Dead Ends

by Paul Willcocks

  First in Yorkshire, where he followed his father into the mines when he was twelve, driving the pit ponies that pulled carts of coal to the surface. When Ginger—he had red hair—was fifteen, miners staged a two-year walkout. The owners evicted strikers’ families from the grimy company row houses, including the Goodwins.

  Canada, he decided, might offer better opportunities. At nineteen, he crossed the Atlantic and took work in a coal mine in northern Nova Scotia’s Glace Bay. A new country, but the same struggles. In 1909, the miners were on strike in a bitter battle for union recognition, and families were again facing eviction and hunger.

  Goodwin stuck it out through the strike, but in 1910 was on the move again, first to mines in British Columbia’s East Kootenay region, then to Cumberland. The town was built practically on top of the mines. Mountains and the Comox glacier looked down on both the town and the Strait of Georgia a few kilometres away.

  It was a beautiful setting, with the most dangerous mines Goodwin had seen. Methane gas seeped from fissures in the rocks. Explosions and fires took a terrible toll. During ninety-two years of operation, 295 men died—sixty-four in one 1901 disaster. Miners heaved a small sigh of relief any day they emerged, black-faced, from underground.

  Goodwin liked the town, with its tidy rows of wood-framed company housing and its ramshackle Chinatown and Japantown, home to about 430 Asian miners. He was a skilled soccer player, and did well in the local league.

  But in 1912, a major labour battle hit the mines. Goodwin was emerging as a union leader and a committed socialist. The two-year strike over union recognition failed—in part because of pressure to restore production as war loomed. But Ginger’s role was noted. He was blacklisted by the mining company and left for Trail, where he worked in a smelter.

  Goodwin was twenty-nine, short and slight, likeable and persuasive. He had decided that unions and socialism were the keys to better lives for working people. He was an activist, powerful speaker, and leader. In Trail, he was elected secretary of the union, vice-president of the British Columbia Federation of Labour, then a political arm for workers, and president of the Trail labour council. In 1916, he ran for MLA under the Socialist Party banner. It wasn’t a token effort. In the previous election, socialists had captured twelve percent of the vote and won two seats. Goodwin came third, with about nineteen percent of the vote.

  But another, bigger, issue was looming. By 1916, the war in Europe was more than two years old. Grinding trench warfare and new weapons brought massive casualties. Returning Canadian soldiers told horrific tales of life in the trenches.

  Voluntary enlistment slowed just as more troops were needed. Conscription—the draft—was introduced in 1917.

  Goodwin opposed the war, but registered and applied for an exemption to avoid service. (More than ninety percent of those who registered for the draft joined him in seeking an exemption.)

  The doctors who assessed Goodwin found him a poor candidate for the military, with bad teeth and stomach problems. He was slight—even skinny—and had trouble eating. He received a temporary exemption from service. (Ill or not, he was still a star player for local soccer teams.)

  Less than two weeks after a strike at the smelter began under Goodwin’s leadership, he was ordered to report for reevaluation and declared fit for service.

  The smelter owners might have pulled strings to get an effective union leader out of the way. The military might have become more desperate for conscripts.

  Either way, Goodwin wasn’t having it. Instead of reporting for duty, he headed back to Cumberland and the woods. If the army wanted him, they would have to find him.

  Goodwin wasn’t alone. A small band of evaders, most local, took to the mountains west of Cumberland, helped by locals like Joe Naylor, a socialist and union activist who had been a mentor to Goodwin.

  The Dominion Police was ordered to bring them in. It was no easy task. Local supporters helped the evaders, who knew the woods. For almost three months, officers had little success. They started hiring trackers and special constables.

  Like Dan Campbell. He was a crack shot and skilled woodsman. He had been running a hotel outside Victoria since he had been kicked off the British Columbia Provincial Police for extorting a bribe from two women he caught recklessly driving a buggy.

  On July 27, Campbell came upon Goodwin in the woods. Both men had rifles. Campbell said he called for Goodwin to surrender. Instead Goodwin raised his rifle.

