Dead Ends (11 page)

MacKay's parole applications have been denied. He remains in jail, and maintains his innocence.

Marguerite Telesford's body has never been found.

D
rugs 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 an 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 the 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.

I
t 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.

As newspapers dug into Hopley's background, the picture grew grimmer.

His criminal record went back decades. Just three years earlier, Hopley had been sent to jail for eighteen months for a break-in that was part of a plan to kidnap a ten-year-old mentally challenged boy. In 1985, he had been convicted of sexual assault on a five-year-old boy.

Now he had snatched a toddler from his bed and vanished.
Kienan's parents, Paul and Tammy Hebert, were regulars at Sparwood Fellowship Baptist Church.

They went to great lengths to protect their eight children. Tammy was a stay-at-home mom, while Paul worked in real estate. They rarely went out and never hired babysitters. The children were even home-schooled, to keep them from risks. “Protection is what we wanted,” Paul Hebert said. “We didn't want to put them in the public school system for safety.”

Not everyone feared the worst. Margaret Fink, Hopley's seventy-year-old mother, said her son wouldn't hurt Kienan.

“I feel really sorry for the little kid,” she said. “I don't think Randy will harm him. He's been with the grandkids here a lot and he's been pretty good.”

Hopley visited her in Fernie hours before Kienan went missing, she said, the first time after his latest stint in jail. They had tea. “He gave me a big hug. He said he was doing all right.”

The
RCMP
launched a massive manhunt, with more than sixty officers working the case. Tips flooded in. Roadblocks checked every vehicle at key points in the area.

But Hopley and Kienan had vanished.

On Saturday—four days after they had last seen him—Kienan's parents met with the media, sitting at a folding table under a white tent outside the Sparwood fire hall. They faced the cameras and microphones, but they were really trying to speak directly to Hopley.

Paul Hebert, a big man with close-cropped grey hair, spoke, while Tammy sat beside him. Both battled tears.

“We're just asking, please bring Kienan to a safe place right now, okay? Like a gas station or a store parking lot where he can be visibly seen and you can just drop him off there. Walk away. We just want him safe.”