Dead Ends

by Paul Willcocks

  He should have been.

  Lepine was becoming convinced only he could save the world from a nuclear holocaust. He was especially worried about the children at the Endicott Home, with their mental handicaps. They needed him.

  He made his way to Oliver, and got work picking apples. He broke into a home to get two weapons—a .22-calibre automatic rifle and .30-calibre rifle. He was ready for his mission.

  On August 28, a pleasant Monday in the Okanagan, Lepine confronted Charles Wright, seventy-one, and William Potter, sixteen, as they worked on the irrigation system in an Oliver orchard. Wright was a Vancouver photographer, recognized for his postcard images. He was retired and living with the Potters, long-time friends.

  Lepine shot both and dragged their bodies into their Land Rover. He headed north, driving about ninety kilometres into wilder country, and dumped their bodies beside a forest road in the Kootenay Boundary country east of Kelowna.

  Just before noon, he drove the Land Rover into a campground on Damfino Creek. Two couples from Princeton in their sixties—Lester and Phyllis Clark, and Allan and Mildred Wilson—were camping on the beautiful creek. Lepine chatted with them, left for a few moments, and came back with his two rifles. He ordered them into the camper and opened fire, reloading three times.

  All four were seriously wounded, but the men managed to drive sixty-five kilometres until they met a grader operator who could help them. Phyllis Clark, sixty-one, died before she got to the hospital.

  But now the police were alerted. About twenty-five RCMP officers from throughout the region started a hunt for the killer.

  Lepine was not done. He drove another sixty kilometres and encountered Herbert Thomas, fifty-seven, and his wife Nellie, fifty-six, near Edgewood, on the west shore of Lower Arrow Lake. He shot them, abandoned the Land Rover, and took their car.

  Less than an hour later, twenty-four-year-old Thomas Pozney of Nakusp was coming off the lake after a day of fishing when he saw Lepine approach. He was the last to die.

  One day, six dead.

  The RCMP captured Lepine the next morning, about ninety kilometres away at Galena Bay. He didn’t resist. When he appeared in court on Wednesday, he sat quietly in oversized green overalls as the name of each person he killed was read out.

  Lepine was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, and in 1974 found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a secure care institution for the criminally insane. He has never been released.

  VIGILANTE INJUSTICE

  Wong Foon Sing was peeling potatoes for lunch in the Shaughnessy mansion. It was July 26, 1924, a fiercely hot day for Vancouver. He heard a bang, like a car backfiring. But when he looked out the window, there was no one around.

  Something seemed wrong.

  Wong wiped his hands and went to check on Janet Smith, the twenty-two-year-old Scottish nursemaid who was ironing in the basement. Her nineteen-month-old charge was asleep upstairs. Fred and Doreen Baker, their employers, were both out, he at work, she shopping downtown.

  Wong looked in the laundry room.

  Smith was sprawled lifeless on the floor. A .45-calibre handgun and an iron lay beside her right hand; the ironing board stood nearby. Her head was a bloody mess.

  The sunny twenty-two-year-old nursemaid was dead.

  Wong didn’t call the police or a doctor. He telephoned Frederick Baker in his downtown office.

  Something is wrong with Nursie, he said.

  ***

  Three people, three different paths to Vancouver.

  Frederick Baker was pedigreed, a scion of two successful families. Doreen Smith, his bride, was the daughter of a Victoria businessman. After their marriage, they had lived in London, then Paris, before returning to Vancouver and the import-export business. He belonged.

  Janet Smith was working class, born in Perth, Scotland. Her father shovelled coal into steam engines. The family moved to London, and Janet studied to be a nursemaid. The Bakers hired her. They moved to Paris, then Vancouver, and Janet, promised thirty dollars a month, came along.

  Wong Foo Sing’s background in China is a mystery. He was twenty-seven, and had been in Canada since he was fourteen, working briefly in a Chinatown laundry before the Bakers hired him as a houseboy. He apparently had a wife and son in China, perhaps the result of a visit two years earlier.