  So Campbell killed him.

  Goodwin’s friends and union leaders didn’t believe it. They were convinced it was murder.

  The authorities had suspicions as well. On July 31, Campbell was arrested and taken to Victoria.

  That didn’t defuse the mounting tension. In Cumberland, the mines were shut down, and a huge procession followed Goodwin’s coffin to the cemetery.

  In Vancouver, union leaders called a one-day general strike, and about 5,500 workers walked off the job, including longshoremen and shipbuilders. It was a day of violence, as returned troops opposed to the strike clashed with union members and denounced strikers as traitors.

  A week after Campbell’s arrest, he appeared before two justices of the peace. They were to decide if there was enough evidence to proceed with manslaughter charges. They heard that Goodwin’s wounds—the bullet through his wrist and into his neck—were consistent with someone being shot while raising a rifle to shoot. But witnesses also said Campbell had talked about killing draft evaders. They decided there was enough evidence to justify a trial.

  But in October, a grand jury heard the same evidence and reached the opposite conclusion. There would be no trial. Campbell walked out of the courthouse on Victoria’s Bastion Square a free man.

  And Ginger Goodwin became a symbol of workers’ struggles in British Columbia.

  COLD CASE

  Jean Ann James and Gladys Wakabayashi might have seemed unlikely friends.

  Gladys Wakabayashi was the forty-one-year-old daughter of a Taiwanese billionaire, thin and exotically beautiful, with long black hair and an easy smile. She lived with her twelve-year-old daughter, Elisha, in a 4,800-square-foot house in Shaughnessy, one of Vancouver’s ritziest neighbourhoods. She studied, and taught, piano. Gladys never flaunted her family wealth. “Everyone we talked to said she was well-liked, kind and a compassionate lady,” a police investigator recalled.

  Jean Ann James was a flight attendant and union leader, perhaps a little chunky, with a blond perm, more than a decade older at fifty-three. Her husband, Derek, was an air traffic controller. They lived in a much more modest house in Richmond, comfortable, but not rich.

  But Wakabayashi’s daughter and James’s son—both only children—were enrolled in the Tyee School in 1985. It was part of the Vancouver public system, a highly regarded Montessori school where parents took an active role.

  The two couples met and quickly became friends. They socialized, had dinner gatherings in each others’ homes, participated in school activities.

  Danger can lurk when couples become close, especially when relationships change. Gladys and her husband, Shinji, drifted apart and separated, on good terms, in 1991. She was Chinese, he was Japanese, their daughter explained. “They didn’t fight a lot. They just had cultural differences that couldn’t be resolved.”

  And Gladys—beautiful, rich, musical, exotic—and Derek James found a strong connection. They became secret lovers.

  Before long, Jean Ann James suspected.

  She didn’t confront them. Instead, Jean Ann began to play detective. She confided in the school janitor and borrowed his car so she could trail her husband undetected, but didn’t catch him out. She called his hotel room when he was travelling on business, but Derek always covered his tracks and had explanations for absences.

  So on June 15, 1992, she told a friend, Brendan Carver, about her suspicions. He worked for a research company, and she had him get the telephone records from her husband’s hotel room on one of his weekend trips.

/>   She instantly recognized the Wakabayashis’ phone number. But once again, she was thwarted. Anticipating trouble, Gladys had asked her estranged husband to say Derek had been calling him.

  Some people might have waited, or let it go, or confronted their husbands.

  But Jean Ann James acted. On Wednesday June 24, as Vancouver sweltered under an unusual heat wave, she drove to Shaughnessy, parked a few blocks from the Wakabayashi house, and made her way there through back lanes. She had called her rival and said she had a present for her, and would meet her once their children were in school.

  The friends had coffee in the kitchen, made small talk. They went upstairs. In the walk-in closet, Jean revealed her gift, a necklace.

  Let me put it around your neck so you can see how beautiful it will look, she said. Instead, she slipped on gloves and, with a razor-sharp box cutter, slashed open Gladys’s throat.

