Rampage (11 page)

“Don’t move! I got a gun!” An adult male began to rise, but the stranger fired, hitting him in the throat. He fell back, gurgling and clutching frantically at his neck. The women screamed. As the gunman placed another bullet into the chamber, an older man made a dash for his nearby truck. He managed to reach the passenger-side door before a second shot dropped him in the dirt. The gunman took aim at a middle-aged woman scurrying in the direction of the girls’ tent, and blasted her through the head. He found the fourth adult, an elderly lady, struggling to access the camper. Walking up calmly behind her, he pointed the muzzle of his rifle to the back of her skull and pulled the trigger. The gunshot thundered through the blackness, dissipating into the bucolic silence to be replaced by the drone of crickets. Now that these obstacles were out of the way, he was free to do whatever he pleased with the children. Stepping over their dead mother’s body, he made his way to the tent where the two little girls lay helpless and cowering. For the first time in his twisted life, he was about to have some
real
fun.

Up in Smoke

   
An aerial view of Bob Johnson’s 1979 Chrysler Plymouth, camouflaged in the undergrowth.      
Royal Canadian Mounted Police

In twenty years of employment at Kelowna’s Gorman Mills, Bob Johnson rarely missed a day’s work. On August 23, 1982, when the head sawyer failed to surface after a week’s absence, his boss Al Bonar contacted the missing persons department of the local RCMP. Bonar explained that Johnson had taken two weeks’ vacation to camp up north at Wells Gray Provincial Park with his forty-one-year-old wife Jackie and their daughters, Janet, thirteen, and Karen, eleven. The Johnsons were scheduled to meet up with Bob’s in-laws, George and Edith Bentley, to spend some quality time hiking, fishing, and eating Grandma’s freshly baked wild berry pies. Bob had been due back for work on the sixteenth, but had never shown up. When the investigating officers learned that nobody had heard from the Johnsons or Bentleys in weeks, the six were officially registered as missing. Frantic, George and Edith’s son Brian Bentley headed to the municipality of Clearwater, just thirty-two kilometres south of Wells Gray Park, and began distributing pictures of his missing family members. Thankfully, a gas station attendant at Avola Petro-Canada remembered seeing the Johnsons and Bentleys refuelling their vehicles, and had even spoken briefly with George about berry-picking spots. Certain that the six missing people had indeed arrived at their destination, a massive search of the Wells Gray area was conducted by the RCMP, concerned citizens, local pilots, and park employees. Off-road vehicles scoured the dense thickets and slopes, to no avail.

There were no further developments until September 13. Abbotsford man Kurt Krack informed the police that he had been mushroom hunting in Wells Gray Park, around Battle Mountain Road, when he had stumbled upon the charred remains of a Chrysler — the same make of vehicle known to belong to the Johnsons. When Sergeant Frank Baruta and Constable Mike Glas searched the vicinity, they discovered tire tracks veering off into the undergrowth. Following them forty-five metres into the bush, they came across a rusted orange automobile — or what was left of it. The vehicle had been set ablaze, blowing out the windows and tail lights and scorching the surrounding soil. The tires and door handles had practically disintegrated, the roof caved inwards, and the rear bumper warped beyond recognition. An open door on the driver’s side had provided the main source of oxygen for the inferno. Strangely, a collection of beer bottles and cans lay cradled in the sunken roof. Though the licence plate confirmed this had once been the cream-coloured 1979 Chrysler Plymouth owned by the Johnsons, time and fire had reduced it to just another feature of the landscape. When the investigating officers peered through the window at the molten remains of the seats, their faces paled. Blackened bones filled the interior: rib cages, vertebrae, shards of shattered femurs — it was like gazing into a makeshift crematorium.

“Mike,” Sergeant Baruta said, struggling to maintain his composure, “secure the area. I’ve got to call Kamloops G.I. This is a homicide investigation now.”

Eye-level views of the Johnson vehicle as seen by detectives.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police

By early afternoon, RCMP investigators Staff Sergeant Michael Eastham and Constable Gerry Dalen had flown up from Kamloops by chopper to conduct a thorough examination of the crime scene. To add to the irritation of the swarming flies, media helicopters hovered over the vicinity, relentlessly seeking out the location. Eastham decided to check the trunk. With the slip of a crowbar, the lid popped open to reveal a grotesque discovery: more bones, including two small skulls that could only belong to children. Their empty eye sockets gazed back hauntingly. In that moment, whatever glimmer of hope the officers had held for Janet and Karen Johnson shrunk to a pinpoint, vanishing into the abyss of those eyes. Though forensics had yet to confirm it, three generations had been slaughtered, burned, and spewed up to the heavens in a cloud of filthy smoke. To complicate matters, the Bentleys’ camper and truck were nowhere to be found, and although the detectives had located the bodies, they had no idea where the family had set up camp.