  Baker listened to Wong, then called police. The home was in Point Grey, a separate municipality with 14,000 residents and little crime. Point Grey wanted to become Vancouver’s Nob Hill, a community for the rich and prominent. Two years earlier it had passed the first zoning bylaws in Canada to make sure shops wouldn’t suddenly appear beside someone’s expensive home.

  The Point Grey police department’s sixteen officers rarely faced major crimes, and knew it was their job to keep the prominent families happy.

  Cst. Jim Green was the first on the scene. He saw Smith’s body, in a blue nursemaid’s uniform, her arms stretched above her head. He picked up the pistol, made note of a blood-spattered, broken pair of glasses. The iron beside her was still warm. There was a bullet hole just above her right eye, and a large exit wound in the back of her head.

  Suicide, he immediately proclaimed. Instead of waiting for an autopsy—normal procedure—the police and coroner ordered the undertaker to embalm Smith’s body right away.

  Within days, the Point Grey police were accused of incompetence, or a cover-up. Rumours of every kind swept Vancouver. Smith had been murdered. Wong had done it. Baker. A mystery killer.

  The story had all the right elements to be a sensation.

  The Bakers were among the elite, in a time when Vancouver was sharply divided on class lines. Reports of trouble in the homes of the rich were eagerly consumed.

  Janet Smith was a perfect heroine. She was young, cheerful, bright, an upright Scottish lass with a lively social life and lots of suitors, making her way in a new world. No one believed the attractive, sunny young woman would kill herself.

  Poor Wong Foon Sing was close to the perfect suspect. Anti-Chinese sentiment—and racism—were the norm in Vancouver in 1924.

  Chinese immigrants had been seen as a necessary evil, cheap labour to build the railways and work the mines. But by the mid-1880s, the railway work was done. In 1885, the first head tax—a fee collected from Chinese immigrants to deter immigration—was introduced. It was steadily raised, reducing immigration and preventing men from bringing over their families.

  Even in the 1920s, newspapers warned of the “Yellow Peril.” In 1923, a year before Janet Smith died, Parliament passed the Chinese Immigration Act, which virtually barred any new arrivals.

  Chinese men—and the population was overwhelmingly male—were seen as opium-using, degenerate gamblers obsessed with white women.

  Wong was a young man, tall, handsome, and well-dressed. He lived in a basement room; Smith lived two floors above. He was, apparently, alone in the house with her when she died. He was in a bad situation.

  The Vancouver Star, owned by a political rival of the Baker clan, led the attack on the suicide verdict. Rumours raced through the city. Smith had been killed as a result of a wild party, and her murder was being covered up. She had been assaulted, one version went, or accidentally killed during a drunken fight between two guests. The imagined Jazz-Age lifestyles of the rich made for great speculation.

  Revd. Duncan McDougall, an arch-conservative Scottish Presbyterian, was persuaded by a friend of Smith that she had been murdered. McDougall was controversial—he had recently announced his support for the Canadian Ku Klux Klan. (The next year, the Klan moved to headquarters in a Shaughnessy mansion about ten blocks from the scene of Smith’s murder.)

  But he had influence, and took his concerns to Vancouver’s United Council of Scottish Societies. The council—politically powerful given the province’s large Scottish population—successfully pressed for a new investigation.

  The results were sensational. British Columbia Provincial Police Inspector Forbes Cruickshank quickly c
oncluded Smith had been murdered and her body arranged to fake a suicide. There were no powder burns on her face, he noted, suggesting the gun had been fired from several feet away. Smith had no obvious way even to have the gun.

  The fastest way to crack the case was to get answers from Wong, Cruickshank decided—whatever that would take. The police couldn’t be directly involved in kidnapping, so he hired a private detective to snatch Wong on his weekly visit to Chinatown. Cruickshank was there for the questioning—and beatings—that lasted hours. Wong’s story didn’t change.

  The police were getting nowhere. Public outrage was growing.

  In late August, Attorney General Alexander Manson, pushed by the Scottish Societies, ordered a second inquest. Smith’s body was exhumed.

  The inquest was a sensation. Crowds pushed and scuffled with police to try to claim seats. A string of witnesses offered dramatic and contradictory evidence.