  James was not yet done.

  “Tell me the truth,” she said. “And I’ll call you an ambulance.” She slashed her victim’s legs, seeking a confession. How long had the affair been going on?

  Then James, the suburban mom and flight attendant, washed the coffee cups and wiped away any evidence of her deadly visit. She dropped the weapon in a Dumpster on her drive home, disposed of her clothes in the school incinerator.

  And her rival was gone.

  Police were suspicious. They interviewed James. But they couldn’t find evidence. It seemed the perfect crime.

  But, sometimes, murder will out.

  ***

  In 2007, fifteen years after the killing, the British Columbia Unsolved Homicide Unit—the cold case squad—pulled the file on Gladys Wakabayashi’s murder, pored over the files, and decided only a confession could close the case. And they set out to get one.

  The Mr. Big sting was pioneered by the RCMP in British Columbia. Police create a fictional world, lure the suspect into a criminal fantasy, and coax or coerce a confession.

  By January 2008, police were ready to start the seduction of Jean Ann James. The play was written and the characters created, each with a backstory and role to play.

  And the curtain went up.

  Act One opened in the posh Spa Utopia in downtown Vancouver, with its waterfalls and faux Roman statues. Jean Ann James received a call saying she had won a day of treatments—although she couldn’t remember entering any contests.

  A stretch limo picked her up, and James found herself riding with another winner, the proudly nouveau riche wife of a developer. They talked in the limo and through a day of massages and pedicures and wine. By day’s end, James had invited her new friend to join her and Derek at a wine-tasting at the Rosedale restaurant on Robson Street.

  Except the new friend was really an undercover police officer. The spa day, the limo, the chance meeting, the tales of a free-spending lifestyle were the start of the sting.

  They had fun at the wine-tasting, and on excursions to shop for gourmet foods and to Granville Island to wander and buy pastries. They shared details of their lives. James talked about her son, an aspiring actor, her dreams of more money and a house in Shaughnessy.

  Then the curtain rose on Act Two. In March 2008, police created a “scenario.” The new friend took a detour on an afternoon outing, stopping in the giant entrance plaza of the Sheraton Wall Centre Hotel. She parked, illegally, told James to watch the car, and grabbed a package to take into the hotel, returning without it. There was no explanation.

  On another outing, the officer showed off three giant bundles of twenty dollar bills—at least $75,000. Soon, as they grew closer, James had to believe her new friend was involved in crime. “She’s turned into one of the best friends I’ve had,” she confided.

  Soon, James went from observer to participant. After the pair lunched at the elegant Fish House in Staney Park one day, all bright windows and white linen tablecloths, her friend asked James to keep watch when she met someone. The officer/friend paid James $300.

  A line was crossed. Now the goal was to drag James in deeper. Her new friend slowly confessed she was involved with organized crime, helping launder money at Vancouver casinos and selling stolen credit cards. She introduced James to fake gangsters, who talked more about their crimes. They lavished attention on her, paid for expensive meals and wine, and flaunted the money they were making.

  But the criminals were all cops, the scenes all elaborately scripted, the cash from police coffers.

  By October—nine months after James met her new friend at the spa—police were ready for Act Three. The gang said they needed to settle a score with a man who owed them $300,000, by kidnapping and beating him.

  And James, the sixty-nine-year-old suburbanite, didn’t blink at the battered victim, his injuries artfully created with makeup.

  The deadbeat got off lightly, she told the new friends in crime. She would have cut off his fingers or burned his genitals with a curling iron or put raw meat on his crotch and let dogs at him.

  Act Four introduced Mr. Big. The gang offered James a chance to earn a one-third share in a $700,000 score, and sweetened the deal with promises to use connections to help her son’s acting career.

  But first she had to meet the boss, Mr. Big, in Montreal. That’s the decisive moment in the sting, when the suspect—to establish credibility, or out of fear—confesses.

