He could send her to an institution for unwed mothers, or arrange a stay in a private home in Vancouver. No one could know. He registered as the father after the birth, but didn’t use his real first name and made up an occupation.

  Belleau named her daughter Maria Ann and held her close in the hospital, until she was taken away. Two decades later, Belleau would be devastated once again when she learned the daughter she had never seen grow up had died in a car crash at twenty-three.

  Soon, five more victims came forward with similar stories. They had been students or staff, young Native women and girls, and O’Connor, the priest and leader, had sexually abused them.

  They were difficult cases. The crimes were decades old. Speaking out meant reliving painful stories and challenging powerful institutions, and trusting a justice system that had rarely worked for Native people.

  But on Monday, February 4, 1991, the word spread through Alkali Lake and other First Nations communities. Thirty years after he took over the school, O’Connor had been charged with six sex-related assaults. Another Oblate priest who had worked at the school had already pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting seventeen boys at the school and in other communities over twenty-five years, and a third Oblate brother faced additional charges of sexually assaulting boys at the school.

  The women were fearful about testifying and reliving those days and about the cumbersome judicial process.

  They were right to be fearful. The justice system did not work.

  The women testified at a preliminary hearing in 1992, and O’Connor was ordered to stand trial on four charges—two of rape and two of indecent assault.

  The trial began in June. But the Crown prosecutor had ignored the judge’s instructions and failed to disclose evidence to O’Connor’s lawyer, mainly notes from the victims’ counselling sessions. The judge stayed the charges and ended the trial.

  Two years later, the British Columbia Court of Appeal ordered a new trial. But O’Connor, with seemingly unlimited money for legal fees, appealed that decision to the Supreme Court of Canada. He lost, but four years had gone by before the new trial began in June 1996.

  O’Connor was found guilty on charges of rape and indecent assault, and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.

  But less than seven months later, he was free. His lawyers had appealed again, and in March 1998 the court had overturned the indecent assault conviction and ordered yet another trial on the rape charge.

  Almost six years had been spent in court. The case would now rest on Belleau’s testimony alone, against O’Connor’s claim that the sex was consensual. And she wasn’t sure she could summon the strength to go through the ordeal again.

  O’Connor’s lawyer proposed an alternative. A healing circle, a traditional Native ceremony, where O’Connor would face the victims and the community and accept accountability. It was a difficult, controversial decision. To many, it seemed a poor substitute for criminal proceedings in a case of rape.

  But Belleau agreed. On Monday, June 18, 1998, O’Connor and government officials drove along Dog Creek Road to Alkali Lake. The circle opened with a solemn ceremony, led by an Elder, and the first segment brought a small group together. Belleau confronted O’Connor, describing her pain and the damage that he had done. O’Connor, now seventy, apologized, though he never acknowledged that he raped her.

  Almost forty people took part, including family members, Elders, and others who were directly involved. They talked about their pain, not just resulting from O’Connor’s acts, but from the residential school experience overall.

  By the final phase, the long, narrow community hall was crowded with seventy people. O’Connor and the region’s bishop read formal apologies. O’Connor’s effort was oddly stilted. He talked about “the complainants,” and his “very difficult time” over the last eight years. But he did apologize for breaching his vow of celibacy and “unacceptable behaviour” and the harm he had done.

  For Marilyn Belleau, it was enough. The circle ended with prayers, songs, drumming, and dancing. A long, terrible journey was over. “I came out of it feeling really much lighter,” she said, not just due to the healing circle but the whole process of coming forward. “That cloak of shame, I’ve let go of that.”

  SAVING THE CHILDREN

  William Lepine was on a mission to save the children. Only he understood the danger. Only he could rescue them from a nuclear holocaust. Even if it meant a killing
spree.

  Lepine didn’t know why he was chosen. He was twenty-seven, just a guy who had left the United States and worked in the orchards around Summerside for a few years. It was easy to fit in there in 1970, even if you were a bit different. The Okanagan Valley was a stop on the hippie pilgrimage to Vancouver. There was work picking fruit, and there were farmers who would let you pitch tents in their orchards if you helped bring in the peaches or cherries.

  But orchard work was seasonal. Lepine found something more stable in Creston, a quiet town in the south Kootenay, about ten kilometres from the Idaho border. He settled in as a gardener and maintenance worker with the municipality in 1971.

  It was a good place to live. About 3,000 people, with the Purcell Mountains rising above the Kootenay River valley. Though Creston had its demons too. A year before Lepine arrived, a logger named Dale Nelson went on a drunken, deadly rampage, killing eight people, including five young children.

  Once Lepine had made Creston home, a more interesting job came along. The Dr. Endicott Home for the Retarded in Creston needed a gardener who could also help with kids. Lepine was hired.

  The institution’s name grates a bit today. But Dr. William Endicott, the founder, was committed to helping people with developmental disabilities live full lives in their communities, a pioneering vision at the time. The home’s thirty children had been joined by the first adult residents a year earlier.

  Things went well at first. Then Lepine started acting oddly. He drove off in one of the institution’s trucks, without permission, and was fired.

  And things unravelled. He harassed the staff, did time in a mental health facility in Cranbrook, but kept going back and bothering people at the Endicott Home. He landed in Riverview Hospital, the province’s main mental health facility in Port Coquitlam, outside Vancouver.

  Lepine didn’t like it. He had unfinished business. On July 30, 1982, he walked away from the hospital. It wasn’t hard. He had no history of violence and wasn’t considered a high-risk patient.