  The largest crowd—some 1,500 people—showed up to try and claim a seat when Wong testified. Chinese witnesses did not usually take the normal oath to tell the truth on the witness stand.

  But Alex Henderson, lawyer for the Scottish Societies, demanded Wong go through a bizarre swearing-in ritual that involved chopping the head off a chicken. He simply repeated the evidence he had already given.

  On September 6, after five days of hearings, the jury delivered its verdict.

  Janet Smith had been murdered.

  The killer remained unknown. Rumours swirled about a wild party. About drug deals. (Baker’s company dealt, legally, in opium and other drugs.)

  And about Wong. One of Smith’s fellow servants had testified she feared Wong. But her diaries said nothing of that, and noted he had given her presents, including a silk nightgown.

  Evidence or not, racism and hysteria were rampant. The Vancouver Star called for greater protection for servants like Smith. “No young and pretty girl should be left alone and unprotected in a house with a Chinaman,” it said. “It is against all rules of decency and safety.” Vancouver MLA Mary Ellen Smith introduced a bill that would prevent white women from working in a home if there were Chinese servants. It failed to pass.

  The unsolved case was an embarrassment. And on March 20, 1925, eight months after the murder, Wong was kidnapped once again, this time by police agents wearing white Ku Klux Klan hoods. He was held for six weeks in a Vancouver house, tortured and threatened. But he never changed his story.

  On June 1, the kidnappers released Wong on a street where other Point Grey officers were waiting to arrest him for murder. (The kidnappers, it was later revealed, included Point Grey Police Department officers and officials from the Scottish Societies. Manson, the Attorney General, knew where Wong was being held but didn’t act to free him.)

  The charge was a sham. There was no evidence against Wong. The authorities hoped he might be holding back some information and would talk if threatened with a murder conviction and the death penalty.

  But it didn’t work. A grand jury dismissed the charge against Wong before it even went to trial.

  Wong went back to working as a servant for the Bakers for a year, then returned to China. Frederick Baker continued as a member of Vancouver society.

  And Janet Smith’s murder remains a mystery.

  WELCOME TO CANADA

  Robert Dziekanski died on the polished floor of Vancouver’s airport just after 1:00 a.m. on October 14, 2007, in front of a small and horrified audience.

  Four RCMP officers had tasered him repeatedly, even as he lay on the ground.

  When he stopped breathing, they stood around and waited for paramedics. None of the Mounties started CPR, or provided any assistance.

  Dziekanski had arrived in the airport about ten hours earlier, ready to start a new life in Canada. His mother, Zofia, had worked two jobs in Kamloops to save enough money to bring her forty-year-old son to Canada from Poland. She was there at the airport to meet him.

  But his flight was two hours late. He spoke no English, and had great difficulty clearing Immigration and finding his way through the airport. No one helped him as he wandered the arrivals hall.

  No one helped Zofia either. She was told Robert wasn’t in the airport. By 10:00 p.m., after waiting nine hours, she left.

  Robert was frustrated, angry, and exhausted. He had travelled for nineteen hours and spent another nine hours trapped in the airport. He finally cleared Immigration at 12:45 a.m. But he still had no idea where to go.

  And his frustration boiled over. Dziekanski was a big man. He had worked in construction and as a miner. He paced around, pushed a computer to the floor, and toppled a small table. Someone called for help.

  So four RCMP officers—constables Gerry Rundel, Bill Bently, and Kwesi Millington, and supervisor Cpl. Benjamin Robinson—headed to the scene.

  They didn’t discuss any plan to deal with Dziekanski on the way to the terminal from their nearby detachment. They didn’t try to find a translator. They didn’t try to de-escalate what was a tense situation.

  Instead, the four RCMP officers marched up to the immigrant. Stand against the counter, they ordered, and place your hands on top. And, although he didn’t understand the words, Dziekanski moved to the counter, where he picked up a stapler.