  On November 27, James knocked on the door of a suite at the Intercontinental Hotel in Montreal to meet Mr. Big, really an RCMP sergeant with a flair for undercover work.

  She settled in an off-white loveseat in a dark sweater and grey pants, looking more like a grandmother than a gangster. Mr. Big was in an armchair half facing her, shined shoes, expensive-looking suit, and a file folder on his lap. Research, he would claim, on James’s past.

  It was an artful performance. Mr. Big talked about his thirty years at the top, the importance of trust, his unhappiness that his associates had brought James in on the deal without his consent, the need for violence sometimes. “It can get pretty sporty,” he warned. He was looking, he said, for “A to Z” people who could do whatever was needed.

  It was an audition and job interview, he said, and he was skeptical she would make the cut.

  The encounter, captured by a hidden camera, did at first sound much like a job interview.

  James, speaking with a faint British accent, ran through her work experience. She had trained as a nurse in England, she said, but became a flight attendant when her qualifications weren’t recognized in Vancouver. She rose through the union ranks to become a national vice-president, but was “knifed in the back” in the rough world of union politics.

  Finally, Mr. Big pulled a newspaper clipping about Gladys Wakabayashi’s murder from his folder. His people in Vancouver had heard rumours about this, he said. Was she involved?

  James hesitated. “This is strictly between you and I, right?”

  And then she laid it all out. How she discovered the affair, planned the murder, slashed Wakabayashi’s throat, then tormented her with more cuts, hid the evidence, told no one, and refused to answer police questions.

  Mr. Big was impressed, interested. He kept probing for details. Incriminating details.

  He asked if there was any evidence that could be used against her, anything she had taken from the home, because his Vancouver connections had heard the rich family was planning a civil suit and pressing the police for action.

  “They got this in Vancouver, this cold case squad,” he said. “You ever hear about that?”

  And after an hour and forty minutes, James left the hotel room.

  Shakespearean tragedies have five acts.

  The curtain opened on the final act barely two weeks later, on December 12, when police knocked on the door of James’s Richmond house, told her she was charged with first-degree murder, and led her away in handcuffs, leaving behind the Christmas display her neighbours so admired.

  James was soon released on bail.

  But when her trial began in October 2011, the
confession to Mr. Big was a fatal piece of evidence. The defence battled valiantly. James’s lawyers suggested other possible killers—the Chinese mafia, Wakabayashi’s ex-husband, a plumber who had worked in the home. They questioned the confession to Mr. Big, noting James could have been frightened of the pretend gangster or making up stories to establish her credibility. They pointed to the lack of physical evidence.

  None of that persuaded the jury. On November 4, they took only hours to find James guilty. She was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison without parole—effectively a life sentence. An appeal was unsuccessful.

  The curtain had fallen. It took nineteen years, but the murder of Gladys Wakabayashi was solved.

  LAST MAN HANGED

  Leo Mantha ate his last meal—a T-bone steak. He wrote a letter to his sister, prayed with the priest, and then shuffled, in chains, to his date with the hangman.

  His life ended on April 27, 1959, in a grim concrete shaft at Oakalla Prison. He was the last man hanged in British Columbia.

  And he died because he was gay.

  Homosexuality was illegal in the 1950s, seen as a sickness and perversion. Gays and lesbians knew to keep their lives and loves hidden.

  Mantha was a product of that world. Born on December 22, 1926, he grew up in Verdun, a working-class suburb of Montreal. His family was devoutly Roman Catholic and he was an altar boy. But he knew he was different. When other boys started chasing girls, he went through the motions.

  His world was jolted when he was twelve, and learned his family had been living a lie. The woman who he had been told was an older sister was, in fact, his mother. His grandmother had been pretending he was her child. He was never the same, an aunt testified at his trial.

  Mantha made it through grade eight, then started work in a munitions plant as the Second World War ended.

  He went on to work for the Canadian National Railway, first as an office junior and then in the railway’s sprawling brick repair yards in Pointe St. Charles, a tough industrial neighbourhood.