The burnt-out interior of the Johnson vehicle, in which the charred bodies of all six members of the Johnson/Bentley family were discovered.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Cold Lead, False Leads

Seemingly overnight, the Johnson/Bentley murders became the focus of a national media circus. Hotels and restaurants in Clearwater were flooded with journalists, the local economy booming in the wake of one of British Columbia’s most heinous tragedies. The exception, of course, was the campgrounds, where the now infamous Wells Gray Gunman was rumoured to lurk in search of fresh prey. Some stubbornly refused to give in to these fears, bragging that they were armed and ready to tackle any threat that came their way. What they didn’t take into account was that George Bentley had kept a .410/.22 over-under rifle in his truck, which had done little to save him. Meanwhile, as detectives continued to collect evidence and canvas the public for information, a phone call from the Kamloops forensics department revealed that a melted .22 calibre bullet had been retrieved from one of the skulls. The revelation meant that George Bentley’s rifle could have potentially been the murder weapon. In light of this new development, Staff Sergeant Eastham decided to employ metal detectors to search the perimeter for shell casings.
**

By now, at least one hundred tips had poured in, all of which had to be checked meticulously. The remains of the Johnson’s Chrysler were transported by a U-Haul cube van to Vancouver, where they would be subjected to closer examination. Further ground and aerial searches, using infrared technology, were carried out on the area in a vain attempt to uncover the missing truck and Vanguard camper. Though some posited the vehicles might be lying at the bottom of a lake or obscured by dense foliage, few among the RCMP imagined they would have left the proximity of the provincial park. That was, until a tip came in from a caller who, on August 24, had spotted an identical truck and camper with B.C. plates at a gas station in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. While dining in the Voyageur restaurant, he had seen two scruffy-looking men exit the truck and overheard them conversing in French. It wasn’t until he saw an artist’s rendition of George Bentley’s truck and camper on television that he finally understood how they could afford such expensive vehicles. Further credence was added to this theory when a waitress in Clearwater mentioned spotting a similar pair in her restaurant.

Not long after these promising leads, the investigators finally got the break they were looking for. An employee at Wells Gray Park remembered noticing a truck and camper parked in a three-acre clearing at the old Bear Creek prison grounds, just before the Johnson/Bentley disappearances. Staff Sergeant Eastham and his colleagues drove immediately to the location. Within a matter of minutes they were convinced they had found the family campsite. Around the fire pit lay two sharpened sticks for roasting marshmallows, lids matching the cans recovered from the roof of the Plymouth, and perhaps most telling, three Extra Old Stock bottle caps — Bob Johnson’s favourite brand. In a nearby creek, Eastham retrieved four unopened beer bottles left to cool in the icy mountain stream. Hurrying back to tell the others, he learned that in his brief absence the team had discovered six empty .22 calibre cartridges with the metal detector — one for each victim. Ballistics tests would later reveal they had likely been fired by a Ruger.

When they learned that two men who matched the descriptions from North Battleford had been hired to slash and burn bush in the area, they were sure they were onto something. Composites of the suspects were drawn up by a police artist and circulated around the vicinity of the park. Meanwhile, sightings of the truck and camper travelling east continued to trickle in from across Canada. When illustrations of the vehicles and suspects were released to the national media, the trickle became a deluge. Witnesses from Vancouver to Quebec uniformly reported having spotted the missing truck and Vanguard being driven by two dishevelled twenty-somethings. This put the detectives in a Catch-22 situation — though many privately suspected the vehicles had never left B.C., the sheer volume of sightings mandated further investigation. As Eastham brusquely explains in his book
The Seventh Shadow
, “If you don’t follow up, it could bite you in the ass. If you do follow it up, and it doesn’t get you anything concrete, at least you know.”
[30]

RCMP reward poster for information leading to the recovery of the Bentleys’ missing 1981 Ford truck and camper, circulated nationwide. Little did the investigators know that the vehicles had never left the provincial park.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police