  About twenty-five seconds had passed since the Mounties arrived at the scene. Robinson ordered an attack with the taser, a device that delivers a 50,000-volt electric shock. Millington tasered Dziekanski, who immediately collapsed to the floor and went into convulsions. The four officers jumped on top of him and tasered him four more times. He stopped breathing.

  The officers climbed off him and stood around for fifteen minutes, until paramedics arrived.

  Dziekanski was alive, and had done nothing seriously wrong. He needed a skilled customer service representative, if anything.

  Then four Mounties arrived, and in minutes he was dead.

  But that’s not what the RCMP told the public. Dziekanski, an RCMP spokesman said, pushed over his luggage cart and began screaming, pounding on windows, and throwing chairs and a computer to the ground.

  That was not true.

  Three RCMP officers working at the airport tried to calm him down, the RCMP told the media. “They couldn’t make any rhyme or reason as to what he was doing,” said RCMP Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre. “He kept yelling in what appeared to be a language from Eastern Europe.”

  That was not true.

  “Unfortunately he didn’t calm down. He kept being very aggravated. He grabbed an object off the desk, we’re not sure what it was, and he continued to yell.”

  That was not true.

  After the Mounties tasered Dziekanski, Lemaitre said, “He fell to the ground immediately although he continued to be very physically combative.” It took three officers to hold hold him down as he was handcuffed, the RCMP claimed. “He continued to fight after that, still kicking and flailing and then lapsed into unconsciousness.”

  Untrue.

  “We monitored his vital signs until medical emergency personnel could arrive.”

  Untrue.

  Dziekanski was sweating profusely and violent, which could indicate either drug use or a medical condition, Lemaitre added.

  But he wasn’t violent. And might have just been hot and exhausted.

  It was a long list of falsehoods. None of it was true.

  And it might have gone uncontradicted.

  But Paul Pritchard of Nanaimo, another traveller, was in the airport with his video camera. He captured the entire event.

  Pritchard gave his camera and the memory chip to the RCMP that night to help with the investigation. They promised everything would be returned within forty-eight hours.

  Pritchard got the camera back. Not the video. Evidence, the RCMP said. We will keep it as long as we want, maybe forever.

  But Pritchard was troubled by the RCMP’S false story and cover-up. He hired a lawyer, threatened to go to court, and got his video back.

  On November 14, one month after Dziekanski was
killed, Pritchard released the video to the media. And it showed that the official RCMP version of what had happened was untrue, a self-serving and utterly false series of fabrications.

  Dziekanski wasn’t resisting. The officers didn’t try to talk to him. They tasered him repeatedly, crashed onto him, and killed him.

  The video forced a reluctant British Columbia government to order an independent inquiry.

  On June 18, 2010, the Braidwood Inquiry delivered its findings.

  The RCMP was not justified in tasering Dziekanski. The four officers lied to investigators. The RCMP provided false accounts of the events, and failed to correct them even when it was clear they were false.

  Too late for Robert Dziekanski, the burly Pole. He had been brutally killed.

  Too late, of course, for his mother, Zofia.

  And, for many Canadians, too late for the reputation of the RCMP.

  JUROR GANGSTER

  No surprise that Peter Gill was partying at the Pelican Bay disco on Granville Island.

  Gill had every reason to celebrate. One week earlier, he had walked out of court a free man, beating two first-degree murder charges laid after the Dosanjh brothers were gunned down in a running Vancouver drug turf war.

  It was an unexpected win for Gill and five “associates.” A headline summed up the reaction to the jury verdict—“Dosanjh slayings acquittals stun police.”

  And no surprise that Gill chose Pelican Bay, or “Bay of Pigs” as it was unkindly known, a rough-and-ready hangout for Vancouver’s high-profile gangsters in 1995.

  But his date for the evening, she was a very big surprise.

  An off-duty RCMP officer in the bar recognized the lavishly made-up, dramatically dressed blonde hugging and dancing with Gill.

  It was Gillian Guess, a.k.a. “Elvira” or the “Dragon Lady.” And Guess had spent the last eight months on the jury that decided Gill and company weren’t guilty. Jurors and defendants aren’t supposed to cuddle in clubs.