Dead Ends (22 page)

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.”

W
illiam 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.

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.

W
ong 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.)